The next day, I fished the slower water upstream to see the outcome of the severe drawdowns, and to see which of the diversity of values represented by the Henry’s Fork had been honored. The Bureau of Reclamation, now world-famous as a welfare program for corporate and millionaire irrigation farmers, had taken a strict constructionist view of its duties and announced that its only responsibility in the management of Island Park Dam was the supply of irrigation water. Indeed, for years its flow regimes have been dead wrong for wildlife. Idaho Fish and Game, pointing to their limited rotenone budget in a proposed trash fish kill, collaborated in the drawdown of the reservoir pool to catastrophic levels. The sediment bed was invaded and over fifty thousand tons of silt headed into the finest piece of trout water in the nation. It poured through the Box Canyon and upper Last Chance area. When it reached Harriman State Park, the august Railroad Ranch, the water slowed down and the silt dropped to the bottom. Fifteen years after I last fished here, I returned and saw that it had gone badly downhill. The silt was bermed up around boulders on the bottom while huge, vague clouds of muck spread out before me in the priceless waters the Harriman family had entrusted to the State of Idaho. Where were those hundreds of big, surface-feeding rainbows of not so long ago? Grossly reduced, to put it mildly. The corpse of the old Railroad Ranch was a fitting monument to the short memories and hit-and-run management techniques of several public agencies.
So, the slug of silt headed downstream. The resident trout of the lake were captured, more or less, and replanted into the Henry’s Fork where, by the time of my visit, they were silvery and gaunt and not at all the vaunted river fish of yore. The trash fish were offed, the poison dispersed, the pool refilled and replanted with hatchery rainbows. Given the important genetic differences within trout species, this approach often results in populations of fish-mutts, such as the Skamania strain of steelhead that have seemed such a panacea to fishery agencies throughout the Northwest. Many people around the Henry’s Fork thought that more thoughtful criteria might have been employed in so important an area.
IT OUGHT TO BE ENOUGH to say that the Idaho Department of Fish and Game had so disgraced itself that I bought the shortest-term license, three days, that they could force me to own. Blame for the steep decline of this great fishery must be shared by the supervisor and staff of the Targhee National Forest who have abetted the clear-cutting of this fragile region. Only the state’s high rate of unemployment explains Targhee’s ongoing ability to recruit qualified young people.
At present, the Nature Conservancy is trying to buy a ranch on the Henry’s Fork above Island Park reservoir, and one would hope they will use the water to help with critical winter flows. But in this part of the West, the prior appropriation concept’s doctrinal heartland, the subject of instream flow is both controversial and ambiguous. The “use it or lose it” approach to water seems to invade even the sacred precincts of private property, an astonishing lapse in an area obsessed with individual rights. The owner of a decreed water right can neither sell it nor give it to the stream itself. His rights as an owner are restricted.
Parts of the West, dominated by the church of irrigated farming, seem willing to accept this abrogation of individual rights, as opportunistic as that may seem to outsiders. State or federal property condemnations to accommodate motor vehicles and new roads are acceptable to most Westerners, but they consider the same practice “unconstitutional” when it’s deployed to protect the natural world.
This spell of fishing, rambling, and philosophizing with Mike Lawson took place in the Island Park caldera, the mouth of an ancient volcano, one of the largest and oldest in the world. The impression on the ground is of a broad, level, circular area with a surrounding rim of low mountains, quite low really when viewed against the Tetons to the east — for me the most impressive way to see them. Bubbling through the porous and mineral-rich basalt of the old lava floor, substantial volumes of water form streams and rivers that are eyed sharply by farmers and trout fishermen alike. They’re eyed perhaps even more sharply by migratory creatures like the trumpeter swan, who staged an eleventh-hour comeback from extinction in this glorious place.
Not completely discouraged by the condition of the Railroad Ranch, Mike and I traveled along the river and were soon so submerged in its glories that I began to forget its troubles. At Upper Mesa Falls, a curtain of vertically dropping mountain water, wonderfully tall, plunged between steep forest walls. A plume of mist climbed high into the blue Idaho sky, striped with rainbows. Mike pointed to a place far below us where nearly invisible water raced across slabs of basalt. In high school, he and his friends used to work their way out on the rock to catch wild trout at the base of the falls. Once, he was swept away toward Cardiac Canyon and lost his father’s watch. I began to suspect that this river-lover, probably like most others, had been swept away often.
That evening we floated the Box Canyon through bird-filled shafts of declining light, the cold, clear water racing through a gallery of boulders where trout took up their stations for passing food. When we pulled our boat out at the bottom of the canyon, Mike related how as a baby, guarded by an inattentive aunt, he was, you guessed it, swept away by the Henry’s Fork, then recaptured by the heroic effort of his mother as he bobbed among the rocks.
I was happy to think that the rivers that first carried me, literally and figuratively, off my feet — the Pere Marquette, the Pine, the Black, the Manistee — were now in the Wild and Scenic Rivers system and receiving its imperfect benediction. As we looked down into the canyon where the trackbed wound around above the Henry’s Fork, Mike told me how his railroader father had taken him along the tracks in the inspector’s motorcar and dropped him here and there to fish. I thought Mike’s river ought to have that kind of care, too.
Above all, it ought to have some water. The first thing I wished was for the Nature Conservancy to acquire the upper Henry’s Fork and find a way to keep that water in the river, not only through Island Park reservoir but through the crooked channel of western water law as well.
Tying Flies
IT SEEMS TO ME there are several schools of fly-tying: traditional, imitative, defiant, and autobiographical. Traditional tying produces a fly that is usually a generalist pattern and has a greater pure aesthetic component than those of my other arbitrarily named categories. Some of these high-concept flies, like other aesthetic ideas of their day, have gone into appropriate eclipse: the Parmachene Belle, Queen of Waters, even the Royal Coachman, as well as the elaborate salmon flies of the past that are now enjoying a resurgence but only as objects for display. In their prime, with ingredients drawn from the most recondite corners of the British Empire, they were the equivalent of Victorian architectural follies, far removed from their origins in utility. Other traditional flies have a restraint and beauty that makes them undiscardable: the Adams, the Quill Gordon, the Hendricksons, the Cahills, all remain useful and pretty. They remind us of the poetic history of our passion as well as its deficiencies. They don’t much look like the flies they imitate except in the most basic way, and they encapsulate certain preconceptions about fish which are aesthetic at base, such as the notion that trout really prefer beautiful mayflies to such tiresome things as caddises, stoneflies, midges, and worms.
Some great fishermen — fly-tyers have been generalists, including the French anglers who supply restaurants from hard-fished public rivers. Most flies for anadromous fish, like steelhead and salmon, are generalizations. The convinced generalist is often one who knows his water intimately and professes a great belief in sharp casting and good overall streamcraft.