The best — and possibly the saddest — way to know what you’ve missed is by delving into the past. It seems almost nihilistic to look too closely, yet we must.

I remember years ago interviewing an old professor in Madrid who transported me back to a time when single, young men drank coffee and women, hot chocolate, both sexes beautifully dressed for the flirtation that naturally followed. As I listened with my tin ear for castilian Spanish, at first I thought how “modern” I was, and how silly, how sexist, it was to confine the sexes to different hot beverages. But as I walked home, a certain nostalgia overcame me to a point that my footsteps eventually just sort of scuffed along the pavement as I wondered at the clothes, the conversations, the intrigue that happened in those early years of the last century.

That day I became a true believer in remembering what we’ve lost, if for no other reason than to preserve that which deserves preserving today. Sure, this time, right now, remains a special one, full of hope and promise I believe outweigh all of the impending zombie apocalypses. Yet, reading Charles McDemand made me pine for a Sierra now vanished, for he wrote his classic “Waters of the Golden Trout Country” in 1944. McDermand penned his trampings along ranges few will travel, bringing his seven-foot fly rod, seven-and-a-half foot leader and “pack board” to dozens of rivers, streams and lakes. Here’s a sample:

“While ichthyologists have long argued over whether steelhead trout are a separate species or not, I had always considered them to be any rainbow trout which had gone out to sea and returned. Fresh from the plentiful food and the colorless habitat of the sea, they were always silvery, energetic fighters when re-entering fresh water. It had been my belief, and the belief of many a seasoned steelhead fisherman, that any of these trout, if landlocked in fresh water for a few months, would return to their usual brilliant coloration.

Now, at Lake Italy, I found my opinions shattered by the squirming, silvery evidence before me. This was a steelhead; there was no doubt about it in my mind. By no possible chance, short of wings, could it have journeyed from the seas through the miles of cataracts and actual falls descending from the Sierra. Obviously, someone had planted steelhead fry in Lake Italy. They had grown and remained silvery instead of reverting to a rainbow coloration. Accordingly, to me steelhead must be a separate and distinct species, not just any rainbow that has gone out to sea and returned.”

See you on the river, Jim Burns