If you ask me, all of this kick and growl about problems between myself and our fishing columnist, Tim Wade, is a bunch of pre-fabricated BS. Granted, Tim is totally within his rights to not like me – he has a lot of company. I can be painfully abrupt and have a habit of saying exactly what I think, and why I think it. It tends to turn people off. They’d rather not hear the truth or, at least, the truth as I perceive it to be.
Personally, I like Tim. And I enjoy reading his column. Given proper impetus, the man can wax lyrical with his prose – a gift. Tim is a true gentleman, a darned good writer and an individual who excels at networking, in the modern sense of the expression. Our major incompatibility is because his business and his expertise are based upon a practice totally abhorrent to my outdoor ethos, although it has many followers/practitioners.
I find the practice of catch-and-release fishing (as opposed to fly fishing, an arcane art) revolting in the manner that modern practitioners use it to exercise their egos and torture fish strictly for their enjoyment. I’m also disgusted because one of the most ancient and revered of fishing techniques, dry fly fishing, is the culprit that has accelerated the practice of this torture to unprecedented heights. We’ll not even go into the problems created when abnormally affluent fly flingers began to isolate themselves into powerful tier groups that exclude other participants due solely to others’ economic/socio-status/class. Or that those financially endowed organizations formed alliances with state departments that waited at their beck and call.
Again, I fish and I generally use bait or micro-lures. Difference is, I fish when I have a taste for fresh trout for dinner, not to have a plaything on the end of my line. To my way of thinking, the only reason to release a fish is because it’s undersized for the frying pan or because size-limiting regulations dictate it. Again, if it is badly hooked, then even if it is too small, I’ll add it to my limit.
Probably there are those who find this attitude unusual for a dedicated hunter. Yes, I am a hunter and have been for over 60 years. But, and it’s a big but, unless we’re talking pest control, if I can’t eat it, I don’t hunt it. The big takeaway here is that when I kill a big game or small game animal, it’s quick and they’re dead. I don’t torture them for up to several minutes or, in the case of open-ocean fishing, hours, and then turn them loose to live or die as their condition dictates.
Fish, like big game animals, are a finite resource and should be respected as worthies in their own right. I can’t be against fly fishing in principle as my son and both of my grandsons are fly flingers. Obviously, the other three grandchildren will also be exposed to this discipline. Hopefully they will understand to catch their limit, enjoying their time on the water, and then to go fix a wonderful fish dinner and go about their day. And yes, there was a time, with three of the greatest waters for fly fishing within 50 miles of my home in Montana, when I also was a dry fly dabbler. I simply discovered I preferred a simpler, more aggressive form of gathering my dinner.
That said, understand that Mr. Wade and I are two different personalities. Like with the world, in the main, one of us is not better than the other, in a moral or philosophical sense, we’re just different. I’ll concede that he may be the better writer and definitely, because he understands networking with competitive aggressiveness, a much better businessman. I personally never cared to have more than I could enjoy in the moment. It’s a failing these days.
But Tim and my life experiences are likely vastly different. I grew up not church mouse poor, but close. Although I don’t know it for a fact, Tim, I would guess, grew up with more. Our lives now and, growing up, were likely vastly different and that’s the way it is world-wise. A separation of economic factors that predisposes different lifestyles for the privileged and the not so privileged.
A thought that should be weighed carefully before incriminations and name calling starts. I’ve known several wealthy people in my long life and what they expect from life, especially privileges and how to exercise existing socio/economic/political influences to get their way, is generally much different than what the working class expects from life.
Cody used to be 90% working class and 10% wealthy. Now the figure tends more toward 40% working class and 60% rich transplants from somewhere else. The town has evolved more toward being a Jackson Hole type of city, as opposed to being a blue-collar, rolled up shirt sleeves, Rock Springs type of community. It is what it is. The powers that be have elected to eject, by dint of excess taxation and such, the working class that are the spokes in the wheels that make Cody run. It happens.
Tim is what he is and I’m what I am. If you don’t like my finger-pointing at the excesses of rich privilege and the differences between those excesses and my traditional standards, you’ve got a lot of company here in Park County. But understand this. I’ll continue to plead the plight of the working class, in print if possible, against what I find offensive, sometimes illegal and against the natural order.
If and when this newspaper decides I’m more of a liability than an asset, they will tell me. After all, they are in the business to sell newspapers primarily, not to defend the common weal, as it were. Other than that, only my steadily approaching infirmity will muzzle my voice and outrage at what I consider unprincipled practices being visited on our readership by the spoilers and the takers as pertain to our outdoor inheritance. Which appellations do not include Mr. Wade. As I said at the beginning, Tim, if nothing else, is a gentleman, with all that the term implies.
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