I loaded up my boat, drove home, put away my tackle, got out my fly-tying gear, and started tying water boatman imitations. This might be a hatch you don’t hear much about, or run into very often, but I wanted to be sure I was ready the next time I did.
LUNDBOM REVISITED
THE FIRST few years Joan and I fished Lundbom Lake, we were treated rather gently by the weather. The place we liked to camp—the rocky point at the lake’s east end—offered no shelter from the west winds that gained momentum as they swept the length of the lake, but only once or twice in our experience had the wind been strong enough to interfere with fishing or force us off the lake.
Then everything changed. Sometimes the wind howled for hours on end, sending three- and four-foot waves crashing against the point’s rocky shoreline. When that happened, fishing was impossible, so we spent the time exploring the lake’s margins, the nearby woods, and the steep grassy slope beyond the rocky point where we camped. During spring the slope was bright with sunflowers, lupine, Nootka rose, and other wildflowers, including a fragile member of the lily family called Indian rice root or Kamchatka lily. The aspen on the point were sometimes visited by mountain bluebirds, their plumage a brilliant match for the sky overhead. Ospreys circled over the lake and ravens called hoarsely from the woods, graceful Bonaparte’s gulls dropped in occasionally, and once we saw a pileated woodpecker. At night our camp was favored with blessed silence, interrupted only by the gentle clatter of aspen leaves in the breeze, the yip and yelp of distant coyotes, or the long, eerie chortling of loons.
Wildlife around the lake was abundant. Deer were frequent guests in our camp, and we saw beavers, porcupines, and a handsome badger that looked like a furry armored vehicle.
Lundbom’s traveling sedge hatch was one of the best in British Columbia and the lake also had a good spring mayfly hatch, season-long chironomid emergences, and a full complement of dragonflies, damselflies, water boatmen, and leeches, plus all those scuds. It also hosted the greatest falls of flying ants I’ve ever seen, sometimes several sizes at once. By any measure, Lundbom had everything a fly fisher could want.
Except, perhaps, a pleasant name.
Actually there was one other important thing it lacked, and that worried me: It wasn’t remote. The town of Merritt was only ten miles away. At the time it was a sleepy little place, shrouded in perpetual smoke from a local sawmill’s wigwam burner, but it had enough people—and probably enough anglers—to overwhelm a lake the size of Lundbom, and I worried that might happen. True, we’d seen few other anglers at the lake, but most of our visits had been before school was out in the spring or after it resumed in the fall, so we were never there when the most visitors could be expected. Nevertheless, we were beginning to see growing evidence of their presence, mostly trash left in fire pits or scattered along the roads and in the woods. I wrote several letters to provincial fish and wildlife officials suggesting Lundbom was such a rare and precious resource it should be protected by appropriate regulations, such as fly fishing only or catch-and-release. Most of my entreaties fell on deaf ears; a few brought responses that were downright hostile.
One June day I witnessed the finest mayfly hatch I’d seen at Lundbom. During a breezy afternoon, big, dark Callibaetis duns appeared on the surface and trout began rising to them. I hooked thirteen fish that day, the most ever at Lundbom. By late afternoon, though, the wind-driven swells were approaching dangerous heights. Several other boats were on the lake and I saw two capsize. One was too far away for me to help, but I rushed to the aid of two people who had been thrown into the water from the other. Fortunately, the water was shallow enough they were able to wade ashore, declining any help. But I still faced my own harrowing trip across open water back to our camp, and had a tough time landing the boat without swamping in the heavy surf.
A month later I returned with Joan, Stephanie, and our not-quite-two-year-old son, Randy. This time we were staying at nearby Corbett Lake Country Inn, which had been chosen as headquarters by ABC-TV’s American Sportsman series for a show on dry-fly fishing for Kamloops trout. I’d been invited to appear on the show with celebrity bandleader Peter Duchin.
