Forgetting is Easy
by Rick Hafele
I’m now at the age where forgetting comes easily. Where did I put my keys? Damn, what did I do with my cell phone? If I had a dollar for every time…. well, you know how this goes.
But there’s another kind of forgetting that’s more insidious and troubling. It comes with accepting what conditions are like now as “normal.” This is a longstanding problem when it comes to environmental degradation. A recent article by a New York Times author provided this example:
In decades of photos of fishermen holding up their catch in the Florida Keys, the marine biologist Loren McClenachan found a perfect illustration of this phenomenon, which is often called “shifting baseline syndrome.” The fish got smaller and smaller, to the point where the prize catches were dwarfed by fish that in years past were piled up and ignored. But the smiles on the fishermen’s faces stayed the same size. The world never feels fallen, because we grow accustomed to the fall. The continued decline of salmon and steelhead are examples here at home that we know all too well.
This shifting baseline happens without even knowing it’s going on. I know it has happened to me during my lifetime. For example, 20 years ago I considered a day of fishing on the Deschutes a “good day” when the Pale Morning Dun hatch had fishing rising all afternoon and I hooked and landed 15 or 20 fish. Today I consider it a good day when I just see a Pale Morning Dun hatch, and it’s a great day when fish are rising to it and I catch a few nice trout on dry flies.
Perhaps this just reflects a decline in my fishing skills, but I think not. Anyone who has fished the lower Deschutes River for more than 20 or 25 years, remembers the excellent hatches of PMDs, Pale Evening Duns, swarms of caddis in your camp food, and the splashing of dozens of rising trout in the fading evening light.
I didn’t fish the lower Deschutes much this year, partly due to the extreme heat, and partly due to selling and buying a different house this past spring (if you have too much free time on your hands, all you need to do is move!). The reports I’ve heard though say there were some “epic” caddis hatches, and trout fishing was good. This is good news and I’m pretty sure one reason for the improvement was a result of the drought conditions, which translated to very low flows in the Crooked River and thus less polluted water entering Lake Billy Chinook and better water quality in lower Deschutes River. However, talk to anyone with a long history of fishing the river and they will talk about “the way it used to be,” and even this good year wasn’t anything like it was in the past. The DRA’s benthic invertebrate sampling (report to come in early 2022) also continues to show serious impacts to the aquatic insect community.
I personally don’t want to see the current conditions on the lower Deschutes accepted as the new normal. It’s easy to forget what it can and should be like, but the DRA will continue to work for cleaner, colder water and a return to even better days on the river.