An Undergrounder sent me an old hardback copy of Russell Chatham’s The Angler’s Coast, and while the writing is evocative and the stories interesting, the most intriguing aspect of the book was its look at fisheries that — in many cases — no longer exist.
Chatham was something of a fly fishing bum and the stories reflect it (he’ll fish almost anywhere for anything), but a modern fly fisherman can’t help but sit up and notice when Chatham tells us Bill Schaadt caught between 800 and 900 steelhead on the Russian River in 1956, yet when the book was written (the early 1970s), Schaadt would have counted himself lucky to land twenty.
What would that number be today?
In other words, the steelhead hasn’t always been the “fish of a thousands casts” and it’s interesting too see how its scarcity has created a folklore that isn’t — historically speaking — true.
Time adds weight to some written works (Swift’s A Modest Proposal is a shining example), and I’d recommend The Angler’s Coast to any newer fly fisherman (especially those in California) who wonders why so many are fighting so hard to restore our still-declining steelhead and salmon runs.
As someone who started fishing in the mid-70s and graduated from high school in 1979, Chatham’s stories about the west’s fisheries fall just outside my grasp; they overlap my childhood but were largely gone before I was old enough to notice, leaving me with the impression of something I should remember, but can’t.
The book was written four decades ago and things have largely gotten worse instead of better, and while it’s not a weepy recounting of what we lost, it is a robust set of stories about the very tail end of the losing, and perhaps an incentive to do the things it will take to recover at least a fraction of what have become the West Coast’s version of the buffalo.
See you in the stacks, Tom Chandler.
