The Longest Silence

Henry’s Fork

I WENT TO IDAHO to fish the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River. I had heard grave reports about its present condition and the impact of dewatering on a great resource whose natural values have little standing in local law. I had the feeling that the Henry’s Fork was managed with a sharp eye on potato production, the modern equivalent of killing buffalo for their tongues.

I spent a couple of days, fishing and driving around with Mike Lawson, a guide and operator of the fly shop, Last Chance on the Henry’s Fork. He and his wife, Sheralee, have lived in the area all their lives. Mike grew up in Sugar City, one of the sacrificial hamlets in the pathway of the Teton Dam, a dubious waterworks that not only swindled the American taxpayer with an indisputably lousy cost-ratio but was also built in such a bad place that, upon bursting, it killed people as predictably as Uzis in the hands of crack dealers.

Mike took me to a small tailwater fishery downriver on the Fork, where it is less like a spring creek than a real, if small, river. As we passed the farms and ranches on our way, well kept by an industrious people, Mike said with real feeling, “I grew up with these folks. I don’t want anything bad to happen to a single one of them. But if they don’t learn to negotiate and compromise, they’re going to lose it all.” Mike is right in the middle of it, as an angler, as a conservationist, as a native son, and as a Mormon. Mike is serious about his faith, an elder in his church, a great fisherman, and a perfect angling companion, relaxed and persistent, informed about his immediate natural world. That he is also an active conservationist on behalf of his beloved rivers has put him in direct conflict with many people in these same communities. One would need to have spent substantial time in these closely knit western farm and ranch towns to understand what personal strength this requires. Mike Lawson’s ability to temper this toughness with his love of the native people is absolutely remarkable.

One of the unpleasant subcurrents of the conservation movement is a general loathing of Mormons as dam builders and irrigators and subverters of the Bureau of Reclamation. It is naive not to understand that Mormons are the irrigation pioneers of the arid West, or to fail to see a certain heroism in their survival against persecution and the poor gambler’s odds of desert life. But the appropriateness of some of their water practices is now dimming. The slogan on Idaho license plates, “Famous Potatoes,” has come to seem like some obsolete farmer joke instead of what it is, the merest insinuation of the power of Idaho’s all-powerful water lobbies as well as her many nature-hating politicians with their zero ratings from the League of Conservation Voters.

At the spot where we encountered the river, there were several rapid channels deflected by a narrow, wooded island. Though the crossing Mike chose looked difficult to me, this was Mike’s river, so we locked arms and set out. I soon felt the strength of the river and erosion of gravel under my feet as the current sped by. “I’m going,” Mike said, a remark which at first seemed obvious until he was swept into a crablike grasp over the top of a submerged boulder. By then I was already floundering downstream myself. We wallowed back to shore, reconsidered, started out again, and this time we made it.

Now we could look around from the gravelly, mid-river shallows. “All kinds of birds winter in here,” Mike said. “Some of them stay the whole winter. I’ve seen a great gray owl here.” The little canyonlike enclosure did seem protected in every direction with its tall, stately rock walls and floor of twisting river currents.

We caught a few trout and then, fishing upstream, I hooked a fish on a nymph, a most delicate take and a rather measured reaction as I set the hook. When the fish eased out of the current to the slack water, it rolled once and I saw that it was an enormous rainbow. At first it fought, as large trout sometimes do, like an annoyed dog, shaking its head in the current, and planing off at a leisurely angle to turn and shake once again. I had enough sense of the fish’s size to resist making him mad. Then, with one sand-filled boil, he turned and ran downstream. At the point where the channels rejoined each other, the river deepened too much for me to wade after him, so I pushed my fingers through the arbor of the reel and tried to slow the spool down. I got nowhere. As the line peeled off and the diameter of the spooled line decreased, everything got faster. The reel’s click ran together in a little screech as the hog trout roared off.

By now, Mike had passed me and was trying to find a path downstream to follow the fish. Thirty yards below me, the backing passed over his head, parallel to the riverbank. Watching the hundred yards of line shrink, the last look I’d had of the fish — its dull red stripe wider than my hand — seemed to hang before me as I acknowledged that this was the largest resident trout I’d ever hooked. I thought of the fish I’d stared at on restaurant walls in northern Michigan as a boy. Most of them would have seemed like cuisine minceur to this beast.

Then the trout stopped. A single turn of backing remained on the spindle at the center of my empty reel. Yet the fish had stopped right then and there! It was like literature! He paused long enough for me to consider how wonderful life could be when it had great literature-style items, such as coincidence and fate and elegant ironies. Then, in that moment of anti-magic, when literature is converted to the far more familiar aspects of the land in which we actually live and breathe and spend our days, the great trout turned and straightened my hook. I had so much line downstream that there was still a substantial bow in my rod. I had to reel it all in. I had to salute the now-absent great fish who had made such short shrift of me. The more line I reeled in, the less bow there was in my rod, and finally, with nothing to commemorate the fish except the whispering river around my knees, my rod was nothing but a straight, dead stick. But there was a terrific, evangelical silence. It is a fact that we are made almost entirely of river water, but the flesh that remains organizes this spectral borrowing from riparian valleys and, rod in hand, blesses our origins by counting coups.

