Again..

In August of 2007, torrential rainstorms staged one after another marched across the Driftless Region of Southwest Wisconsin and Southeast Minnesota, the area where I do most of my trout fishing these days. The resulting floods took the lives of over a dozen people and did millions of dollars in damage to small towns and infrastructure all through the region. I did not return to fish the area again in 2007 after the flood water receded. Life was full and busy and back home in Pennsylvania, my Dad's health had taken a serious turn for the worse. It was better, for the time being to stay close to home.

Early this past April, I went up for my first outing of 2008 and to survey the damage to the streams I love. To say it was surreal is very near to an understatement. On one stream, I saw a leaf-covered deer skull wedged in the crook of tree 50 feet back from the stream bank and five feet in the air. The little creek, in normal flows seldom more than 20 feet wide and three feet deep had deposited the skull with its wreath of leaves there during the height of the flooding. Many of the streams I visited on this and subsequent trips looked like The Almighty had taken a hundred bulldozers, linked them in tandem and turned them loose. There were SUV-size piles of stream gravel out in the middle of cornfields and entire near-stream groves of poplar and oak with much of the bark stripped from them eight, 10, 12 feet in the air. It was an awesome testimony to the power of moving water.

Still, the fishing virtually everywhere I went, even in the most apparently devastated of stream valleys, was fine. As good as it was before the floods last year and as good as it's ever been in my 10 years of experience out here. Another awesome testimony, this time to the resilience of wild trout.

Every year, a good friend comes out from Pennsylvania and we spend a week hopping around on the spring creeks of SW Wisconsin and NE Iowa. We drive from creek to creek, catching too many fish (if that's possible), eating too many cheap cookies and drinking too much Mountain Dew and Diet Coke. Just generally exulting in the great fishing and having a grand time. This year's trip took place the first week in June. All week long, the weather forecasts warned of impending severe storms with heavy rains and all the rest. Yet, despite the ominous forecasts and no shortage of equally ominous skies, we saw perhaps a half-inch of rain all week. This changed as were pulling stakes from the last stop of the trip on a little Grant County Wisconsin spring creek. Dark clouds churned behind us and the sparse but big raindrops that often form the lead edge of a summer thunderstorm splattered against our windshield. By the time we had driven the 200+ miles home to my place, we had gone through several major storms and the skies promised more. We didn't think that much of it. We were tired and ready to go home. Relieved to stop eating cookies and convenience store sandwiches and start eating real food again.

Rising the next morning and picking up the newspaper, we learned that it was Deja Vu all over again and not in a good way. The entire region we fished was being pounded by storms that were in the process of dropping anywhere from 5-11 inches of rain in just a couple days and every river in the region was in serious spate. It was August of 2007 all over again, only perhaps worse. The little NE Iowa streamside parking lot where I picked my buddy up on Wednesday evening of our trip giddy and exhausted from catching trout was now beneath 8 feet of water. The neat and tidy small municipal campground, hard by the banks of the usually placid Kickapoo, a place where I often hang my hat on my solo trips to the area was under at least 10 feet of water.

As I write this and think about it, the foremost thing on my mind isn't how we escaped the worst of it and had a productive trip. It is rather, about the twice-innudated folks of the region who will now to begin all over again so soon after the floods of 2007. Our hearts and our prayers go out to them. They're a fine people and did not deserve this heartbreak again. Let's hope they have the resilience of the wild trout in the streams of their beautiful region. I'm pretty confident they do..