Truchacabra’s History of Fly Fishing in North America, Part 1 – The Land Bridge to The Little House on the Prairie

How many of us have wished we had lived in a time when fly fishing was even more fun than it is now? Imagine the rivers so packed with steelhead that you hooked ten to thirty every time you went out. Imagine fishing a western river that didn’t have a boat train steaming down it every day, or a time when anglers viewed fishing as fishing and not just another round of golf.

I waste lots of time indulging such fantasies, mostly in the wee hours of the morning when trying to put myself to back to sleep. For the past few weeks, my son and I have been reading Little House on the Prairie, and I’ve been wondering what it would be like to fish in the Era of Pa.

McGyver meets Bill Cosby meets Augustus McCrae, that was Pa. He could dig a well, till a garden, build a notched log cathedral, befriend whomever came within a hundred miles of him (including Indians), and saw a fiddle for his family after a supper comprised of the beast he’d shot a few mile’s hump from the cabin. The guy showed up, he brought it, and he kept some in store every night for making sweet prairie man love to Ma.

"Pa is so hot right now. Pa."

I’d say the Ingalls family was closest to the South Platte, the Arkansas, or some other Front Range stream. We should all be so lucky right? But if they went fishing in the spring, they’d encounter heavy, uncontrolled runoff. In the summer, warm water would drive them deeper into the mountains. In a horse-drawn wagon mind you, which means that by the time they got anywhere good, Pa’d only have enough time to fish the evening hatch before he’d have to haul their butts back out of there before winter (yes, Pa, I know you could just throw up another cabin, but I ask you, is that a life?)

It’s important to remember that Pa went to the prairie because he felt crowded out of the big woods in Wisconsin. Still, even around 1870, when Pa was at his mac daddy best, there were already plenty of settlers along the Rocky Mountain front. I would speculate that the proportion of humans to miles of accessible trout stream might have been as high as it is today if not way higher. Also, these folks were grazing lots of stock, diverting streams onto plowed up land, and every trout they took from a stream went to the table.

Then there was the mining. Butte, Montana is still getting over the 1860’s copper boom that annihilated streams and denuded mountains for miles around. At the headwaters of the Arkansas, where Pa might have gone, the town of Leadville was a moonscape in its 1880’s heyday, compromising the river’s ecological function in ways that have endured as well. All this was decades after the California gold rush where ore was panned from the streams and dug from the ground, not to mention eroded from the hills with high pressure water hoses (the Yuba River, my favorite in the world, was done in this manner).

Butte area fishing reports stayed the same for about 100 years.

Doing it for the spawners.

To summarize, land rush, mining rush, Civil War, Mexican War, Indians everywhere starting to say, “WTF? I think it’s time you all got the hell out of our kitchen!”

Doesn’t look too good, Pa.

Perhaps we could venture back to Lewis and Clark days, go deep into the country to what must have been the most awesome cutthroat fishing ever. Imagine all the bull trout, the hatches! But then the grizzlies would probably come and ruin it all, or wolves. Horsehair leaders could never hold a steelhead, and every time you’d try to go fishing, you’d get a hundred feet from camp and someone would call you back to fix a wagon wheel or attend to a fever.

Imagining fishing during Ice Age when the ancients crossed the land bridge would bring us to the same predicament: habitat was pristine in its nature-made perfection, but the technology of the times would limit enjoyment to a point where, in my opinion, it wouldn’t even exist. Heck, I can’t even have fun with bamboo. How could I get off catching a monster arctic char on a hook made of bone?

"Dial it down, dude. Me and Ma were just looking for a spool of flourocarbon."

The best era for fly fishing? Let’s change that to the best era for fly fishing as we know it. Even redefined, our mission will not be easy, for among many questions, when did we first know fly fishing as we know it? Time to move on to Part 2, when Pa’s little house becomes a town.

Public Lands Cage Fight

In one corner a team that, at its worst, is extraordinary for its sentimentality, at its best, for its passion. A mixture of red and blue, give it up for Team Purple:

HUNTERS

WEAKNESSES: It occasionally satisfies you to arrange birds you’ve killed into the letters P, E, T, and A. This behavior dishonors your quarry, is juvenile, stupid, and reeks of the hypocritical righteousness you abhor in anti-hunting zealots. Take Ted Nugent. Those familiar with his oeuvre know of his ability to sustain a guitar fart for a really long time. In spite of being excellent to the max, this talent is no excuse for Nugent being a rotten ambassador for your sport.

