The meetings were over. I was enervated, drained in that special way that only two days of meetings and two nights of trying to get something approaching a decent night’s sleep in a hotel room can  drain you. 

    The call to room service the night before to arrange a wake up call wasn’t necessary thanks to the gentleman with a booming bass baritone and a fondness for showers at 5 a.m. who’d rented the room adjacent to mine. I might have tolerated him had it not been for the door slammer 4 hours earlier and the gaggle of partying teenagers in the parking lot at midnight, whose caterwauling somehow failed to arouse the attention of Hotel management.

    All meetings are hard on the body and the soul, but these were especially so as they had the promise to effect really meaningful change but failed to do so due to an insufficiently stocked toolbox and further constraints imposed during the process driven, largely, by what must have been a successful lobby by a group that really had no place, and should have had no say, in the process in the first instance. 

    Packed up and checked out, I pulled onto the highway bound for Fraser Lake. The plan was to fish Stellako rainbows; it was Andrew’s, and was a good one. 

    I crossed the Bulkley. It was high and grey. The land was sun dappled. A flotilla of ominous dark clouds was cruising in from the west like the tallest of tall ships. The wind had picked up and the woods, aspen and poplar for the most part, were flickering as I passed Walcott and ascended the biggest hill between Telkwa and Houston. Is it hungry hill? I couldn’t remember.

    As I passed Barrett, my eyelids started to get heavy and droop. I opened my eyes wide in a gesture of surprise, but there was no surprise here, the rigours of the weekend were taking their toll. I needed to take a snooze. 

    I recalled hearing it said that falling asleep at the wheel was suspected to be responsible for more highway fatalities than driving drunk – suspected because you can’t smell fatigue or find it in the bloodstream of a dead guy whose left the road at 100 clicks or, worse still, slipped into the oncoming lane and become embedded in the grill of an 18 wheeler. 

    I remembered the time, years ago, when I was returning from fishing the Bulkley late on a Sunday after noon, nodded off for what must have been only a few seconds, then opened my eyes to find myself zooming toward oncoming traffic in the wrong lane, and decided to pull over at Houston. I did. Under the world’s largest fly rod. 

    There I got out and in on the passenger side, reclined the seat and closed my eyes for 15 minutes. Insufficiently rested, I drove across the highway to a quaint and obviously popular cafe, thinking I’d have a meal then take another motel room rather than risk life and limb on the highway. 

    The place was packed. The menu was dominated by comfortable food. I was beginning to salivate trying to choose between liver and onions, Salisbury steak with mashed potatoes, both of which looked good even in the yellowed pictures on the menu, when it occurred to me that I should phone Andrew. 

    I unholstered my cell phone and dialled directory assistance for the number for the Stellako Lodge.

    “Stellako Lodge.”

    “It’s Rob Brown, Trudi. Is Andrew staying with you?” I asked.

    “He’s out fishing,” she answered, “but he has his tent set up in the campground, and he’s booked a table at the cafe for dinner at seven.” 

    “Tell him that I’m on my way and that I’ll be a little late, I told her.

    Dinner at seven. It was six and even a Nascar driver couldn’t make it from the World’s largest Fly Rod to the Stellako Lodge in an hour, not even with a following wind. Besides I was still sleepy. 

    Coffee? Naw, I’d given it up; hadn’t  drunk a cup in 4 years; and I wasn’t about to now. Coke has caffeine. I don’t like the stuff, but this was an emergency. I apologized to the waitress and drove down the road to a 7-11 where I bought a couple of cans of Coke and stood impatiently in line behind some young girls with an arm load of junk food and a morbidly obese young teen wearing a Darth Vader Helmet and packing a six pack of soft drinks and fist full of candy bars.         Coca-Cola packs a punch when you’re not a caffeine consumer, as it turns out. I was glad it did. I put the AC to maximum chill set it to blow in my face, set the radio National Public Radio, and set out getting high on Coke. 

    The coke kicked in. I no longer felt as if I was about to fall asleep at the wheel. It was a phoney wakefulness, unnatural as a cattle prod, but it did the job. 

    The talk on my Sirius Satellite Radio was serious. James Lovelock, independent scientist, author, researcher, environmentalist, and futurist, the lateral thinker famous for a lot of things but most famous for what the greens dubbed the Gaia Hypothesis, was being interviewed. 

    “Your famous idea, your Gaia theory,” said the interviewer, “ is that the Earth is a super organism.”   

    “Yes,” answered Lovelock, who is in his ninth decade, and sounds like a man in his third or fourth. “It is essentially an extension of the theory of evolution, but it goes beyond biology to geology and geophysics. It was met with derision by the evolutionary biologists, men like Richard Dawkins. For a while I simply couldn’t get a paper published anywhere, so I published books instead. But, they’ve come around now, I’m happy to say.”

    Lovelock’s latest book, which originally carried the working title, The Changing Face of Gaia, Enjoy Yourself While You Can, prompted the interview, so, naturally, the interviewer brought up the subject of climate change. 

