Where the River Flows

The Big Lost, Aldo Leopold, and immigrant trout.

ALDO LEOPOLD’S UNDERWORLD TROUT

September 23, 2016

Dear, Trout —

I had hiked down a heavily switch-backed trail that ran among sagebrush and young mule deer. The Big Lost River flowed past my feet. Its surface was alive with cutthroat trout eating bugs.

Completely alone, I had no reason to hurry. The Tao of Trout Fishing in America says that hurry never brings the future faster than it will come on its own.

Aldo Leopold knew this as he dropped the reins and watched his farm rewild.

I carried A Sand County Almanac in my pack when I fished alone. The book was good company — especially Round River. Leopold was not a very good trout fisherman, but he knew his Ecology.

“It would not surprise me if trout that spawned here have progeny alive and well in the Snake River,” Leopold said from my pack. I was used to him starting conversations from my pack. I always left it unzipped a little to hear his voice better.

“How’s that?” I asked.

“This river flows from the Rocky Mountains past Mackay, continuing south through an agricultural valley before passing Arco. The river heads east, northeast, then north to a marshland called the Big Lost River Sinks where it disappears into the ground, feeding the Snake River Aquafer.

“All things flow downstream.”

I had never contemplated the idea of a subterranean trout lineage until that moment. A river disappearing into a farm field and its trout swimming into the realm of the underworld.

Underworld fry with pale par marks popping up from various springs along the Snake and into the sun to tan and get some color on their cheeks and grow fat and strong in the big river.

Or underworld trout that grow to outlandish, ghostly proportions, too big to emerge from the ground and perfectly content to feed on the caddis husks and mayfly larvae and crayfish and small glass minnows that follow the flush of the Big Lost into the aquafer. Gollum trout!

Maybe grayling and whitefish, Apache and Gila trout, and westslope cutthroat are all trout of the underworld. All hanging out in the great trout lost-and-found.

I wondered if, with a long enough leader and a zebra midge, I could somehow fish the Sinks and reach the lost-and-found.

Leopold kept on from my pack.

“Think of the downstream trout-flow feeding the Swan Valley and its moose and livestock and grasses and wheat and coyotes and pinion fields and rodeo bulls; following the Snake to the Columbia and its trout-flow from the Canadian Rockies, eventually pouring itself into the ocean, climbing back into the sky, and falling like trout-manna to the Rockies to start all over again.

“Walleye, carp, and smallmouth, like propaganda over the Great Lakes.”

And the river goes round —

An old friend

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A GRAND AND GRANITE VISION

September 26, 2016

Dear, old friend —

Teddy Roosevelt had a little-known Phase II for his national park project: to make Yellowstone the trout hub of America. Roosevelt’s vision was a web of trout subways connecting the east to the west, essentially opening the flow of trout travel to visit new water or relocated family or find work in the bourgeoning destiny of the west or the well-oiled machinery of the east. Tremont Street made full-scale! New York City’s subway-in-progress 100-fold larger and more fluid! Ten million trout per river mile! The original round (trip) river!

German and Scottish immigrants propagating their fortunes in prairies and valleys and mountainsides under a big sky! Bonneville cutthroat, Gilas, California rainbows, Goldens, and Westslopes, Rio Grands and Apaches, and anadromous Steelhead pulsing east, reaching the Plymouth Rock of our precocious nation.

Trout commuting in America! Welders and stonemasons, bankers and business owners, academics and farmers, journalists and radicals waving as they pass in the grand and granite Yellowstone Station or emerge from smaller spurs in smaller national parks. The sharing of trout knowledge and talents and perspectives and values and music and art and poetry and spirituality and food culture and parenting hacks. The economic boon of a tireless population working far and wide for the common good. One nation, underground, with mobility and unfettered access to all.

Feasibility plans, engineer drawings, budget proposals, Congressional minutes, and survey reports for Roosevelt’s dream are decaying in the recesses of the National Archives. In his last address to the nation, Roosevelt opined, “The day will come when trout lead us to glory. Maybe then we’ll figure out the buffalo situation.”

Presciently —

T