Book Review: World is overrun by 'plastic' fish

AN ENTIRELY SYNTHETIC FISH: HOW RAINBOW TROUT BEGUILED AMERICA AND OVERRAN THE WORLD. By Anders Halverson. Yale University Press. 288 pages. $26.

You can catch rainbow trout in Spain today, though rainbows are not native to Spain. Only brown trout are native to Spain, as are browns to much of Europe, Central Asia, and North Africa.

Rainbows are there for Spanish fly-fishermen to catch because rainbows, though native only to rivers which flow into the Pacific in an arc running from California up and over to the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, have been transplanted across the globe. Thus raised in hatcheries and stocked from trucks or airplanes, rainbows today swim in every state in the United States and in every continent but Antarctica.

When Spanish anglers happen to catch a stocked rainbow trout, they know what to call them. Mimicking the most recognizable line in cinema's "The Graduate," fly-fishermen in Spain call rainbows "plasticos." Hence the title - "An Entirely Synthetic Fish" - and the sub-title - "How Rainbow Trout Beguiled America and Overran the World" - of Anders Halverson's recently published, intelligent, fair-minded, and uncommonly readable volume from Yale University Press.

What do we make of a central appeal of fly-fishing - a connection to something wild - when we're mostly catching some of the 80 million rainbow trout stocked annually in the United States, rainbows which are anything but wild?

Offering balanced answers to this question is a part of the appeal of Halverson's story. Still, the book's central appeal is in fact the story itself, or the stories themselves.

The two keys to successful teaching, I have concluded after a lifetime at liberal arts colleges, are the shaping of analogies and the telling of stories. The latter Halverson knows and at this he is a master.

Nor are his narratives restricted to anything like fishing alone. Thus, we learn of the link forged by American writers between martial courage and American manliness on the one hand, and hunting and fishing on the other; of an early morning cloudburst upstream of Los Angeles which produces a few hours of river in the city, which leads state officials swiftly to stock the temporary river with rainbows and to blow a siren when they'd completed their task, which siren in turn lures L.A. fishermen to catch them all before the river dries up by noon; of the poisoning of Wyoming and Utah's Green River with rotenone through "a full-scale military operation" and of this maneuver's role in creating endangered species laws; of the vast transformation of much of our thinking about nature wrought by Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," a transformation from better living through chemistry to leaving nature, for God's sake, alone.

Much of American history Halverson deepens and animates through his stories, stories told with the suspense of, and with heroes and villains worthy of, a mystery novel. Moreover, and this is their real charm, Halverson's narratives are markedly personal. His stories are about people, well-known people like John Muir and Joseph Grinnell and Aldo Leopold, but also local heroes, such as the ichthyologists Robert Miller and Carl Hubbs, who fought, unsuccessfully, the poisoning of the Green River, or Dick Vincent, who convinced the Montana Department of Game, Wildlife and Parks that the hatchery trout they had been stocking for decades were doing stunning damage to wild fish, and villains like Spencer Baird, who introduced carp from Germany into U.S. rivers in the 19th century, or the many officials caught in one federal bureaucracy or another. We find ourselves cheering on Halverson's heroes, razzing his villains, as if we, too, were players in these dramas.

And what's the verdict on the reshaping of fish and fisheries through the creation of "an entirely synthetic fish," a phrase coined as praise by the federal government's head of fish culture in 1939?

Some good we must admit has come from all these hatcheries and all this genetic manipulation. It allows millions to enjoy an activity which would be unaffordable, unavailable, impossible, absent the work of hatcheries and fish geneticists. Rivers, too, have been improved in some senses, though many of us there are who can never love a dam, as formerly muddy and carp-filled rivers in the American West have been transformed into tail-water fisheries alive with trout. But, and our verdict probably reaches its conclusion here, much there is to lament about the millions devoted to raising, genetically "enhancing" and stocking rainbow trout here, there and everywhere.

The fish are not challenging to catch; indeed, they are bred precisely to be susceptible to inexpert anglers. They are not very good to eat, having been raised on soybean pellets and the like.

When we fish for hatchery fish, we are rarely alone, often standing a short cast from many others. Further, these synthetic fish are unattractive, with stubby fins in place of the long and graceful fins of wild fish; they are drab colored and simply unappealing.

