08_2025_REELLIFE_DIGITAL - Flipbook - Page 8
fishing
WE ARE CAPTIVATED BY TROUT.
And we wonder why. Trout
don't love us, they don't
love each other, and they
don't do anything for their
fellow trout, except by
accident or by instinct.
But the same could be said
of art. We appreciate art for
maybe the same reason we
love trout. Let's see if the
words - art and trout - are
interchangeable.
Wynetka Ann Reynolds
might have said, "Anyone
who says you can't see a
thought simply doesn't
know trout."
For two summers, I
spent afternoons and
weekends exploring back
roads, backcountry and
backwaters in streams
and lakes down the flanks
of Wy'East for a book we
called Fishing Mount Hood
Country. My co-author,
Robert Campbell, covered
most of the western water,
and I fished more of the
east side. Early in the
project, Campbell began
to send close-ups of trout
- Veda Lake cutthroats,
Timothy Lake brookies,
Salmon River rainbows - in
hand, going back into the
water. The imagery seeped
into my consciousness,
and when I brought East
Fork Hood River cutts, or
Boulder Lake brooks, or
Badger Creek rainbows to
the bank, I began to look at
each one as a piece of art,
at each scale as a stroke of
a brush.
Hood River wild fish, where
there are fewer trees above
the water, and the bottom
is light, are bright and shiny.
Fish in west-sloping rivers
with darker streambeds are
often tinted, an adaptation
that helps them survive.
While there are a few
resident rainbows near
the mouth, Campbell's
exploration of the upper
Clackamas turned up big
rainbows, part of a remnant
We seldom fished the same strain that can grow to
water twice during the two several pounds in that
mountain water. I plan to
summers on and off the
mountain. We caught bass, research that water again
soon.
sturgeon, steelhead, and
salmon, but the fish that
If Goethe had been born to
defined the effort was the
a fly-fishing family rather
coastal cutthroat. There
than to German drama,
are many variations. The
he might have written,
Clackamas watershed fish
"There is no surer method
were different in coloration
of evading the world than
from Zigzag River fish,
by following trout, and no
and in bigger lakes, trout
surer method of linking
coloration varied due to
oneself to it than by trout."
the micro-environments
they frequented. We might We caught hatchery
put the distinct differences planters, of course, and the
further they were removed
down to genetics, habitat,
from the raceways, the
food sources, and light
better they looked.
penetration.
