Against the Currents: The Unlikely Story of the Southern California Steelhead
By John G. Tomlinson, Jr. Published by Aquarium of the Pacific; $9.99 softbound.
Imagine a 100-fish limit. Once, that’s what the Department of Fish and Game imposed to protect the trout and steelhead population in Southern California. Yes, you read that correctly. In the late 1800s, writers such as Charles F. Holder billed the area as a natural wonderland, a place to restore one’s health through fishing and hunting in its well-known sunshine. Their stories, as well as that of the piscatorial protagonist, make for enjoyable reading in Against the Currents, the Unlikely Story of the Southern California Steelhead, the first book published by the Aquarium of the Pacific, which complements its permanent exhibition on the subject.
Make no mistake, this short book, which comes to 48 pages, reads more like a Greek tragedy than a dry screed on an endangered species. As author John Tomlinson shows us, the steelhead is a mysterious fish, one whose exact name and origins scientists debated until 1930, when instead of arguing about the biological relationship between steelhead and rainbow trout, “the argument for one fish — the steelhead being the sea-run version of the rainbow trout — seemed to have prevailed among California ichthyologists.”
The book also solves a great mystery, and one I’ve wondered about as a local fly fisher: how did steelhead ever run from the Pacific Ocean up to their mountain spawning grounds, some 50 miles away? After all, the Los Angeles River is 45 times shorter than the mighty Mississippi, yet it drops 795 feet in elevation, which is 150 feet more than the Mississippi sinks in its entire 2,350 miles, according to The River Project.
The answer lies in the region’s geography, but also in its Mediterranean climate, which has drawn everyone from Spanish missionaries, to industrialists, to moviemakers, to the millions of people who moved to Southern California from elsewhere. The Mediterranean climate is known for fabulous weather, but also for persistent droughts, much like the one our state is now experiencing. When monsoon rains replace bone-dry droughts or average rainfall, the result for humans is pure chaos, but steelhead would use the ensuing floods to advantage and navigate them up to their mountainous spawning grounds.
In 1941, the year after the iconic photo of Leonard Hogue’s 25-inch-long steelhead beauty shot appeared, the Los Angeles Times reported thousands of steelhead making their way up local waterways. “Large schools of steelhead trout were running up the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers to spawn, facing certain destruction if the stage of water in the streams falls.”
Remember, too, that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had already encased large sections of the L.A. River in concrete at the behest of city government to tame the river after the devastating floods of 1938. The high water plus concrete meant that a steelhead had to be to a hell of a swimmer. It should be noted that a recent expedition, funded by both the aquarium and the advocacy group Friends of the River, found no steelhead at the river’s mouth in San Pedro. Yet the L.A. Weekly and other news media reported that this spring, a lone adult steelhead was seen cruising in the justrenovated Malibu Lagoon. While foes of the restoration project cry PR foul, advocates point to a restoration project that’s working.
Next stop, if the state gets its way, is removal of the moribund 90-year-old Rindge Dam, which blocks migration upstream.
Currently, California Trout estimates that steelhead can no longer access 90 percent of their Southern California waters, from north of Santa Barbara to the Tijuana River at the Mexican border. The culprits include dams, urban development, and disappearing coastal tidal pools — basically, the whole hodgepodge habitat for 17 million humans.
As for the Greek tragedy aspect of the early days of steelhead and boom-or-bust water flows in Southern California, certainly the reader will find public figures of importance and outstanding personal qualities who fell to disaster because of personal failings and circumstances with which they could not deal. Holder, a professor and highly regarded fly fisher, is a prime example. In his widely read A Life in the Open (1906), this son of well-to-do Quakers devoted an entire chapter to steelheading on the Arroyo Seco stream in the San Gabriel Mountains, north of Los Angeles. Yet these very promotional writings, plus the Hunt Club he helped found, fomented the building of the famed Rose Bowl in the Arroyo Seco and the destruction of steelhead habitat.
What’s next for the Southern California steelhead, a species biologists watch with a sense of urgency, not only because of dwindling numbers, but also because it can survive in warmer waters fatal to its Northern California brethren? It’s hard to tell, and that’s a frustrating aspect of the book. At the least, though, let’s all be mindful of the Greeks and of our own tragedies of unintended consequences.
—Jim Burns
Badges, Bears, and Eagles: The True-Life Adventures of a California Fish and Game Warden
By Steven T. Callan. Published by Coffeetownpress, 2013; $13.95 softbound.
This book is notable for three reasons. First, it shows readers the reality of the detailed work of California game wardens. Second, it points out the huge flaw in the system of penalties for those violating wildlife laws. And third, one of the wardens in the book is named Martens. (It’s not me, by the way.)
