western watershed romance |
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Gliding and flitting in the
bucolic, tranquil, deserted North Delta, a region in the watershed I
adore. Despite the frequent pummeling down by winter's wrath, spring
was just too mature to be contained anymore, and when the water
temperature began to climb in the early afternoon, all mama's resident
finny creatures blossomed in insatiable pre-spawn life. Crappies
mingling around vertical structure thumped both jigs and small
jerkbaits. Ol' biggie shoved up into thick, shallow tule clumps and
against sun-baked rock, pouncing with abandon on well-placed plastic
worms. And bluegill, iridescent hens fat with eggs and big bulls with
copper-cobalt foreheads, traipsed around bank-side brush in the back
end of a slough, eating marabou jigs just as they do during spring in
water-supply reservoirs. Given a long, intimate relationship with all
these fishes and their brothers and sisters, from bluegill and redear
in Poway ponds in my early teen years, to the glorious crappie fishery
that was Lake Gregory in high school, to the biggies and smallies
that've been constant companions stuck to my hooks for nearly 30 years,
I caught 'em all with elegance, and that while enmeshed in the North
Delta's wild hardwood-tree-adorned mid-channel bars, snaky sloughs, and
remnant tidal marshes.
In short, a fabulous predator-prey day
in a wild place.
But after getting home and gazing at the few pictures we took, and
under the influence of Laura Cunningham's State of Change, I
questioned just how Wild
the experience was - I mean, all the fish I caught were non-natives,
albeit wild-spawned and self-sustaining. I wondered - what would I have
caught in the North Delta had the season been the same but the dams and
dikes and diversions hadn't existed? The habitat sure would've been
different: tule marshes (of which only a smidgen currently exists)
would've been ruling the landscape, backed by vast grasslands that now
exist mainly as frayed fringes along the sloughs, there now for cows,
goats, sheep. Without the dams and invasive aquatic plants, the sloughs
would've been more turbid throughout, although certain sections we were
in - upper Barker, upper Cache - had fairly stained water. Substrate
would've been finer since the levees wouldn't have existed and thus
neither the requisite riprap. And the resident fishes? Instead of
largemouth hunting the tule pockets and corners, thicktail chub
would've been the lazy stalking predator, chewing sculpins. In place of
shy crappie, shy Sacramento perch would've glided slowly up to
suspended tube jigs and then slurped 'em in with a quick snap. Tule
perch, rather than bluegill, would've been the water-column
bug-pickers, similarly susceptible to the damselfly imitations that
fooled the 'gills. Key to all the natives, however, is that they
would've been spawning or already spent, while all the non-native
centrarchids that bent my rods were in a pre-spawn chow-down. Migratory
species back then, as now, would've been notable by their absence:
adult squaws and hitch would've been in the rivers to spawn (similar to
striped bass today), and splittail would've been doin' their thang in
floodplain lakes.
The corollary is that how I connected
with the fishes resembled how I would've before Americans reorganized
the landscape, although my little performance was by no means unique
since bluegills and crappies and bass have been introduced all over the
fucking world. Photos of well-caught thicktail chub and Sac perch
certainly would've presented more diversity and spice in the theater of
global fish porn than another shot of another pre-spawn biggie. But
with the dams and the waterweed both clearing the water, neither of
which is going anywhere, with reduced flows and the hotter climate
giving rise to ever-warmer waters, the non-native fishes are entrenched
and are now a permanent part of this watershed. Too, the native crappie
and biggie analogs, the Sac perch and chub, are never coming back,
leaving Pomoxis and ol' largemouth as the closest I'll ever be able to
touch thicktail and Sac perch in their native range.
Summer on the North Delta, a
true summer day, hot and breezy, where we flowed through vestiges of a
place dying and through a place blossoming. Suffocating channels
coughed sediment-starved water into desperate tidal marsh, and only
sliver hauntings of ancient grasslands that once buttressed the aquatic
world trickled down the slough banks, yet persistent mini-islands
hoisted big ol' venerable valley oaks and cottonwoods, and Bullock's
Orioles and myriad heron species and grackles and swallows gawked and
chattered as we sped by on our stout boat. And in the newly hewn
sapphire water, amid vibrating stalks of vibrant jungle, many a
post-spawn big - echoes of the extinct thicktail chub - kissed my plugs
and plastic worms, reaffirming that, yeah, I understand largemouth bass
exquisitely, and that, yeah, my skills for catching the big-mouthed
black bass remain honed.
Delve into the heart of the North Delta
I did - I felt it, I listened to it, and I ate it. The power of the
hungry adult biggies ached my arms as I battled the fish to the boat.
The searing, shimmering sun's heat teased out a lizard sensation on my
skin, as if it were triggering an ancient, latent desire deep in my
bones to appease Nature's requests. The pheasant's scratchy crackle and
the heron's old-man screech pricked my ears with especial vibrancy in
the paucity of humanity, as did the vaulting and splashing of the
hooked largemouths. And the culmination: a largemouth bass fillet,
crispy and golden, fed and freed me as I continued to roll through time
and become ever more wed to the wailing watershed.
Blustery winter valley-floor
day, blasting rain, avalanche clouds, ripping winds tossing leaves and
birds and buckets. The North Delta the previous day, however, was
different. Placid water, no people, an intimate ground fog, clouded
ceilings softening the sun yet not pummeling with rain, and warm air,
which, when combined, gave rise to a productive autumn largemouth bass
bite in the evolving Delta, a Delta evolving ever closer to a tidal,
freshwater Texas lake. We would've preferred stripers, being better
equipped for the dynamic Atlantic immigrant than the languid
Mississippi native, but the striped fish only showed herself at the
last spot of the day, and then in spotty numbers. Aside from the slow
tides thus weak water structure, so much of the habitat that a mere few
years ago would've attracted stripers (and pikeminnow) - strong current
seams, sparsely vegetated corridors in side channels - was now choked
with weeds, ragged, clogged, morphed into hunting grounds now lorded
over by largemouth bass. Largemouth, the lowly largemouth, ubiquitous,
cosmopolitan, lacking in novelty, but, still, they remain a worthy fish
- they taste good, they're higher-tier predators that eat and transform
many smaller organisms (shad, gobies) into more effectively captured
packets of life, and they're wild. The friendly biggies, they turned
the sour notes of the North Delta's dissipating striped bass and
associated vaporizing Native Wild to bittersweetness.
At least we still
have that.