    “I have no personal doubts about the validity of global warming,” replied the eminent scientist. “Not only are there odd events that have happened so rarely in the past that they’re extraordinary, but there’s a concatenation of them that the man on the street notices. Ask almost anybody if they think the climate’s changed in the last couple of decades and they will all say ‘yes’ and give you lots of examples. Where I’m living, people are talking about growing olives in Devonshire and wine is grown all over the place now: there are even vintage British wines. Global warming is much more than just a real effect, it’s something deadly that will threaten nearly all of us who are now alive by the end of this century.”

    As I hurtled along the tearful highway, past Topley and Perow toward Burns Lake, exhausting a tank of fossil fuel, Lovelock fielded the question of whether the earth has seen warming on a global scale before.

    “Yes,” he said, “55 million years ago, at the beginning of the Eocene. We’re not quite certain how, but about two million million tons of carbon dioxide came into the Earth’s atmosphere over a period of about 10,000 years. I think the most likely cause was a volcanic sill: lava underground from a volcano coming up beneath a petroleum deposit in what is now the Norwegian Sea. This vaporised practically the whole deposit and put a huge quantity of carbon into our atmosphere.”

    Lovelock went on to speculate that if homo sapiens hadn’t developed into an intelligent species, the climate right now would probably be moving slowly back towards the next glaciation. By putting so much carbon in the atmosphere, he said, we have irreversibly changed the Earth. We won’t have another ice age, not at least for another 200,000 years.

    I started to feel really guilty as Lovelock speculated on what we might see, or more accurately, what kind of change our kids are going to see.  

    Very stark, predicted Lovelock, citing the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose report came out in 2007.        “Around 2040 to 2050, the European summer of 2003 (where over 20,000 people died of overheating) will be the norm. People might be able to deal with the consequences: they may go away for the summer to cooler places or they can turn up the air conditioning. But for the plants and the ecosystems, there’s no such relief. European agriculture will probably cease to produce food by then, it will become a desert and scrub region. And the rest of the world will not be exempt: Asia and America will be suffering the same consequences, as will Africa and the nations of the southern hemisphere. We will be entering a world where food supply becomes more and more scarce and there will be mass migrations. Anyone with an imagination can see the awful human consequences of that, and we’re talking about something which is only about 30 years ahead.”

    Too many people, summarized a sanguine Lovelock after pointing out that a whopping 40% of the CO2 in the atmosphere is put there by people, their pets and their animals breathing. 

    I pulled into Burn’s Lake and the first service station I see, to gas up. As I pulled up to the pump, I noticed that the gas station in Burn’s Lake had morphed into one of those seven come elevenish gas bars and groceterias that sell everything from windshield wiper blades to transfatted, sugar-soaked, plastic wrapped, junk food with not a shred  of solid nutrition in between. 

    I left my InterAct card with the girl behind the counter, a forced homage to  the poor young man who was dragged to death attempting to thwart a gas thief at a lower mainland station several years back, and filled my tank wondering why on earth they removed the triggers on the nozzles that formerly enabled you to lock the spout in the open position, then step away from the obnoxious noxious fumes. 

    I glanced at my watch as I made my way back to the store to complete the transaction. 7 p.m. I was late. Inside, the clerk was having an animated conversation with a friend, another young girl who, between sentences, slurped on a drink that looked like Aqua Velva shaving lotion in a plastic cup. She had a really pretty face, but, like so many kids these days, was much too heavy thanks, no doubt, to too many of  those drinks and too much fast food. 

    “You get a free six-pack of water with every fill-up,” said the girl behind the counter. She made a gesture toward a display of bottled water    

    “No thanks,” I said unable to disguise my distaste at the thought of consuming the stuff. “Do you drink this water?” 

    “Sometimes, yeah,” she replied innocently.

    “You shouldn’t.”

    “How come?” 

    “Because the plastic is not stable. It leeches into the water.” 

    The girl with the drink stopped slurping.

    “You’re the second guy tonight that’s said something like that,” she said.

    I told the girls how certain kinds of plastics would trick their endocrine systems into misbehaving, how they’ve been linked to infertility and worse, then urged them to Google the topic to find out more.

    “Gee thanks, Mister,” said the girl behind the counter. 

    “You’re welcome,” I said. 

    As I pulled away, I thought about the residents of Burns Lake, living in the watershed of the mighty Fraser River, surrounded by large lakes and a seemingly endless supply of good water, paying for, then drinking. plasticized urban reservoir water from a plastic bottle that had been manufactured in foreign country then trucked thousands of miles. Testimony to the power of marketing and more support for Jim Lovelock’s contention that our species will probably not make the cut when the earth moves from the unstable state it’s in now to the next stable state with mind-numbing speed. 

    The light was more oblique and dramatic. I saw Mouse Mountain in the distance, turned on the  Endako Mine Road, and climbed the hill towards Francois Lake. A short distance from where I passed under the transmission lines, I startled a fine specimen of mule deer that had been munching greens next to the shoulder of the road.

    I swung west and began my descent. Francois Lake spread out before me. Other than the bands of red lodgepole pines on the far side of the lake, the view hadn’t changed substantially over the 25 years since I first saw it. 

