The Written Word
for February 9, 2000

I think I’ve just returned from seeing the past. Not very profound, you say? We’ve all seen the past. But the past I’ve seen seems so quickly swallowed by the present and the future that it shakes you more than just a bit.

I do my annual fishing on a river in New Zealand – a river that flows into Lake Taupo and is adjacent to the better known Tongariro made famous by Zane Grey when he called New Zealand the "Eldorado" of fishing. My river is called the Tauranga-Taupo and is the most beautiful stream, especially in its higher reaches, I’ve ever seen.

The maps of this river stop naming pools above the "Ranger’s Pool" simply because no one bothered to fish them. In fact they are spectacularly beautiful and the second pool up from the Rangers’ I called the Cathedral Pool many years ago and the name has stuck. The next run up from that I call Rafe’s Run because of some spectacular personal victories there but somehow that name hasn’t caught on. Nevertheless I do have that little bit of immortality on that pretty run the Cathedral Pool on the lovely Tauranga-Taupo. It’s not everyone that has successfully named a trout run.

So what’s all this in aid of? Well, New Zealand has had some bitter economic pills to swallow in the past 25 years and sees that the best permanent source of foreign capital comes not from its exports but by importing the hard currency of visitors. And this means big new hotels and big new hotels means exploiting touristy things. Exploiting touristy things means building big hotels near rivers full of trout then pouring fishermen, bedecked from head to toe with flashy fishing appurtenances, onto those rivers. I saw my first example this past holiday. Wendy and I were fishing a beautiful run in the middle of the Tauranga-Taupo. An American, who bills himself as a tourist guide to avoid being a member of the guides association, waded in, with his four clients, right in the middle of the stretch Wendy was fishing. These clients, all clad straight from an Orvis catalogue, and the guide himself, simply didn’t know better. And it will get worse. There is already talk of a big new Hotel for the Turangi area which is right by the mouths of the Tongariro and the Tauranga-Taupo and the Chambers of Commerce are orgasmic at the thought of all those dollars coming in.

What were once marvelous, world class trout streams will now become over-fished semi sewers where instead of peace and tranquility we’ll have the New Zealand equivalent of the Vedder River in full bloom. There will be fights over space, beer cans all over the place, and lots and lots of hathcery fish poured into the stream just above the "fishermen". And it will, of course, be seen as progress, especially by those who sell things to tourists.

I don’t know how you stop these things. I know that the Tauranga-Taupo wasn’t made by God for the near exclusive use of Rafe and Wendy when they pop in once a year. But where does it end?

You can’t, I’m told, fish the famous New York Beaverkill any more because of what they call the "aluminum hatch" meaning the masses of canoes, row boats, kayaks and rafts that fill the river any time there’s sunshine.

People on snowmobiles ruin otherwise remote lakes in the interior of B.C. through ice fishing. And don’t kayakers and ice fishermen have the same right to fish as flyfishers?

I suppose they do. But as these rights get exercised and as the merchants get richer something is lost. And it’s old fashioned as hell. It’s called tranquility. Where once people shared a river with others who wanted gentility, there are now people, cell phone to the ear, smothered with the latest outdoors gadgets, making sure that they get what they believe they’re entitled to.

And they probably are entitled to be noisy boors every bit as much as a person is entitled to stand in a stream, throw fly line, and dream dreams of a civility which will never pass this way again.