https://caspercollege.cvlcollections.org/files/original/bdf418fd00adaad3942056f8ceeb3668.pdf 2f561c353fa8762f5021d5add64a4a6d PDF Text Text The Nevada Review Vol. 4 Spring 2012 No. 1 �A Field Guide to the Trout Stream in Your Heart Chad Hanson Early in the morning on the fifth of August, I start north out of Casper up the east flank of the Big Horn Range. The prairie is green on account of a wet spring and a storm in late July. My course will take me past Sheridan up to the town of Ranchester, where I catch a route through the mountains. Once I’m over the summit, I plan to head north one more time, across the Montana border, and onto a dirt road that leads to a canyon with Ram’s Horn Creek stirring at the bottom. While I’m driving I take note of the hawks perched on fence posts and telephone poles. Hawk number seven swoops toward the ground but I lose sight of him as he drops into the sagebrush. I assume he ound a field mouse or a prairie dog. It makes me wonder what hawks think about when they spot their prey from above. Do they see tender eg muscles? Do they begin to imagine the taste of a heart? I bet they do. Why wouldn’t they? I ask myself, ‘Why don’t I think along those lines?” I do not think of food when I see animals. Sometimes I skip breakfast when I’m on a fishing trip. Even with hunger pulling at my attention, when I catch a trout I do not see fillets. I admire the form and the colors. Then I put the fish back in the water. When I flush pheasants from the brush beside a creek, I do not think of drumsticks as they fly away, and when I see cattle in a pasture I don’t picture them as cheeseburgers. We are not the same as other animals. My friend Beck believes that we are driven to fly fish by the forces of biology. He claims that we are no different from any other predator, n his mind, it is an inborn lust for blood that drives us to lakes and rivers. For years, I sat in the passenger seat of his pickup, listening to stories about how our choices are determined by nature. Finally, I said, Chad Hanson lives with his wife and two cats in Casper, Wyoming. He teaches sociology at Casper College, contributes to academic journals, and writes poems in the haiku tradition. His essays and mort Stones have appeared in Sky Journal, Mountain Gazette, Third Coast, Pilgrimage, South Dakota Peview, and Morth Dakota Quarter^ among others. His first book. Swimming with Trout, is available from' the University of New Mexico Press. �Beck. I do what I want. I do things when I want and how I want I’m not driven by anything.” , , . He didn’t like that.' He appreciates the thought that his fly fishing habit comes to him as a primordial instinct. I am sympathetic. I warn an explanation for why I spend so much time up to my knees in moving wamr, and the biological explanation is easy, but I know it’s not the I take a left onto the road that meanders over the Big Horns The dimb to the top is drawn out over twenty miles. I take my time on the switchbacks The views get longer as I twist up the east slope. When I reach the summit, the road straightens and tracks off to foe west. I make a stop. Before foe road bends down toward foe lower elevations, it runs within two miles of foe Medicine Wheel The site has been preserved by foe managers of foe Bighorn National Forest Curious travelers park their cars and hike to foe edge of a butte where native people placed stones on foe ground in foe shape of a circle. The form is sixty-five feet in diameter. A second circle marks foe center of foe wheel, and foe center is connected to foe rim by twenty-eight spokes or lines made with rocks set into foe soil. Historians and anthropologists have spent generations trying to assess the meaning of foe Wheel. The spokes align with astrophysical patterns over foe course of a year. There are spokes that point toward foe rising and setting sun during foe solstices. The total number of spokes correspond to foe lunar cycle, and there are spokes that line up with stars like Rigel and Sirius. Even so, foe intent of foe Wheel’s creators has been a source of contention. No one knows who built foe circles and their motivation is unclear. Crow elders can only offer that foe site was built by people vX a chance that foe Medicine Wheel exists in its place and shape because foe builders liked its looks “Aesthetic reasons” have been offered as a rationale for its size and location. Standing alongside foe stones—staring two hundred miles into the distance—that speculation feels on target. It is hard to imagine ' that people built foe Wheel because they were biologically driven to place rocks in circles at foe edge of scenic overlooks. It’s even tougher to see how instincts could have played a role in producing any of the meaningful things that we created over foe course of humanity—music. �71/ Chad Hanson philosophy, or the; great works of literature. Through art we transcend our biology. Last year I served as a member of a panel convened to discuss the subject of writing about fly fishing. I sat at one end of a table. To mv flght sat a hero of mine, Ted Leeson, weU known for The Habit ofTdvers To his right sat another hero, John Gierach, famous for Trout Turn and a dozen other well regarded books. When the presentation started, each of us talked for ten minutes about the process we go through when we write stories or egsays. As the low ranking member on the panel I spoke first. Then Leeson addressed the group, and Gierach finished the presentation. We left thirty minutes for questions. The first person to raise a hand directed his comment to Gierach. A man in the front row asked, “Why fly fishing?” I sat there thinking” Thank you . I imagined that I was going to hear our guru address the’ rundamental issue that we face. • Gierach stared at the ceiling for a second. A room full of fly fishers waited with anticipation. He looked back at the audience. Gierach turned his gaze to the person who posed the question. Then he said “It’s pretty.” ’ I _ I wasn’t the onjy one thinking, “What?” I could see it on the faces in the crowd. Fly fishing is “pretty?” While I pondered the answer Gierach talked about the first time he saw someone cast a fly rod’ I thought about the first time I watched somebody casting, knee deep in a