    In those days, the Stellako Lodge got as much traffic – quite probably more – than it does now. I was drawn to the place by an article in a book called Masters of the Dry Fly, a compilation of essays by famous fly fishers on aspects of the sport. There was an essay on hatch matching by Art Flick, another on fishing selective brown trout penned by Ernie Schwiebert, another by Leonard Wright on how to dance  one’s caddis imitations enticingly in front of trout. One essay by BC’s own Roderick Haig-Brown was less technical than the others, but easily the best piece of writing. 

    At the end of each essay, its illustrious author listed his favourite three streams to fish. Naturally the Ausable, the Willowemoc, the Beaverkill, and other famous streams on Eastern side of the US made the lists, as did the famous streams of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. The Test and the Itchen got more than honourable mention, but second on Haig-Brown’s list was the Stellako. a first class place to fish, he wrote for free rising rainbow trout. 

    Free rising rainbow trout: the river was only a few hundred miles from Terrace. I had to go there. 

as I neared the Stellako lodge, memories flooded my mind. I could still recall how, a quarter of century ago, anticipation kept me awake most of the night and how sleeplessness didn’t really matter all that much then because I was young and could go without sleep and feel no ill effects the next day. I remembered thinking that in a few hours, I would have the opportunity to fish a blue ribbon trout stream whose magic propelled it to second place on Roderick Haig-Brown’s all time favourite places to fish. Back then, everything else took a back seat to that.

    At that time the lodge was owned by Doug Kelly: Douglas Tynwald Kelly (the Tynwald suggesting a possible ancestral connexion  to the Isle of Man) former Member of the Legislative Assembly for Omenica before the riding’s boundaries were redefined to include the Peace River country. 

    Kelly was an indefatigable battler for his constituency in the New Democrat Government led by Dave Barrett, rising to his feet in the House on problems with fish and game surveillance and enforcement, the waste of timber after Alcan’s unconscionable abuse of Ootsa Lake, the equilization of gas prices, health care in the North and numerous other concerns vital to the people of Northern B.C. 

    Doug Kelly and his wife lived next to a global treasure and they knew it. The Stellako was –  and is – one of those special places where a relatively short river knits two large lakes together. Those corridors are always lavishly vegetated, rich in fish, and rich in animals and insects as a consequence. 

    The riches of the Stellako are further enriched by oceanic fertilizer transported there on a nutrient highway called the Fraser River by sockeye salmon.   

    When the Kellys first took up residence and acquired the Lodge overlooking the upper floors of the Stellako, the central part of this province was still viewed as a massive wilderness, out of sight, out of mind for most citizens, even more so than it is today, a kind of Third World country within a First World country ripe for resource plunder. The continental construction of motordom was still underway. Hydro dams were slated for far too many rivers, and logging was proceeding at a rate that suggested those doing it believed there was a never ending supply of trees. 

    In 1967 logging companies, in the absence of specific legislation within the Forest Act, and with flagrant disregard for the Fisheries Act, began driving logs across Francois Lake and down the Stellako River. Kelly was livid. Frustrated by his inability to halt the vandalism through normal channels, he took to his tin boat and, in a time before GreenPeace patented the grand media event, anchored it in front of the logs and dared the drivers to drive their cargo over him. The act brought an end to the log driving.

    The Kellys had purchased a house and some land behind the lodge and grounds and were on the verge of retirement when we made our maiden trip there. 

    I recalled getting up before breakfast and suiting up on that first day on the river. I recollected passing Kelly on my to the bridge where at least a dozen fishermen, spaced only a few feet apart were leaning against the railing, waiting for a tell tale twitch of the rods leaning against the same railing. 

    I looked over the span into the pellucid water. Pressed against the fast current just below the bridge footings were fish. At first I thought they might be coarse fish, large suckers perhaps, but no, they were trout, their torpedo shapes were unmistakable. Some of them were as long as my forearm, some of them were longer. I quickly understood that their proximity to the bridge timbers afforded them sanctuary since the current would quickly carry the line of any eager fisher who tried to place his bait in front of them quickly downstream.  And, that was what they were using. 

    I couldn’t believe it. Here was a blue ribbon treasure of a trout stream and these fishers were fishing it with salmon eggs. When I asked Kelly about this later, he told me the bridge fishermen were all locals hoping to fill their freezers with trout. He didn’t like the fishery. He wanted to see an end to it. I don’t know how much the former MLA has to do with it, I suspect quite a bit, in any event, the bait fishery was closed down a year later.

    I walked across the bridge. It was a gorgeous day. Fly catchers were swooping down over the river after mayflies. A solitary fly fisherman was standing in the river up to his waist a long way downstream.

    I turned on the trail that followed the river downstream. As I walked, openings in the bush afforded glimpses of the water and of yellowing fields on the far bank. From time to time I brushed up against the bushes, sendinging clouds of brown caddis flies into the air. 

    The path wasn’t much more than a game trail. It grew steeper as I neared the first bend. The sound of rapids came within earshot and grew louder as I scrambled over a small bluff. The path petered out. I found myself standing next to a large pool. The rapids plunged into its head end. The current was stronger on the far side where it ran up against a rock wall. Steps wound up the gray rock to a large cabin nestled among the trees atop the bluff. 