Saluting means you're American. Or Sadaam Hussein, or just someone who thinks smart people are fooled by random saluting.

STRENGTHS: Pursuing wild creatures in their native habitat promotes the only practices and philosophies that can save humanity from itself. From hunting and fishing we learn about death and grief, compassion, respect, mercy, wonder, forgiveness, humility, and most of all, love.

BAIT AND LURE FISHERMEN

WEAKNESSES: You do not clean up after yourselves very well. The fish you hook happen to die in large and frequently illegal numbers. Also, all commercially-produced baits and most homemade ones taste like crap.

STRENGTHS: Circle hooks enable catch and release bait fishing, and in one Behnke-cited study, treble hooks caused less mortality than single barbed or barbless. You have an enviable ability to wake up, see a pretty day, and get out in it with your toes in the water and your fingers around a can.

FLY FISHERMEN

WEAKNESSES: Not only do many of you confuse catch and release with the moral high ground, but you are too often averse to sharing. All it takes is you believing your favorite spot is a secret (which is rarely, if ever, true), and suddenly nobody but you has a right to go there. You behave as though you invented rivers, if not water itself. Anyway, lots of people find you arrogant, often for good reason.

STRENGTHS: Not to say releasing most of your catch is a bad thing. And you love rivers, need them in fact. If not for rivers, you would go insane.

OTHER OUTDOOR RECREATIONISTS

WEAKNESSES: You take too much for granted, figuring that since you and your friends love skiing, birdwatching, and mountain biking so much, your favorite mountain can’t get hurt by anyone, including you. Many of you seem to think that wildlife and trails exist due to the efforts of hikers and mushroom hunters instead of management agencies that operate on the dollars of people who buy licenses and permits.

Oh yes you did.

STRENGTHS: Many outdoor pastimes are expensive to engage in. Affording snowboards for the kids requires a healthy income, which is usually associated with challenging yet stressful jobs. Outdoor recreation, being an easy way to alleviate stress, addicts many highly functional people to clean and abundant wildlands. Addicts get mean when they don’t get their fix.

VEGANS

WEAKNESSES: While trumpeting the high morality of your eating habits, you ignore the cloudy morality associated with not eating animals. By not supporting hunters and farmers who treat food animals with respect, you make it more difficult for natural and wholesome animal products to make the necessary impression on the mainstream palate. As a result, factory farming will endure.

STRENGTHS: You make available lots of steak, bacon, farm fresh eggs, lobster and butter, sharp cheddar cheese, and pastrami. You consume the world’s blandest tasting foods so the rest of us don’t have to.

Oh boy! Someone's eyes are getting bigger than his stomach.

SECOND AMENDMENT HUGGERS

WEAKNESSES: Too many of you think that giving your daughter a Glock for her first birthday, a kid being shot by a neighborhood watch volunteer, drug cartel firepower, campus mowdowns, household defense, and hunting must all be viewed through the same lens. Your blindness to the color gray manifests itself politically in ways that are needlessly detrimental to society.

You got a problem with that?

STRENGTHS: Guns are used for hunting; hunting is good. Guns are used for personal protection; personal protection is good. The Outlaw Josey Wales is hands down the best movie I’ve ever seen.

The Original Gun Nut

LEAVE-IT-ALONE ENVIRONMENTALISTS

WEAKNESSES: For the sake of your definition of pristine, you sometimes stand in the way of healing the land and restoring ecological function. Your righteousness is unearned and frequently unproductive.

Guys, could we do a prescribed burn first and save the lawsuit for later?

STRENGTHS: You’re nasty fighters who never back down. Plus, in this day and age and especially in the United States, being left alone once in a while is really sweet, and pleasant, and quiet, and………..

FARMERS AND RANCHERS

WEAKNESSES: In the mistaken belief that you always act in society’s long term best interest, you sometimes consume too much water, fodder, and land.

STRENGTHS: Land is something you’re particularly good at. You might not want to admit it, but you have a knack for using science to solve problems.

