I recently heard a fellow fly fisherman—who should have known better—suggest that trout have an easy life; "What could be better than living in a mountain stream?" he asked me.  Now, you must understand that this is a guy who "camps" in something that looks an awful lot like the Madden Cruiser, and, following the advice of his overbearing mother, who coddled and terrified him as a child, never "camps" or fishes anywhere more than 60 minutes from a hospital.  He hits the stream with so much gear I'm shocked he hasn't bought himself a brown person to schlep all his crap for him.  Only fishes dry flies.  Exactly.  What a fag.

The truth, of course, is that your average high country freestone stream is an incredibly brutal environment.  The habitat tends to be very marginal, with areas of relatively 'deep' water essentially confined to bathtub sized plunge pools, each with swirling vortex of white water at its center and the occasional narrow chute, where vicious currents have gouged a narrow channel from bare rock.  With so little deep water, a hotter than average summer or a colder than average winter could easily prove lethal to trout.  Drought in the summer.  Floods in the spring.  And that gin clear water?  Just the visual consequence of an ecosystem largely devoid of the organic nutrients needed to sustain life.  In these streams, only one fish in thousands will survive to adulthood, and a trout that lives three years (out of a potential lifespan of 15-20 years) might very well be the grand old man of the river.

One of my favorite trout streams is just such a creek.  It is headwater tributary to another, somewhat larger tributary of a middling river of no particular importance.  Inexplicably, on maps, it is called a "river," but nowhere is it more than 10 to 12 feet wide, and it is rarely more than shin deep.  It is also the most beautiful stretch of water I can conjure to mind.  In just over a mile, the river drops over 1100 feet through a laurel and rhododendron choked gorge, racing around boulders and over pea gravel and cobble, never falling very far at once, with rugged chutes and shallow riffles alternating with stair step plunge pools.  Nestled in the lap of a temperate rainforest, it has always seemed like a secret temple, sacred if not sacrosanct.  It's a place I rarely bring any but the closest friends and family, and only those I know will hold the secret with the same reverence that I do.


The fish are wild rainbow trout, tenacious survivors and descendents of some long-forgotten and thoroughly ill-advised private stocking.  They have the sort of lean lines, fantastically vivid colors and fighting spirit that simply cannot be matched by any fish raised in the concrete raceways of a hatchery facility.  And they are tiny.  The trout in this stream average maybe 4-6 inches, and a real monster might top out at 10-11 inches, but they are wild and they are beautiful and in this setting they are perfect.


There is another river I fish with some frequency.  There's nothing remotely secret about the Davidson, which is among the premier non-tailwater trout fisheries in the Southeast.  While it has many of the charms of any fast flowing, clear stream, the grip of civilization lies heavy on the Davidson.  Paved roads parallel it for miles.  Cars are almost always parked at the the regularly spaced pulloffs.  On summer weekends, you'll find anglers stacked at intervals of 40-60 yards along the most popular stretch.  One very productive series of holes backs up against a half rusted out rail trestle and an abandoned industrial property.

For varying reasons (drainage size, soil chemistry, altitude), the Davidson is inherently more fecund than most small high country streams.  But the real draw here is the state trout hatchery, which draws water from the river, cycles it through its tanks, then discharges it back into the river.  This cold, highly oxygenated discharge carries with it the accumulated effluent of 300,000 odd fish, as well as leftover feed pellets, turbocharging the entire stream ecosystem below the hatchery.  From this point on, the river is a thoroughly unnatural bug factory, pumping out a vast biomass of aquatic insects, and able to support an enormous biomass of insectivorous trout, too, with enough leftover to support large numbers of suckers, dace, chubs, sculpins and crawfish, the sort of meals that truly large trout eat.  And that is the whole attraction of fishing the Davidson; there are tons of trout, and a few of them are huge.

Davidson River trout are what some anglers like to call "educated," but this implies a level of agency in their behavior that fish simply do not possess.  Rather, these are fish attuned to an environment of rich abundance.  The constant availability of forage suppresses more opportunistic feeding instincts.  The name of the game is convenience (i.e. minimizing energy expenditure), and strikes either have to be elicited through extremely precise casting and presentations, or by targeting fish during a major insect hatch, when the fish feed more actively.  Like moderns, the largest Davidson River trout require fairly significant levels of stimulus just to attract their attention.  They're chunky like moderns, too.



I find myself fascinated with the ways people experience a place and how they try and relate that experience to others.  When folks talk about visiting the Davidson, they talk about the number of trout they caught or the unbelievable size of that one fish they saw.  When they visit my secret spot or other high gradient mountain headwaters, they invariably speak of the beauty of the scenery of and the gemlike quality of the fish.  Fishing the Davidson is a thoroughly modern experience.  It's all about numbers.  Quantification.  Outcomes.  Small stream fishing feels like a journey into the past, an exploration of long-vanished modes of thought and being.  It is an experience of place, inextricably entwined with aesthetic revelation.

I have a sneaking suspicion that what makes such places seem so lovely is the thrill of mortality.  Our appreciation for beauty is in some sense tied to our sense of impermanence.  I believe that beauty cannot be disentangled from the awareness of frailty, of the tragic, glorious fragility of existence.  The mountainside robed in the splendor of autumn; in a week, reduced to a skeleton of bare rock set off by the silent bones of trees.  The lovely girl in the full flower of a youth that is always too brief.  The Old Guard at Waterloo, in the moment before shell, steel and shot brought an entire age crashing down in bloody ruin.  One tiny doomed fish, rising to dimple the surface of the water in the lee of a rock that is all that remains of a mighty peak, long since pulverized to sand.  In some primitive, instinctual corner of our beings, we recognize the tenuousness of life, and all the challenges it must overcome to simply hang on.  The real beauty lies in the tenacity of life in the face of certain death.