    At the time, I remember thinking that this combination of pool, rapid and rock had to be an angler’s dream backyard. No fish were rising there at that moment, but there would be. The temptation to begin fishing right there was strong. I resolved to fish it on my way back upstream and continued to reconnoitre. 

    This part of the river was markedly different from the long, and relatively shallow, glide upstream. The river channel was considerably narrower and a lot deeper. Rock shelves and  large rocks, some the size of small cars, were plentiful. Very large trout could lurk here, invulnerable to fast sinking fly lines, thanks to the boulder garden. If a guy was going to catch large trout here, he would have find them feeding near the top of the water. I wondered if the really large trout fed high in the water column. Failing that, the angler would have to persuade the brutes to come up through 3 or 4 metres of water and grab his fly from off or just under the surface. I wasn’t sure whether such a feat was possible.

    A few hundred metres downstream, a fisher was sitting on the rounded top of one of those large boulders, resting apparently. As I approached, he slid into the water and unknowingly answered my question. 

    Trout fishing is characterized by short casts. Line control is the central issue. The amount of control is in inverse proportion to the length of the cast. This is why skilled trout fishers wade rather than throw long. But, there was no wading possible where this man was fishing. I sat on a rock of  my own and watched him peel what seemed like an awful lot of fly line from his reel. He made a few false casts then sent out a cast of at least 20 metres.    I knew his fly had to be large because, even from my rock seat a considerable distance away, I saw it land at the base of another rock bluff and begin its passage. For the most part, drag is anathema to proficient trout men, but this fellow had his bug on a tight leash. I gave him no chance of catching a fish and a good chance of putting down all the fish in the general vicinity of his fly, then watched in amazement as the kind of splash only a very large trout can make appeared where the big, dragging fly had been a split second before. 

    The fish ran hard. It took to the air, once, twice and then twice more before throwing the fly and winning its freedom. I waded in. After only a few steps the water was up to my waist. There were no insects hatching so I knotted on a muddler minnow, probably the best go-to fly when you haven’t a clue what to use, and began casting to a current seam. 

    When the angler downstream made his way to shore, I contrived to meet him by doing the same. When our paths crossed on the trail, or, more accurately, the trail remnant, I uncharacteristically asked what fly had brought that big trout to the top. He smiled and dug into the breast pocket of his vest and produced a clear plastic box crammed  to capacity. The flies were identical. He popped the lid, plucked two bushy bugs from within and held them out. I extended my hand so he could drop them in.

    “Tom Thumbs,” he said. 

    And they were indeed, huge bushy Tom Thumbs, immaculately tied but with the deer hair wing cut evenly  across in a manner I hadn’t seen before. 

    “My friend, Soji Inouye ties them for me,” he added. 

    After I’d examined the patterns, I thanked him and impaled them on the patch on my vest.

    He held out a large hand. “I’m Gary Wray,” he said.

    Gary Wray was a tall, good looking guy. He’d been coming to the Stellako to fish for a number of years when I first met him. I can’t recall whether he worked for BC Tel or BC Hydro, but he was with one of those outfits. 

    He and his wife Shirley lived in Smithers back then. Gary satisfied his appetite for fishing by angling the Stellako for trout every summer and fishing the Bulkley for steelhead that frequented the runs, pools and riffles between the walk bridge at Walcott and Eddy Park in Telkwa. 

    The Bulkley steelhead sport fishery has a long history in this province, but, a few decades ago, most of the angling took place on the river’s largest tributary, the Morice, and the well know water just below the Little Bulkley at Barrett Station. The miles of river above Telkwa, like the water from downstream of Telkwa to Smithers, was very lightly fished – so lightly, in fact, that Gary and his equally avid angling partner, railway man, Soji Inouye, fished every weekend in the Fall and rarely encountered another fisherman. 

    Enjoying the process of figuring things out for themselves, in fact, preferring it that way, Gary and Soji were untutored in the crafty art of angling. On my second trip to the Stellako, Gary and I shared some beer and some angling exploits. I told of some of my adventures on the lower Skeena and her tributaries. He matched those  with detailed descriptions of some of his Bulkley River exploits. The fishing described was fine and very appealing. 

    What fly do you and Soji like? I asked.

    Sofa Pillow, he replied reflexively. 

    Seeing the puzzled look on my face, he began rummaging around in his fishing vest. 

    The Sofa Pillow was a famous trout fly tied to imitate the giant stone flies of Montana. It had a red quill tail, a red floss body, a wing of red fox squirrel tail and couple of tightly wrapped brown cock hackled up front. I’d seen pictures of the pattern in books. Were Gary and Soji fishing the pattern on a free float over top of steelhead? It seemed an impossible task especially since it was difficult to spot steelhead on a large river like the reaches of the Bulkley the two of them fished, let alone get near enough in shallow water to fish for them on a dead drift as if they were giant trout.

    Here, said Gary, pulling out a gray, foam line box and popping it open. Sofa Pillows. 