ANIMAL RIGHTS ACTIVISTS

WEAKNESSES: The animal rights you seek come at a cost in animal welfare. For example, pets and feral animals have huge negative impacts on wildlife and natural ecosystems, and you are unwilling to accept aggressive measures to mitigate this. Also, by opposing hunting and fishing, you build walls between children and the outdoors.

How beautiful, they're running. To the one patch of grass they haven't eaten.

STRENGTHS: You love animals. Animals are cool.

NUMBERS GUYS

WEAKNESSES: Bulls and lunkers, doesn’t matter if they come from pens or the wild, just that they come. Over the last few years, this quantity-over-quality attitude has led to a rash of unnecessary lobotomies being performed in the name of government-funded predator control. It also threatens initiatives to restore sensitive habitats and species.

Numbers guy. Hatin' on the cutthroats.

STRENGTHS: Since quality and quantity aren’t mutually exclusive, it helps to know how upset you’d get if neither standard were being attained.

In the other corner, into which all light is absorbed, and from which none escapes, Team Black:

SPECIAL INTERESTS

WEAKNESSES: None, because screw everybody. To you, fish, wildlife and public lands only exist as objects for you to exploit to the exclusion of all, even your society. Seriously, if there was such a thing as the grandmother of special interests, you would tackle her for a crust of bread.

You eyeballing me Grandma?

STRENGTHS: You have the ability to divide your enemy into factions that, while enormously powerful when united, fight like cats and dogs otherwise. In fact, you excel at making the segments of your enemy behave as special interests themselves, though without enough muscle to accomplish much of anything. You also use your magic to charm or, as some would say, “own” the referees.

You know the drill. If Team Purple wins, there will be an immediate rematch and another if need be, until such time as Team Black takes the crown. At that point, the whole thing is over.

Guides – Part 3

In Which She Says, “Put a rock in your pocket for that one, Bob.”

Not that you don’t draw a stinker assignment every now and then. A couple from suburban Chicago once requested me to be their guide for their week at the lodge where I worked. They were both quite capable anglers. In fact, whatever her name was fished better than her husband Bob, probably one of the reasons they fought the whole time.

"Honey, want to get away on a nice Alaska fishing trip?"

And not just Zoolander versus Hansel tit for tat stuff either. This was British soccer times World War II times Animal Planet squared. If they are not divorced by now, I am sure they each made good on a mutual murder pact.

One of my life’s most white hot memories is the day I took them up the Tazimina for rainbows. The sockeye were in so thick that in places the stream was red from bank to bank. Before we began, Bob told me that he liked putting a pebble in his pocket for every fish he caught so he’d have an easy time tallying at the end of the day. He decided to fish eggs behind the sockeye, and I warned him to keep his drifts from swinging so he wouldn’t bump the salmon.

He couldn’t do it. No matter how hard we worked at presenting to clearly visible rainbows, his rig would drag to one side, tap a sockeye, Bob would do a hookset, and the snagged salmon would take off. With each snapped-off glo bug, Bob’s roars grew louder, until I asked to be excused so I could attend to the wife downstream.

Having chosen to fish where there weren’t any salmon, among the rapids and big rocks, she was sculpin-hooking rainbows on almost every cast. It was the kind of action that on most days would thrill a guide to no end, but she had to go and let out a victory hoot after every fish she landed.

"Sorry, I can't hear you over the screaming of my reel."

I soon distanced myself from her too, ostensibly to keep both of them in my sight but really to prevent Bob from thinking I was taking sides (also, because three consecutive days had greatly lowered my tolerance to her toxicity). Upon finishing the run, she walked up to me, her huge smile reflecting her opinion of her performance. Her man was finally fishing like I’d instructed him to and was hooking a few rainbows and grayling. She and I watched him until he inevitably swung a drift wide, the line stop hard, and he stuck another sockeye.

From fifty yards away you could see his face go red as the curses erupted from it. To pop the tippet, he repeatedly jerked back, knowing, I’m sure, that rods get broken that way. His Hall of Fame moment, the mother of all tantrums in which he left it all on the field. After a couple minutes, the line finally snapped, and Bob threw his rod to the bank and hung his head.

That was when she said it.

Though I forget the exact details of what ensued (they either fought like mongooses or were silent), her words were definitely a new sliver of bamboo up the thumbnail of our day.

