Catch your breath

Sharing a simple, magical reminder of the world around us

Simple climate action   //   I S S U E   1 7    //    B R E A T H E

Thank you

We’re taking a week out to collect our thoughts at the end of this extraordinary year. Our midwinter gift to you is this exquisite reflection by David O’Hara, environmental philosophy professor at Augustana University. Take ten minutes out over Christmas to enjoy it. 

We’ll return to our digital lives theme next week. Wishing you a restful, healthy break,

Jemima, Mike & Jim

A meditation on trout fishing

By David O’Hara

When I was a boy I used to stand on bridges and look down into the water to see what was swimming there. I lived in the Catskills in New York, low mountains laced with small streams and creeks. There are bridges everywhere, and most of the time, I was looking for brook trout.

A stream in the mountains of the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska. Photo: Michael O’Hara

Ripples on the surface distort the images of whatever lies below, so it takes a while to spot a trout as it fins in place against the current. Their coloration makes it even harder: viewed from the top, they’re covered in drab green camouflage that makes them blend in with the river bottom. This allows them to swim where they can find food without being obvious targets for the ospreys and herons that hunt them.  

Sometimes you have to unfocus your gaze and then just wait for a fish to present itself. This is an exercise in letting go, in not trying to see what is there, precisely so you can see it, like“Magic Eye” images you have to stare at until 3-D shapes appear. Seen from another angle, they look completely different. Once you’ve seen a brook trout in profile, it’s hard to believe they could ever hide from our sight. From above, they’re nearly invisible, but from the side they are vivid palettes of color. The olive vermiculations of their upper backs shift to yellow and blue spots on their sides, erupting in vivid reds and whites on their upper bellies and fins before fading into slate gray. When you look down on them, you can barely see them; when you get down at their level, it’s hard to keep your eyes off them.

Trout, more than any other fish, have fostered a strange ethic among the people who fish for them. Find someone who fishes for walleye, or bass, or stripers, and you’ve probably found someone who fishes for food. Many trout anglers, on the other hand, practice catch-and-release fishing. They use tiny, barbless hooks, and bring the fish in quickly so it doesn’t tire. If they must handle the fish at all, they do it gently, with wet hands. I’ve seen anglers cradle a fish in the current, letting clear water run over its gills for a minute or two while it catches its watery breath. They’ll kneel down, belly-deep in a cold stream, like supplicants praying for the resurrection of the fish they’ve just caught. One moment they’re trying to pull it from the water, then the next moment they’re doing all they can to get it back safely to its home.  

When the fish is ready, it gently swims out of their light grasp and gets back to what it was doing before it was caught. Sometimes it will swim just downstream of the angler so it can rest in the slack water behind the angler’s legs, as though it knows the angler is no longer a threat.   

“I’ve been fishing for trout since I was a boy, and I admit that I still don’t completely know why. Trout pull me into streams just as much as I try to pull them out.”

Each year finds me fishing with less gear; I don’t want the experience mediated by so much stuff. If the cold is at all tolerable, the waders come off.  I wade in shorts and tennis shoes, and my feet ache with the cold as I slip and slide on the slick stones underwater. Lately I’ve been fishing with a Tenkara rod that has no reel, just line attached to its tip. Little by little I’m stripping away the tools and getting closer to the water, and to the fish.

The trout is, for me, an icon of what I hasten to ignore. I’m so damn busy most of the time, answering emails, preparing lectures, going to meetings, racing to get home after work. When I move that fast, the whole world becomes a distraction. As we race through the city on buses and trains, or as we speed across the interstate, the world becomes a blur, and all its particular details stop mattering.  This is ironic, because it’s hard to imagine what could matter more than the world we inhabit. I once asked my environmental philosophy students how many kinds of ducks we have in our state, and the best answer I got was: “Two. Mallards and non-mallards.” My students are busy, like the rest of us.  The problem is, we have no idea what we are racing by, and all the ducks have become blurred into one. Or two, at most. 

Brook trout, center stage. Photo: Michael O’Hara

When I step into the stream, I have to slow down. The current is not mine to master, but a force to be reckoned with. Turn your back on a fast current and it will buckle your knees and sweep you off your feet. It often amazes me how such gentle, soft creatures can survive in whitewater where humans can’t swim. “Watch a trout leaping up a waterfall, and you’ll share my wonder: how do they do it? What kind of life do they possess, and what power?”