Steven Callan worked for 30 years as a warden for what was the old California Department of Fish and Game and is now the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, rising through the ranks from a patrol warden in Riverside County in Southern California to a lieutenant based in Redding, where he supervised wardens in Shasta County and oversaw regional projects.
Callan’s now retired, and this is the latest in a string of books written by game wardens after they retire. The most prolific warden-turned-writer is Terry Hodges, who wrote a number of books that come with such alluring titles as Tough Customers, Sworn to Protect, Predator, and Sabertooth, which is subtitled The RipRoaring Adventures of a Legendary Game Warden.
In Badges, Bears, and Eagles, Callan recalls a patrol early in his career when he and a partner ran into George Werden, an iconic DFG warden who wrote many of the state’s wildlife laws. (Yes, he was called “Warden Werden” by other wardens when he was working.) Werden gave the rookie wardens some salient advice: “You boys are just starting out on the best job in the world. Don’t take yourself too seriously, and above all, always think of it as a game.”
Callan took the advice, although his book shows that the work was not so much a game as a puzzle as he and fellow wardens fit together wildlife crime clues that lead to an arrest and prosecution. “I wrote the book because I want people to know that there are wildlife officers out there who are passionate about wildlife, proactive, and capable of putting together complex investigations,” Callan writes in the book’s introduction. “More than just ticket writers and fishing license checkers, many of today’s state and federal wildlife officers are highly sophisticated professionals, putting their lives on the line for the protection of our rapidly diminishing natural resources.”
Callan’s book contains profiles of the poaching and wildlife crime cases from his tenure at the department. These include cases described by such enticing chapter titles as “Crowley Lake Trout Opener,” “Assault with a Deadly Salmon,” “Not in My Stream,”“The Eagle Case,”“Bears and Bad Guys” and a story about a big tiger named Sultan that a woman legally owned and that clamped onto Callan’s thigh during an inspection. Fortunately, “Sultan’s canine teeth had been removed,” Callan writes, and adds that the cat released him after being zapped with a cattle prod. “How many people can say they’ve been mauled by a five-hundred-pound Bengal tiger and lived to tell about it?”
As part of their work, Callan and his fellow wardens encounter many criminals, some smarter than others. One of the less-than-brainy lawbreakers tried to snooker the wardens who visited his house on learning that the fellow, who worked as a truck driver, illegally possessed a leopard. After first denying he had the leopard, the man, who was named Wycoff, decided he was better off admitting the ownership of the animal, for which he had no permit. “All right, I’ll tell you the truth,” Wycoff says. “’I was in Texas and I ran into a guy who owed me money. Instead of paying me he gave me this young leopard that he had in the back of his rig. He said that he bought it from some carnival.’”
Callan writes: “Wycoff rattled on with another five minutes of BS before I interrupted and asked if the cat was inside his garage,” adding that he wanted to inspect the garage with Wycoff ’s permission. “Taking a half step inside, I immediately got the feeling that I was being watched: out of the corner of my eye I could see two large greenish colored eyes staring down at me. The half-grown leopard had jumped from the garage floor, eight feet into the air and perched itself on one of the crossbeams. I carefully backed out of the garage and closed the door.” That is just one of the many cases that Callan describes that come with details of how wardens must arrest the lawbreakers and also document evidence for an eventual legal trial or court appearance.
Unfortunately for wildlife, many of the cases on which Callan and other wardens spend countless hours result in convictions only for misdemeanors, which carry relatively small fines. Sometimes, though, Callan and his officers find evidence of felony crimes as part of poaching activities, which can result in a prison term for the lawbreaker.
If you admire game wardens and the work they do, you will enjoy this book, because it shows that these law enforcement officers do what they do to preserve wildlife, and not for the money. Says Callan: “Anyone lucky enough to become a wildlife protection officer should think of his occupation not as a job, but as a careerlong adventure. We were getting paid to roam the fields, forests, and waters of California, searching for anyone breaking the law or harming our precious natural resources.” Truly a lucky guy.
—Tom Martens
Classics Revisited
The Well-Tempered Angler
By Arnold Gingrich. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1965; available used.
Arnold Gingrich was a giant in an era when magazine editors were royalty (and lived like kings). Gingrich was editor and cofounder of Esquire, the nation’s first men’s magazine, an undertaking that somehow left him enough leisure to become one of the most skilled and knowledgeable fly fishermen of his time.
