Troutfishing in the Lake of the Stone Mother : A Sportsman Reflects on the Abuse of a Nevada Lake, Language and the Land

Three Thousand Wagons, Nine Hundred Graves

ON JAN. 14, 1844, CAPT. JOHN C. FREMONT AND 24 OTHER white men were searching the deserts of western Nevada for a river reputed to flow east to west from the Rocky Mountains to San Francisco Bay--a river reputedly large enough to be navigable, at least by large canoes. What Fremont found instead, at the terminus of the unnavigably small, swift river now known as the Truckee, was a huge, landlocked saline lake. On this lake’s eastern shore, miles away across the water, Fremont spotted a 400-foot triangular rock that reminded him of an Egyptian pyramid. In his journal he wrote:

“ We’ve encamped on the shore, opposite a very remarkable rock in the lake, which had attracted our attention for many miles. This striking feature suggested a name for the lake, and I called it Pyramid Lake. “

There is just one problem with Fremont’s journal entry: The lake already possessed a name. Resident Paiutes had long ago named it after a little tufa-rock formation just behind Fremont’s grand pyramid, a formation called Tupepeaha, which translates “Stone Mother.” Unprepossessing though she was, the Stone Mother’s legend was the Paiute people’s origin myth--their three-dimensional Book of Genesis, if you will--and for centuries the tribe had told stories and sung songs that gave her real presence in their lives. It was her tears that had created the lake and its life-giving bounty (and when you taste the water, sure enough, it’s salty). According to Joe Ely, the tribe’s ex-chairman, the Stone Mother and her legend “set our identity, and forever fix the components that make up our way life.”

In the tradition of Great White Explorers the world over, however, Capt. Fremont was not interested in indigenous tongues, mystic names or mysterious presences. Fremont desired a navigable east-to-west river, not a navigable inner life. And most of our forebears have inherited, by choice or by force, the tongue and mind-set of Fremont, not that of the Paiutes. So the Stone Mother continues to be an ignored matriarch of knowledge lost or forgotten. And the lake continues to bear a trivial name.

HOW IMPORTANT IS THIS LOSS OF MEANING? DOES IT MATTER who names a lake, or any other body of water? Does it matter what they name it?

I believe that it may. It rains an average of six inches a year in west-central Nevada. The wettest year on record here is about 12 inches, and the dry year’s record is less than one inch. In a land this arid, H2O ought to be measured in karats, not acre-feet. Water here is the essence of life, the only possibility of it. And to be careless in the way one handles life’s essence can be fatal.

Four years after Capt. Fremont “discovered,” de-named and renamed Pyramid Lake, gold was discovered in California. In the ensuing cross-continental rush of “Forty-Niners,” tens of thousands of would-be millionaires crossed, or attempted to cross, the nameless, 40-mile-wide soft-sand desert just south and east of Pyramid Lake. By the end of 1850, that little no-name desert contained 9,771 dead domestic animals, 3,000 abandoned wagons and 963 fresh human graves. Yes, there were precious metals in California. But on the trail through Nevada, water proved even more precious.

Nevada is a strange state for many reasons. High on the list of strangenesses is the fact that 85% of the state isn’t even the possession of the state: It’s public land owned by every single citizen of the United States. Equally high on the strange list is legal gambling, which has created a multibillion-dollar tourist business, which has in turn created Las Vegas, Reno, Tahoe and other casino cities, which have in turn created dire water shortages, extinct species, traffic gridlocks, foul air, high crime, Mafia corruption, environmental devastation and all the other urban amenities. But even stranger, and more crucial, than either of these things--especially juxtaposed to these two things--is that six annual inches of rain. A Fun Nevada Fact: There are about 1,500 more people employed by the Mirage hotel-casino in Las Vegas than by every farm and ranch in the state. Another Fun Nevada Fact: There are only 86 fewer security guards working for the Mirage than Nevada highway patrolmen. An UnFun Nevada Fact: The Mirage, the 258,000 residents of Las Vegas and the city’s 22 million annual casino-bound visitors are dependent not on Nevada’s own rivers, rainfall or mountain runoff, but on virtually all of the state’s allotment of Colorado River water, and on the eons-old, non-replenishable underground reserves the city is sucking at a No-Tomorrow pace.

