by Mark Schatzker

The question “Would you like iceberg ice in “your water glass tonight?” is the kind typically reserved for destinations of rarefied pomposity. A boutique Japanese cruise liner, say, or a nightclub in Moscow that only the oligarchs know about. But not in the interior of a Dodge Caliber doing the speed limit on Grenfell Drive, a highway lined by fir trees, the odd birch and an almost ridiculous number of moose.

You find Grenfell Drive on the Northern Peninsula, a tip of land that shoots northward off the shore of Newfoundland, Canada. I was not here to see, or taste, icebergs. My quarry, also of the ocean and also having to do with dinner, was far more rare. I was on my way to a fishing lodge to eat an Atlantic salmon.

Consuming such a fish isn’t generally considered much of an accomplishment. Atlantic salmon is in almost every supermarket and on most menus, including those at the Olive Garden (herb-grilled salmon) and Red Lobster (Maui Luau shrimp and salmon). Its pink flesh is a member in good standing of sushi and sashimi platters across the continent. Hardly surprising, when you consider that Americans eat more than 300,000 tons of salmon every year.

Not all Atlantic salmon, however, are created equal. The stuff at supermarkets, chain restaurants and even high-end sushi places all comes from fish that spend their lives in pens eating pellets. Its flesh may be gorgeously laced with ivory-colored fat, but when you place a piece of it in your mouth, the flavor tells the story of its Beckettian life: epic boredom. And that’s to say nothing of the issue of freshness. Unless you live in a fishing village, salmon can take days to get to your plate. The problem with cold-water fish is the omega-3 fatty acids, which are prone to “oxidation,” a scientific way of saying the longer you wait between killing a salmon and eating it, the fishier it will taste.

Atlantic salmon was not always a commodity fish. It was once considered among the greatest eating fish in the world. But deliciousness was its undoing: thanks to overfishing, wild Atlantic salmon hasn’t appeared on menus since the late 1980s. You can’t order it anywhere — not at Nobu, not even on the Northern Peninsula — no matter how much you’re willing to pay. Attempting to buy or sell a wild Atlantic salmon in Canada could land you a fine of up to $100,000. The only way a person can acquire one is the old-fashioned way: with a rod and fly.

Which is how I found myself in a Dodge Caliber pulling into a wood-paneled cabin called Tuckamore Lodge. In my bag were a fishing vest, bug repellent and a sashimi knife of near-sword dimension made by the company MAC in Sakai, Japan. The sea up here is still cold and unpolluted. The land is freckled with lakes that drain into long tongues that flow green and occasionally white and that empty into the salty ocean. Some of the rivers here aren’t much bigger than creeks, but they receive yearly salmon runs into the tens of thousands. I just wanted to eat one. And the man who was going to help me get it was Dennis Pilgrim, a gray-bearded local who has wiped untold gallons of fish slime off his hands over the decades. Back when “abundance” was a word we associated with oceans, Pilgrim worked as a commercial fisherman. Now he makes his living taking outsiders like me to the salmon.

Finding them isn’t the issue. If you drive long enough — which is to say five minutes in any direction — you will cross a river and there will be salmon in it. What comes next is more difficult: getting one to bite.

Salmon are voracious eaters in the ocean, but as soon as they enter fresh water, they become nature’s greatest dieters. Coaxing them to eat is tricky. While trout eagerly snap at lures resembling mayflies or little fishes, salmon aren’t in the mood. For some mysterious reason, however, certain flies arouse their interest. Pilgrim doesn’t know why. No one does. But Pilgrim does know which flies the salmon might like. And there, on the shore of the Salmon River, he tied on something called a pink bug, a stretch of pink fuzz with a hook coming out of it.

The salmon were, as advertised, not hungry. They would emerge from the black and follow the fly as it drifted on the current, then disappear back into the inky depths. Every minute or two, a salmon would arc fantastically into the air and slap — somewhat flagrantly, I thought — back into the water. Most of the time, you just heard a splash and whipped your head around to see a circle of ripples. Eventually, I forgot about the salmon and became lulled by the rhythm of casting.

When, for whatever reason, a salmon decides to bite, the event is so dramatic it is referred to as a “strike.” And if you are staring at rocks and trees and such, as I was, it will catch you completely off guard. There was an all too sudden yank on the line. I jolted the rod back and up high, and found the line was now as taut as a guitar string. A salmon was undeniably, thrillingly and awesomely on. It leapt, shooting out of the water in slow motion, swishing its tail back and forth. When it plunged back in, I pulled on the rod again and almost fell over. The line was as limp as 30 feet of overcooked spaghetti. There was no salmon on the end. During its leap — which now felt like it took place hours ago, in a dream — the hook became dislodged. The salmon was back at the bottom of the pool, and now it definitely wasn’t hungry.