At Esquire his credo was: “He edits best who edits least.” No wonder authors loved him. But when it came to the good life, less was not more. Gingrich’s passions included town and country houses, Bentley automobiles, French hotels, classic violins by Stradivari, Guarneri, and Amati, and at least two dozen bamboo fly rods that were top of the line. He wrote about these and other baubles in Toys of a Lifetime, one of nine books he authored or edited while putting out what was in its heyday the country’s hottest general-interest magazine.
It was Gingrich who came up with the oft-quoted remark, “Fly fishing is the most fun you can have standing up.” He also liked to refer to Sparse Grey Hackle’s observation that the finest fishing was in print, and his angling library was the envy of literate anglers on two continents.
If truth be told, his kind of fly fishing — often on private club waters, with wicker hampers stuffed with gourmet lunches — smacked of WASP privilege. (Lest anyone forget, in 1939, Esquire eliminated all Semitic names in bylines on the advice of advertisers who felt the magazine was becoming “too Jewish.”) Gingrich seemed always to be fishing with Parisian hoteliers such as Charles Ritz or bumptious knowit-alls such as Edward Ringwood Hewitt. Gingrich’s judgment on Hewitt — “He was very positive in all his pronouncements, and he tended to make a pronouncement of almost everything he said” — could have applied to Gingrich when the editor was riding one of his hobbyhorses. Gingrich was a tireless advocate for fishing for Atlantic salmon with midge rods, an affectation that seems less Sparse Grey Hackle than sparse grey matter. That his ultralight rods came from the great Michigan rod maker Paul Young might have given his angling a provenance, but not a pedigree. Gingrich’s insistence on catching Atlantic salmon on two-ounce fly rods could have garnered him one of Esquire’s Dubious Achievement Awards.
As L. P. Hartley said, “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” And Gingrich was definitely oldschool. Esquire might have been au courant, but his angling essays read like period pieces. Gingrich fished in a tweed jacket, a necktie, and a Tyrolean hat. He admired the kind of good manners that aren’t in vogue these days and anything that was well made and classy, like those luxurious Bentleys he drove to get to his favorite trout streams in the Catskills. Above all, he admired good writing. In the estimation of many authors, he was the best magazine editor of the twentieth century. The fact that he paid generously and wielded his blue pencil lightly might have had something to do with that.
Gingrich came up with the idea for Esquire in 1932 while editing a Chicago trade journal called Apparel Arts (a magazine that would later morph into Gentlemen’s Quarterly and then into GQ). Gingrich’s “magazine for men” would be “dedicated to the enjoyment and improvement of the new leisure.” It was the height of the Great Depression, so the only “new leisure” was unemployment. But Esquire was a commercial success, starting with its premier issue in October 1933. (A young Hugh Hefner, working in the magazine’s promotions department, had his own revolutionary idea, and when Esquire moved its headquarters from Chicago to New York City in 1950, Hef stayed behind to create Playboy.)
“We wanted always to feel that the reader could never feel sure, as he turned from one page to the next, and from one issue to the next, of what might be coming up,” Gingrich said. Gingrich understood that magazines exist to sell advertising and that the only way to do that was by boosting circulation. So he brought in marquee names such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway and filled his magazine with “cheesecake” illustrations of pinup girls drawn by George Petty and later by Alberto Vargas. Those racy illustrations landed Esquire in legal trouble, but the U.S. Supreme Court eventually upheld the right of the magazine to distribute those now iconic “Vargas Girls” through the U.S. mail. An article called “Latins Make Lousy Lovers” got the magazine briefly banned in Cuba in 1936.
Esquire then evolved from a men’s fashion and lifestyle magazine into a wildly popular general-interest publication featuring some of the liveliest fiction and journalism of the day. It built up circulation through a unique blend of consumer lifestyle reporting, high wit, and the kind of patented irreverence found in evolving features such as its annual and much-anticipated Dubious Achievement Awards.
Gingrich resigned as editor in 1943, returned as publisher in 1952, and appointed Harold Hayes editor in 1963, after leaving the editorship open for a time. The Gingrich-Hayes teams helped usher in the so-called “New Journalism,” publishing authors with bold viewpoints such as Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, and Tom Wolfe and short stories by fiction writers such as Saul Bellow, William Styron, and Truman Capote. Gordon Lish, the new fiction editor who was brought in during the 1970s, would introduce America to the “dirty realism” of Raymond Carver and other now iconic authors. Esquire was a must read. And because the magazine was always meant to be fun, Gingrich saw to it that articles about his favorite sport made it into print from time to time. The bylines of fishing writers such as Preston Jennings, A. J. McClane, and Ernest Schweibert were showing up in the magazine in the company of Pulitzer winners and Nobel laureates.