More damning still, hatchery rainbows spawn with wild cutthroats, thus giving birth to hybrids, which grow more slowly, produce fewer offspring, and are far less adaptable to tough conditions than are native, pure-strain cutthroats. And, this most of all: Hatchery fish lack all wildness.

It is just here that my own unbreakable connection with fly-fishing finds its origin and its rationale. In my 55 years of fly-fishing, thousands of rainbows I have caught, mostly caught and released but plenty of them I've eaten. Beyond rainbows alone, what does one make, what can I make, of this dedication to fly-fishing?

For decades, I annually traded draft essays with a long-time friend and former Dartmouth colleague, the late Chauncey Loomis, essays in which we attempted to capture fully but succinctly something of the appeal - the spiritual appeal, really - of fly-fishing for trout and Atlantic salmon. We failed, though Loomis came much closer to success than did I. The goal, fly-fishing's allure, as strong and as remaking as a religious conversion, in a few thousand words, continued to allude us.

So what to do, absent resignation and despair? Closest I've come to achieving the unobtainable, to capturing in prose something of the appeal of fly-fishing, is to make a list, an account of what prompts me to fly-fish.

My list began when I first taught fly-fishing, as I have to students at the schools and colleges where I've taught or served as president (Hotchkiss, Dartmouth, Kenyon, and Carleton) and to friends and colleagues who fish the freestone streams of the Poconos or the limestone gems, the Letort above all, near Carlisle, Pa., where so much of American trout fishing history was written.

Here's how my fly-fishing courses run.

After some early lessons in knot tying (allowing another to tie your fishing knots is like permitting someone else to tighten the lug bolts after you've changed a car tire) and casting (the 10 o'clock to 2 o'clock stroke still makes sense, though the stiff elbow does not), I pause to explain to each class why I do, why they might, lose themselves through fly-fishing. And that very goal, losing oneself, freeing oneself from otherwise relentless concern and fretting, claims the first place on my list:

Fly-fishing is so demanding of one's attention, which must focus at once on difficult and sometimes dangerous wading chest deep in swiftly flowing water, on where the fish are lying and feeding, on what they are eating, on the flies which might mimic this food, that one must and one does free himself from otherwise consuming concerns.

My list continues.

I fly-fish because it demands discipline and skill and knowledge - the latter especially: A day on a river is immeasurably the more if one can identify with scientific precision aquatic insects or fish; hence, the rainbow trout is Oncorhynchus mykiss. I fly-fish because it is not easy, and nothing of lasting worth in life is easy.

Nor does this exhaust my list.

Fly-fishing entices because of its rich literary history and its host of traditions, and to many of the latter I adhere, traditions like always wearing a necktie when fishing for trout or Atlantic salmon, or casting with a split-cane rather than a plastic rod.

I fly-fish because, though we can fly-fish for bonefish and bass and carp, we usually are fly-fishing for trout and salmon, and trout and salmon hang out in beautiful places (this borrowing a thought from John Voelker/Robert Traver).

I fly-fish because one can only fish for Atlantic salmon using fly-fishing tackle, and fish the world around come in two categories, Atlantic salmon and everything else.

And I head for cold, clear water with a fly rod and line because it offers the promise of being connected to something truly wild. Perhaps here, just here, is the central magnetism of fly-fishing: a connection, however fleeting, via a bit of leader material and a fly not much larger than a nail's head, to something wild.

Halverson quite rightly calls Aldo Leopold "the patron saint of wildlife management in the United States." For most of the last 10 years, I have kept on the desk where I meet students a photograph of the shack in which Leopold composed the essays which became, after his death, "A Sand County Almanac." The photograph was given to me by Leopold's granddaughter, after she heard me cite her grandfather's work in my welcome to new students and their parents to college. After urging all to come to know Leopold's work, I cite from him a single sentence:

"There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot."

Leopold was one who could not. So am I.

Rob Oden last month retired as president of Carleton College, a private liberal arts college in Northfield, Minn.

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The cover of the book 'An Entirely Synthetic Fish: How Rainbow Trout Beguiled America and Overran the World.' Enlarge

Fake trout are taking over our waterways, degrading the wildness we need to sustain the human spirit, writes a fly-fisherman.