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Swift and rocky waters were the reason I took up fly-fishing. I spent my childhood lollygagging in johnboats on deep, silent rivers and when I began fly-fishing I was fully captivated by the shallow tumbling of clear mountain streams, where water breaks its customary silence. For me there is no finer place to fish than a riffle-unless you want to catch a big brown trout, that is.

In my Midwestern home waters, we find big browns not in a picturesque Madison River type of riffle but in dark green pools where the silt from a hundred surrounding farms waits to be purged by the next gully washer. Though the surface of these pools is flat and transparent, like the glass of a new window lying on sawhorses, you cannot see the bottom. To wade anywhere near these depths can feel like a futile trek through quicksand, as the seemingly bottomless goo inhales your wading boots. Great swirls of mud billow behind the wading angler and disperse lazily from one's casting position like a plume of airborne pollution on a stale, quiet day.

This seems so wrong. Have these trout lost their self-respect? What's next? Will they grow whiskers and start eating read more » Read more – offline – from the current issue; subscribe to FRR.