After making the producer promise the name of the lake would not be mentioned on television, I suggested we start filming at Lundbom. After the production crew fussed for hours with camera and sound gear, we finally got on the lake late in the afternoon the first day. Peter and I were in a large aluminum jonboat; right behind us, in an even larger jonboat, were the producer, sound man, and photographer. The latter was perched atop a tall stepladder, and we soon discovered that casting a fly isn’t exactly easy when there’s someone right behind you on a stepladder.
I’d never been in a situation where I was expected to catch fish on demand, and I felt the pressure. It didn’t help that Lundbom, always enigmatic, was in a stingy mood that day. A few sedges were on the water and we saw a few scattered rises, but in the hour or so we fished neither of us hooked anything. I felt badly, “but apparently the film crew is used to this sort of thing,” I wrote in my diary.
Next day we returned to Lundbom. Shortly before noon the sedges started coming off and fish started rising. I hooked a large trout and quickly broke it off. Then Peter hooked two and broke off both. Finally I connected with a handsome trout of about two and a half pounds and landed it, our first fish on camera. After a short break for lunch, we resumed fishing in spite of increasing wind. The rise continued and I missed several fish in the chop, but the wind eventually became so strong we called a halt to the fishing day.
I had expected we’d return to Lundbom the following day, but at breakfast the producer announced the previous day’s sound recordings were useless “because the steers were bawling all the time.” I’d been concentrating so intently on fishing I didn’t realize that many cattle were grazing around the lake. Perhaps they were doing only what I remembered Roger LeCompte saying they did to fertilize the lake, but apparently they made lots of noise in the process and I hadn’t noticed it. The producer said we’d have to fish somewhere else, and for the remainder of the week we did.
So much for Lundbom Lake’s television debut.
My fishing diary contains records of many more visits to Lundbom over a period of years. Once I triumphantly recorded landing seventeen trout, the most I’d ever taken in one day from this tight-fisted water. My best day ever, however, produced only five trout, but the smallest weighed five pounds and two were seven and a half pounds each. It was the kind of day anglers dream about.
Looking back, though, I could see the tenor of my diary entries gradually changing. When I returned to Lundbom the year after the American Sportsman trip, I was dismayed to count twenty-seven vehicles parked around the lake, and nearly as many boats on the water. Virtually all the boats had outboard motors and nearly all their occupants were fishing with gang trolls, long unwieldy strings of metal spoons. Many also trailed stringers of small dead trout. It was the manifestation of what I had feared—that this beautiful, productive water was slowly turning into a crowded, noisy, put-and-take fishery.
There were other signs. The fire pits on the rocky point were filled with residue from the great outdoor sport of building fires hot enough to melt beer cans. The grassy slope, where delicate Indian rice root and other wildflowers still struggled to bloom, had been gouged by squadrons of motorized trail bikes. They had left deep gashes that were eroding rapidly, and each heavy rain sent streams of muddy water into the lake.
School was out for the summer by the time of my next visit, and the difference was immediately obvious. Entire villages of campers, mobile homes, and trailers were scattered around the shoreline, and the lake’s surface was streaked with speeding boats. Those not speeding were dragging gang trolls and more strings of dead trout. Mindless trail bikers were tearing new ruts in the hillside at the end of the lake, simultaneously fracturing the silence for miles around. I tried fishing, but it’s hard to enjoy good sport under such circumstances.
I
saw fewer rising trout than ever on that trip, maybe because of the growing oil slicks left on the surface by outboard motors. I suggested as much to another angler who fished the lake often; he agreed there were fewer rising trout but offered a different explanation: “The fish have learned not to stick their heads up for fear of having them ripped off by speeding outboards.”
A year later, when I returned, I saw immediately that something had been added to the skyline: A great slash had been cut through the timber on the south side of the lake to make way for the metal towers and thick cables of new power transmission lines. It probably would have been just as easy to place the lines on the far side of the ridge, where they wouldn’t have been so visible, but that’s not the way things are done in British Columbia.
