The Elk generators have flowed since 3:00 a.m. so there was no fishing today. As an alternative I bought a new issue of Fly Fisherman and read it in the evening. I think I am about to quit buying and reading fly magazines because what I see in so much of this writing about flyfishing is an element that turns genuine sport into an elitist non-sport. In the magazine I bought there was an article entitled, "Fishing the Midge (Diptera)." Note the Latin. It is essential: you don't really know unless you can add the Latin. Of course, by providing the order instead of the class or genus is rather like saying that you were hunting for a brown, furry animal and putting in parenthesis (mammalia). Big damn deal. Diptera. So now I know that midges are flies. That narrows it down to 87, 000 species worldwide, 16,000 in North America. I now know (!) a lot more than when I started reading the article--but is it worth knowing? People who are not biologists should not pretend--they ought to let trout fishing be trout fishing. If this author had said either just "midge" (or "chronomidae" if a precise identification had been available), I would have not quarrelled, but to say "diptera" is to lay useless Latin or Greek on the reader. This way of writing and talking plays the elitist game but it does not advance true sport. The author builds his credibility, but I acquire a sense of inferiority and exclusion. He is the "true" fisherman; I become a lowly outsider to his pure sport.
Why do I have the impression that trout flyfishermen are caught up in elitism in this way to a far greater degree than professionals in most other field and stream sports? Is trouting now become so special that it can't be innocent fun anymore? Why do we as trouters persist in trying to turn flyfishing into something else? Why do we need to think that our long rods are superior or that our technique is better because it requires so much knowledge? Why have we turned this wonderful sport into school and work? I don't know why, but I do know that it hurts fishing. Today, more than ever for fishermen, we need to find ways of working together to protect water quality and to save our critical brood stocks from overfishing. We have lost too many good waters--lakes and streams--to pollution. Toxic runoff in the watershed affects bass as well as trout. When it comes to water quality, bream and bass and trout anglers are in the same boat. When it comes to learning about the way fish feed, I am inclined to be a lot more sympathetic to my unlettered, corn-and-worm friends who say, "They're eating them little teeny weeny wiggly things." "Them little teeny weeny wiggly things" is a hell of a lot more accurate than "diptera". And I know who I had rather talk to--and fish with.