The Paper Hatch

To Read

THE KLAMATH KNOT: EXPLORATIONS OF MYTH & EVOLUTION
By David Rains Wallace
$30, University fo California Press, Twentieth Anniversary, 2003
Available on Amazon

On the river, I have sometimes pondered the evolutionary forces that decide whether a trout rises to devour my stimulator, or not. The way a McCloud River rainbow’s eyes and brain pick out its prey, riding the glassy current, and whether the fish eats or not, is surely decided by natural selection’s process across thousands of generations. The rainbow that can see and eat more golden stoneflies will pass on more offspring than one that falls more readily for a barbed imitation or is nabbed by an eagle while swimming too close to the surface. I am fishing for a survivor of survivors, honed by millennia of bug-staring and munching, so I don’t get too mad at a refusal or three.

But my query involves specific, precise moments and individual decisions, not the innumerable teeming attempts at life to survive across millions of years (such that makes up evolutionary forces). At this level, answers seem to lie in a single thread of life—the failing hackle of my favorite size 12 yellow fly, the calluses on my fingers as I tie the knot, the glare of the water and the currents at the fish’s specific holding spot just in front of a rock the size of a VW Beetle. The moment between the fish and I feels more like a short tale, or maybe a myth, than large-scale theory.

David Rains Wallace, in his 1983 book The Klamath Knot: Explorations of myth and evolution, picks carefully through a blend of evolutionary science, biology, forest-craft, and folksy wisdom. The point of the book can feel as expansive as the evolutionary eras and mountain range it studies, but it begins with dreams he had frequently as a child that put his own life in the context of the evolution of all animals and things:

…dreams in which I floated above great depths of air or water so bright and clear that animals and plants beneath me glowed with colors beyond my capacity to describe, colors without names… as the dreams continued over several years, the beings in the depths began to rise toward me, with increasing surges of power, until I found myself at the apex of a maelstrom of creatures—fish, snakes, seals, blue horses with wings and scaly, serpentine, fishtails. Far from being frightened, I had felt buoyed up by this fountain of life, reassured; and after a few more such dreams, my anxieties quieted.”

Just like his dreams, evolution in the Klamaths can be confusing. But perhaps at the heart of Rains Wallace’s arguments is that evolution doesn’t have to be consistent—it just has to work. He conducts a thorough study of this idea across species from the lamprey to bunch grasses to tailed frogs and even “mountain giants,” they that might be Sasquatches, or at least some evolutionary cousins of homo sapiens.

I am no evolutionary scientist, and I’m afraid I would butcher many of the more complex ideas and theories that Rains Wallace explores. Just to give you a taste, though, there’s symbiosis, such as the relationship between the fungi that lives among the root systems of pines and oaks, helping them to absorb nutrients; preadaptation, when one lucky trait that gives advantage after an environment changes, like the lobed fish that adapted to crawl in shallow water and found an “evolutionary jackpot” by succeeding on land; and neoteny, or evolving to breed from an immature form, like some salamanders or even as Rains Wallace supposes, humans, who he reckons are an immature form of their hairy, serious ancestors.

The truth is, you don’t have to be an expert on evolution to appreciate this book. It’s an excellent entry point into some of the more complex concepts, and the way Rains Wallace intersperses evolution with great nature writing makes it both a page-turner and a thought-provoker.

The real star of the book, besides Wallace and his fabulous writing style, is the Klamath Mountains, a place Wallace describes as: 

An exceptionally rich storehouse of evolutionary stories, one of the rare places where past and present have not been severed as sharply as in most of North America, where glaciation, desertification, urbanization, and other ecological upheavals have been muted by a combination of rugged terrain and relatively benign climate.

Rains Wallace has spent many days and nights trekking the wide ranges of this unique and daunting range—a region he describes as “a rare remnant of a much lusher past.” The Klamaths, due to a number of unique circumstances the author explains in great detail, mirrors rainfall and temperatures last found in the Eocene epoch, when temperate forests “surpassing any today” covered the northern half of the continent from coast to coast. Looking out over the Siskiyou range, he writes, “I was seeing a community of trees at least forty million years old.”

The book follows Rains Wallace as he explores the evolutionary facts and myths that made its rocks, bacteria, rivers, evergreen forests, snow forests, red-rock forests, and high meadows the way they are. One question, “Where did the Klamath’s Chinook salmon evolve from?” will catch the eye of every fly fisher. Maybe from smaller fish that lived in lakes and streams in the Arctic Circle and were pushed to the sea by glaciers. There’s not much fossil evidence, Rains Wallace notes; “it is known that a fish much like today’s Atlantic salmon lived a million years ago, and it is thought that Pacific salmon species such as the Chinook evolved from it after having been cut off from the parent stock by Ice Age freezing of the Arctic Ocean.”

Though the book is now over 40 years old, and surely some of its evolutionary theory has been proven outdated, Rains Wallace’s study of nature is such a breath of fresh air for appreciating each species of plant, animal, and fungus. No knock on religion, but it’s one thing to wonder at god making a rainbow trout in seven days, a whole other to stare at its gills and colors and shape and be amazed at the tenacity of life springing up due to precise and ever-changing conditions on our planet, a work in progress for the last several billion years.

The thing about evolutionary biology is it can help us appreciate a salamander down to the growth order of its cells or simply as we watch it swim toward the surface through a crystal-clear glacial lake where it’s eked out a life for millennia. David Rains Wallace and his interesting study of the Klamaths puts that down onto the page very well, in a way that’s both entertaining and deeply intriguing.

Evolutionary science struggles to be exact. Rains Wallace proves that we can make individual meaning of the earth-wide forces that create life as it is here.

To Watch

UNDAMMED (2024)
By Patagonia Films
Directed and Produced by Shane Anderson
17m | NR
Documentary

This short film by Patagonia Films follows Amy Bowers Cordalis, a Yurok tribal member and attorney. After witnessing at a young age the massive fish kill on her ancestral home waters, she dedicated her life to restoring the river and removing the four PacifiCorp dams that block salmon and steelhead migration. The documentary follows Amy’s years-long journey to free the Klamath and end its ecological, cultural, and economic crisis. 

– The Editors

To Listen

The Fly Tapes Podcast
By Fly Fish Journal and Syzygy Fly Fishing

After a five-year hiatus, the Writer’s on the Fly podcast is back. Episode 25 features the San Francisco readings from their West Coast Tour that took place in April 2024. Hear pieces by Nathaniel Riverhorse Nkadate, Anne Landfield, Steve Duda, and California Fly Fisher Editor-at-Large George Revel (at 35:05). 

– The Editors

Add a comment

Leave a Reply