It’s astonishing, the power and persistence of genetics. The landlocked salmon of Sebago Lake, blocked for over 150 years from their spawning grounds in the upper reaches of the Crooked River, swam right back up there the moment they could, when in 1972 the Scribner’s Mill dam between Harrison and Otisfield was partly removed and a fishway installed. And when a bit upriver the Bolster’s Mill dam was partially restored, allowing the passage of some fish, the salmon were waiting for that, too. Until 1972, the last salmon to swim past Scribner’s did so around 1845, but the memory of that migration has survived in the DNA of Sebago salmon so that dozens of generations later the fish know exactly where they want to go and what they want to do when they leave the lake and head upriver.

Sometime before the end of the year the owners of Scribner’s Mill are expected to file a petition with the Maine Department of Environmental Protection to rebuild the dam, for the sole purpose of lending “authenticity” to the museum which the mill is becoming. Authenticity would come at a great price to the Sebago salmon, the anglers who love them, and the Sebago fishing economy.

The proposal to rebuild the dam will certainly include a fish ladder or some other fish passage option, but any of the options would “intercept a significant proportion of the adult spawning salmon population,” according to Francis Brautigam of the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. Brautigam finds the idea of rebuilding the dam “very disconcerting.” At a moment in history when the Sebago salmon fishery is thriving again, thanks in large measure to the free passage of spawning salmon up the Crooked, here comes a proposal to do serious damage to a legendary, world-class fishery just so a reconstructed millwheel can be turned by water power to amuse a handful of tourists. What do they plan to tell visiting schoolchildren about the fish the dam is frustrating? About the “thousands of fish, boys and girls, that will not be able to practice their nasty spawning habits because of this authentic millwheel!”?

As Francis Brautigam points out in a letter to the New Hampshire engineer who is designing the dam, “dam impacts can not be fully mitigated” by fish ladders or other passageways. Note the unqualified “can not.” No way. For this reason the MDIFW strenuously opposes the dam, and so should you, angler or no.

Scribner’s Mill sawed its last barrel stave in 1962. Bolster’s Mill closed forty years earlier. Water-powered sawmills may be quaint and well worth preserving as historical artifacts -- I'd be happy to make a contribution to the restoration of the mill -- but we don’t need to dam rivers to turn millwheels anymore. Save the mill, sure -- but block that dam before it blocks the river again.

If you want to weigh in on the issue, contact the Maine Department of Environmental Protection’s Dana Murch. He’ll be processing the dam application when it’s filed. dana.p.murch@maine.gov

As Maine goes, so goes the nation? Not when it comes to fishing.

Fewer Americans are hanging the “Gone Fishin’” sign on their doors. Nationally, sales of fishing licenses are on a downward slope. A recent article in the NY Times cited U.S. Census Bureau figures showing a three percent loss in anglers from 1991 to 2001. The trade group Outdoor Industry Association’s research arm, the Outdoor Industry Foundation, found a nearly 20 percent drop in participation in flyfishing from 2004 to 2005, and 300 million fewer fishing outings of all kinds over the same period.

Maine, thank goodness, is going the other way. The Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife says license sales in 2006 were the highest in the past 12 years and well above the 14-year average. (Thank you, Wendy Bolduc of MDIFW for those figures.)

Fishing ranks only 7th among Mainers’ outdoor recreational activities, behind wildlife viewing, trail sports, paddling, bicycling, snow sports, and camping. Only hunting has lower participation. Still, the state sold 279,262 fishing licenses last year.

There are probably a lot of reasons for the national decline in interest in fishing, but I think one is simply that we have become a less contemplative, faster-moving society. Kids demand action in their video games, movies and on TV. Fishing doesn’t exactly guarantee action. Also, many kids’ weekends are pretty tightly scripted by parents who seem to fear that a nanosecond of idleness will lead a kid into a life of dissolution, debauchery and self-destruction, much like my own.

When I was growing up, parents also had a script for their kids on summer weekends. It was one-line script, delivered at full volume if we lingered around the house for more than a minute after breakfast: “Go outside!” So we would hop on our bikes and cruise the town for similarly evicted pals and discuss whether to play ball or go fishing. If we didn’t have enough ballplayers for even a game of scrub, we went fishing.

That Maine is bucking the national trend towards a decline in fishing is good news: we’re still living “the way life should be,” at least by one measure. It means Maine dads and kids are still sharing quiet days in boats or on streambanks, and Maine kids are still learning the pleasures of angling and acquiring the immeasurable benefits of patience, persistence and positive interaction with the natural world.

It was no big surprise to discover that the head of the Baghdad School of Flyfishing is a soft-spoken Kentuckian who is more comfortable lobbing lures at bass and bluegills with a spincasting rod than presenting a #16 dryfly with a 5-weight flyrod. The big surprise was discovering that the Baghdad School of Flyfishing existed at all. After that, nothing could faze me, not even the fact that there’s a large sort-of hotel here at Camp Victory that caters to visiting dignitaries, operated by the Joint Visitors Bureau, where Major Chris Curtis works as Battle Captain, coordinating the movements of guests ranging from congressional delegations to rap stars. What do we who dwell in tents know of such things? Chris has just made major, but it’s a good bet that if he minds his military manners he’ll be a U.S. Army colonel some day. A Kentucky colonel, for real.