So was my boat driving on the way home. At a shallow bar I sucked gravel bad enough to kill the motor. I tried to start it a few times, praying silently, for I hadn’t run many boat trips yet and had blanked on my troubleshooting lessons. Bob, his wife and I walked the boat down a few bends, and they both seemed sober and a bit spooked. Then I finally took the motor apart, took out the gravel, and, happy days, the thing fired right up.

What followed was a slog. No matter how I gunned the motor, the boat could not get on step, and I almost hit every sweeper in the river. When we reached Three-Mile Lake (which I believe was seven miles long) the thing was pure whitecaps, which felt like speedbumps at 35 mph when I rammed them. The lake drive took forever, and as I knew would happen, one or both of them started to bitch.

“Grab a coffee can,” I said. “Bail.”

Story short, I was relieved of their company for the rest of their stay. I took this as a slap in the face, but when Bob and his wife told me later that I was the best guide they’d ever had, I figured they’d made a mercy call. Perhaps they thought they’d slapped me quite enough.

If only they’d known that I’d mistakenly put the exhaust thingy on backwards when I reassembled the motor, so the jet was blowing forwards instead of backwards like it should have. We’d made it to dock with approximately one drop of fuel left. Though we probably would have been rescued, it might not have been soon enough. They could have died. I could have killed them.

Guides – Part 2

In which, “What, you want me to teach you how to cast too?”

And then there are the bad ones, the guides who caught a few trout and girlies in high school and figured that they were destined to be rock stars.

How he thinks he looks......,

I recently read a fly fishing novel in which the guide protagonist’s real job is babysitting his daddy’s McRanch and the spring creek that flows through it. Some stuff happens, don’t remember the details. Reason being, it’s a masochistically bad book (I read the whole thing), though in a way it’s as honest a treatment of the guiding profession as Miles Nolte’s Alaska home run. Enjoy, reader, this tasty snack:

“OK,” Marshall said, struggling not to sound patronizing, “here’s the thing; when you have clients in a boat, well, most clients can’t cast more than thirty feet. It’s stunning how bad these people are.”

“They pay all that money and they can’t fish?” Kyle asked.

“Right. If you can’t actually fly fish well enough to catch fish on your own, you spray four hundred bucks on some guide and think he’s supposed to do the work for you.”

It’s an unfortunate truth that in the minds of many trout guides who’ve never worked in a fish camp, fly shops suck, other guides suck, Californians, Texans, East Coasters, wives and kids suck. Tell me who doesn’t suck and I’ll answer that he’s not a client. Common whines are that clients can’t cast and are either too stupid (though smart enough to earn enough money to spray at fishing guides) or spastic to set the hook. Clients talk too much, own too much, think too highly of their own fishing ability and too lowly of how masculinely their guide is floating them down a spectacular Rocky Mountain stream. Whatever the case, they certainly don’t deserve a lot of effort for the huge tip their guide expects from them.

....and what he really looks like.

Too many guides carry an inflated notion of their own guruness and therefore don’t understand that when someone pays you fairly, they expect you to endure whatever it takes to get the job done right. Untangle their tangles, share heartily in their triumphs and disappointments, partake of their friendship and hard won wisdom (ever notice that your clients are somewhat older than you?). Who knows? Someday you might want a job wherein you don’t remove musty work pants and gag on the smell of pickled rat corpses. A sympathetic client might be able to help you with that

I definitely had the rock star fantasy myself. Then I began guiding and realized that rock stars not only made a lot more money than guides but had to possess real talent.

Well, most of the time anyway.

It might surprise you to read that you can get into guiding without knowing much about fly fishing. It doesn’t take long, however, before you will either conclude that you like it or you don’t. If you don’t like guiding, you will eventually stink at it, a fact that will become increasingly difficult to hide. If you do like it, you probably see the work as a reasonably challenging way to suit your desires and temperament (subjectively speaking at least, I must say that the average day of guiding is plenty fun). And yes, people will hire you for the exact reason the protagonist in the crappy fishing novel I read says they shouldn’t: BECAUSE THEY HAVE DIFFICULTY CATCHING FISH ON THEIR OWN; BECAUSE THEY WOULD LIKE YOU TO DO THE WORK FOR THEM.

