Fishing the Bottom
I’ve fished the same water for the last two Saturdays—a receding stretch of river slowly returning to reservoir status. Jeremy, that ever-reliable, rehabilitated surf bum turned respectable member of society, has gone with me on both outings. The first trip saw us take a back road to an easy access point. Easy hike. Easy water. Busy day. The second trip saw our original entry point flooded. Pushing farther up, we found a second entry point that required some heavy blackberry bushwhacking coupled with pathless scrambling. In a season of anadromous unicorns, we fished against the grain, looking for trout—big winter trout you sometimes find in Oregon when rivers and reservoirs are in flux and those of us willing to walk three or four miles one way stand a fisherman’s chance at catching something memorable. This kind of fishing never comes easy. Loose gravel threatens to give way as wading boots scramble for stability on steep hillsides. Massive, thorny blackberry vines tear at waders. Quick mud appears as ground water rises. The weather changes on a dime. A good day sees water temps barely cresting forty degrees, and sometimes the fish just fuck off and refuse to move. These are the days that measure mettle. In my opinion, it’s pretty near the bottom of trout fishing and maybe that’s what makes me love it even more. I’ve always gone in for underdog chances. Everything else seems to lack character.
It’s an open secret that the Willamette River Basin—with all its tributary rivers—has been in trouble for some time. Native chinook and winter steelhead and bull trout are listed species on the ESA. Our native redside populations have been on the decline for a while, too. We have failed to restore much less give these fish something of a fighting chance at survival despite millions (by some calculations, the number is closer to a billion) of dollars spent. Several dams in the Willamette Valley block 100% of spawning ground for anadromous fish. The dams not only lack adequate fish ladders to help pass fish up stream, their respective reservoirs and power-producing outlets prevent and/or kill smolts that try to pass down stream. So far, solutions have been delayed, poorly reasoned, forced by the courts, and led to unintended consequences for downstream conditions. Currently, the leading ideas are to flush certain reservoirs below power outlets so that smolts can pass down stream while engineering (with concrete and big equipment and asphalt and cement ponds) fish collection stations so that more trucks can drive the fish over the dams to spawn. If flushing fails, as it most likely will because the dams were not built with fish passage either upstream or down stream in mind, the Army Corps of Engineers plans to build giant fish vacuums to suck smolts up and then dump them over the dam. The only peer review study done on the results of such a contraption show it as a failure. But never fear. The idea is to build it three times bigger than that which was studied. Because, as we all know, bigger is always better.
On top of dams, trucks, and vacuums, flushing reservoirs has led to turbidity issues and warming river temps down stream. The town of Sweet Home saw its drinking water turn brown from silt. The Willamette River near Jasper reached temps of nearly seventy degrees for a few weeks last year—first time it’s done that in decades. There was a major fish kill at Green Peter Reservoir and smallmouth as well as walleye once held in a reservoir as game fish have been flushed into the upper Willamette creating a whole new threat to the ecosystem.
Finally, river access has been drastically impacted by other problems the Valley faces. The McKenzie River has lost Finn Rock Boat Launch until July (potentially) due to private construction and ramp improvements. The Forest Service has closed Rennie’s launch for years with prevailing theories being that the government simply forgot it even exists. On the lower McKenzie, Hendricks Park is closed until at least May because of ice storm debris clean up. This removes not only a major county park where the public can access the river, but it also fundamentally changes the way that same public will float the river in the Spring. On the Willamette, access to the Middle Fork has been gated at the base of Hills Creek Dam—because of campers, trash, and general human fuckery. The same is true for access under the highway 58 bridge near Oakridge. ODOT got tired of cleaning up illegal trash dumps and campers so they shut that down. Farther down river, Dexter Boat Launch is closed for three years due to construction related to “improvements” on fish collection, not improvements to the dam. The Jasper Bridge boat launch was gated last year by ODOT for predictable reasons: human fuckery and our generally trashy nature. I am sure there are other closures, but these are all I can think of now.