mountain stream. The beauty struck me, too. Fly fishing is not the most effective way to catch a trout. If you just want to put a fish in your net—you carry a carton of worms to a local waterway. Everyone knows that live bait works the best. But here we were, a crowd full of people who had disavowed the most effective way to catch a fish, because a fly line looks better. The Navajo are fond of the saying, “Go in beauty,” and Gierach is right. Fly fishing is at least one way that white people abide. Leeson went next. He took the same question. He started with a story about waiting for a flight in the Pordand, Oregon airport For five minutes no one understood his point. He painted a picture of the scene in the concourse. He described how he sat next to a woman with a^two year old resting in a collapsible stroUer. He explained that the child started crying when one of the airline employees barked an announcement through a microphone. �In response, ±e mother held up a quilt and stretched it in front of her face, hiding herself from the child. Every ten seconds she pulled the blanket^^away. Then she stuck her face up toward the toddler and cooed, Peek-a-bool” Soon the kid was giggling and squirming. It s a scene we ve aU enacted. We have been behind the quilt, and we have been in the stroller. I wasn’t sure what that had to do with fly fishing, but then Leeson made a transition to talking about one of his trips to the Deschutes River. Once again he took care to describe the setting: swift water, peaks in the distance, a forest of larch and pine. He talked, about flipping a blue-winged olive forty feet upstream. He explained how he had to mend his line to make sure the fly found a sweet spot. He told us how the olive looked as it spun down the bank. As we listened to Leeson, we became children nestled in our seats. Then he cooed, “Peek-a-boo!” A redside trout attacked the olive. Trout don’t say “peek-a-boo” when they attempt to eat an artificial fly, but they might as well. We fly fish, in part, because we like surprises. Gierach offered us beauty. Leeson gave us unresolved mystery and the pleasure that follows when something uncertain becomes clear. All I had to talk about was a modest childhood, spent in central Minnesota. I grew up on a creek set in between a swamp and a hardwood forest. But I didn’t teU the crowd about the water or the woods, at least not in the beginning. I started out by asking the audience if they’d ever seen somebody look at a piece of scenery and say, “This reminds me of...” Memories are uncanny. It is incredible what we can store and then conjure up in our minds, but the long record of people, places, and events creates a precedent, which we use to judge and then compare each moment we live through. For most of us, there are portions of our childhoods that are tough to follow. I spent summers wading and splashing in a stream beside my parent’s home. I took naps on the bank me and the birds, fish, swamp grass, and snapping turtles. No politics. No financial concerns. No knowledge of pollution, climate change, or species extinction. Compared to adult life, our childhoods often shine like pure states of affairs, but they are gone. In the words of Jackson Browne, time is a “conqueror,” banishing the things we love into the past. We cannot get our youth back, but we can try, and I am not ashamed to admit that I do that with a fly rod in my hand. �Chad Hanson _ I take one more moment to look at the Medicine Wheel. Then I hike back to the car and continue down the west slope of the ranee After twenty minutes, I reach the road that ends at the mouth of Ram’s Horn Canyon. At this point, names like Ram’s Horn are nothing more than reminders of the fauna that used to roam the ranges of the West. Eight years ago, on our way to Yellowstone, my wife and I made a stop at die Bighorn Sheep Center in Dubois, Wyoming. The center sits on the south side of the road that runs through the middle of town. Inside the building there are mounted sheep, taken from every comer of the world. Some of the mounts hang on the walls. Others are placed on die faux ridges of carefully wrought exhibits. The displays are impressive. On our way out, I stopped at the counter to talk with one of the center s staff. The woman looked to be fifty years old. Her hair was pulled into a bun in the back of her head, and she wore a pair of wirerimmed glasses. I walked toward her thinking, “This woman wiU answer any question I can think to ask.” I said, “Howdy,” and she smiled. I explained that I have hiked into the Big Horns on dozens of occasions. I told her that I began making trips to the Horns when I was in college. Then I mentioned how the number of trips increased when I actually moved to Wyoming. I said, “In all that time, I haven’t seen a bighorn.” I asked, “Are there any bighorns in the Big Horns?” She said, “No. Not to my knowledge.” I put on a flabbergasted face and asked, “Isn’t that why we call them the Big Horns? The bighorns?” “Yes. We caU them the Big Horns because at one time they were covered with bighorns.” “What happened?” Her explanation started down a predictable road. She described how the wild sheep in the Big Horns were hunted to the brink of extinction. She pointed to a row of sheep’s heads on the wall and asked Wouldn t you want one of those above your fireplace?” I said “No' Thank you,” but my answer was beside the point. Mounted ’sheep heads were a status symbol in the early part of the twentieth century. �• The West was still the frontier, and at the time, people wanted a piece of that in their living rooms. Hunting regulations curbed the wholesale slaughter of the Rockv Mountiun bighorn sheep, but hunters were not the last threat they would face. Wyoming is known as the Cowboy State, but when the phrase w^ coined there were more sheep than cattle within our borders. Domestic sheep carry an infection called pasteurella. They’ve een carriers for years. They are immune to the disease. Domestic sheep can live full lives with no outward effects. But wild sheep are not immune. When bighorns and domestics range over the same landscape the infection IS passed from the tame to the wild animals, and it makes them disorders, pneumonia in particular. Epidemics of