A Democracy Of Anglers
Greg Keeler 
Reprinted with permission from the BIG SKY JOURNAL

I'm talking bait vs. flyfisherman. As my friend and I lashed a long deep run with nymphs, dries, and streamers all in vain, we glanced downstream and saw HIM coming toward us, gently flipping his spinning rod and plooking some frayed organic material not twenty feet from the end of my streamer's swing. The territorial imperative welled up in me and I tried to make myself as big as possible, huffing and inflating like a chukker and standing on a large submerged boulder. Who did he think he was? How dare he? A barrage of imagery flooded my mind to flesh out his stereotype. This guy's name was Bobby Don and before he learned to use bait, he gathered carp with a pitchfork in southern Minnesota. He only drank "animal beer" (Schmidt's), he drove a '67 Ford F-250, he smoked Swisher Sweets, and he'd kill whatever he caught after he let it writhe in his creel for an hour or so. Mustering all my nerve, I turned to him and spoke.

"Howdy, havin' any luck?"

"Not much." He patted a wet lump in his creel. "Pretty slow today."

I was startled to see that he was a small, almost delicate man, and hearing the gravel crunch behind me, I turned to see his small, delicate wife hopping down the bank from a nearby cottonwood thicket.

"You should have seen him last week," she beamed. "He caught two giant brown trout, both over eighteen inches."

My friend overheard this and shouted the instinctive question over the rush of the Gallatin, a question that, had it been asked during the French Revolution, might have gotten him guillotined. "Did you release them?"

The man and his wife looked at each other. "You mean--let them go," said the woman as if she were talking about giving up her children to the gypsies.

"No," said the man, "we didn't release them. We ate them." And with that, they bid us both a curt farewell and stomped up the bank toward a hole we had just fished, but before they were out of earshot, we could barely discern the words L.L. Bean, Eddie Bauer, Orvis, and yuppie above the irate clatter of their footsteps across river rocks.

Later, back at the parking area, we saw them again, herding a covey of pretty little daughters into an old Datsun sedan. Before the mother slammed her door, the smallest of them leaned out, her blond curls shaking in defiance, and said, "My daddy fishes better than you rich...," but the door cut her short and seconds later they were a cloud of dust and gravel.

Driving home, my friend and I were quiet, and I felt an odd sense of remorse creeping up on me, dragging a host of rationalizations with it. I could have stopped them and shown the little girl my 1980 Toyota pickup, how the grill was held together by duct tape, how my rod and reel were both Korean, discounted in a discount store.

I could have told her about myself when I was her age, following my grandmother out into an Oklahoma pasture, my cane pole bobbing beside me as I walked, tickled pink that she had allowed me to carry the can of chicken guts, their rich smell accompanying us to the pond bank where I would look up at her in the shadow of her huge flowered bonnet and she would show me how to bait the hook, toss out, wait for the cork to move, jerk, and send a green, glinting catfish whistling over our heads and into the prairie grass behind us. I could have described the mystery of a gunny sack full of bullheads writhing in the chicken yard, waiting to be cleaned--how Grandma loved to clean them so much she insisted on dressing everything Grandad caught on his long trips to the Salt Fork River; how she taught me to kill them with the pliers, cut around their heads, pull their skin off in a long silver sheath and throw it with the guts into a clump of squawking, scrabbling chickens; how she soaked them overnight in salt water then batter fried them for Sunday dinner, their odor filling the house like a pagan blessing.

I could have told that little girl about long, dusty trips to the river with Grandad in his ancient black Chevy--how we'd stop for a road-killed jack rabbit and cut it into little cubes to bait the trotlines; how the channel cat roiled ghostlike just beneath the surface to let us know they were ours and how they looked on the red clay bank, huge flopping silver mysteries. At a weaker moment, I might even have told her about my old backwoods bachelor cousins who would station themselves at each end of a hidden river inlet with old country telephone generators and crank until the surface was alive with bullheads quivering in the voltage.

And would she have begun to understand how, when I grew up and moved to Louisiana, I admired and respected the black men and women who fished the bayous and ditches between Natchitoches and New Orleans with their cane poles and secret baits for buffalo carp, sunfish, snapping turtles--whatever their exotic recipes could convert to their rich, mysterious banquets; and how, when I saw them, I couldn't help thinking of my grandmother and a tradition of fishing and eating as diverse and inclusive as America itself?

I might have even tried to explain how flies became part of the mystery, the old dusty piles of Field and Stream in my grandparents' attic, the pictures of trout like religious icons in clear water with blue, purple and white mountains behind them, the amazing addresses in the back where I could send off to places like Dan Bailey's and order jewel-like devices of feather and steel with names like Adams, Royal Coachman, and Renegade--how the bluegill and small bass of Oklahoma farm ponds seemed to prefer these to the things they were tied to imitate.

Yes, I could have stood there propping open the back door of that little Datsun and yammering on until that little girl started crying and the father got out and popped me one. Obviously this whole dilemma was my own problem. After all, it hadn't been too long before that I had been the bait fisherman, casting maggots for spring whitefish on the Yellowstone while McKenzie boats full of fly-fishing purists passed me scowling under their Connemara hats so fiercely that I felt compelled to yell, "Whitefish! I'm just catching whitefish!" What I needed was perspective--perhaps historical.

The Crow Indians who hung out around the Gallatin and Yellowstone valleys for a few centuries didn't like fish. They considered them beneath their dignity--especially when there were plenty of buffalo around. Those old native cutthroat trout probably didn't have to worry too much except about getting too fat, or dodging the occasional hungry Blackfoot. Hardly anyone bothered to catch them, much less release them.

Ah, but then came those pesky white explorers and those downright destructive guides and developers like Jim Bridger and John Bozeman. And in the wink of a century, those fat, carefree cutthroats had been replaced by big bullying brown trout with German accents, blue-blooded eastern brook trout, and trendy California rainbow trout. And for a while, the new generations of Montana anglers followed the stocking trucks around, unconcerned about the philosophical implications of put-and-take fisheries, happy to sack up their ten-fish limit, take them home, fry them, can them or slam them in the smoker.

But in the past twenty years, something even more odd, perhaps even twisted, has happened. Some of these exotic newcomers, both in and out of the water have begun to consider themselves natives. A few old brown, brook and rainbow trout can brag like their human counterparts that they have lived here for many generations--unlike these new out-of-streamers who are trucked in for holidays. These "native" populations of trout are neither here for their own hard gemlike existence nor for the subsistence of fisherfolk; no, they are just part of a sport--a bit like golf balls, protected more and more by catch-and-release fly fishing for those few who can afford to decorate the last available pieces of streamside lifestyles with colorful surveying ribbons and stakes. And the "native" populations of people? They may not be golf balls, but their century-old cowboy way of life isn't too far from a German brown's, except that the former is protected from rich outsiders by government policies such as subsidies and low grazing fees; whereas the latter is protected for rich outsiders by by government policies aforementioned.

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