It was the end of March. It felt and looked like the middle of February. Where the river had cut them, the snowbanks were glacial blue. We waved to Bruce, our pilot, as he rose through heavy rain, turned his machine on an invisible axis, then roared out of sight through the narrow corridor framed by old trees and low clouds.
Gear lay where we’d hastily thrown it before scrambling under the rotors. We pulled it together, stumbling in the snowy depressions hidden by the flat light. Radioless and five wilderness days from anyone, we made camp with care, then fished to burn off the anxiety that always accompanies the start of a new adventure.
So began a series of Skeena Angler columns I wrote in the Spring of 1985 that described a thrilling five-day drift down the then pristine Dala River to the sea in eight-foot inflatable rafts with Mike Whelpley and Stan Doll.
Hanging from the wall of my cave is a picture commemorating that trip. It was shot on the last day of the float by Mike’s Canon, which he’d put on autopilot so that it would capture the three of us. Mike and Stan are looking sharp in their favourite cowboy hats. I’m clutching my toque, which I’d taken off for the sake of the photo, thereby revealing a thick mop of reddish-brown hair matching that of my beard.
I flipped a few more pages in the first dust-covered binder labelled the first of dozens that line the shelves above my fly tying bench and come across this passage: “After a century of overfishing and egregious mismanagement, Skeena’s summer steelhead, like summer coho, are on the brink of extinction. The commercial fishing industry has long acted with a callous disregard for other users of the resource and for the resource itself. As a result, we may lose a race of the finest freshwater fish.”
This snippet is from the first of many pieces that took on the commercial fishing industry and incurred the enmity of many in that industry and their servants in the Federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
Logging in Skeena was a crude affair in those days when the Ministry of Forests was a behemoth and converting trees into boards was the driving engine of the provincial economy. The unwillingness by the forest companies to embrace anything close to sustainable practises, the unwillingness of the regulatory bodies to make them do so, and the callous disregard they demonstrated for watercourses critical to the health of salmonids was a source of great concern for the friends of salmon, most of whom were anglers and my friends. Articulating those worries led to many barbed columns over the years.
Those columns of 33 years ago weren’t the first. The Skeena Angler began sometime around 1982 or 83 after I witnessed the abuse of Pink Salmon at the hands of a few sportsmen and wrote a letter about it to the new paper in town.
The Terrace Standard was filling a void left by the demise of the almost illegible Terrace Herald. The Standard operated out of a white heritage building on Lazelle Avenue. The Age of the Internet was dawning. The journalists, Rod Link, Jeff Nagel, and Malcom Baxter beavered away on blue computers the size of king-sized microwave ovens, storing their data on floppy discs the size of flapjacks.
Jeff saw something in my letter. He talked it over with Rod then phoned to ask me if I’d be willing to pen a weekly column on fishing and fish-related issues that would be called The Skeena Angler. With almost no idea of what I was getting into, I agreed. I typed those formative pieces on the second-hand electric typewriter purchased from typing phenom, Al Lehman, then edited them with a pencil before rushing down the hill to the offices of the Standard before the Saturday morning deadline.
The majority of my scribblings –- roughly 60 per cent, I’d guesstimate — were concerned with fish and issues close to fish and fishing, while a large number of the remainder stretched my mandate a bit. Some had fish swimming through them for the briefest of moments, and I have to admit that a few, like the one about the first Gulf War, were outside the box.
During my recent sabbatical, all kinds of people wanted to know the fate of the Skeena Angler. While enjoying a locally brewed glass of draft at the Sherwood Mountain Brewery with my buddy, Glenn Grieve, a young man asked if I was me. I said I was, whereupon he told me that he’d “read everything I’d written.” He went on to say he was from Toronto and was here to fish steelhead.
At the local airport, I had a similar experience when a young fellow from Kitimat recognized me and told me my writing had had a big effect on him. I hoped it was a good one, I remarked.
To those who love to hate my stuff and those who like it, I’m back and eager to take on a backlog of important issues as well as tell a few yarns.
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