Its amazing how far we’ve come.
When I was growing up in the mid-60’s my parents bought a two-family home in an urban community. It wasn’t a big house, but then again, my parents didn’t have much. My father was an Italian immigrant who came to the United States in the early 50’s. He was able to find work in a large factory for several years and, coming from a poor family, he learned to save what he could. Eventually he saved enough and was able to achieve his goal of opening his own business. He rented a small storefront and opened his tailor shop. The house he purchased sat next to a thin strip of adjoining land that he purchased and eventually built his own tailor shop. The backyard bordered a small river and that’s where this story is headed.
As some of you may recall, if you happened to be as old as me, the word “conservation” wasn’t big back then. The land was polluted, the air was polluted, the rivers were polluted. And so was the river behind our house.
My brother and I would stand in the backyard, all 15 feet of it, and shoot the rats that called the river home. There were days when the water wasn’t clear. Sometimes it flowed green. Sometimes it flowed blue. Sometimes it was just coated with foam. And it had a rather unpleasant odor most of the time. The factories upriver used it as a sewer and the people living in the congested neighborhoods would throw their trash into it. I would spend many hours shooting the bottles, lightbulbs and other items that flowed past. Eventually my father built a fence to put it out of sight and the city built a conduit for it to flow through. It was really “out of sight, out of mind”.
After having completed my college studies and finding a job I was able to move away, though my apartment was still on the river. One of my coworkers got me interested in fly fishing and my quest to find fishable waters began. The conservation movement was just starting to make headway and more and more waters were beginning to flow clear. My father and I would joke about someday being able to fish the river behind his house but, though we could no longer see it, we could certainly smell it!
As the years past my parents passed away and I started hearing rumors of that dirty little river being cleaned up a little. I continued to fish other waters but always had, in the back of my mind, the thought of how happy my father would be if someday I caught a fish from that river.
Now I’m an old man who still fishes when he gets a chance. Life gets in the way sometimes, but I’m lucky enough to have a wife who likes to fly fish also. I kept hearing rumors about that little river being fishable now. In fact, I heard it had a Trout Management area, too. Last week the weather was nice, I’m a fine weather fisherman now. I suggested to my wife that we take our equipment and go for a ride. We ended up along a spot on that little river that wasn’t underground. While some of that old odor remained, we went for a wade. There was still litter along the banks, it’s still very much an inner-city river, and sometimes you could almost see a sheen of oil on its surface, but we still cast our flies into it. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, the day was good. My wife promised me she wouldn’t brag. I thought I’d get it out before she did. She out-fished me that day! But I caught my first trout out of that little river that day. And they were all beautiful. It’s amazing how far we’ve come.