IN “LIVING DRY”--HIS DEFINITIVE ESSAY ON THE AMERICAN UNDERSTANDING, and misunderstanding, of the arid inland West--Wallace Stegner pointed out that the syllable pah, in the Great Basin’s Shoshonean tongues, means water, or water hole. This is why so many Shoshone place-names (Tonopah, Ivanpah, Pahrump, Paria) contain this syllable. It’s also why the region’s prevalent tribes are called Paiutes: Pah-Ute means, literally, “Water Ute.”

The Paiutes of Nevada, accordingly, lived in small, highly specialized, lake-dwelling, marsh-dwelling or river-dwelling bands, most of which were named after the prevalent food of their small ecosystems. The Paiute word for cattails, for instance, is toi, and the word for eating is dokado, so the band that lived on Stillwater Marsh was known as the Toidokado--the cattail eaters. And the endemic (and now endangered) food fish of Pyramid Lake were the cui-ui (pronounced kwee-wee ), so the band that lived here were the Kuyuidokado-- cui-ui eaters. Cattails, trout, cui ui--pah foods, water gifts, all.

“The West is defined,” Stegner wrote, “by inadequate rainfall (and) general deficiency of water. . . . We can’t create water or increase the supply. We can only hold back and redistribute what there is. . . . Aridity first brought settlement to a halt at the edge of the dry country and then forced changes in the patterns of settlement. . . . It altered farming methods, weapons, and tools . . . and the structure of land ownership. . . . In the view of some, it also helped to create a large spacious, independent, sunburned, self-reliant Western character. . . . Of that, despite a wistful desire to believe, I am less than confident.”

Sipping Scotch on the rocks in an air-conditioned casino while pumping one’s paycheck into a slot, one feels infinitely removed from the natural laws of the desert. But the fact remains--sorry, gamblers--that the rocks in those Scotches come to us compliments of a pah, a place of water. This is why I’m serious about my refusal to accept Fremont’s offhanded renaming of the Kuyuidokado’s desert lake. Six inches of rain per annum is not a viable climate, it’s a perennial crisis. Nine hundred sixty-three graves just south of the Stone Mother demonstrate that to be careless in the face of this crisis is fatal. And a cavalier naming of a desert body of water is a form of carelessness.

There was a culture that lived with quiet grace beside these waters for tens of centuries. There is another culture that’s left devastation, dreck and dead bodies strewn all along the path of its half-cocked arrival. The Kuyuidokado, the Agaidokado, the culture that considered water to be the Stone Mother’s tears, has nearly vanished. The culture of the Gold Rush and Mirage has begun to feel the desert heat. In this land of constant, critical aridity, whom can we trust to properly name and care for the precious springs, hidden seeps and rare bodies of water? What should the inland sea known as Pyramid really be called? I don’t pretend to know. But I do know that we must soon find out; that we must ask the water questions unselfishly; that we must dig deep, and listen to the earth and each other, very closely.

Where, exactly, to begin?

Were it up to me, I’d ask the Stone Mother.

Fly-fishing Atlantis

ON APRIL 28, 1993, A BATTERED AMERICAN PICKUP EMPTIES AN EXPEDITION of four white guys--me; a sculptor friend, Frank Boyden; the Nature Conservancy’s Graham Chisholm and the Paiute tribe’s fisheries biologist, Paul Wagner--onto the shore of a large saline lake at the terminus of the Truckee River. Maps, road signs, countless books and the local populace all refer to this body of water as Pyramid Lake. But scattered along the beach upon which we’ve parked are fishermen--fly-fishermen, most of them; 18, at a quick count. And each of them has carried an aluminum stepladder out into lake, which they are now using as casting platforms as they ply the wide waters for trout. Watching them cast--and still obsessing on Capt. Fremont--I pop open a beer, reach for my pen and make a journal entry of my own. I write:

“ We’ve encamped on the shore, opposite a very remarkable row of men in the lake, which row had attracted our attention for many miles. This striking feature suggested a name for the lake. I have therefore decided to hell with the maps, road-signs, books and native populace, and have renamed the whole shootin’ match “Aluminum Stepladder Lake.”

