Word: rivers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...else. To fish with a fly is to imitate the fly at its various stages of development. As the fly is born and grows, it changes at different times of the day and year. Sometimes the fish go for the nymph, the youngest stage, at the bottom of the river. Sometimes they wait for the flies when they are emerging upward, attached to a self-created gas bubble. When the fly matures, it lies helpless on the top of the water until the bubble explodes and frees its wings. The fish will try for it then too, and you imitate...
These days he is leading a fight to dismantle some of the nation's hydroelectric dams, once essential for people, now destructive of spawning salmon. Chouinard was instrumental in the taking down of the Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River in Maine. Today, at the other end of the Snake, in the State of Washington, the government, egged on by Chouinard, is looking for ways to put such dams as the Little Goose out of service...
...begins my education by showing me dry-fly casting on a path above the river. Move the arm, not the wrist; keep the arc of the cast between 2 and 10 o'clock. But today the fish we are going for, whitefish and cutthroats, are loitering on the bottom. So we will wet cast and roll cast instead, with little weights on the line and flies that look like nymphs. Roll casting requires less arm movement. You swing out the line upriver and let it drift down in a natural motion. I find I'm not half bad at this...
...alone standing on a flat gray rock in the Snake River, roll casting, as if I had walked there by myself. Out goes the line, like a river winding on a river. The fly whips and curls. I strip the line. I am beginning to see what he means by process. It is far more satisfying to cast for a fish than to have one on your hook. The consequence completes the process, so it is necessary to the process. But it also carries a kind of disappointment in completion...
...admits it's not easy for a business to be green. "But part of the process of life is to question how you live it. Nobody takes the time to do things right. Look at those guys." He indicates three boats that have appeared on the river. Two fishermen sit on raised chairs at the bow and stern of each boat. A guide sits in the middle and rows. "They won't catch a thing," says Chouinard, "because they're dry casting. Besides, you don't need a boat to fish this goddamn river. All summer I haven't seen...