I Am Not A Sailor. I Am Not A Sailor, I’m A Captain

Take My Hand on YouTube

I saw Los Lobos play an acoustic show the other night. They brought their A game as I’d hoped they would, but I couldn’t help being taken back through the years I’d lived since I first saw them play at the Fillmore. To be exact, I saw in each one of them – the gray hair (Hidalgo), bad back (Rosas), and general slowness of movement – the aging that has us all in its relentless grip.

Though I was never distracted from the music, an impossibility, for it was unmitigated beauty, it was also impossible to ignore the fact that the lives in the auditorium were well advanced from the randy and muscular moment when the band first left the launching pad. You know you’re getting old when you go to a concert and there’s an intermission, and during said intermission the line to the men’s room is longer than the girls’. When Cesar Rosas asked us if they were loud enough, I figured it was out of respect to those in the audience wearing hearing aids. Or perhaps it was he who was hard of hearing.

I went to bed with their songs in my head, and smiled at the memory of Hidalgo losing his voice for a second while his hands and brain remained well in command. I realized how much a great band is like a river. Like a river, the music follows a nature-ruled order of rapids, runs, riffles, bends, and deep, mirror-surfaced stretches of calm. It will wander with time, perpetually losing and finding itself. Material will accrete, life will take root before the flood takes it elsewhere. Everything is beholden to the current.

Guides – Part 1

In Which You are Meat

I just finished The Alaska Chronicles, a wonderful account of a season in the life of a fishing guide. Having read my share of mags and lots of dishing on fish camps, every part of me was expecting another guide’s version of himself as thankless public servant, cultural visionary, and God’s gift to the ladies.

Hello. I'll be your guide for the day.

What I got instead was a brutally honest tale of the mistakes, evil thoughts, and moments of joy and reverie that can befall any mature guide who has the guts to be honest with himself.

Until I got used to it, this honesty of author Miles Nolte was almost embarrassing to behold. I guess I hadn’t appreciated, at least not completely, the role of ego in the guiding game. In Nolte’s day-by-day rendition, there is a pattern in which every moment of him shooting himself in the foot follows an episode of excellence and victory that might have floated him just a little too high. The author seems to notice the trend himself, a fact that makes me root for him all the more.

I’ve felt for years that the way to grow the best guide is to send him

......or her......

to Alaska for his first tour. I’ve brought this up to guide friends, who’ve been almost unanimous in disagreeing with me. Sure Alaska fish are big, they say, but they only eat eggs, and who wants to go to the top of the earth for that? They’re rainbows, not cagey spring creek browns, or they’re salmon, something that doesn’t even eat. These guys, I should add, had never guided in Alaska and the majority had never been there. So they don’t know from shinola.

In the lower 48, we think this guy wears a pink bra and thong.

Guiding in Alaska has very little to do with fishing and a lot to do with camp. Depending on your “lodge”, you will be housed in a tent, a plywood shed, or log cabin. Food and acoutrements are hauled in at great expense, which is passed to clients. Contrary to what many think, any profit a lodge makes comes from a strong blend of parsimony and guile, a lesson perpetually taught by the Alaska wilderness itself. Everything is stretched, or margins and sometimes people are lost.

This is especially true of a lodge’s labor supply. A guide, for example, is a 24/7 combination of fisherman, mechanic, carpenter, bed changer, floor sweeper, table clearer, dishwasher, outhouse slopper, wood chopper, fly shop, and all around kisser of asses. And no matter how much you’ve spent on your Alaska trophy experience, what you’re really investing in is your guide’s ability to pilot a fast boat and to aim a steady shotgun while brownpantsing himself. A level head, in other words, and the pride in a tough job well done.

McGeary Creek Boatride on You Tube

Cavernoscopy

As a born New Mexican, I’m embarrassed to say that I’d never been to Carlsbad Caverns before President’s Day weekend. I am definitely a big fan of geological wonders, even bats, but I guess I don’t crave them like I do trout streams and verdant mountainsides. I think that’s all changed now.

So this is really going to be about Carlsbad Caverns.

One of the great things about the desert is that it forces you to mentally plant trees and shrubbery in the sand and to populate your view with animals of yore if not those already existing but holed up out of the sun and heat and wind that are probably thinking “Why the hell did I evolve where you can’t just go out and get a sip of water when you want one?”