The next day, I fished the slower water upstream to see the outcome of the severe drawdowns, and to see which of the diversity of values represented by the Henry’s Fork had been honored. The Bureau of Reclamation, now world-famous as a welfare program for corporate and millionaire irrigation farmers, had taken a strict constructionist view of its duties and announced that its only responsibility in the management of Island Park Dam was the supply of irrigation water. Indeed, for years its flow regimes have been dead wrong for wildlife. Idaho Fish and Game, pointing to their limited rotenone budget in a proposed trash fish kill, collaborated in the drawdown of the reservoir pool to catastrophic levels. The sediment bed was invaded and over fifty thousand tons of silt headed into the finest piece of trout water in the nation. It poured through the Box Canyon and upper Last Chance area. When it reached Harriman State Park, the august Railroad Ranch, the water slowed down and the silt dropped to the bottom. Fifteen years after I last fished here, I returned and saw that it had gone badly downhill. The silt was bermed up around boulders on the bottom while huge, vague clouds of muck spread out before me in the priceless waters the Harriman family had entrusted to the State of Idaho. Where were those hundreds of big, surface-feeding rainbows of not so long ago? Grossly reduced, to put it mildly. The corpse of the old Railroad Ranch was a fitting monument to the short memories and hit-and-run management techniques of several public agencies.

So, the slug of silt headed downstream. The resident trout of the lake were captured, more or less, and replanted into the Henry’s Fork where, by the time of my visit, they were silvery and gaunt and not at all the vaunted river fish of yore. The trash fish were offed, the poison dispersed, the pool refilled and replanted with hatchery rainbows. Given the important genetic differences within trout species, this approach often results in populations of fish-mutts, such as the Skamania strain of steelhead that have seemed such a panacea to fishery agencies throughout the Northwest. Many people around the Henry’s Fork thought that more thoughtful criteria might have been employed in so important an area.

IT OUGHT TO BE ENOUGH to say that the Idaho Department of Fish and Game had so disgraced itself that I bought the shortest-term license, three days, that they could force me to own. Blame for the steep decline of this great fishery must be shared by the supervisor and staff of the Targhee National Forest who have abetted the clear-cutting of this fragile region. Only the state’s high rate of unemployment explains Targhee’s ongoing ability to recruit qualified young people.

At present, the Nature Conservancy is trying to buy a ranch on the Henry’s Fork above Island Park reservoir, and one would hope they will use the water to help with critical winter flows. But in this part of the West, the prior appropriation concept’s doctrinal heartland, the subject of instream flow is both controversial and ambiguous. The “use it or lose it” approach to water seems to invade even the sacred precincts of private property, an astonishing lapse in an area obsessed with individual rights. The owner of a decreed water right can neither sell it nor give it to the stream itself. His rights as an owner are restricted.

Parts of the West, dominated by the church of irrigated farming, seem willing to accept this abrogation of individual rights, as opportunistic as that may seem to outsiders. State or federal property condemnations to accommodate motor vehicles and new roads are acceptable to most Westerners, but they consider the same practice “unconstitutional” when it’s deployed to protect the natural world.

This spell of fishing, rambling, and philosophizing with Mike Lawson took place in the Island Park caldera, the mouth of an ancient volcano, one of the largest and oldest in the world. The impression on the ground is of a broad, level, circular area with a surrounding rim of low mountains, quite low really when viewed against the Tetons to the east — for me the most impressive way to see them. Bubbling through the porous and mineral-rich basalt of the old lava floor, substantial volumes of water form streams and rivers that are eyed sharply by farmers and trout fishermen alike. They’re eyed perhaps even more sharply by migratory creatures like the trumpeter swan, who staged an eleventh-hour comeback from extinction in this glorious place.

Not completely discouraged by the condition of the Railroad Ranch, Mike and I traveled along the river and were soon so submerged in its glories that I began to forget its troubles. At Upper Mesa Falls, a curtain of vertically dropping mountain water, wonderfully tall, plunged between steep forest walls. A plume of mist climbed high into the blue Idaho sky, striped with rainbows. Mike pointed to a place far below us where nearly invisible water raced across slabs of basalt. In high school, he and his friends used to work their way out on the rock to catch wild trout at the base of the falls. Once, he was swept away toward Cardiac Canyon and lost his father’s watch. I began to suspect that this river-lover, probably like most others, had been swept away often.

That evening we floated the Box Canyon through bird-filled shafts of declining light, the cold, clear water racing through a gallery of boulders where trout took up their stations for passing food. When we pulled our boat out at the bottom of the canyon, Mike related how as a baby, guarded by an inattentive aunt, he was, you guessed it, swept away by the Henry’s Fork, then recaptured by the heroic effort of his mother as he bobbed among the rocks.

I was happy to think that the rivers that first carried me, literally and figuratively, off my feet — the Pere Marquette, the Pine, the Black, the Manistee — were now in the Wild and Scenic Rivers system and receiving its imperfect benediction. As we looked down into the canyon where the trackbed wound around above the Henry’s Fork, Mike told me how his railroader father had taken him along the tracks in the inspector’s motorcar and dropped him here and there to fish. I thought Mike’s river ought to have that kind of care, too.

Above all, it ought to have some water. The first thing I wished was for the Nature Conservancy to acquire the upper Henry’s Fork and find a way to keep that water in the river, not only through Island Park reservoir but through the crooked channel of western water law as well.