Back at the lodge, they served fresh lobster dipped in melted butter alongside a glass of spring water with iceberg ice. It was as fine a meal as a human can eat, no question, but, like that salmon, I wasn’t hungry.

By noon the next day, I was on the receiving end of four strikes. Three times, the salmon freed itself. But one time it did not. There followed a fight that made the story of David and Goliath seem like a minor tussle. By its end, the salmon was swimming in tired circles by the bank and I was able to lift it out of the water. It sat there twitching its tail and scanning its eyes over the alien landscape. A whack on the head with a rock stunned it, a second killed it, and the salmon passed from shimmering life into the still-life pose of death. Now it was as unanimated as the rock that dispatched it. Now it was dinner.

For the afternoon, Pilgrim proposed a change of medium, so we drove into the town of Main Brook, where he lives, launched his fiber glass fishing boat and roared out to a place called Shoal Arm, where the water was perhaps four feet deep and so clear that if an open book were lying on the bottom, you could drop anchor and read it.

Pilgrim took a garden shovel, dug down into the muddy bottom and began bringing shovel loads of blue mussels into the boat. When we had enough mussels, we motored back a ways toward Main Brook. At some point of ideal depth known only to Pilgrim, he throttled down, threw a net over the back of the boat and dragged it over the sea floor. Every few hundred yards, he would pull it to find seaweed, rocks, scallops and a peculiar sea snail known locally as a cuckoo. He took out a jackknife and pried open some scallops right there in the boat, and we ate them raw. They were creamy, unimaginably sweet and pleasantly crunchy. I took Pilgrim’s knife, cut a sea urchin in two and scooped out dollops of astonishingly good uni, which Pilgrim was sure would kill me.

When we got back to the lodge, it was time for salmon at last. Days earlier, a sushi chef I vaguely know had taught me how to slice a salmon into perfect rectangular pieces. Now I sat down at a table on the porch and pulled my sashimi blade through vibrant pink flesh.

I laid a morsel on my tongue. It tasted of the ocean the way a seashell sounds of it. A gentle briny note gave way to a sweet and floral aftertaste.

Flavour is an oddly relative phenomenon. There is no instrument or smart phone app that can take an objective reading. It is always of the moment. Did I like the salmon because I’d caught it myself, because as I ate it I could stare out at a blue lake where salmon like to linger on their journey upstream? To get a point of comparison, I pulled a piece of farmed salmon out of the fridge. My plan was to cook them together, farmed and wild. I followed a local recipe, dusting each piece in flour, then sautéing them in rendered salt-pork fat. (I cooked it to medium rare, however, which is something locals only do by accident.)

The farmed salmon wasn’t terrible. The skin was crispy, and there was a hint of salmon, however fleeting. But it also tasted fishy and greasy. And oddly like chicken. That might be because a lot of farmed salmon is more like chicken than you’d care to know. Like chicken, farmed salmon are fed processed soybeans and grain. They’re also fed a fair amount of . . . chicken. Their pellets often contain chicken fat as well as an industrial feed called chicken by product. It sounds appalling, but the truth is that there aren’t enough herring, krill, shrimp and sand eels to feed farmed salmon anything close to a natural diet.

I put a piece of wild salmon in my mouth, and it was like my tongue had just undergone cataract surgery. Compared with the farmed salmon, it tasted bright and vivid. As with the scallops, the sweetness floored me. There wasn’t even a suggestion of fishiness, not in the skin and not in that seam of dark, fatty meat inside the skin that is almost always inedible. It was the food equivalent of standing in a summer meadow in full bloom and inhaling a fresh ocean breeze.

The next morning, I packed the remaining fillet in ice and stowed it in my bag, then boarded a Saab 340 to St. John’s followed by a much larger plane to Toronto.

I was home by afternoon, surrounded now by buildings instead of trees, back in the stifling midsummer heat. I reached into my bag and found that the salmon, to my relief, was still cold. By dinner, white wine had been poured and an identically flour-dusted, sautéed filet sat on my wife’s plate. She took a bite and, as expected, entered a state of fish-induced awe. She blurted out words like “amazing” and started sentences with “I can’t believe. . . .”

I took a bite. The sweetness and intensity repeated itself, and for an instant, I was back on the porch at Tuckamore Lodge. But then a mild but all too detectable fishy tinge announced itself, and just as suddenly I wasn’t.

Tuckamore Lodge, Main Brook, Newfoundland; (888) 865-6361; For a one-week fishing package, including accommodations, meals, guides and equipment check out the price at tuckamorelodge.com.