Gone Fishing
Krayton Kerns
4.9.08
Spring is here. Druann and I were out for our Sunday morning run and, because we were running well after daylight, we heard song birds for the first time. (During the weekdays we run with headlamps around 5:30 am and birds don’t sing in the dark.) The morning was cool and still and reminded me of the spring mornings of my youth when I would grab a busted fish pole, a few worms, and head to the creek.
I lived on tributaries of Porcupine creek until I was eight. The name ‘creek’ would imply there was actually water within its banks but I don’t actually remember seeing any water in it or any of the other creeks on our ranch east of Ingomar. (Back then we didn’t realize droughts were from global warming caused by carbon release from evil capitalism. We thought they were just…droughts.) Regardless, since there was no water, fishing was a little slow on the eastern plains of Montana. But, in the spring of 1966 we moved to the home place west of Parkman, Wyoming. Not only was there running water in East Pass Creek, they even had fish, and my two brothers and I were in the creek every day.
Our success at bringing home fish for dinner was best in the early spring once the snow melted and before there were leaves on the trees. Here’s why: The minute we hooked a fish, step one was launch the trout out of the water into the brush patch behind you. (We never had a net, so this was the preferred technique.) Step two was scrambling through the chokecherry and wild plum bushes towards the sound of a flopping fish. (This proved difficult in either snow or fully leaved trees.) Step three was climbing tree limbs to untangle our fishing line. (We had more injuries falling out of trees while fishing than we did from anything else. Fishing is more dangerous than it appears…at least the way we did it.)
Those were the good old days. Last year, time constraints of the ‘07 legislature put a damper on my early spring fishing expeditions and that brings me to my point.
Your legal access to reach the stream bed of state waters at the intersection of public right-of-ways was defined several years ago by an Attorney General opinion and nothing has changed. Senate Bill 78, the “Stream Access Bill”, was introduced into the 60th Montana Legislature and it had nothing to do with stream access…although leftists will scream otherwise.
SB78 should have been titled the “Fence & Bridge Abutment Bill” as it dealt almost entirely with fences. It was a bureaucratic nightmare. It was possible that fences attached to bridge abutments for the past 100 years would suddenly be in violation of SB78. As a solution, a new level of bureaucracy was to be created to instruct you how to bring your fence in compliance with the new and improved state law. The bill was a mess that became a political football, and it was turned down. Rest assured you can still go fishing in Montana knowing legal access at right-of ways hasn’t changed in spite of the best efforts of the legislature to screw it up. (Do you see why you are safer in the even numbered years when the legislature is not in session?)