Another thing is the slowness of process, the growth of what will and its decomposition. A type of evolution, though what’s so striking about the caverns is not the timeline of living things but the story of the earth as told by rock. In the Grand Canyon, you can read the story on the multicolored cliffs and even from an airplane. But at Carlsbad, you literally have to penetrate the story in order to understand it.

In the parking lot, you stand on a reef at the edge of what was once an inland ocean spreading south and east before you. Then down you go into thousands of feet of dead and carved marine life. While Dimetrodons became T-Rexes became T-Mobiles, drop by drop of mineral-laden and acidified groundwater calved out chunks of limestone, made rooms, then proceeded to decorate them with speleoforms of every conceivable shape in the divine universe.

Nope, still about the caverns.

The kicker is that if it weren’t for the installation of electricity, Carlsbad Caverns would be amazing in the dark. Talk about trees falling in the forest. “It’s like going into a butthole,” said my nephew, who, like most 7 year olds, has a knack for boiling life down to its most basic truths. Given the theoretical state of our near future world, I fear the worst for my family’s youngest generation, which is why I was quick to take advantage of such an obvious teaching moment. “Mind you, not just any butthole,” I said. “It’s the butthole of time, so of course no light can get through.”

My weekend epiphany came from that. It’s something I’ve been chasing for years, and I finally see that to qualify as a national park, a wild place must be able to cause you to say or feel anything without appearing ridiculous. In other words, a place must be so awe-inspiring, must possess so much cosmic, psychic, and spiritual space that everything that every imagination can and will ever produce fits easily inside it.

Yea, and the Lord spoke verily unto them, "Oh this little old thing? Just something I've been toying around with for a few billion years. You like?

In this respect, I believe we have chosen well – Yellowstone, Yosemite, Denali, Carlsbad, to name a few – and I believe we still have a national soul as a result. I hear often of eliminating the Park Service. Parks are wasteful luxuries. We can’t afford them. National soul, I said. That’s something we can never not afford.

Playing God As If God Weren’t Paying Too Much Attention

I don’t have the skills to express exactly why native rainbow trout are my favorite fish, so I won’t even try. They take your breath away the way ice-carved, black, Dracula’s castle peaks are breathtaking. Alaska, in other words. And the speed of the rainbow will never stop amazing me. Suffice it to say that my reincarnation will begin somewhere on the Pacific Rim.

Good Fish

I have different feelings about rainbows beyond their ancestral range. I must admit that they’re a heck of a lot of fun wherever I find them, – the Bighorn, the Missouri, Madison, Green, or San Juan – but I sometimes get a really strong feeling of “you should have been here yesterday” when I survey the big country around these places, as in “you should have seen the trout that were here before the cows and the mines and the dams and browns and rainbows were invited over.”

What can you do, right? We played God, and this is our heaven (isn’t it though?).

Bad Fish?

A couple years ago, I and several Trout Unlimited friends fished Tusas Creek, a gem of a trickle flowing south out of the gentle yet forbidding mountains northwest of Tres Piedras. We caught rainbows first, tip-finned streamborn fish that were as plump as they were gorgeous. After cresting a good sized but barely passable (for trout) waterfall, we caught fish that were more cutthroat in appearance, and the farther we went upstream the more phenotypically pure the cutties became. Then, at our farthest advance into a high alpine elk meadow, we caught a couple fish that looked almost pure rainbow.

For a number of reasons, I don’t like killing trout. I don’t like the taste of them, especially if they were caught downstream of mines, agricultural lands, golf courses, nuclear research facilities, or the set of Jersey Shore. I don’t like how trout look dead. It’s too obvious that life isn’t there.

Yet, although I could never kill an Alaskan rainbow, I did not hesitate to kill those rainbows on the Tusas. I honestly couldn’t help myself. Something extracorporeal pressed my thumb against their heads as I broke their necks. The area I was in was too wild, or too much from another time, of grizzly bears, Apaches and trappers, streams full of cutthroat trout.

