| western watershed romance |
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Welcome to Western Watershed Romance, my
obsessively self-indulgent repository of prose and photos for which
western US fishes I've caught and their environments serve as the
threads and themes that bind all my words and images together. Before
you wade into my opaque mental wanderings on this website, some
background's requisite.
I'm
Teejay O'Rear, and I spent the first 13
or so years of my life in the dreary, desert shit-hole known as
Lancaster, California, son of a typical working-class dysfunctional
single-parent family. I then spent my freshman high-school year in San
Diego before moving to the San Bernardino Mountains for high school's
remainder and my early 20s. As you're likely to glean from much of my
words, it was in Arrowhead where so many of my personality's traits
crystallized. From my early to late 20s, a hazy period, I drifted: a
few years in San Diego, one in Portland, Oregon, and then back to Lake
Arrowhead. Finally heeding the siren call of a rapidly dissipating
professional future, I found a little direction and moved to Davis,
California, to earn degrees in and then work in fisheries biology. I
lived in Davis, that college-kid-overrun town, for 20 years before
rightfully returning to an abode in the conifer-clothed mountains.
Given
that history, why "Western Watershed Romance" instead of "California
Watershed Romance"? While I may have lived in California for all but
one of my life's years, I've explored and caught fishes successfully
throughout the West: Oregon (of course), Nevada, Idaho, Colorado, Hell,
even Alaska. Thus it's too restrictive to delimit me, this, to
California when the experiences have been so obviously applicable to
watersheds in other western states. Since fishes are such a focal
point, why not "Western Fishes Romance"? Initially, I'd titled this
website "Western Freshwater Predator" to reflect the piscine focus, but
that also seemed too confining. Far too often, I wander away from the
water where I started, I climb up and sift through and soak in the
trees and rocks and adorable newts - I ain't killing. Additionally, the
second and third words of that title - "Western Freshwater Predator" -
were essentially inaccurate: I chase fish frequently in brackish and salt water,
and I never kill ducks (though I happily eat those killed well by others). Besides, after a while, "Western Freshwater
Predator" just sounded juvenile and lame. Finally, why "Romance"? When
I'm out there, there may be love, there may be hate, there may be
jubilation or deflation, but never, ever is there indifference. And, as
I hope this journal shows, it’s more.
(Western Watershed Romance is affiliated with no other person, no group, no organization, no party, NO one - it is purely the narcissistic creation of me, Teejay O'Rear. Shoot me an email at teejayorear@gmail.com, and I might respond.)