Trout Friendly Police

In many respects this has become my life. The trout seem to bounce around the walls of my skull at night. During the day it can consume me, my phone calls, emails, thoughts, strategies and plans revolve around making friends with trout and the folks who collectively have the power to save or destroy them. The logo has me wrapped up like a burrito, a pig in a green blanket. I'm the trout friendly cop on the block, I can't help it. For the summer it is most of my mission. It has sent me smack into Idaho's Aspen or Jackson Hole--Sun Valley. I've seen houses and properties that haven't been imagined in most of America. Lofty modern homes with cement floors of radiating heat, decks overlooking the river, sprawling post and beam spreads whose floor plans are like drunken characters of the alphabet. There are outdoor covered porches, like lavish living rooms without walls, beautiful furniture, fire place and rustic mantle, elk hanging over the scene next to a silver grill station flanked by stainless steel counters, fresh flowers on the table to entertain the bees. And that's just standard. There are folks with native plants arranged in their gardens, water conscious drip irrigation systems to make any Portland homeowner drool in green envy. And then there is the "wretched excess" which people at the office call it. The mansions plopped on the canyons like expensive manure, astroturf green lawns, blue spruce twenty feet tall that came on huge trucks special ordered to the fancy of the second homeowner who may get the chance to pat themselves on the back for their foofoo lawn a few times a year. There is Arnold Schw....not gonna try's house with a pool like a lake sandwiched between public land-hummers, private jets, spas, violently overpriced restaurants as one reviewer put it. And still it can be flipped, and you have the hungry surface, the renters, the day laborers, the young and the interns like myself, loving that mountains stand so close and at that at every moment there are lessons on how and how not to live.