Trout Fishing at Christmas

.....A neighborhood holiday party inspired Rebel Girl to dig up the article below to share with ya'll. She was, at the time, busily digging into a paper plate of Christmas tamales when she heard the story of how the homeowner, sitting in his livingroom, spied the recent Harding Canyon mudslide as it slid. His perch, on our side of Modjeska, opposite Harding, gave him a perfect view.
....."It was like the hand of a dark ghost," he said. The man is a sheriff, not usually as given to metaphor as, say, an English major like Rebel Girl. She was impressed.
.....It is believed that the mudslide, the dark ghostly hand, took out what was left of the Harding Canyon rainbow trout.

From the Associated Press:

.....SANTA ANA – A mudslide in fire damaged Orange County wiped out one of the last remaining populations of native rainbow trout in Southern California.
.....“What we feared, happened,” said Adam Backlin, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. “The hillsides just slumped into the canyon, and buried the entire creek.”
.....Backlin said he became concerned about the Harding Canyon trout after the Santiago fire, which burned more than 28,000 acres during the October wildfires, creating mudslide conditions. The fish lived in rocky pools along a stretch of creek.
.....The loss is just one example of how many of Southern California's dwindling species teeter on the edge of disappearing completely. The once thriving populations of fish and amphibians have shrunken into small pockets easily threatened by storms and mudslides.
.....Backlin had tried to arrange with the Department of Fish and Game to temporarily remove the fish, fearing that one good rain could fill the trouts' refuges with mud. When it did rain, the trout disappeared under as much as six feet of mud.
.....This isn't the first time a post-wildfire mudslide appeared to wipe out a population of animals. In 2003, the last mountain yellow-legged frogs in the San Bernardino Mountains appeared to be lost forever. Later, a few surviving frogs were found, and now scientists are working to re-establish them.
.....The Harding Canyon trout, however, seem unlikely to make such a lucky comeback. Backlin and another scientist searched below the mudslide, hoping to find a few trout that had washed downstream, but came up empty.
.....Rainbow trout can become protected steelhead if they can get to the open ocean. While moving from freshwater to the ocean, the fish take on a streamlined shape that gives them their name. The process known as anadromy allows the fish to exploit both habitats, and to return to protected upland pools for breeding.
.....But during the rainbow trout phase, the fish are not protected. The Modjeska reservoir and other barriers prevented the Harding Canyon trout from ever reaching the ocean and gaining that protection.

.....Pictured right is Harding Canyon, along the Seven Pools hike, before the fire and the mud.
.....Years ago, when Rebel Girl was growing up in Torrance, California, a flatland So Cal suburb that lacked trout entirely, she fell for post-beat poet Richard Brautigan in a big way. He is an writer she finds almost entirely unintelligible now, absurd, embarrassing—but she keeps him on the shelf like one might keep the letters of old lovers. At one time they meant everything, the world, to our young selves.
.....Here is what Brautigan has to say about trout. It's not that bad.

The opening page of Trout Fishing in America:

.....As a child when did I first hear about trout fishing in America? From whom? I guess it was a stepfather of mine.
.....Summer of 1942.
.....The old drunk told me about trout fishing. When he could talk, he had a way of describing trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal.
.....Silver is not a good adjective to describe what I felt when he told me about trout fishing.
.....I'd like to get it right.
.....Maybe trout steel. Steel made from trout. The clear snow-filled river acting as foundry and heat.
.....Imagine Pittsburgh.
.....A steel that comes from trout, used to make buildings, trains and tunnels.
.....The Andrew Carnegie of Trout!