    The box was jam packed with strange looking flies that bore almost no resemblance to the Sofa Pillows I’d read about. The bugs had a long tail of gray squirrel tail hair over a shorter tail made of a small bundle of calf tail hairs dyed red. The remainder of the fly was constructed of the feathers from the saddle of a Wyandote rooster, known as badger hackle among fly dressers, wound tightly from the bend to the eye of a heavy up eyed salmon hook then tied off with black thread. The thing looked like a miniature bottle brush. Later I learned that a similar fly, appropriately called a bottle washer was used for salmon on the east coast. 

    You fish these things with a floating line?

    It was Gary’s turn to look puzzled.

    No, he said, we use a sinking tip.

    If you’d given that bushy creation of Soji’s to any knowledgeable flyrodding steelheader, he’d have attached it to the end of a long leader knotted in turn to a full floating fly line and done his best to fish it on or just under the surface of the water, much as fishers Atlantic Salmon do their similarly dressed bottle washers and MacIntoshes. Not so these home-grown flyfishing Smithereens who, because sinking tipped lines of those days sank slower than the slowest sinking tip contemporary fly lines,  had concocted a way to fish their flies what could only have been a foot or so under the surface film using sinking lines. 

    I asked Gary if he’d ever used a floating line to hunt steelhead. It seemed an eminently reasonable question given that the Morice was, at that time, probably the only steelhead river in the province, and, come to think of it, the only steelhead stream on the continent where flyfishers not only favoured the floating line, but consistently persuaded steelhead to come up and grab flies that were dragged across the top of the water – in much the same way I’d seen Gary bring a large rainbow to his Tom Thumb on the day I first met him.

    Gary was nonplussed. I found a pair of Bombers, big bristling, deer hair flies, in my vest and gave them to Gary. 

    Try these on a floating line in places where you think there might be steelhead I said. 

    He glanced at the flies incredulously, smiled, then politely stuck them in a corner of his box of Sofa Pillows.

    When we returned to the Stellako a year later, Gary and Shirley were preparing to leave. 

    For some reason they’d taken their holiday a week earlier than usual.

    You know that fly you gave me?  asked Gary. 

    I didn’t at first. 

    You know. That deer hair thing with the fuzzy body and the wing sticking out the front. 

    Oh, I recalled, the Bomber. 

    That’s what it’s called, eh? Anyway, I got a boat now. I was fishing above the campground at Telkwa. 

    Yeah.

    Didn’t touch a fish all day. Fished hard too. Using Sofa Pillows. Then I noticed that fly of yours in my box – what was it again?

    Bomber. 

    Yeah, Bomber. I remembered what you said about fishing it on a floating line, so took the reel off my rod and put on the one with a floating line on. Then I tied the fly on, made a cast, Gary’s eyes widened, a mock shocked expression spread over his face, and two fish came after it at the same time.

    I guess you’ll want some more.

    No. It’s OK. I got Soji to tie me up a few. 

    So, I asked, how’s the fishing been. 

    Not bad. Almost drowned though. 

    At my look of astonishment, Gary continued. You know Dr. Dufton?

    Know of him. From Prince George.

    That’s right. Well, last year he was fishing rainbows at Babine Lake.

    Uh-huh. 

    And, he starts to have a heart attack.

    I guess he’d recognize the symptoms.

    Yeah. So, drives to Prince George.

    Why not Smithers? I wondered, since the it was about five hours closer than Prince George. 

    I guess he had more faith in the doctors in George.

     He got there and they took care of him. Anyway, he seemed ok when he got here. He had a zodiac. He asked me if I wanted to drift the river with him. 

    A drift raft? 

    Well, not exactly, one with a transom.

    I winced at the thought of drifting a river with a boat that glides gracefully when powered by an outboard but turns into a unwieldy craft when rowed like a raft. 

    Three of us went: Dufton, me and his son, continued Gary. Everything went fine down to the Cabin Pool. There was no problem getting to the Wing dam and to the Millionaire’s Pool.

    Today, after the advent of pontoon boats and personal water craft, drifting the Stellako, and rivers like it, has become commonplace. Not so when Gary and the Duftons made their maiden drift. Then, kids in inner tubes bobbed down to the first few kilometres then took out at the Wing Dam and intrepid, skilled canoeists, unafraid to brave some daunting bits of white water, paddled to the takeout located on river left just above the falls, were the only traffic down the river. 

    Gary became more animated as he described how young Dufton lost one of their two paddles as they bumped awkwardly through one of the many short rapids between Millionaire’s and the Falls. 

    Have you ever tried to paddle a boat with one paddle? Gary asked.

    As a matter of fact, I had once, on the Lakelse River after a near fatal mishap. That trip was less than a kilometre on smooth water slower than any Gary and Duftons had before them, yet even that was perilous.

    We were spinning around. We were out of control, said Gary. Then we saw the car. Before we could do anything we were past it and into the fast stretch, headed straight for the falls. 

    There’s no road on the side where you take out, I said. 

