Floating this evening in our pond contemplating the twilight sky as a bat, lightning bugs and the fleeting half-moon take turns making their separate journeys above and beyond me. It is a beautiful evening albeit warm and humid. But how do I love the fresh water feel and smell...It has been many a day since as a young boy of ten or twelve I fished for trout in Beaver Creek, near Know, Pennyslvania. An idyllic setting for a city boy, a Pittsburgher, to have the opportunity to spend at least one week during the summer at our shared hunting cabin, "Cabin in the Pines." My father and his circle of friends built the Cabin in 1942, shortly before they set off for war. A meadow and hemlocks circle the Cabin with just enough room for badminton and whiffle ball or even a tight practice field for baseball. The campfire would be built every evening with hot dogs and marshmallows and we would look at stars, play cards, or simply tell stories or relate the day's events. Yet it is the trout fishing that I remember best. I would grab whatever bait was available be it a worm or supper fare like a hot dog or corn and head up or down stream. My fishing bait really didn't matter that much though. I usually could catch a minnow on just about anything, but it was the spring-stocked trout that I was after. Usually by June or July the trout had had a chance to acclimate themselves to the water so they weren't quite as reckless in their feeding habits.
So it was one twilight evening that I grabbed a hot dog and sped off upstream to a hole that I knew harbored trout. That particular evening the trout decided to take advantage of my offerings. In a short time I caught a 12 or so inch rainbow and a 17 inch brown trout. I was one happy boy when I returned to the Cabin with my catch. We cooked the two trout up almost immediately. They tasted great and I will never forget the sense of that evening in the place, the family and the fish...All good things though seem to end. Within a year or two after that construction on Interstate 80 began. I can remember that my Father anxiously waited for the opening of the I-80 as he knew that it would shorten travel times from Pittsburgh, but also to points (i.e., hunting grounds) further north and west. Little did we know though but that one day when we arrived at the Cabin, Beaver Creek had turned orange. Turns out that the highway construction had opened an old mine and released acid mine drainage into Beaver Creek just upstream from our Cabin and just upstream to my favorite fishing hole. If my memory serves me right my Father wrote to Dr. Roger Latham about the drainage and impact on Beaver Creek. Dr. Latham was the outdoor editor for the Pittsburgh Press at the time. He subsequently had an article in the Press about the acid mine drainage.
I was devastated at the time. How do you take a clear stream, one that you swim and fish in, and then turn it orange. We had absolutely no control over what had happened. That lesson of long ago has never left me. How do you reconcile societal needs and demands with the natural environment which we so often take for granted. Some how and some way we must understand and better track the impacts, really the potential impacts of everything that we do. Yet I fear that the lesson we must learn is one that will only be lived and learned the hard way. For that I would guess we must say our prayers that we will survive what is to come...
