Opinions, musings, ideas, pearls of wisdom
Opinion by Kent Hull
Opinion by Kent Hull
Before reminiscing, I'd like to remind readers what this column is supposed to be about. One way or another, it's my opinion. One column expressed my personal opinion about the club, another was whimsy about the differences between men and women who fly fish, and recently several were about factual consequences of political policies that in my opinion we fly fishers should be concerned about. If you take exception to any, tell me about it. My email address and telephone number are in the newsletter and roster. I attend most Club meetings. But please don't complain to some other officer of the Club and expect something to be done. I don't work for them. They can't do anything about it. I'm inclined to ignore anything that I hear of second or third hand. I am open to publishing other points of view as long as they are well-reasoned and relevant to our concerns as fly fishers (or would be amusing to us). I am not open to publishing points of view that are not well reasoned, even if I agree with the sentiments. But I don't have an inexhaustible store of editorial opinion topics. So please, if you have ideas or opinions you think should be of concern or interest to club members, tell me about it. I want to hear.
Right now, three fishing memories stand out in my mind as my most treasured. None is about biggest, most, hardest or easiest. They're best, nevertheless. And they seem to be gone.
The earliest is about a day on the Rose River, a very small high gradient stream flowing east from the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia in the Shenandoah National Park. It's an easy hike about 1500 feet down from the Parkway (and a miserable one back up). It is (or was) very beautiful. The stream is cold, clear, and was full of brilliantly colored native and wild brook trout. And they were eager to take a small dry fly. I wasn't alone there, but I saw no one else fishing. The scenery was perfect, the day was perfect, and the fish were perfect. The memory is poignant, however, because the reality is probably gone forever. In all likelihood, all of the Shenandoah NP streams are now sterile, victim to acid rain. Acid rain exhausted the limited buffering capacity of the stony soils and one by one, in the '90s, the stream ecosystems crashed. Who was at fault? It had little or nothing to do with national or state partisan political policies. It probably was the fault of the historic character of Virginia politics, more than two hundred years' resistance to anything that might restrict local civic activities. Every little town in the piedmont wanted its own coal-burning electricity generation plant and no one in Richmond was about to encourage any cooperative regional regulatory arrangements that would interfere with that, even if it meant standing by while the crown of Virginia was poisoned, as a result.
The second is about a day on the Casselman River in western Maryland, a few miles south of the Pennsylvania border, where it passes through Yoder's farm, a lovely pastoral setting. (Yoder is a prosperous Amish farmer in his middle years, a pleasant and thoughtful man.) This particular day it began to rain, hard at times. My fishing partner had taken my car back to get the raincoat he'd forgotten, and I had the whole river, as far as I could see (though only 20 or 30 feet at times) to myself. My new breathable parka hadn't started to leak, there was little wind, and the temperature was perfect to be comfortable in rain gear and waders. It was easy to roll an unweighted nymph into the current seams, often to be taken hard by good sized brown trout. Everything seemed just right. Dry and comfortable in the falling wet, fishing in the middle of a simple farm that was managed so well it both made the farmer rich and protected the stream, and enjoying the bounty of it all, it was wonderful. It, too, is mostly a memory, though I suppose I could fish it each year when I go back in the spring. Yoder is no longer so amicable about allowing trespass on his land. Too many fishermen have trampled his crops, damaged his bridge across the river, and trashed the parking area he provided, and he no longer allows motor vehicles on his land. The bridge will still carry his horse-drawn implements and his buggy, but it's pretty rickety. Whose fault that we no longer enjoy Yoder's good will when fishing through his land? Ours. And nothing to do with politics.
The third is several days at summer's end on the headwaters of Bear Creek where it flows out of Lou Beverly Lake. The feel of the place was remarkably similar to the Rose River, which is several thousand miles east and about 9000' lower. The same tiny stream, the same slightly sparse forest (though conifers instead of mixed hardwoods and conifers) and similarly gorgeous, feisty wild native trout, native goldens here instead of native eastern brook trout in Virginia. All it seemed to take was a little stealth and a deliberately slow approach for most casts to be intercepted by beautiful fish. It was perfect, too. It seemed like a microcosm of what was right with the world. And this setting is still there, with its breathtaking scenery and lovely trout. But returning to it is problematic. This time it's my creeping decrepitude (no, that's not a word, but you know what I mean and many share the ebbing of youthful vigor described) as well as Sierra wilderness area policy. The policy makes it lots less affordable to make a return trip, and prohibition against campfires above 10.000 ft elevation takes lots of the fun out of the kind of trip (a SCFF fishout) we had five or six years ago. Who's to blame for that? It's an unfortunate effect of regulatory responsibility where administrators (NFS in this case) lack the capability to control the real causes of problems, so they try to do what they feel is their duty by regulating the things they do have control over. So every human who has anything to do with the High Sierra is to blame because not one of us is perfect in knowledge, intention or behavior.
What am I advocating here? Cherish every great fishing memory you have, and do what you can to make it possible to experience them in the future. Yes, a lot of our declining opportunity is the unnecessary result of current politically non-controlled greed (from my own perspective, "their" fault), but a lot of it is caused by our own flaws that have little or nothing to do with partisan politics. So do what you can, even though it often may seem as if even your best effort is inconsequentially little.