Fishing for the future

A lazy Sunday in March is good for reading, napping, munching, and watching the birds come and go at the feeders. Once again we are faced with  a mostly cloudy week upcoming and the prospect of more than an additional half a foot of snow before next weekend. I hope someone soon reminds Mother Nature that we’ve reached the time of year when the snow pack is supposed to experience a next loss, not gain more than melts. I’m sure we’ve not lost seven inches of snow cover during the past week.

There’s no sign of open water, nor even the icky gray color that rotting ice shows, at the Sunrise river pools in Carlos Avery Wildlife Management Area. We’ll check more regularly from now on since we believe that, in general, waterfowl migrating north generally seek open water. That’s likely to be slow coming since the near term temperature is below normal and even normal isn’t all that warm around here.

what kind of ancestors do we want to be?

Photo by J. Harrington

Even though Minnesota offers fly fishing opportunities during the winter, the traditional stream fishing opener (inland trout) is more than a month away. In anticipation, I’m going to ask you to read a couple of recently published articles that we all need to think about and act on.

The future of fly fishing rests in our hands, in HATCH magazine, and

Do we anglers, ourselves, amount to a ‘conservation challenge’? by the Editor of TROUT magazine

There’s also an article in today’s Star Tribune in which Minnesota Pollution Control Agency officials claim they can’t limit nitrate pollution to our rivers and streams. There’s legislation [HF2076/SF1937] pending in the Minnesota Legislature that would reinstate the Citizen Board that used to oversee the MPCA. If you’re concerned about clean air, clean water, healthy babies and having the “fishable/swimmable” water we were supposed to have back in 1983, you might want to demand your Minnesota legislators support that legislation. Alternatively, if there are no fishable waters, we anglers won’t be faced with the question of whether we, ourselves, are a conservation challenge. Problem solved.

The Fisherman

W. B. Yeats - 1865-1939

Although I can see him still,
The freckled man who goes
To a grey place on a hill
In grey Connemara clothes
At dawn to cast his flies,
It's long since I began
To call up to the eyes
This wise and simple man.
All day I'd looked in the face
What I had hoped 'twould be
To write for my own race
And the reality;
The living men that I hate,
The dead man that I loved,
The craven man in his seat,
The insolent unreproved,
And no knave brought to book
Who has won a drunken cheer, 
The witty man and his joke
Aimed at the commonest ear,
The clever man who cries
The catch-cries of the clown,
The beating down of the wise
And great Art beaten down.

Maybe a twelvemonth since
Suddenly I began,
In scorn of this audience,
Imagining a man,
And his sun-freckled face,
And grey Connemara cloth, 
Climbing up to a place
Where stone is dark under froth,
And the down-turn of his wrist
When the flies drop in the stream;
A man who does not exist,
A man who is but a dream;
And cried, 'Before I am old
I shall have written him one
Poem maybe as cold
And passionate as the dawn.'

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