prt,r/vvvZh-i:;uiiccd pneumonia wiped out herds of bighorn sheen including those that used to roam the Big Hom Range. When she fimshed explaining the demise of the bighorns in the Big Horns, I asked, Doesn’t that bother anyone?” She said, ‘Tou’re the first person to ask.” I was flattered to think that I was the first to ask, but it turns out Aat I wasn’t the only one outraged by the thought that there were no bighorns in the Big Horns. In the fall of 2004, the Game and Fish Department air-lifted forty sheep out of an Idaho canyon, and placed ±em at 8,000 feet of altitude on the west side of the range. The department hoped the herd would grow to include 200 animals and stabilize. The group has not grown to that size, but the population is stable, and that makes me feel better about the condition of my favorite mountains. It takes a minute for my feet to grow accustomed to the water The creek is freezing cold. It stings at first, but then I start to cast, and forget that I have toes. Mayflies hatch on the surface, spread their wings, and flutter in the air. The trout watch bugs from behind rocks and sunken logs. A splashing sound catches my ear. I look in time to see a brook trout arching back into the current on the downside of a leap. I whip a cast along the bank. The rod arches and the bug lands upstream, but the fly does not have time to ride the current. It is hit by a brookie. His belly shines in the air as he rolls over, sweeping the fly underwater. �94 Chad Hanson With my line in tow the fish makes a run toward a pool. He swims hard, but I pull him close despite his determination. Once I have the trout in hand I am quick with the hook, although, I take a moment to appreciate the colors on his sides. I ask the fish to forgive me for the intrusion. Even though I do not fully understand my desire to insert myself into the food chain of a stream, the compulsion is too strong to deny. Two days before the trip to Ram’s Horn, I left the house at noon and rode my bicycle to a local burrito stand. There were seven people waiting to place an order. At the counter, there stood four boys in their early teens. They looked like they had come from a soccer practice. Three men in business suits waited behind the boys. The kids were wiggling all over. They were smacking each other and laughing for reasons that no one else could understand. The businessmen stood silent behind their neckties—faces resentful. As I thought about the distinction between the adults and the teenagers, it occurred to me that I was looking at the difference between wild and domestic human beings. In the past, I have worn ties and worked fifty weeks out of the year. I know the effect that such a life has on a person. It’s debilitating, but it’s hard to stop. We yearn for homes and cars and clothes and sporting goods. Our desires trap us on the road to what we think of as success, and that road does not have an exit. Sometimes, we drive into the weedy ditch beside the economic freeway of our lives. We do it because we know we gave up something when we became middle class. We know that something untamed stiS exists in the tall grass and sagebrush beyond the parking lots and close­ cropped lawns. We fly fish in part because we all harbor a sense of loss. We’ve seen fields of lupine bud-dozed and paved into subdivisions. We’ve had to watch people we love grow old and pass away. We’ve read the reports that explain how pikas, marmots, and polar bears are scheduled for oblivion. With all of the usual bad news on TV, we start to yearn. The feeling begins as a quiet longing, but it grows. We develop a need for sensual experience—the reality of moving water, jumping fish, tall peaks, and quaking leaves. We are the yearning creatures on this good green Earth. Hawks do not crave anything. Trout do not possess desires. Cats and coyotes long for nothing. We are different. We yearn our way into plastic, �throw-away lives, and then we yearn for a way out. We yearn for beauty, for what is gone, for whatever waits around the next corner, unseen. We might be kidding ourselves, with our vests full of gadgets, our brand-named waders, and our SUVs. We’re actors playing the parts available to us in our culture. Our society said, “Take a page from the screenplay of A VJver 'Bains Through If and head for a body of water.” When we can afford the costume and the props, some of us are happy to oblige. Our actions are not forced on us by genetics, but there is a thirst that afflicts people that come of age in this country. For those of us with fly rod tubes in our closets, the longing appears as an urge to stand knee deep in rivers, colorful rocks under our feet, birds chirping in the branches overhead, a light breeze carrying the seeds of cottonwoods— all of it thrumming to the rhythm of a stream. ■ � Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. 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Title A name given to the resource A Field Guide to the Trout Stream in Your Heart Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <div id="dublin-core-rights" class="element"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div id="dublin-core-rights" class="element"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div class="element-text"> <div class="element-text"> <div class="element-text"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div class="element-text five columns omega"> <div class="element-text"><a href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/">http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/</a></div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div> Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2012 Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Chad Hanson Is Part Of A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included. Chad Hanson Journal Publications, CCA 04.ii.e.2025.01 WyCaC US. Casper College Archives and Special Collections. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context CCA 04.ii.e.2025.01_ChadHansonPapers_14 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Searchable PDF Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <em>The Nevada Review</em> is published by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform