When I read the young biologist the species name Dale had penciled on the back of that photograph, she got very quiet, and then she said, Mrs. Keller, if that fish is still in your stretch of river, the district cannot put a reservoir over it, because that is a federally protected species and it changes everything.
The water district engineer was polite as he told me the dam would go at the mouth of the valley, that this whole bottom would go under, that in five years there would be sixty feet of water over Dales kitchen.
He did not know what Dale kept in his wicker creel.
Dale carried that creel for fifty years and never let anyone open the lid, and inside, under a fly box, was a letter from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from 1987 and a photograph of a rare native fish Dale caught in our stretch of river, a protected species whose presence makes damming this valley a federal problem no state condemnation can simply override.
Dale built our log house from trees he cut on the ridge, and the fishing shack where he taught all our grandsons to cast, and he knew that river better than anyone. He documented that protected fish with Fish and Wildlife back in 1987 and kept the proof in the one place nobody else ever looked.
A federally protected species in the water changes a done deal into a fight the district does not want. Before they can put sixty feet of water over anything, they have to answer to federal law about what lives in that river now, and Dale made sure there was a record that it does.
The biologist came out, surveyed the stretch, and found the fish still there, just as Dales letter said, and the district suddenly had a federal review standing between them and their dam.
When the engineer came back, I did not argue. I handed him a copy of the 1987 Fish and Wildlife letter and the new survey and I said, I told you Id talk to my husband about it. He left me his answer in his creel. Theres a protected species in that river, documented since 1987. You build your dam somewhere that isnt a federal habitat, because you are not putting sixty feet of water over Dales kitchen or that fish.
The reservoir site is under federal review now, and the valley Dale built by hand still has a river running through it instead of a lake on top of it.
It was Dales creel that did it, the one thing of his I almost left on the nail. Fifty years he never let anybody open that lid, and it turned out he was keeping the whole valley safe inside it, waiting for the day the water came asking.