A conspiracy minded person might see in these closures nefarious intent from our government agencies. Others would argue that the closures are necessary and well within the authority of those entities. Some might even go so far as to advocate for the agencies, claiming there are good people working there who care about fish. For my part, I would like to point out that definition is always the first order of argument. ODOT is the department of transportation. They could give two shits about fish. Army Corps of Engineers is not the Army Corps of FISH Engineers. Sure, they have biologists on staff. Guess what, big tobacco had doctors on staff telling us there was no risk of cancer with tobacco. Big oil has climatologists on staff saying climate change was (and IS) a hoax and that oil has nothing to do with a warming planet. I have no doubts that as individuals these persons care—to greater or lesser extent—about these environmental problems. But, like Mr. George Carlin says, people are different. People are the problem. People—groups of three or more—are the worst and do the worst. Go ahead. Trust people. See where that gets you.
If there is a bright spot in all this darkness—and it’s both a stretch and a dim brightness at best—it comes from the draining of the reservoirs. Sure, the whole riparian zone is gone. It’s been raped and denuded and flooded. But, it also keeps trying to come back with every draining. Sweetgrass is there. Alders are there. Willows are there. And as the water recedes more of the old river bed does show its face. The old, freestone river still lies underneath all that silt and dirt and bullshit we’ve put there. More river means more fishing access which means, potentially, more persons can go and see for themselves what we took away from ourselves, what we let people engineer and flood and bury away.
Truth be told, fishing these bottoms can be remarkably good. Hold over hatchery stock and wild fish grow massive in the lakes and move up into the river bed as waters recede. Since the reservoirs are home to other game fish, every once in a while the trout fisherman gets a smallmouth, a walleye, and feels a different thrill while also questioning what the hell those things are doing there in the first place.
Then, too, the simple experience of fishing more river with potential can change hearts and minds. Talk to any old timer river bum who was fortunate enough to fish those waters before their ruination and they’ll tell you it was the best damn water around. They’ll talk about football trout and the stink of salmon that could be smelled in town with the right breeze. They’ll tell you about steelhead and bull trout and free flowing rivers and big old trees and something beautiful.
Jesus, that must have been a sight. Go ahead, pops. Tell me how good it was. No, really. Tell me what we lost.
Jeremy and I both fished the bottoms with trout spey rods because the water was broader than most might assume and because the fishable runs sure do swing good. We both caught fish. That first weekend, Jeremy landed two fish on only two takes with both measuring over twenty-one inches. That’s a damn good fish for February. My first weekend saw a few more than that, but nothing coming close to his lunkers. The second weekend the reservoir was up, with runs that had been ankle deep a week before now over the tops of our chest waders. We both got our asses kicked. Jeremy got skunked even though he fished the hell out of things. I got a few with the best of it all being something I never saw. It was closer to the big water at the last swingable run before the river went to lake. I tied on a Dec Hogan Belvedere sized down for trout spey applications. I would like to say there was good reason for my choice but there wasn’t. I was just about done with the run, hadn’t had a bump, and simply wanted to see how the fly would cast and swim. On maybe my seventh or eighth swing, just when I felt like the fly was in the juice and if a take was gonna happen, it was gonna happen then, lightning struck. It was a hard, fast, mean hit, the kind I call a hateful hit. I turned the rod to the bank and just watched as the fish took line like nothing. I was only fishing 8 pound test so didn’t want to crank the drag. I had made about a thirty-five yard cast to get the swing going. My reel has about seventy yards of mono shooting line before backing. When the fish was done with me there were about seven turns of mono left on the reel. Whatever it was came unpinned in the run. I laughed. I stood there at the bottom of that run with nearly all my line in the water, laughing. I had no shot at that fish. I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t turn it, couldn’t do much of anything except watch the line peel off in wonder and admiration. I don’t know what the hell it was and, honestly, don’t want to speculate. Big. It was big and that is enough for me.
I know I’ll never see my homewaters restored to glory because my life is too far gone to last until that day. Somedays I’m okay with that. Somedays I am happy to fish what waters I have and love them for what they are. Somedays not so much. Somedays the bottoms get to me and I can barely stand my own company. But most days, though, are split. They divide between past, present, and future where nostalgia and the givens and hope mix together in that peculiar amalgamation I haven’t thought to name yet. I suppose that big ass something on that last run of the day is about as close as I’ll get to landing that feeling. If nothing else, at least it builds character.