The time for the cutthroat could very well be past us. I read in the paper the other day that feral pigs are becoming as common in New Mexico as 40 year old grandparents gassing up at Allsups with their engines still running. In the Jemez, locust trees are succeeding the ponderosas in the wake of the previous big fire, and any day now I’m expecting to find a hearty brown trout swimming around in my morning coffee. Definitely can’t get too wistful around this place. Hope for less societal erosion and you risk some serious heartbreak.

So what's the big diff?

I’m actually hearing noise about just waving the white flag and letting human enhanced nature take its course. Really? Is homogenization really so easy to swallow? With brown trout doing just fine (though they’ll be in trouble next) and cutthroat in their current straits, we are a couple bad forest fires from being Arkansas or Missouri as far as trout fishing is concerned. Nothing against those places, or Oklahoma or Texas where artificial trout fisheries have been successfully created. People love catching trout and should do so wherever they can, but people should also catch native trout wherever they can as well.

In Alaska it’s easy, in New Mexico, not so much. That is not necessary, nor is it right.

The Nerve

Quite a few presidents have loved outdoor pursuits. Teddy, Ike, Jimmy, Cheney, JFK (sunk his nymphs deep), and Bush Uno were handy with a rod or gun. I figure one more wouldn’t be a problem, but Facebook fly anglers said, “no like” to the picture above. Chalk it up to the usual usualness of our political kneejerkapalooza, but still I must wonder why one would fuss.

But Truchacabra,……..

Obama’s no fisherman. No one can stand it when someone acts like they know what they don’t. It’s like a draft dodging Air National Guardsman going AWOL and later trying to juice his resume by claiming military service.

Awesome. Now where's that flight suit I wanted to prance around in?

Obama’s a socialist. According to the dictionary, a socialist president doesn’t have to say, “pretty please” to get government teat-sucklers to return phone calls. The socialism we actually live by, however, simply entails socialized costs with privatized benefits. Along with providing life support to the poor and elderly, this “entitlement” system has been somewhat healthy for Big Oil, Pharma, Military, Retail and Mining, among many. No biggie, it’s been this way since around the presidency of Clovis Man. Maybe what’s irritating folks is Obama’s talk about investing in infrastructure, an idea that proved its worth in the great economic poopstorm of the early 20th century.

From Goldman Sachs? Gee, those guys sure are swell.

Some people just don’t like Obama. In 2008, I heard a guide on the Bighorn yell to another, “You gonna vote for the little niglet?” A commenter on this Facebook photo also suggested that the president fish with a cane pole, bobber, and stink bait. I guess Obama makes people of a certain ilk fall into bouts of lighthearted humor that only people of a certain ilk find funny.

Lawdy, Massa! Y'all gonna let me be prezodent?!

Obama haters know something you don’t. I’m pretty sure which direction the GOP presidential candidates would go on the Pebble Mine, unchecked public land development and a host of other issues with serious ramifications for the quality of my fishing. Maybe Obama detractors actually don’t like the Pebble Mine idea and feel that Romney is our best chance to dig the Pebble Partners a different kind of hole. Heck, maybe Mitt would save us.

Or perhaps, as responsible sportsmen, they fear that Obama might try to push the project through. My most paranoid self thinks that the possibility is there, simply because I have yet to hear the president express how he truly feels about issues that are so critical to hunters and anglers. So he postponed consideration of the XL pipeline. Does that mean he really wants renewables or just doesn’t want to deal until the election?

Sure, he might think it prudent to hold his cards, but that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy the silence. It’s like I’m on a beach with a girl who, after having me massage her with sun lotion, leans into my ear and whispers, “Be a sweetie and get me a pina colada?” Later on her porch, I get a peck on the cheek, some more cootchy-coo whispering, and then she shuts the door in my face.

It’s either her or the floozy giving the back seat tune up for the easy low price of a bologna sandwich. She no longer even pretends to care about me, and when I’m feeling cynical, like I have been recently, I’m almost soothed by her honesty. I’ve grown accustomed to taking what I can get.

Yet if it matters to me at all that my son learns what wild things are, I am obligated to say that I’m tired of taking what I can get. For a change let me take what I, what we, deserve. We deserve elk and ducks and steelhead, and healthy sky, water, and landscapes in which to pursue them. No matter who the next president is, he’d damn well BETTER own a rod, a rifle or a bow, if not a dog-eared copy of A Sand County Almanac. And he’d better know what it means to truly use them.