This beach has a name. It’s called The Nets. And it was not, I am happy to say, named by Capt. Fremont. It was christened just recently, Paul tells me, by the local Paiutes, after a failed attempt to raise Lahontan cutthroat trout in net-pens right off the beach here.

Graham has fixed us chips and salsa. He’s watching birds now. We’ve seen five or six hundred white pelicans, many at close range, a few still in sight on the lake. Also mallards, great blue herons, coots, grebes, warblers, many doves. My favorite sighting was a raven, alone on a big tufa formation over near the Stone Mother, madly croaking at the jet-trails in the sky above. Low-flying black god calling out to high-flying white ones. Be careful whom you worship, Raven. (But maybe he was cursing . . . .)

The hills are pale pink, the sagebrush pale green, the lichen on the rocks brilliant yellow. The white snow patches high up on the Pah Rah Mountains seem precious in this clime: next month’s water. If we stayed on this beach and kept eating these chips for a couple of decades, perhaps we’d become known to local Paiutes as the Chipsandsalsadokado. Maybe the Stone Mother would begin to speak to us. Hope so. My wife sure wouldn’t.

In digging out my notebook, I found a tourist brochure about the lake. It’s amusing, with the lake right here, to compare the purple brochural rhetoric to the bright blue evidence before my eyes. Pyramid, the brochure assures me, is “a magnificent lake; a lake remarkably different from any you’ve ever seen. It’s enchanting, a primeval lake where the weathering forces of wind and water have carved one of nature’s bold statements: timelessness.”

Something about this “timeless” prose makes me want to glance at my watch and note that it is 5:30 p.m. But I do agree that the lake is a “bold statement” of some kind. It’s 26 miles long, four to 10 miles wide, up to 350 feet deep, and its waters range, as the brochure promises, from turquoise to copper-green to deepest blue. The wide beach upon which we’ve parked is one of “more than 70 miles of sandy beaches that make picnicking and camping ideal.” A beach feature the brochure neglects to mention, though, is the cow pies. We had to displace an entire herd of impending hamburger in order to park our trucks, and there are cow calling-cards everywhere. Not that I’m complaining. It’s an occasion for added sport, actually: The desert air dries the pies so fast that I find (after my second beer) that I can take a little run, hop onto the dried top of a pie, and “skimboard” three or four feet along the beach, leaving a fragrant green streak (another “one of nature’s bold statements?”) on the sand behind me.

Swallows dip low over the pelican-tracked and tire-tracked sand. Sound of waves, sound of gulls, sound of fly-reels cranking. But the predominant sound here at The Nets is the human voice: deep male voices, most of them; calm for the most part, and conversational; but now and then broken by the weird grunts, hoots and laughter of men hooking and playing trout.

PYRAMID IS FAMOUS FOR ITS LAHONTAN CUTTHROAT--”WORLD FAMOUS,” the brochure proclaims--and at any rate famous enough to create a boom in local stepladder sales. In 1925, a world-record 41-pound Lahontan was caught in the lake. During that same era, commercial fishermen were netting 15 tons of trout from the lake each week. Broken down into Fishing Fantasy terms, this means the lake was producing an average of 6,000 individual five-pound trout per week. The big cutthroat, on their Truckee River spawning runs, looked more like Chinook salmon than trout. They traveled like salmon, too, up rapids and over falls, all the way up the Truckee to Lake Tahoe and its tributaries. The ranger station at Pyramid, where I stopped to buy a fishing permit, has a nice framed photo of Clark Gable holding up two big trout he’d just caught in the lake. There’s a photo of President Calvin Coolidge, giving the big cutts a try as well. But--no political innuendo intended--Coolidge got his wide ass skunked.

