The Brochure

The New Mexico Department of Game and Fish publishes a brochure, “New Mexico Fishing Waters,” that locates and describes all fishable streams and lakes in the state. One side of the brochure displays a simple map of these fishing waters and indexes each one to a short description. These descriptions fill the other side of the brochure.

The brochure was redesigned several years ago, and the new edition is by most measures an improvement on the previous edition. The map is essentially the same, as is the indexing scheme. But where the old brochure was a simple black and white production with a simple line drawings on the front and back covers, the new edition sports a color photomontage of fishing scenes on both covers and an color illustration of the coldwater game fish of New Mexico on the inside flap. There is one other difference: the descriptions in the old brochure were unapologetically subjective capsule summaries of the state’s fishing waters. They have been replaced in the new brochure by colorless, bureaucratically correct shadows of their former selves.

Where the Mora Pecos River was once “very fine all the way…Rainbows and browns…much open water; beaver dams,” it is now a “medium-size tributary to the Pecos River…Browns and rainbow.” Lake Katherine was once “the queen of the high mountain or timberline waters…Plenty of cutthroat and rainbow.” Now it is a “1-acre lake in the Pecos Wilderness at the head of Windsor Creek. Cutthroat and rainbow.” And the Middle Fork of the Gila River, once the “largest and best trout stream in the Mogollon Mountains…A fine place to ‘pack-in’ for a week,” is now simply a “middle-size stream flowing from the Gila Wilderness.”

The practical mind understands this trend. A bureaucracy tends to have strong self-preservation instincts, and it spends a large percentage of its institutional energy seeking out and eliminating potential threats to its continued existence. Such threats can include simple adjectives. In an official natural resource inventory, subjective descriptions take on an unnatural significance.

And who can argue? What may be “the best cutthroat stream in the state” this year may, in the following year, be inundated with silt from the reconstruction of a dam upstream. Trout stocking patterns and programs are always subject to the whims of funding and the demands of fishermen, and several years, of near-drought conditions, increased livestock grazing, and warm summers may create an exclusive brown trout fishery in what was once a healthy mix of “browns, rainbows, and cutthroat.” And in this benighted age of rights without responsibilities, who is to say that the state would not be criminally liable for grevious emotional distress if a conscientious fisherman sued the state after being skunked on a stream that was described in an official publication as being “an unusually fine large stream,” with “many large fish?”

Never mind. I kept the old brochure. It is stained with brown coffee-mug circles from many Thursday-night planning sessions, and it is tearing at the fold lines. There are other marks on it as well. These other marks are why I continued to use this old, irresponsible version of the brochure and why I left the new one in the bookshelf.

Over the years, I annotated the old brochure with symbols and brief descriptions that represent dozens of fishing trips I've made to the small streams of New Mexico. When I first picked up the brochure, I spent an evening or two happily highlighting every stream description looked promising. Then, when I finally got around to fishing a given water, I put a mark next to the highlighted description.

Most of the marks are simple check marks -- notches on my fly rod, so to speak -- usually accompanied by a few words: "crowded," "lots of small brookies," "in canyon above Montezuma," "peackock nymph," "big cutts." These checkmarks indicate streams that were OK: not too bad, but not really worth a second visit.

A few of the marks are x's, accompanied by a thumbs-down description: "too muddy," "blah," "not so hot."

Finally, a few of the streams and lakes are annoted with an asterisk, indicating a memorable fishing day. Five or six have two asterisks: lifetime days. None of these starred and double-starred entries have additional annotation. Just reading the names of those streams and lakes triggers memories of some of the happiest days of my life.

My worn-out brochure has become a talisman, a touchstone. During the long, cold, dark, and rainy Oregon coastal winter, I can always use it to summon up a warm June day, a remote canyon, a trail through a Ponderosa needle carpet,  a small, clear stream, and the miracle of a wild trout rising to a fly.