Canada Day—Canada’s equivalent of Independence Day—is July 1, which of course fits hand in glove with America’s July 4 holiday. That means both Canadians and Americans flock to the British Columbia interior for a long weekend. It’s probably the worst weekend of the year to go fishing, but working people have to take advantage of whatever time they can get away, so, with trepidation, one year I headed for Lundbom on the Canada Day-July 4th weekend. “There are dozens of rigs camped in every available spot and the lake is taking a fearful pounding,” I wrote that night. “I long for those good days when we often camped alone here for days on end. Those days, apparently, are forever gone.”
Next day’s entry: “Mosquitoes and people equally thick.”
A year later, desperate for fishing, and against my better judgment, I returned to Lundbom on the same weekend. It rained hard all night and the day was cold and overcast with a strong west wind. That’s probably why the lake was “not as crowded as I’ve seen it—just counted twenty-six rigs—but crowded enough.” People were throwing garbage into the lake, and more noisy trail bikes were tearing up the slope at the east end. There were no more wildflowers.
After that I stayed away from Lundbom for six years. I suppose it was nostalgia that finally prompted me to return—that, coupled with a desire to see the lake once more before the opening of the new Coquihalla Highway. Merritt had always been accessible only by roundabout routes from the populous lower mainland of British Columbia, and for many years that helped protect the fishing; it simply took too long for people to get there. The Coquihalla Highway would follow a direct route to Merritt, and the long-debated project was finally authorized for completion before the opening of the 1986 Vancouver World’s Fair. The new highway would reduce driving time to Merritt by hours, and I knew that once it was open the area’s lakes would be flooded with anglers.
So I went there on yet another Canada Day weekend in 1985. The first thing I noted in my diary was that “a new road has been punched in, making Lundbom more accessible than ever, which it didn’t need to be.” And though I was glad to see and fish the lake again, “I also got a sharp reminder of all the things that have kept me away—mindless trail bikers, speedboats, a ‘mobile skin-diving school’ (of all things), whose members were busy building a dock (probably illegally), loud stereos, and drunken campers. There are still large trout in the lake, as evidenced by large rises and leaping fish, but they are as taciturn as ever.”
Next day I fled to another lake, then later returned to Lundbom. “Most of the wild people have left after their three-day weekend and the world is nearly at peace,” I wrote. I fished the morning without seeing a fish and then the familiar west wind came up, great screaming gusts of it, and fishing became impossible. I stuck around hoping the wind might subside in the evening, but it didn’t.
That night I was kept awake by a nearby party of drunken campers, and next day I drove home. “Very likely this will be the last time I ever come here,” I wrote.
Yet I couldn’t stay away. Just to see what had finally happened to the place where I’d experienced so many enjoyable days, I made one more trip. It was after the new highway was open and work also had begun to convert the old two-lane highway near Lundbom into a four-lane freeway. I followed the new freeway and came to an interchange with a designated left-turn lane and a lighted overhead sign pointing to Lundbom Lake. The left turn led to a new fifty-mile-an-hour graveled road that took me to the lake in moments. The dirt road around the north side of the lake was still there, however, so I followed it, passing dozens of pickup trucks, campers, motor homes, trailers, a school bus, and other assorted vehicles until I reached the rocky point where I had camped so many times. I couldn’t find a parking space there, even though all the aspen on the point had been cut down by campers for green firewood.
At last I found a cramped space off the road, parked, got out, and looked around. Out on the lake I could see several large cabin cruisers, a pair of party barges, several jet skis, even a few small hydroplanes racing back and forth, with outboards screaming. Rock music blared from stereos and ghetto blasters around the shoreline, almost loud enough to obscure the sounds of barking dogs and the shouts of drunken partiers. The usual noisy trail bikes raced up and down the slope at the east end, now totally devoid of vegetation, raising great clouds of dust where fragile lilies once grew.
I left my truck and started climbing a hill, anxious to get away from the irksome racket and dust. When I reached the top, I turned and looked down at the lake. Sunlight glinted from the steel towers and cables of the power lines along the opposite slope and from the metal rooftops of all the campers, trailers, motor homes, buses, and other vehicles parked below. I started counting them but gave up when I reached one hundred.