I moved my archery target, a few days ago, from the garden, out into the woods, to gain more range and tidy up the garden. I can stand off up to seventy yards now.
That's a good long way, for a longbow, and still be able to hit reasonably accurately, although it would be nothing special for a compound bow. But I only have a recurve and a longbow, being the traditionalist I am.

Straw bales are a great arrow-stopper, although it remains to be seen if the deer will eat them.
Over the bales I have a two-foot-square hessian bag full of synthetic roofing paper, all screwed up into a fairly solid medium, inside the bag. And a nine-inch roundel marked on the front for an aiming point.

I hadn't shot an arrow in many months, but, astonishingly, my first arrow hit the bull, at about sixty yards.
This is astonishing for a number of reasons, but it is a phenomenon I have seen several times. That first arrow is, more often than not, the most accurate one of all. And why would that be?

I can only surmise that the first shot is concerned only with finding the range, elevation-wise, and by not caring where it hits, it unintentionally gets to be the best shot. I couldn't believe my eyes. The second shot was almost as accurate, about two inches right. And all following shots fell into the predictable groove of reasonably accurate, in a loose group, with one or two low misses.

Zen, at work. Dispense with desire, and unlikely results occur.

I have often noted a similar phenomenon while fly fishing.  My casts upon hitting the water are often things of beauty, tight loops unfurling just so the fly kisses the water within inches of the opposite bank.  My casting stroke then usually deteriorates as my mind enters the equation.  I become concerned with a thousand little peripheral things—line manipulation, where I want to bring the fly to life, where oh where are the goddamn fish, watch out for that overhanging laurel.  Casting becomes work, and I try to compensate by carefully aiming my casts, trying to impose my will upon both my body and the surrounding environment.  This rarely works, and usually results in lost tackle and missed strikes. 

My stroke usually returns just about the moment that my mind, numbed by failure, retreats to a less willful and more contemplative state.  I find myself mesmerized by a particularly lovely swirl of current, or a bird I've never seen before.  Is that a mink?  A brown trout rushes from a dark undercut to grab the fly, but most of my mind is elsewhere, conveniently out of the way as my body does all the right things that it couldn't do just minutes before. 

They're really quite lovely.

I must say that I, too, have a soft spot for wasps.  Or, at least for yellow jackets.  They taught me much about the fine art of observing one's surroundings before plowing ahead.  And I only had to get stung about 300 times to learn!

Dylar, what is is beyond thought; a thought can be pointed out, but reality is the pointer - how can a knife cut itself?  The mystical experience, the experience of that reality (of one's own reality), is not primarily a thought-state, though, of course, thought might arise; even so, it is known, at that point, that one is not the thinker (it is no longer "my thought").  Shiva sits upon Kailash in the deepest of meditations, being only the Self; there is no thought, no feeling, no sensation, only existence.

Nonsense.  Mystical experiences, like any other thoughts, are ephemera conjured by the human mind, no more, no less.  The distinction is whether one imposes conscious control of the process.

The mystic experience isn't non-thought, it is thought in its least adulterated state, thought divorced from sensory input, thought untainted by discourse with others and their thoughts.  The tools of the mystic—isolation, asceticism, meditation, trance states etc.—aren't tools for emptying the mind of thought (even if they are presented as such), they are tools for clearing the mind of impediments to thought and the obligation to consciously shape thought or herd it in a particular direction.

Political ideologies—like their religious counterparts—provide a mythic framework for A.) explaining why things aren't the way they ought to be and B.) how things can be made to be the way they ought to be.  Childish, yes, but for a human being, who might reasonable expect 80 years of life in a universe where a billion years is chump change, a certain degree of perpetual childishness is to be expected, no?

Quote from: Dylar on June 05, 2012, 10:06:31 PM

nor will requiring voters to show photo identification disenfranchise any substantial number of minorities.  

You're wrong there. It definitely will, as minority groups tend to have higher rates of crime in the USA, and so have a higher chance of being prohibted from carrying common state issued ID's like drivers licenses or trade licenses. Of course, the standard issue regular "state ID" which just says one's name, DOB, and what state they're from in addition to personal characteristics can be obtained, but not many people have them or know about them to my knowledge.

But, that just highlights problems inherent to those respective minority groups, not these laws. Ultimately I agree that these laws are just a distraction from the real problems.

When you look at who actually shows up to vote in the first place, it's clear that laws like this don't really result in much of the way of actual vote suppression: the people who end up being impacted by ID requirements are people who wouldn't have turned out to vote in any event.  Vote fraud and vote suppression are non-issues masquerading as significant.

Organisms are adapted to the specific environments in which they evolve.  Even where they are "successful" upon introduction into another ecosystem, that very "success" can thoroughly destabilize and degrade the ecosystems into which they are introduced.  It's not just—or even primarily—that they out-compete native species: the problem is the accretion of secondary effects that follows from the initial displacement of native species.  A lot of ecosystems have fairly tight tolerances, so relatively small changes can disrupt equilibrium to a degree sufficient to induce systemic decline.