    We know that now, said Gary. We were just about to go over the falls when Dufton threw out the anchor. The bow of the boat stuck up and Dufton yelled at his kid to get out, meaning he should get out on the right side where the boat was pinned up against a rock wall.    The kid started to get out of the other side. I grabbed his arm and dragged him in. What am I doing here with one paddle and guy with a weak heart? I asked myself.

    What then?    

    We just managed to crawl up that wall.

    Dodged a bullet, I said. 

    Gary nodded.

    Not long after that, the Wray’s left Smithers. Gary retired and they left for Vancouver Island. They made at least one more trip to the Stellako, at least we saw them once more then no more. 

    It was getting dark when I pulled up to the restaurant at the Stellako Lodge. Andrew had eaten. I was an hour after than I’d told him I’d be arriving, so I was glad he’d started without me. Irwin, who made his living as a chef before he acquired the lodge, was still cooking, so I told Trudi, his wife and waitress, I fancied a Weiner schnitzel. 

    Between bites, I described the frustrations of the Quality Waters meetings to Andrew, who  was slated to be on the Central working group to represent resident anglers. 

    Like me, others in the process thought Andrew was a good pick for that position since he has a broad and understanding of angling in general and he has fished on the east coast, as well as on the Skeena and almost all her tributary streams, including the Kispiox. Andrew lived in the Kispiox Valley for some years. And the Kispiox River fell within the purview of the same Central working group. 

    Unfortunately, a resident of the Kispiox Valley, who obviously wanted desperately to be on that group, discovered that Andrew had worked as an assistant guide for one day in the year past. Since the rules stated that the reps of resident anglers could not have guided in the previous year, Andrew was disqualified. 

    I suggested to Andrew that David Larson unknowingly did him a large favour, since the series of meetings that began last year and ultimately gobbled up four weekends of the participants’ time, was the most frustrating process I’d ever been involved in. First, I told him, there was something intensely annoying about the structure. The government hired facilitators. Facilitators are by nature control freaks who regard anything faintly resembling disorder as something akin to the H1N1 virus. To keep everything running smoothly they use control mechanisms like consequence tables and tool boxes. 

    In this case they presented us with a tool box bereft of tools. For example, the tackle box was not in the tool box. Thus tackle restrictions were not to be used in the formulation of regulations intended to preserve steelhead angling of the highest quality. Considering that most of the most effective fishing regulations implemented on this continent in the past 100 years – everything from prohibitions on snagging to bans on bait to single barbless hooks – has involved gear restrictions and tackle modification, the decision to exclude them from the process was patently absurd. 

    All that was left then to prevent overcrowding and angler concentrations, and the consequent diminution of angling quality, was the ability to manipulate time and space, so that’s what we did with recommendations that included resident-only times, resident only zones, suggestions for rod day caps and lotteries for non-resident anglers. 

    At that point the recommendations were shot-gunned around to everybody with the ability to log on to the internet. This was followed by a series of meetings to elicit feedback. Why the government chose to invite feedback from foreign anglers is beyond me. Do we elicit their opinion on hunting regulations? Do we ask for their two cents when we make regional bylaws or amend our traffic laws? 

    As was expected, some American steelheaders who clearly regard us as a colony rather than a sovereign state, reacted volubly and badly. They threatened lawsuits, circulated petitions, petitioned Gordy Campbell and other politicians, notwithstanding the fact that they don’t live here or pay taxes. And what did the government expect the American steelheaders to say. Any group that is about to suffer some restrictions is  going to react negatively. What did the government expect? 

    The crime here, is that the government not only listened but acted upon the outrage, subsequently modifying the process by removing the lottery mechanism from the tool box, sending us back to the drawing board by doing so. Then to further complicate matters, they introduced new members to the working groups midway through the process,  creating a further impediment to the final goal of the entire 20 year process. 

    I railed on, becoming more and more animated as described the frustrating and unsatisfying experience. 

    Oh well, he said, after a good night’s sleep and some trout fishing tomorrow, you’ll feel better. 

    Andrew took to his tent, I, to my rented cabin. I poured a glass of Merlot and watched swallows dip to dine on caddis as hundreds of their brethren buzzed around the porch light.

    It was mid morning by the time Andrew  and I on our way to fish the river. 

    A lone angler was drifting his fly along a current seam some hundred metres or so below the bridge. 

    That’s Bill. I’m pretty sure, I said to Andrew. 

    I couldn’t make out his face but the smooth casting stroke and the split cane rod strongly suggested the man working it was Bill Burkland. 

    We walked past the sign declaring that the Vanderhoof Rod and Gun club was responsible for the maintenance of the trail and turned toward the river at the first access point. During that time, Bill had moved to the spot downstream where the trail met the river. 

    Bill, I called out, how ya doing?

    Bill turned, looked over the glasses perched on the end of his nose and smiled.

    Poorly, he said. 

    He always says that. If  he’d said he was well, I’d have been worried.

    Bill is a skilled fisherman, though you’d be hard pressed to get him to say so. He and his wife Shirley live out of their fifth wheel, which they park in a spot overlooking the river for a month or more every year. Bill fishes every day, if he can help it, and he never brags about his catches, which makes him a superb fishing barometer. 

    You know Andrew?

    Bill nodded. Believe we’ve met, he said.

