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Writing my hopes . . .

By Steven J. Meyers

Found in: | Outside | Fishing | Fly Fishing |

I will not write my fears. Not today, at the end of a great summer filled with beautiful trout taken from wild, cold, clean water surrounded by dense forest; not now, weeks or months before the onset of winter. Not today, not when my recent memory is so filled with joy. There will be time for those fears, later, plenty of time to see the red-tinged spruce as portents, the dying groves of aspen as harbingers. There will be time to lament, soon enough. But if we do not write our hopes, we are lost already.

In 2058, my granddaughters will be grown beyond childhood, adolescence and mere adulthood. They will have become, in the eyes of children, old. Perhaps they will have long since had children of their own. Perhaps their children will by then have children as old as they were when they first saw a trout taken from Hermosa Creek by their daddy in the summer of 2008. These future grandmothers may remember with a smile that their Papa and grandma, carefully stowed warm clothing, raingear, drinks and snacks, and that Papa diligently placed a fanny pack full of fishing gear in the Truck but somehow forgot to bring a fishing rod, that when they finally got to the stream after a laughing bumpy ride and Papa discovered his folly he'd fashioned a pole from a streamside branch and that their daddy had drifted a weighted nymph under an overhanging willow on a length of leader tied to the end of the supple stick, that he'd felt a sudden tug, set the hook and lifted a brook trout all green, spotted in white and blue-haloed red wriggling and shaking and full of life from a run of water between river-washed cobbles as colorful as Joseph's coat and a sky so blue it did not seem quite real.

Perhaps they will take their children and grandchildren to Lime Creek, where they first skipped stones with Papa and their daddy, before I left them and this extraordinary world. Their memories may sadden and gladden them in equal portion as they search with their own grandchildren for flat stones - grey limestone, red sandstone spotted with gray ("salamander rocks" we always called them), salt-and-pepper granite and slick green quartzite - to send them off dancing unpredictably across the water like children across time.

The once-dense stands of aspen in Lime Creek that came in after the big fire nearly two centuries earlier will have thinned, replaced by the taller fir and spruce that once grew in their shade, grew in soil stabilized by the pioneer aspen's roots and taps and by ground cover in soil made rich by the gathered deposits of all that had ever lived there, and died there. That dirt and its history will stain their fingers and knees as they search for worms and grubs to drift on baited hooks through deep holes, before, in the years to come, my son's daughters finally switch their grandchildren (after they beg to be taught) to the artificial flies their daddy and Papa loved to fish so much.

In 50 years, perhaps children will still be taught to fly fish by their grandparents.

Perhaps the creeks will still be clean and clear and cold, full of oxygen, and squiggly bugs.

Perhaps the forests that guard the streams and hold the mountains' soil in place will still be healthy, littered with aspen, dense with fir, spruce and pine, with ribbons of streamside riparian willow and cottonwood threading through the valleys - and not have become the shrunken, ragged fringe of small, dying, arboreal islands, isolated, the result of a dramatically changed climate - the sub-alpine forest once bordered by tall ponderosa and oak now surrounded by the bleakness of encroaching desert.

Perhaps great western forests will still be owned in my granddaughters' daughters' time by the people.

By everyone. And no one.

Perhaps the forests will still be free for the hiking.

With a little luck the anthropogenic climate change deniers (some simply ignorant, others who acted out of short-term self interest), ideologue privatizers and free-market absolutists will have absorbed the overwhelming evidence all around them before it was too late and accepted the appropriate role of government in protecting these precious things. And if not (in spite of them), maybe the will of the people in defense of their forests and streams, their planet, will have prevailed over the rampant and profoundly short-sighted and destructive greed of Papa's time.

And the sisters, now grandmothers, who had come back to spend time together in this place they so eagerly looked forward to visiting every summer when they were kids, will see in their own children's soil-stained knees evidence and emblems of their own past.

And of their grandchildren's future.

For seven generations.

This is my hope.