Four buffleheads land on the water just out of casting range. A 24-inch fish (by his estimate) follows Frank’s fly right in to his rod tip. Then Paul hooks one. I wade over, once it starts losing the war, to give it a look. It’s 16 inches long, very slender, very silver, and healthy: It gives him a good fight. But I can see that Paul’s no predator. His life’s work, after all, is the breeding and rearing of these fish. As he lets the cutthroat go, he wears the haunted look of a kindergarten teacher who’s just spanked one of his pupils for no reason.

I WISH I COULD KEEP THE STORY SIMPLE AND JUST GO CATCH A FISH, BUT Paul’s profession raises a question. In a lake and river system so prolific that it naturally produced 15 tons of trout per week, why does the Paiute tribe feel compelled to contribute hatchery-reared trout at all?

The depressing answer is that, if Paul and the tribe did not contribute trout, there would be none in the lake.

The culprit, as in so many Post-Western Blues sagas, was the federal Bureau of Reclamation. The “Bureau of Wreck the Nation,” as it’s sometimes known locally. It was the bureau that took it into their heads at the turn of the century to erect a crude dam on the lower Truckee River, the purpose of which was to divert Truckee water into a canal, over a ridge and down into the neighboring Carson River Valley, where it would turn desert into farmland, coyotes into dairy cows, dust into agricultural dollars and the sleepy town of Fallon into a wide-awake fast-foods strip.

To an extent, that’s exactly what happened. But there were a few unpredicted costs. In keeping with its reputation, the bureau did no soil surveys, no environmental studies, no study of possible impacts on the Pyramid trout, no study of impacts on the Paiute people, resident flora or fauna, or the nearby Stillwater Marsh. According to a later Reno Gazette-Journal account:

“ When the Truckee River was abruptly diverted during the dam’s inaugural celebration, thousand of cutthroat trouts were left flopping in the mud. Cheering spectators, rolling up pantaloons and pant legs, wallowed in the slime and clubbed the fish to death. “

By 1938, the Truckee-dependent Winnemucca Lake National Wildlife Refuge had become uninhabitable hardpan desert, so its refuge status was hastily removed. By the same year, Pyramid Lake had dropped 40 feet, the Truckee River delta had become permanently impassable to spawning cutthroat, and the Lahontan trout remaining in the lake were forced to live out their life spans, unable to spawn. Sometime in the 1940s or ‘50s, the last of these lunkers sank unseen to the lake’s bottom, and the great Pyramid cutthroat strain was extinct. But--Fun Nevada Fact--they’re growing cantaloupes, and other crops that already existed in surplus, just over the hill in Fallon.

The cutthroat we’re now fishing for, Paul tells me, are actually a Summit Lake strain, raised in hatcheries here at Pyramid by the Paiute tribe, then released into the lake once they’re big enough to survive. And, despite everything, trout still thrive in this desert lake. The largest cutthroat Pyramid has produced since they were reintroduced was a 36-inch, 23-pound monster. Ten-pounders are common. And the word is out: The sport fishery generates between $5 million and $9 million a year for the city of Reno and the Pyramid Paiute tribe.

Paul Wagner’s own cautious words on the Pyramid sport fishery are worth remembering. He told us, “One generation took something wonderful and turned it into nothing. We’ve turned it back into something. If we’re careful--and lucky--maybe one day it’ll grow back into something wonderful again.”

WE’VE LEFT THE NETS BEHIND and driven to a quieter, much more beautiful beach, and as the sun drops behind the Pah Rahs, I’m wading out, rod in hand, intent on experiencing the “something.”

