Rife with statistics and information derived from various studies, Taftsville author Tim Traver’s Lost in the Driftless: Trout Fishing on the Cultural Divide is not exactly breezy summer reading. Yet Traver’s scholarly account of his months spent in the Driftless region of southwest Wisconsin — an area where politically charged undercurrents flow within its pristine waters — contains brilliant imagery and enough humor and discourse that it’s easy to get lost in.
The guest of curmudgeonly septuagenarian worm angler Roger Kerr in rural Boscobel, Wis., Traver’s work grapples with the conflicts between those of Kerr’s ilk and the newer, catch-and-release and specialization movement fueled largely by urban fly fishermen.
Traver, an avid all-around fisherman and experienced guide and conservationist, attempts to present both sides fairly, but clearly is sympathetic to those of Kerr’s ilk. By the end of the book, when Traver attends the annual meeting for Trout Unlimited — a national cold-water fisheries group that is both celebrated and ridiculed widely for its conservation efforts — he’s sufficiently poised for a three-page diatribe beginning, “If I were King Tut.”
Traver, a Rhode Island native who as a child learned to fish from his maternal grandmother in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, contemplates the importance of trout fishing to rural culture and laments the decline in its popularity. Only 3 percent of U.S. citizens engage in it regularly, he writes, and fewer children are being introduced.
The reason? The internet and video games, of course. “We have more factual information at our fingertips than ever before, but less reality,” he writes in the introduction. “Gaming zombies are more real than catching a brook trout partly because of proximity. Values are simply what we love — what’s close to us. We can’t love a trout because a trout is no longer real, no longer close.”
Yet Traver encounters plenty who remain impassioned about trout fishing in the Driftless, a region that received its name because, unlike much of the Midwest, it wasn’t subjected to glacial activity and thus enjoys deeply carved river valleys. The enthused especially includes Kerr, a long-time Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources fisheries manager who became a rules-breaking protester upon retirement.
At issue are regulations implemented since the early 1990s that sharply shifted Wisconsin’s minimal rules tradition. In 1990, 30 water sources were made “special opportunity” catch-and-release only and 34 were managed with slot limits and lower daily bag limits. Regulations have only increased since.
“By 2005, Roger was in full-blown revolt,” Traver writes. “The regulations had not grown more wild trout, he said — wild trout transplants and the restoration of trout streams had. But the regulations had scared off anglers.”
Traver is careful to present perspectives that challenge Kerr’s beliefs, such as a statistical breakdown inserted during the description of an outing with DNR biologists.
“They looked at four productive brown trout creeks in central Wisconsin, where, they concluded, heavy fishing pressure and no size class protection for larger fish had skewed the trout population to younger, smaller fish,” Traver writes before digging into the figures.
Interwoven through the conflicts is prose devoted to Traver’s unabashed love of fishing, highlighting Driftless with distinctive imagery. For Traver, who came of age in the 1970s, fishing is “a thinking man’s reflective occupation,” representative not only of youthful freedom but resistance and rebellion — as well as the plainly divine.
“We can imagine that fly line continuing its upward arc to Heaven, connecting land, grass, creek, fish, angler and fly to God,” he writes during a description of a magazine cover in Chapter 12.
While the majority of the book centers on the counties of southwestern Wisconsin, there are passages describing additional conflicts realized during trips through northern Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Twin State readers will enjoy the many references to Vermont and New Hampshire dynamics, including a section that apparently points to the waters between West Lebanon and White River Junction.
“Vermont anglers love where they get to go, sometimes in spite of the backdrop, and they keep their secrets,” Traver writes. “One music teacher I know fishes on mid-summer evenings from a canoe on the Connecticut River, somewhere behind the big box stores of a busy retail strip.”
Traver pays homage to the Bridgewater-based Meccawe Club, founded in 1900, which once counted Calvin Coolidge among its members, and extols the virtues of finding one’s “home river,” for him a nearby section of the Ottauquechee.
“I’m one of those lucky anglers who’s gotten to travel to fish, thanks to an understanding spouse. But there’s no place like the home river,” Traver writes. “There’s a path only I use, hard to find; virtually no one fishes where I fish, so I have come to feel a sense of ownership of a place that is technically not mine.”
Humor is also interspersed in the work, as well as a fair number of tangents unrelated to fishing. A man’s antique sign collection, for example, is explored at the start of one chapter.
“I felt like I had to provide some of that,” Traver said an an interview at his Happy Valley Road home. “I find all of the numbers and data fascinating, but (readers) can only handle so much without a break.”
Traver never strays too far from his narrative of conflict, and by the late chapters the prose is at times sprinkled with angst. After an entire season processing and digesting the political squabbling of disparate angling interests, by the time Traver attends the Trout Unlimited annual meeting in late September, he’s likening himself to Hunter S. Thompson at a drug convention.
“While all around me were schools of well-dressed, white, male, hardworking, fly-fishing board members and other believers of the truest sporting faith on Earth, I was carrying a rock in my heart,” he writes.
Lost in the Driftless at times could stand to better explain terminology and perceived sentiments among experienced anglers for the layperson, but anyone who enjoys the outdoors will appreciate its aim. There’s plenty of apt material for the ardent conservationist or economically minded, and just as much for the everyday fisherman with a can of worms, a cheap rod and a full Saturday at his or her disposal.
The book is available to order through local bookstores or at www.timtraver.net.
Jared Pendak can be reached at jpendak@vnews.com or 603-727-3225.