In 1965, Gingrich was asked by his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf,. to write a book about “the fishing life.” He didn’t need to be asked twice. The result was The Well-Tempered Angler. As writing goes, it’s not quite up to “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” or other Esquire classics, but it’s still a lot of fun. It always pays to read about the passions of those who live large, and Gingrich’s fishing is proof of the maxim that living well is the best revenge.
Gingrich had a lot to write about. He fished for big game with Hemingway off Bimini and Key West, mastered trout on the fly rod on two continents, sought Atlantic salmon in Ireland, Iceland, and in the Canadian Maritime Provinces, and generally had more fun than most people are allowed to have in a single lifetime. He developed a fetish for ultralight fly rods and hobnobbed with most of the world’s best-known fly fishermen. He amassed a vast fishing library and became an authority on “the angling heritage.” And he wrote about it all with wit and affection.
But Gingrich could be a real fussbudget with a tendency to overanalyze his fishing. Chalk up his obsessiveness to unflagging curiosity. No theory goes unexamined in The Well-Tempered Angler. Gingrich reproduces for his readers a four-year scorecard that he kept for a single mile of a Catskill steam, as if we might really be interested. He lists each trout caught and the artificial flies that took them, as if he were Linnaeus laying out the foundations of modern taxonomy.
Gingrich never met an angling celebrity he didn’t like. He seemed particularly fond of Charles Ritz, a devout fly fisherman who managed the Ritz Hotel in Paris as a kind of sideline. Another famous “Charlie” he befriended was “angler-naturalist” Charles Fox, who rarely strayed from the banks of Letort Spring Run in Pennsylvania, because “he can say, as the Parisian says about travel: why bother? I’m already here.” The names of famous rivers are dropped in this book as frequently as designer brand names turn up in Esquire. Halfway through his book, I lost count of all the places where Gingrich fished, the lodges where he stayed, the number of angling personalities with whom he kibitzed, and the private fishing clubs to which he belonged. Conspicuous by its absence is any mention of the Rocky Mountain trout hippies and West Coast barbarians who would later come to dominate the scene. Gingrich was not of their world, and perhaps he had no particular use for their kind of nostalgie de la boue (from the French, literally meaning “yearning for the mud.”) He probably would have fainted at the sight of Bill Schaadt.
While Esquire always managed to tap into the zeitgeist, The Well-Tempered Angler, beating against the current, is borne back ceaselessly into the past. The fishermen in Gingrich’s book seem to occupy a world of snobbery and privilege. A lot of the methods and a great deal of the flies and tackle he fussed over have gone the way of the feather in his Tyrolean hat. Some of the tropes are so ancient as to feel downright creaky. Here is Gingrich on the opposite sex: “Women who watch fishermen . . . almost invariably remind me of a dog watching television. They have no capacity of sustained attention.” Ouch. Gingrich routinely lunched at the exclusive Anglers Club of New York, which even today bars women from membership. There might as well be a sign on the building that says “No Irish.”
It’s hard to believe that a guy with his kind patrician attitudes published the hippest magazine of his day. But I guess as an Old World angler, Gingrich was wholly unreconstructed. He apparently took a great deal of pleasure in writing The WellTempered Angler, because he wrote two more angling books in this mode, The Joys of Trout (1973) and The Fishing in Print (1974.)
Late in his career, one of Gingrich’s hobbies turned deadly on him. A chest X-ray revealed a shadow, the aftermath of a lifelong love affair with Picayunes, Sweet Caporals, Piedmonts, and finally Camel cigarettes — not to mention the many fine Meerschaum pipes from Dunhill that he smoked and wrote about in Toys of a Lifetime.
Even after his diagnosis, his daily routine didn’t waiver. Gingrich would awaken at 4:30 A.M. at his home in Ridgewood, New Jersey, drive a few miles up Saddle Road to the Joe Jefferson Club, and fish its stocked trout ponds in the predawn darkness. From there, he would commute to New York City and to the offices of Esquire. Gingrich still read every word of copy before it appeared in his magazine. After reading and marking manuscripts, Gingrich would take out his Stradivarius and practice for a full 90 minutes. He might have been a crack editor and fly fisherman, but as a violinist, he was no Yehudi Menuhin. Ignoring his scratchy tone, he would saw away contentedly, often playing the blissful adagio f rom Mozart’s Third Violin Concerto, his favorite piece of music. He died in the summer of 1976 at age 72.
After his passing, it was hard to tell which went downhill faster — the fishing or Esquire.
—Michael Checchio
