Fish peace talks break down

Fishing STARTS fights.

Watch for fisticuffs on and around Lake Crowley this weekend as trout season opens and competitive instincts flare.

This Collector’s Edition of Outdoors will verify that people battle endlessly about whether it’s better to fish with bait or flies, better to gently release trout or fry ‘em in a pan. They argue that hatchery trout are a blessing or that they’re a scourge to the only true trout -- those born wild. Women butt heads over preserving trout habitat and men throw verbal blows about whether an environmental threat is worthy of taxpayer dough.

The paradox is that we stalk trout to seek solace. Like Hemingway’s Nick Adams, we turn to streams for healing. Rivers bring peace from life’s wars.

Fishing is important to us. That’s why we get so worked up.

For the past few days, we’ve been bickering around the office about fishing literature.

Thumbing through dozens of beloved volumes, Outdoors staffers and others selected dozens of snippets for possible inclusion in the anthology on pages 6 and 7.

The compilation revealed this: When men write about fishing they write about fishing. When women write about fishing they write about men -- often in terms that would make Norman Maclean fidget and blush.

Deputy editor Pamm Higgins saw the selections and pitched a fit. She refuses to believe that women are so male-fixated -- even though women helped make the selections, even though a woman edited two anthologies from which we plucked passages, even though her notoriously reasonable husband assured her it was so.

Couldn’t it be, I suggested, that women associate fishing with men because most girls make their first tentative casts as father or brother or boyfriend guides their hands in this still male-dominated sport?

Might it not be that women, alleged to be relationship-oriented, carry thoughts of loved ones with them as they boat and wade, while men seek out lakes and rivers to escape relationships for a few hours or days?

She dismissed that as ridiculous and ... (Mr. Sipchen made the mistake of taking a few days off before this issue went to press, so I’ll interrupt here. It is ridiculous, this being 2004. If on Saturday I, Pamm Higgins, pull a 22-inch brown out of the East Walker on a size 14 tungsten bead Soft Hackle Pheasant Tail that I tied while swatting black flies with a copy of “A River Runs Through It,” will you shut up?)

We hope you enjoy this issue, and may you go the entire season without a stray fishhook lodged in the back of your ear.