I realized then that I was viewing the tribal camp of a society that had lost control of itself, hopelessly addicted to internal-combustion engines, ear-damaging noise, and the pursuit of selfish pleasures, without regard for others or the damage they were doing to the earth and its creatures.
With tears in my eyes, I thought of how poor old Angus William Lundbom must have felt watching the destruction of his beloved grasslands. Now I felt the same about the lake that had been given his name.
Unlike Lundbom, however, nobody forced me to leave. I left willingly on my own, and never went back.
BETTER THAN STRAWBERRIES
THERE’S AN old saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Assuming the truth of that statement, then its logical extension is that a lot of knowledge can be even more dangerous. It can, for example, get you invited to speak to an audience of people who are all more knowledgeable than you are.
That happened to me a few years ago. By then I’d written several fly-fishing books, edited two fly-fishing magazines, and spoken at what seemed like an endless series of fishing-club meetings, conferences, and conclaves. That résumé apparently was what got me invited to speak at a university graduate seminar on ocean resource management, where everyone in the audience would have more education than I did. It occurred to me that it would probably have been more appropriate for me to be listening to them instead of the other way around. However, it did seem probable they hadn’t had as much fishing experience as I did, especially with a fly rod, which might give me at least a chance to hold my own. In fact, some of the students—maybe even all of them—might never have been fishing at all.
The seminar was at the University of Washington, my alma mater, and I’d been asked to share my views of how sport fishing should fit into the management of ocean resources. It seemed like a big responsibility, since these future resource managers might never have another opportunity to learn about the cultural and economic importance of sport fishing, or how it should fit into the many demands the world makes on its oceans. For that reason, I spent considerable time researching and preparing what I would say. My research yielded some useful numbers, now long obsolete (they were generated mostly in 1991 and 1996), but I’ve left them unchanged here because they served so well to illustrate the points I was trying to make and lined up in such a nicely coincidental manner that I was able to use them for a couple of tongue-in-cheek observations.
Somewhat to my surprise, the highly educated
young people in the audience seemed very attentive and interested in what I had to say and asked some very good questions. I think we learned from each other, and it was a good experience for me and, I hope, for them.
Here’s what I said:
Today is your lucky day. That’s because, while the rest of the world is busy getting ready to start another week of work, you get to go fishing. And by fishing I mean, of course, recreational fishing, the kind you do only for fun.
I suppose it’s logical to ask whether this is a legitimate topic for a graduate-level course at the University of Washington, or any other university for that matter. After all, in today’s world, with an expanding population increasingly dependent on the oceans for food, minerals, oil, commerce, and any number of other essentials, how can one justify “fun” as a legitimate use of the seas? Is it possible to make a case for recreational fishing in the face of all these other seemingly vital competing demands?
I believe there are some good answers to those questions, but before I get to them I think I should first define exactly what I mean when I talk about recreational fishing. We don’t know who was first to think of fishing as a form of recreation rather than a means of survival, but we do know it happened a very long time ago. Perhaps it was the Cro-Magnons who left us the stylized drawing of an Atlantic salmon on the wall of a Spanish cave, or maybe it happened even before their time. But whoever first had the idea, it probably came in the form of a sudden realization that once you had caught enough fish for supper, it was still fun to go on catching them—particularly if you used some method other than a spear or a net or a trap, some method that gave the fish more of a fighting chance.
For that is the central idea behind all forms of angling: It requires the acceptance of self-imposed handicaps. If obtaining fish were the only purpose of the exercise, then it would be easier and far more efficient to use dynamite or nets or rotenone or any number of other infernal devices. Instead, anglers use a long rod and a slender line, with bait or lures or artificial flies to entice the fish. This levels the playing field, so to speak, and gives the fish something approaching an equal chance.
A Fly Fisher's Sixty Seasons Page 10