The philosopher Henry Bugbee was once asked by Martin Heidegger what occasion prompts philosophical reflection. Bugbee, an angler, replied “Could the sound of a fish leaping to a fly at dawn suffice?” I think it could.  

“When the trout rises to sip a mayfly from the surface of a stream, it kisses our airy world and reminds us of another world beneath the spreading ripples. That is, it reminds us just how little we know. I am drawn to the trout as I am drawn to a mystery; once I know it is there, some deep part of me will not cease seeking it.”

I don’t mean that everyone should see trout this way, but many of us live closer to the trout than you’d expect and our lives are connected to theirs. Brook trout are the official freshwater fish of nine states. I’m told that Manhattan island once had small, clear streams that held brook trout; now only their ghosts drift beneath the streets. They’re native to all the mountains from Maine to Georgia, but we’ve eliminated much of their habitat by clear-cutting forests, by cutting highways across the mountainsides, and by removing mountaintops to get easy access to the coal veins beneath. The rock exposed by blasting for highways is a wound in the Appalachians, one that leaches acid into the rivers and kills the trout, and the small insects and animals they live on. The debris from mountaintop removal gets dumped in valleys. By some estimates, we’ve lost almost 2,000 miles of headwater streams, forever buried under the corpses of ancient mountains. Downstream of those extinct valleys trout populations dwindle.   

My friends who don’t share my predilection for walking in cold streams sometimes ask me why they should care about fish they don’t need. If trout vanish from a few streams in Kentucky, there are still plenty in Maine and Michigan. Someday we can transplant them, right? We extirpated the bison from South Dakota once, but through careful management we’ve now got a thriving herd in the Black Hills. Why not do the same thing with trout, once we’re done gouging the mountainsides?

If we think about trout as an economic commodity, that might make sense. But that’s not a good way to understand trout. For one thing, trout, like their relatives the salmon, tend to have unique genetic strains in places where they’ve long been isolated from other populations. Trout can’t hop from stream to stream, so each watershed tends to have its own strain of trout. They’ve been adapting to those places since the glaciers that put them there receded.  

Just as importantly, for me at least, is the fact that trout are one of my points of contact with the world that made me. I return to them each year, and look for them in their old places. Familiarity with a species, in its natural place, is like getting to know your living room. If someone moves your couch, you’ll see it right away because you know where it’s supposed to be. The longer you dwell somewhere, the more likely you are to notice when something is out of place.  

And someone ought to notice when the trout change, because they’re the canary downstream of the coal mines. Brook trout are very sensitive to small changes in water quality. They need cold, clear water with lots of oxygen and a healthy food supply, and they’re sensitive to changes in pH. Sometimes when we pollute the water it’s easy to see. If your river catches fire, or if your lake turns an unusual shade of green, you know something is amiss.  

Trout notice the pollution much sooner than we do, though. Trout streams are an environmental early warning system, but their sirens are not very loud. Silt from farm runoff, construction sites, or logging operations can choke a trout’s gills, preventing it from taking in oxygen from the water. If the silt is very heavy, it can seal up all the little places where fish eggs are maturing between pebbles on the river bottom. 

Trout can usually handle a little silt, but other environmental factors are much harder to cope with. Acidity from rain or blasted rocks can kill a stream while making it look cleaner than it was before. Healthy streams have a little color to them, because they’re full of microscopic life. Acid and other pollutants can change a river’s color from tea to clear glass. Casual observers might think the clear stream is the healthy one — it takes intimacy to know the difference.  

We’ve done a lot to control acid rain in the last forty years, but a bigger threat is looming in climate change. Lots of other species can migrate northwards as temperatures increase. Birds and mammals and insects — anything that lives on the land or flies — can potentially change its range. On the other hand, Appalachian trout have nowhere to go. As the water warms, the oxygen levels in the water drop, and the fish grow sluggish. This makes them easy marks for predators. Sometimes they just suffocate.

In our haste and commerce, small things die, and we do not notice their passing. Unless, of course, we do.  

I can’t know all the things that live and die around me, but a few of them shine in my mind’s eye like some glittering beauty in Homer, a thing gleaming with a virtue all its own. 

David O’Hara teaches environmental philosophy at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. His latest book, co-authored with Matthew Dickerson, is Downstream: Reflections On Brook Trout, Fly Fishing, And The Waters Of Appalachia

Hothouse is a weekly climate action newsletter written and edited by Jemima Kiss, Mike Coren and Jim Giles. We rely on readers to support us, and everything we publish is free to read.