In two weeks we’re driving to Broken Bow, Oklahoma, 328 miles and 5 1/2 hours, to fish with Chris Schatte at Beavers Bend Fly Fishing Guide Service on the Lower Mountain Fork River. I don’t know Chris, though my friend Mark Morgan says he’s from our home town. There are few enough people from my home town that it surprises me that I don’t know one who fly fishes, but there you are. Maybe he was Church of Christ or Baptist. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t Methodist.
The Lower Mountain Fork River is a tailwater, which means it’s the waterway below a dam. There are all sorts of peculiarities about tailwaters. Flow can be dangerous or at least weird, particularly where electrical generation’s involved, and river temperatures below the dam can be substantially lower than above the dam. Our Guadalupe River changes from a nice warmwater fishery above the dam to a trout river below the dam, at least for a few miles. Water released from the bottom of a deep lake does that, and on rivers like the San Juan and the Green it turns an ignored high desert river supporting a population of catfish into a trout angler’s amusement park.
My father grew up Church of Christ, and they practice a rigorous kind of orthodoxy about the strangest things. They don’t allow, for instance, musical instruments as part of the service, just like the Greek Orthodox. While my Dad became an apostate Methodist and took his family along, I figure I inherited that orthodoxy gene, and it comes to the fore about tailwaters. There’s just something about them that seems artificial.
Now mind, fishing 50 states is an excuse: visiting all 50 states is something I’ve wanted to do that I haven’t made time for yet, like playing Layla on the guitar and reading Ulysses. But when you reach my age, time isn’t a limitless commodity. If I’m going to see the country, I need to get a move on. We like to fish. We like to travel. Fishing gives the travel a purpose, an excuse, a prod, and not a gentle one either.
So this whole enterprise is a bit artificial. Even the geography of it is arbitrary. The difference between the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and the Gulf Coast of Alabama or between a trout stream in New Hampshire and a trout stream in Vermont is some miles, and not very many either. So why, since this whole business is a bit made up, do I resent the stocking of Southern and Southwestern tailwaters with trout? Why is it that tailwaters in particular bother me?
Because I’m a hypocrite of course, because all winter long I drive up to the Canyon Lake/Lower Guadalupe tailwater and fish for stocked trout. Am I dubious about stocked trout? Yeah. Do I fish for them? Yeah. And I’m happy as can be when I catch a tailwater fish. From time to time I’ve gone out of my way to fish tailwaters: the White and the Little Red in Arkansas, the San Juan in New Mexico, the Gunpowder in Maryland.
Come to think of it, there’s only one natural lake in Texas (which I’ve never fished), and every time I drive out to Damon’s and spend a couple of hours catching bass I’m participating in the fly fishing equivalent of an amusement park, or at least a golf course. Nearly every time I fish, most places I fish, there’s some unnaturalness going on, some dam upstream or downstream, some introduced species not native to the place, some native population supplemented by stocking. I ought to recognize my scruples for what they are: my tendency for misplaced orthodoxy.
Meantime when we go to Broken Bow we’ll come back through Texarkana and have breakfast with my cousins. I haven’t seen them in years, and we were close when we were younger. The elder, six years older than me, seems bent in her FaceBook posts on forcing President Obama from office. Can’t wait to see them.
