I was gazing fondly at the salmon report for 2009, wherein the Pacific Fisheries Management Council claims, “… the ocean’s are what done it!” There’s a passing reference to the continued decline of freshwater assets throughout California, and how the entire salmon run has the biodiversity of Velveeta cheese – wild fish essentially extinct and what we’re mourning is the inbred product of four hatcheries.

That’s a heady accomplishment, extincting the entire run of one of the largest freshwater river complexes in the world – within a couple of lifetimes.

Naturally the scientists were as surprised as we were, they’d misplaced a decimal point in the mathematical model they were using to predict returnees, which has since been fixed, so we’re all good again.

Alaska is going to harvest more than last year as their mathematicians have sharper pencils than their California counterparts. It begs the question, if the “scientists” most often used by the government are math professors, versus biologists, are we using video games to manage migratory fisheries?

Most of the games I’ve played eventually froze up – and after the reboot you’d lost the last three weeks of play. I guess that’s what happened with our fish, only we lost the last 100,000 years of natural selection.

Despite all the concerned anglers and organizations that represent them, we’re losing almost every battle and the war as well. Fencing off the creek is a short term fix, when the states need the water they’ll annex it, so that’s no solution. Buy the headwaters of whatever you want, imminent domain will leave you the ranch, but your water rights will revert to the state as soon as they’re needed.

Do we take the $40 we’d spend on our CalTrout membership and buy some fish instead? Taking the bag containing the fry of our choosing under the cover of night, and plant the little SOB’s ourselves?

Any mainstream advocacy group would be appalled at the thought, Fish and Game would string you up by your thumbs, and Trout Unlimited would disavow all knowledge.

Fundamentalism is all the rage of late, and despite eight years of “Gee Dubyah” explaining why we should fear it, perhaps its time to be the “little agile fellow” that survives on a crust of bread and a cup of water, thwarting spy satellites, cellular surveillance, and drone aircraft to plant another couple hundred feeder goldfish in some toxic and lonesome trickle.

We’ll suffer any indignity in order to kill a fish, but we’re content to leave the fight to others to restore some.

License money siphoned off the conservation agencies to copper a  burgeoning state deficit, small organizations making smaller progress – undone by hordes of fishermen on hajj to the newly pristine – grinding invertebrates underfoot in their rush to catch the few remaining big wild fish.

It’s one hell of a pickle we’re in – and while there’s no end to the fingerpointing as to who done it, the question that remains unanswered is, “what’s the endgame?”

Is leaving something behind enough, or is leaving what was there more desirable?

Future generations aren’t likely to consider us more than narrow-visioned butchers – more intent on leaving our mark on the sport than leaving any survivors.  The sport and its icons could be just another unkempt footnote in a book whose subject is long forgotten – along with the quaint pastime it gentrifies.

We know where the problem is – even if the forces arrayed against us point elsewhere, and is the forty dollars sent to some well meaning entity enough to assuage our personal guilt, or is an unpopular and protracted insurgency our only salvation?

Largemouth Bass are $2 each for the 2-4″ size, and my $40 donation is 20 fish delivered to a watershed that could sorely use assistance.

My confidence in all the staid conservation methodology is eroding. There’s plenty of well intentioned fellows arguing for the cause in every governmental venue, but the effect appears marginal – we lack the votes to carry the issue past a hearing.

I’m less excited about attempting to reclaim a wilderness experience, than properly managing taint – the eventual fate of our epic watersheds.

My fetid little creek is forty miles of perfect spawning gravel, all of which is the exact size required by steelhead and salmon, yet they’re denied access due to the priorities of waxy and pallid tomatoes. As each of these tributaries were turned into overly warm, toxic rivulets – we lost the native strain and its contribution to the larger yearly run.

We gleefully took 40,000 fish from the millions – because they were as plentiful as Buffalo, and celery wasn’t – and as agrarian interests marched up the valley; impounding, altering, channeling and blocking, we lost another 40000 fish with each stream so corrupted.

Now we’re left with four sterile concrete raceways from which we extrude the last vestiges of what was once a staggering flow of Salmon.

Goddamn ocean. Poppa always taught me to never turn my back on it and I’m beginning to understand why.