SIMPLE SMELT

Obviously, I'm brain-damaged from winter steelheading. Blood felt my brain to warm up legs stuck in frigid flows on days when line freeze your guides. Readers mature enough to remember the 20 years I wrote from Northern California know that already. Youngsters can take my word for it. Why else should I "lust in my heart" for jack smelt when I live in Northern Idaho half-way between the 20 pound B-run steelhead in the Clearwater River and the 20 pound pike and landlocked salmon in Coeur d'Alene? Why, when I wrote NORTH TAHOE TROUT, don't I feel the need to try for big browns on the Truckee River ? Why don't I morn the loss of favorite California trout streams, like Goodrich Creek, to fee fishing? Why don't I worry why things like they were in the old 100 shad days on the Feather River? Mostly, I suppose, because the old days weren't that good. Better, yes, but we got skunked then as now, and time makes us all retrospective experts, and today's increased number of anglers should be offset by the less time to get to action. Spend the twelve to fifteen hours it used to take to drive to Crescent City steelhead and you can be well into Oregon. Drive all night, as we used to do regularly to hit reach Oregon's Pacific City salmon, and you can be here in Idaho. Certainly, population doesn't help fishing. Last trip to California while finishing up my book COUNTRY TOWNS OF NORTHERN CALIFORNIA, I meandered through Markleyville -- streams weren't that crowded -- and wound up over the Sonora Pass to fish Deadman's Creek. Back in the days when Gary Cooper made FOR WHOM THE BELLS TOLLED here, you rarely saw another angler above Kennedy Meadows. Last year each and every hole I could see from the road sported anglers after, I was told, the newly stocked trout we call "truck trout" here in Idaho. California's certainly changed since I started flyfishing for trout around Kennedy Meadows back in the 1950's. However, a day spent with the nephews smelt fishing felt like old times in Berkeley. Granted you can't leave your bike at the university courts and hit tennis balls as was the case in the 1950's. Courts are buried under the anthropology building, and I'm told anything left for more than a moment, walks. It's been a long time since my brother and I were banned from the Lion's Club Smelt Derby down on Berkeley Pier too. In the meantime, the pier's truncated, sports lights and concrete and the tacky old fisherman's shack transmigrated into posh pubs and yachts for yuppies.

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