Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
The New
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May 21, 2000, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section 8; Page 12; Column
3; Sports Desk
LENGTH: 897 words
HEADLINE: OUTDOORS;
A Beltway Insider Who Casts His
Lines for Fish
BYLINE: By Pete Bodo
DATELINE: DELHI , N.Y.
BODY:
Flyfishers love clean, fresh water, and they prefer to see it going by them
horizontally, sucking at their waders, rather than vertically, in the form of
rain. But the customary chagrin any angler feels as rivers begin to swell and
turn the color of caramel during a deluge was doubly troubling to me on a recent
expedition to the Little Delaware River. I was accompanied by guests, Jim and
Lizzie Range, who split their time between a home in Washington, D.C., and a
lovely ranch in Craig, Mont. They did not come to the Catskills because they
were dying to poke around in musty antique shops, haggling over the price of
some old weathervane.
Besides, their Flyway ranch sits on the banks of
one of the world's great trout rivers, the upper Missouri, and I've passed many
unforgettable days fishing there. It was payback time, and I felt the pressure
as we huddled in our rain jackets, plodding toward the river through orchard
grass and timothy flattened by the rain. We were accompanied by Jambo, the
Ranges' black Labrador retriever. He, of course, couldn't get wet enough.
Soon, Jim and I were wading in a riffle, as Lizzie hunkered down for a
nap in the shelter of a big root ball. Jambo stood up to his belly in the river,
staring intently into the backwater at Lizzie's feet, as if he expected a
three-pound dog biscuit to materialize at any moment. Never underestimate a
dog's capacity for hope.
I felt a flush of relief a few minutes later
when Jim, understanding that in the high water the fish would seek relief from
the swift current against the grassy bank, cast right to the bank and promptly
hooked a handsome 14-inch brook trout.
Jim, 54, an insatiable sportsman,
lawyer and lobbyist for various conservation groups, is not
your typical Beltway insider. He will happily fish in the rain, and he knows his
trout -- and water. He was an architect of a bill recently introduced in
Congress that should be of keen interest to advocates of clean water, the
Fishable Waters Act of 2000. It would provide financial and technical support
for locally based efforts to protect and restore watersheds. The beneficiaries
would include watershed coalition groups, which represent partnerships between
clean-water activists and state environmental agencies. Such groups are already
working independently in places as diverse as New York's Beamoc (Beaverkill and
Willowemoc) watershed, Tillamook County in Oregon and on the Licking River
watershed in Kentucky. The act would support them more comprehensively, with
funds that already exist.
The act was conceived by the Fishable Waters
Coalition, an alliance formed nearly three years ago, partly from brainstorming
sessions conducted at Flyway ranch. The goal of this group is to ensure the
fulfillment of the promise of a landmark piece of legislation passed 28 years
ago, the Clean Water Act. "The act promised fishable waters, but that hasn't
happened yet," said Charles Gauvin, president of Trout Unlimited, one member of
the coalition, which includes heavyweight organizations as diverse as the Bass
Anglers Sportsman Society, the Izaak Walton League of America and the National
Corn Growers Association. "This legislation is a strong step towards protecting
and repairing America's troubled waters."
Surprisingly, nearly 40
percent of the nation's waters are still not considered fishable. That may sound
like an arbitrary line in the sand drawn by self-interested anglers, but it was
written into the law. Besides, the ability of a waterway to support fish is a
pretty simple and dramatic barometer of its health. And according to the
coalition, some sources estimate that barely 2 percent of America's 3.6 million
stream miles are healthy enough to be considered high quality.
"We
deserve better than that," Jim Range said, "in a wealthy nation where 80 percent
of the population stands squarely behind the concept of fishable waters."
The Fishable Waters Act has two noteworthy features. As Range said,
"It's a bottoms-up piece of legislation that emanates from the community up,
rather than from the government down." Thus, it is free of Big Government
regulatory measures that top-down laws often contain and which many people
reflexively oppose.
Congress is expected to conduct hearings on the act
as early as this summer, setting the stage for consideration in the 107th
Congress. The Fishable Waters Act and the Conservation and Reinvestment
Act, which sailed through the House of Representatives recently, with
bipartisan support, promising to invest nearly $3 billion each year for the next
15 years in conservation projects, could jointly establish a
new baseline for conservation legislation in this century.
The rain fell, Lizzie slept. Jim fished hard for another 30 minutes in a
downpour before reluctantly agreeing to call it quits. Neither the forecast nor
the evidence trickling down our necks promised much for the rest of the weekend.
But my guests were impassioned, optimistic anglers. The next day we had
sunshine, and, despite high, cold water, we experienced a dense caddis hatch on
the West Branch of the Delaware. Although the Ranges were fishing unfamiliar
waters, they performed heroically, inducing our truculent and wise brown trout
to take their Missouri River caddis patterns.
It was a fine display of
angling expertise, not exactly what you expect of a Beltway insider.
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LOAD-DATE: May 21, 2000
