Wood frogs croak along the pond’s marshy aprons otters chase trout through the submerged branches of downed trees, a forest inverted. In the intermountain West, wetlands, though they make up just 2 percent of total land area, support 80 percent of biodiversity you may not hear the tinkle of running water in our swamp, but listen closely for the songs of warblers and flycatchers perched in creek-side willows. If there’s a fisherman here, he’s thrashing angrily in the willows, his fly caught in a tree.Īlthough this beavery tableau isn’t going to appear in any Field & Stream spreads, it’s in many cases a more historically accurate picture-and, in crucial ways, a much healthier one. The musty stink of decomposition wafts into your nostrils. When you step into the water, you feel not rocks underfoot but sludge.
Gnawed stumps ring the marsh like punji sticks dead and dying trees stand aslant in the chest-deep pond. Instead it’s a sluggish, murky swamp, backed up several acres by a messy concatenation of woody dams. What do you see this time? No longer is our stream a pellucid, narrow, racing trickle.
I want you to imagine a landscape with its full complement of beavers. I want you to imagine the streams that existed before global capitalism purged a continent of its dam-building, water-storing, wetland-creating engineers. Instead of envisioning a present-day stream, I want you to reach into the past-before the mountain men, before the Pilgrims, before Hudson and Champlain and the other horsemen of the furpocalypse, all the way back to the 1500s. This time, I want you to perform a more difficult imaginative feat. It’s a lovely picture, fit for an Orvis catalog. If, like me, you are a fly fisherman, you might add a cheerful, knee-deep angler, casting for trout in a limpid riffle. What comes to mind? Perhaps you’ve conjured a crystalline, fast-moving creek, bounding merrily over rocks, its course narrow and shallow enough that you could leap or wade across the channel.
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