Tears for Trout

By Tom Rowley, A Rocha USA Executive Director

Embarrassing as it is to admit: I cry a lot.

Raised in Texas in a time and culture where men did not shed tears, not publicly, I nonetheless find myself shedding more and more of them.

Some are tears of joy. Those welling up now as I listen to songs about creation and Creator by Nashville artists I’m glad to call friends. Those I blink back every time I watch this beautiful video by another gifted friend, Nathan Gerhardt. And the ones that leaked out last October watching my sons hold and release Coopers, Sharp-shinned and Red-tailed hawks that shot from the sky into mist nets before us to be measured, weighed and banded.

Others are tears of sorrow.

Two summers ago, I found myself alone on the once-famous Fishing Bridge in Yellowstone National Park. Maria, Jake and Michael were getting a snack while I took a nostalgic walk out onto the near-empty span over the river. As a boy, I’d stood on the bridge by my grandmother, mother, sister, cousins and dozens if not hundreds of others doing what people did back then on Fishing Bridge: fishing. My grandfather, father and uncle (none of whom I ever saw cry) stood waist deep in the flowing water below. Bridge fishers used night crawlers. Waders cast flies. All of us caught fish—lots and lots of Oncorhynchus clarkii, dubbed “cutthroat” trout for the brilliant red, pink and orange below the jaw. I can see and smell it all to this day.

And so it went for many summers. As the cutthroat headed up the Yellowstone River on their annual spawning run, we headed west then north out of Texas, cutting a corner off New Mexico, up past the Colorado Rockies, into Wyoming and Yellowstone at last. Paint pots and pine trees. Bears and bison. And fish.

But no more. Overfishing (of which I and my family were once guilty) and the introduction of nonnative fish have combined to decimate the cutthroat population at Yellowstone Lake and Fishing Bridge. This little jewel of creation has lost some of its sparkle. So on that summer day, in the height of spawning season in a place where trout by the thousands should have been swimming, I saw none. Not one fish.

And I cried.

A day or so later, we sat on benches beneath trees by the lake at a Sunday morning church service in the park. Counting our family of four and the two college students leading worship, we totaled about a dozen. Like the bridge and the river, the amphitheater was nearly empty.

Correlation is not causation; I know. The lack of worshippers that day had nothing to do with the decline of the cutthroat at Fishing Bridge. And the relative indifference (and even the sometimes hostility) of Christians toward environmental concerns is not the sole cause of environmental degradation. But there is a connection. Too many of us have abdicated our role as stewards of God’s very good creation—people, planet and trout. And as the apostle Paul says in Romans, that creation “waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons [and daughters] of God.” (Romans 8:19)

Put plainly, the creation is waiting for us to show up; the world is watching to see if we will; and the cutthroat need our help. And if we do show up and help, tears of sadness may yet turn into tears of joy.