    I asked the obligatory question:

    How’s it been, Bill?

    Good a couple of weeks back, but for the last week we’ve had storms. Lot’s of wind. River’s come up. Hardly any hatches to speak of. He hesitated. What kind of pole is that? he asked, squinting at my rod.

    A Bob Clay, I told him. The fourth one he built, I think. Sold it to me for a hundred bucks. Felt sorry for me after I broke the rod Ron built for me at the end of a rafting trip we made together. It’s a nice rod. I really like it.

    At that price he gave it to ya, said Bill. 

    We left Bill to his fishing and made our way back to the main trail. Andrew had told me the night before that he’d done some brushing to clear the path at a couple of awkward spots, but I had no idea that the path was as bad as it was. 

    Apparently the Vanderhoof Rod and Gun Club is falling down on the job, I said to Andrew, though a more likely explanation is that the club has probably disbanded or fallen on hard times.

     There were fallen trees everywhere, many of them over the path. At first I assumed, as Andrew had, that the carnage was a result of strong winds, but rather than leaning in same direction, as wind throw does, the trees had no discernible pattern. Later, I learned, from Trudi and Irwin, that there had been a freakishly heavy fall of wet snow on a single afternoon a few years ago. Many of the trees, they said, simply could not withstand the weight and collapsed.

    As we clambered over pines trying not to tear waders or entangle fishing rods, I thought that perhaps there was an upside to this mess. The foot traffic to the Cabin Pool and the runs below it, which was considerable in the past, would almost certainly be lessened dramatically. That fact and the fact that floating anglers, in a hurry to get to the Flats, the Wing Dam, the Big Bend, and the Goat Trail, would be reluctant to give up precious fishing time at the Cabin Pool, would likely make it a good place to find some uncluttered angling. 

    The Cabin Pool was the same but the Cabin had been transformed from a rustic abode into a stylish house complete with a satellite dish. 

    Bill had warned us the water was higher than is usual for this time of year. He was correct. We slid in, first Andrew then I. The after a few steps the water was over our waists. We caught a few fish that afternoon and vowed to return in the evening when there would almost surely be some insect hatches. 

    We did and there were. Caddis, for the most part, popping out of the cold, high water on a blustery, cold night. I knew my breathable waders were inhaling water, but I didn’t realize how badly until then. 

    After landing a few  nice fish with the promise of many more, I was shivering. 

    Andrew was below me, bringing up fish on every few drifts. 

    I’m getting hypothermic, Andrew, I shouted. You stay. I have to head back and warm up. 

    As I left, I glanced back and saw him playing another fish. I cursed my wretched waders.

    I returned home and told Karen of my trip to the Stellako. When we first began going there, we tented. After a few years of that, we tired of the discomfort that attends tent life and bought a truck and canopy from the Nissan dealership. We slept under that canopy on foamies purchased at K-Mart, our feet under a shelf with our clothes, Coleman stove, and sundry camp gear and our heads just inside the tail gate and we thought we were the lap of luxury. 

    The division of labour was simple in those days: I drove. Karen cooked. Both of us packed up but Karen was the foreman for that task. I still marvel at how she managed to find a way to get fishing gear, clothes, coolers, camping paraphernalia and sundry odds and sods neatly stowed away in that small truck and leave a little room for our elbows and anywhere from one to four kids.

    When there were a lot of kids, they slept in the tent. And when the lustre wore off tenting for them, I bought a small used camper from Leo DeJong, which, though it was the ideal rig for camping, came with the hassle putting it on and taking it off the truck and the ever-present problem of winter storage. 

    I raved about the cabins to Karen. They were rustic and clean, I said, but not all that rustic I  suppose, since they included a stove, a fridge, running water, ensuite plumbing, cutlery, dishes and a sink, all of that for 70 bucks a night, and 70 dollars less than 350 bucks if you stayed for five days.

    One of those crummy motel rooms within earshot of the highway costs more than that, I said. 

    Well, we should plan to stay there on our way to Vancouver this summer, she suggested.        Bill and Shirley just left yesterday, Trudi told us when we checked in two weeks later. 

    Off to Morice, I said as she handed me the key to cabin three,  part of one of the duplexes that perched on the high bank south of the cafe overlooking the river. You can rent an entire cabin for 20 dollars more, but we were happy with a view of the river instead of the lake. 

    The river had dropped since I’d been there with Andrew. The weather was warmer. The insect hatches were abundant. At night large swarms of caddis surrounded every glowing light. 

    Our neighbours were a couple from Utah, he a former Canadian expatriate who became a US citizen and worked as a highway patrolman, she, a  homemaker who fancied horses and was presently hobbling about as result of a recent surgery to remove a bone spur from her foot. 

    They both loved fishing, she told me after we met on our shared porch and I invited her in for a glass of wine. 

    There won’t be any fishing for me this trip, she told us. 

    I suppose not, I commiserated. 

    She added that, to make matters worse, she’d been bitten by a black fly. She held out her finger to show us a really nasty swollen yellow and black wound.

    I think I’d let a doctor have a close look at that, I said. 

    Karen agreed. 