Paul’s name for this cove is Atlantis. Back in the ‘80s, his story goes, the boosters of Reno and Washoe County decided to sink some money into a campground in hopes of luring more spendthrift fishermen to the lake. To that end, they built eight concrete picnic tables with permanent metal sunshades, several deluxe outhouses and a large, all-weather concession building to purvey hot food and drink. Demonstrating the boosters’ unwavering fondness for both anachronism and cliche, they dubbed the place Warrior Point. But happily, almost the day the job was finished, the record rains of the mid-’80s began, the lake rose 20 feet, the concession, outhouses and tables were flooded, and Warrior Point, for Paul anyway, became Atlantis.

In the drought of the past seven years, the waters dropped and the campground reappeared. But the risen Atlantis seems to have been discovered by no one but the ubiquitous cows, who, judging by the ample evidence, are experiencing serious confusion about the respective functions of the picnic area and the outhouses. Graham’s begun making barbecued veggies and chicken while the rest of us fish. I’m happy to report that he’s cooking on the beach, not in the picnic area.

Lahontan cutthroat are famous for feeding right on the bottom, so I’m a little surprised, after a few fruitless casts, to see a fish rise nearby. I point out the rise-form. “Tui chub,” Paul speculates. A trash fish. But I cast to it anyway--with a no-name nymph a friend sent in the mail. It’s covered with peacock feathers, like a dancer in an MGM floor show, feathers that imitate no insect known to man, but do sometimes generate the same iridescent confusions in trout that the dancers do in humans. The nymph hits the water while the rise-form rings are still expanding. I start it strutting across the sandy bottom. The fish takes it. I set the hook. But as the rod bends hard, I know before I see it that this is no kind of chub: It’s one of Paul’s Lahontan pets. It’s not a leaping fish, but it makes several strong runs. Its fighting tactics remind me more of brown trout than of the cutthroats I’m used to catching on the Oregon Coast.

All through the long dusk and into the darkness the cutthroat keep rising. And casting to those rises, I hook, and further educate, eight of Paul’s bright pupils. Fourteen to 19 inches, if anyone’s wondering. All rock-hard, moon-silver swimmers, reluctant to let me touch them in order to let them go.

No trout I take compares to the two bloodied lunkers Clark Gable was holding in the photo. But--no political innuendo intended--I didn’t get my ass Coolidged, either. And every trout with whom I danced at Atlantis is still living in this once-ruined lake, slowly growing--if we’re careful, and lucky--back into something wonderful.

I AM, HOWEVER, A FLY-FISHERMAN. And “it is not fly fishing,” wrote my neighbor, Norman Maclean, “if you are not looking for answers to questions.” So let me ask: How wonderful? How wonderful can a manufactured lake fishery ever really be? Isn’t this lake, divorced by dam from its river, a bit like a body divorced from its head? I come from the Pacific Northwest--land of migrating salmon--and I’ve felt the wonder that passes, at the salmon’s annual coming, between the fish-people and the two-leggeds. Something crucial, two mysterious messages--one from mountains, rain and snowmelt, another from the sea--crisscross in the heart of a waiting human when the great salmon runs pour in each fall. So I can’t help but remember the Lahontan trout’s ancient spawning runs. Will the big cutthroats ever again climb the Truckee to Lake Tahoe and beyond? Am I being absurdly neolithic to even consider such a question? Or is there something worth yearning for here?

I have lived my life on the shores of little rivers where, each fall, enormous, ocean-fattened, exotic-colored creatures suddenly appear on beds of gravel to circle, dig and dance their species to life even as they batter their own bodies to death. That’s the biological truth of the salmon’s life cycle--but also a spiritual example that changes the way a lot of us Northwesterners choose to live. So what about the cutthroat? Will the guardians and users of this small inland sea and river one day yearn to see their trout set the same beautiful example?

I don’t pretend to know. In the climate of our time, it’s just a dream to me, or prayer. Were I ever to require an answer, though, you’d find me rod in hand on the vast, salty lake there, close by the Stone Mother.