I am a sportsman, and I approved this message.

Utah Boys Basketball Championship: Corner Canyon Sexy Moms Favored to Take it All

This from msn.foxsports.com -

School board rejects ‘Cougar’ mascot

Future students at a Utah high school had their choice of mascot — a cougar — rejected by the school district because it could be seen as offensive to older women.

The students, who in 2013 will attend Corner Canyon High School in Draper just south of Salt Lake City, were asked to vote on their new mascot and school colors, KSTU-TV reported Wednesday.

With 23 percent of the vote, the cougar was the top pick for the mascot, but board members of the Canyons School District expressed concerns over the appropriateness of using a mascot title that, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, can be used as a slang word for “a middle-aged woman seeking a romantic relationship with a younger man.”

Do these fangs make me look fat?

Instead the board members chose a war horse as the school mascot noting the alliteration of Corner Canyon Chargers. It was also an image of strength that could unify the community, the board noted.

In making their decision, the school district also cited the fact that three other Utah high schools and Utah’s Brigham Young University already used a cougar as their mascot, the FOX-affiliate station reported.

In my imagination, this is how it happened:

PRINCIPAL OF CORNER CANYON HIGH (to the student body assembled in the school gymnasium): The reason we’ve called you here today is to begin the process of choosing Corner Canyon High’s new colors and a name for our mascot. As you might imagine, we’re looking for a symbol for what this institution means to you, something that might inspire you to your greatest achievement and pride. Or just think of something you like. The choice is yours. Think power, ferocity, speed, nobility, grace.

RANDOM MALE STUDENT: Or smokin’ hot.

RANDOM MALE STUDENT: Boob job, dude. Divorced.

PRINCIPAL: Gentlemen, please. Future students will thank you for taking this exercise seriously.

RANDOM MALE STUDENT: Boob job’s cool, but what about the stretch marks and veins and the wrinkles and dimples on the back of the thighs?

RANDOM FEMALE STUDENT (rolling her eyes): It’s called cellulite, and TMI by the way.

RANDOM MALE STUDENT: Whatever.

PRINCIPAL: Future citizens, may I remind you that we’re choosing our school’s colors and mascot. We are not discussing anything even remotely to do with, with….This decision will not happen today. Rather….

RANDOM MALE STUDENT: Lipstick red or fishnet black for the colors. Whatever it is should be able to dish out the most awesome…..

RANDOM FEMALE STUDENT: And it can, like, totally steal your boyfriend. The cheerleaders can wear ankle bracelets and heels.

RANDOM MALE STUDENT: Boob job.

I'd close my mouth but my Botox won't let me.

PRINCIPAL: Look. By next Tuesday we should have a list of options for you to vote on. The winner will be announced next Friday. Please be sensitive to the fact that what you consider an inoffensive mascot may rub certain groups the wrong way. Take, for example, the Washington Redskins, who chose a racial slur as the name for their team. And though their organization has not suffered from this oversight, they might have chosen differently if given another chance.

RANDOM MALE STUDENT: How about the MILFs?

PRINCIPAL: Again, we’ll compile a list by next Tuesday and,… excuse me? I don’t even know what, what in the world is a MILF?

RANDOM MALE STUDENT (eyes half closed): Fast. Ferocious.

ENTIRE STUDENT BODY (for a full minute): Go MILFs! Go MILFs!

Future Homewreckers of America!

PRINCIPAL: Please people! Let’s think this over before, I mean, how about an animal’s name? Something simple. The Bears, say. Yeah. What’s wrong with the Bears?

RANDOM MALE STUDENT: Like you said, sir. Some fat and hairy bearded guys might get offended in San Francisco.

MALE STUDENT WITH HALF-CLOSED EYES: Strong. Graceful.

PRINCIPAL: OK, forget it, meeting’s over. Next Tuesday’s the list. I mean, how about we call ourselves the Bags of Rocks? Great mascot huh??!! The Bags of Rocks!!!! I love it. I’m positive you can all relate to that one, can’t you?!!!

RANDOM FEMALE STUDENT: But I think the people on the school board would be all, and then like get offended (principal stares at her, his face turning red), cause that name would hit, like, pretty close to home? I like your animal idea better, like a big cat or something.