    We talked about our families and drank another glass of cabernet sauvignon, then she excused herself so that she could go soak her foot. 

    Just before dark I heard the footsteps of her husband, Paul, the patrolman, on the porch. He was back from fishing the night shift. The next morning, he was off at cock’s crow, so I missed meeting him again. 

    After a leisurely breakfast, I played my guitar for an hour then solved a few chess problems then tapped away at the keys on my laptop before deciding that it was time to catch a few trout. Through my rented front window, I’d watched a small procession of fishermen work their way down the far bank. Bob Melrose, former tackle store owner from Prince George and former fly fishing school instructor for many summers on the river, was floating some dry flies just below our cabin. I didn’t see any fish in the air, but I had to admit that I hadn’t been watching much the time.

    I made my way over the deadfalls to the Cabin Pool picked up where Andrew and I had left off, but in water tight waders this time. Mayflies began coming sporadically at first then regularly. I tied on a small mayfly emerger and was soon fastened to a nice trout. Minutes after letting it go, I was onto another. The pace quickened then slowed   in time to the hatch. By the time I had my tenth trout, the hatch had abated. 

    Ten fish was more than enough. I made my way back to the cabin. Karen was reading on the porch. 

    This was a good idea, she said, smiling. 

    The next morning I met my Stellako neighbour, Paul, of the Utah highway patrol. He told me about the sizeable fly fishing club he had back home and that his goal was to persuade a few or all of them to make the trip to the Stellako. 

    I’d like them to see what a real river looks like, he said. 

    As Paul and I compared notes, a group of people, one woman and four men, began stowing their gear in the adjacent, previously unoccupied, cabin duplex. 

    Is that you, Rob Brown? asked one of them. 

    I looked up at the man addressing me. It was, appropriately, Ray Pillapow, without glasses now, and more burly since the last time I’d seen him – which explains why I didn’t recognize him instantly. I say appropriately because, in my mind, Ray Pillapow is forever associated with the Stellako. When I first met him, Ray was a gangly, bespectacled kid in his sixteenth year, prowling the shores of the Stellako in search of the trouty equivalent of Moby Dick with his buddies, Steve Bennett and Ric Konig. As I watched him fish, I simply couldn’t believe that a kid could possess such angling finesse. 

    Even now that it has become yuppie chic and been marketed accordingly, and even more so when I first met Ray, fly fishing tended to be an older man’s sport; something that fishermen tried their hand at when they’d grown tired of chucking spoons and soaking bait. Yet here was this kid from the meat fishing capital of Northern BC, Prince George, casting beautifully, wading skilfully, constructing delicate mayfly imitations (they even had pin holes in their transparent wings and floated upside down on parachute hackle so as to hide their hooks, for god’s sake) with the precision of a jeweller, and manipulating a dry fly as well as the best. And, the rest of his teen cohort, Konig and Bennett, weren’t shabby fishers either.         Once they had their driving licenses the trio ranged farther afield. They caught steelhead in Zymoetz, managing to total Steve’s pick up in the grill of a logging truck on one fateful trip. They were trapped at the Herman Creek parking lot by fallen tree. Undaunted, they spent the next two days subsisting on coke, beer and Twinkies when they weren’t catching far too many fish. Between these escapades they fished myriad lakes and streams in the Prince George/Vanderhoof area, always returning to the Stellako to chase rainbows by day and give Trudi and Irwin fits partying in the campground at night. 

    When do you guys get time to chase girls? I once asked Ray and Steve when they were staying in our apartment. They looked up from the fly fishing magazine’s they were reading with bewildered looks then looked at each other and shrugged. 

    The fly fishing took a back seat for Ray when he met a met a pert, exceedingly attractive Aussie waitress, then recently arrived in PG. He was smitten, so much so in fact that, despite the vigorous competition from his peer group, he managed to persuade Rennae that a lanky angler, not her numerous buff suitors, was the man of her dreams. They were married – where else? – on the banks of the Stellako. Ray, his best man Steve and second best man Ric fished all morning with relatives and friends, then we exchanged waders for tuxes and the ceremony was held on on the back porch of the lodge with a river full of  trout rising to a large hatch of mayflies as a backdrop.

    Rennae began a career as a outdoor education teacher and Ray, after a series of jobs, signed on with the fisheries branch of the Ministry of the Environment, which was why he was back on the Stellako that day as it turned out. 

    He told me, he and the rest of the crew, would put on their snorkelling gear and swim the upper section of the river on the first day of a two day float. The object of the exercise was  to count fish to determine their size and abundance. 

    The next day they began the swim above the bridge. After taking temperatures and PH levels they swam off face down, each swimmer assigned to a lane bounded by imaginary lines. On a white board divided into sections according to size, each swimmer recorded the number of rainbows in pencil. 

    It’s the 12th year we’ve done the count, Ray told me. The data is really useful to us. 

    It was wonderful to see Ray, in his forties now, a happily married father of a girl and a boy, and hear him talk of his newly built home on the banks of the Nechako, doing what he loves on the river that has run through his life. 

    People who have rivers flowing through their lives are specially blessed to be sure.