The building that houses the guest quarters is part of the Al Faw Palace complex that Saddam Hussein had constructed to commemorate a battle with Iran that occurred during their long, bloody, and eventually stalemated war. Many of the guest rooms overlook the blue-green lagoon that surrounds the huge central palace, a monument to a tyrant’s megalomania and lousy taste. Before this current war, I was told, the palace and its lesser mansions, and its lagoons, ponds and canals were the glittering centerpieces of a lush game preserve, where African antelope dodged African lions, jackals, and bullets fired by Saddam and his guests for their amusement. Saddam also liked to blast away at the ducks that mistook the ponds for safe havens. The American army doesn’t much care for vegetation – too easy for bad guys to hide in – so the word “lush” no longer applies, and the landscape is now scraped land, bare and dusty in the summer's stunning heat. Most of the animals were collateral damage, though a pack of jackals survives and can be heard sometimes in the night, complaining of the heat.

But the fish survived. And they thrive.

There are carp, and catfish, and barbels, and a fish called Saddam’s Bass which was reputedly the product of genetic engineering by the dictator’s mad scientists, and there are asps, which look like some species of freshwater herring or alewife. They’re all in there, and doing fine, having survived even the “shock and awe” bombing that destroyed the palace’s vehicle bridge, which now lies crumpled in the water providing, incidentally, excellent cover for fish. Now, one can’t believe every story one hears about the cruelty of Saddam and his boys, Uday and Qusay, but in three trips to Iraq I have learned from Iraqis that it’s pretty hard to exaggerate the depravity of the Hussein gang. So the stories about the fish ponds, stories that will curdle your blood, may be true. There are fish in the lagoons and canals that are as big as a 12-year-old boy. I’ve seen ‘em in pictures and I’ve seen their gaping snouts rise up out of the water to snatch at food thrown by soldiers from the footbridge that connects the palace to the mainland. And the stories I have heard go a long way toward explaining how those fish got that big, stories about what the homicidal Uday would feed those fish…

But I digress. Major Chris and I outfitted ourselves from the collection of flyrods, reels, flies and other gear that has been thoughtfully donated by folks in the U.S. who understand a soldier’s basic need to flyfish. I took a 4-piece, 9-foot 5-weight rod, and a reel wound with floating line and a 9-foot 4X tapered leader, to which I tied a Woolly Bugger. Yep, the Woolly Bugger is a universal fish-catcher, from the trout streams of Maine to the lagoons of Baghdad. And I did in fact catch a fish on a flyrod in Baghdad, an asp, all of 12 inches long. For me, I think that’s quite enough. Frankly, I don’t care to catch a 60-pound carp that might have fattened up on…well, I don’t want to go into details here. Just think of the lakeside scene that Officer Marge Gunderson stumbles onto in “Fargo.”

Sebago Lake is one of Maine’s crown jewels, a nearly-pristine deepwater lake that bears the joys and sorrows of being one of the state’s primary recreation assets. The glaciers of the last Ice Age did us a big favor when they left Sebago in their wake, populated with frisky salmon and tasty smelts. Things went swimmingly for Sebago for the first ten-thousand years or so, until 20th Century Man gazed out over the rippling blue waters and said: “This is perfect. Let’s change it.”

The Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife has produced a draft document, lyrically titled, “LLS Quality Size Management Evaluation Form.” Well, lyrical as bureaucratic documents go. The LLS are, of course, Landlocked Salmon, and the thankless task the document tackles is, What to do about Sebago’s salmon? The drafters, Francis Brautigam and Jim Pellerin, have done yeoman’s service to provide us with a detailed analysis of Sebago’s salmon fishery and its human fishery and their sometimes competing interests. The draft was forwarded to me by Kyle Noonan, the secretary of the Sebago Chapter of Trout Unlimited. Brautigam and Pellerin are soliciting comment on their draft, and TU chapter president Tom Brunelle says the chapter will in due course weigh in on the issue.

Sebago’s salmon population crashed in the 1960s because their main source of food, the smelt, was nearly eradicated – along with many other life forms – by the prodigal use of DDT, which poisoned the tributaries where the smelt reproduced. After DDT was banned in the U.S., the smelt and salmon rebounded, and Man had to come up with other ways to screw things up. So in 1972, lake trout were introduced by the MDIFW into Sebago, and over the following decade 300,000 of them were stocked in what had been a pure salmon fishery. And the lake trout began naturally reproducing.

Lake trout were an improvement over DDT, to be sure, but guess what’s for dinner at Mr. Lake Trout’s house? Smelt. Lakers eat a lot of smelt. The MDIFW stepped up salmon stocking as well, leading to a sort of golden age of Sebago fishing in the 1980s. But it couldn’t last, because all those lake trout and salmon “exhausted the smelt population,” as Brautigam and Pellerin put it, and the fishery crashed once more in 1990. More thoughtful management has brought the salmon fishery back to where the spring 2007 angling was terrific. The future of the noble Sebago salmon looks bright again, though some bonehead illegally introduced Northern Pike into the lake four or five years ago, and they are reproducing, posing a new threat to both trout and salmon.

The MDIFW’s current dilemma revolves around size, and what sort of fishery anglers want. Fewer but larger fish? More small fish? Wild fish, or stocked? Adjusting size and catch limits and stocking quantities can take it either way. If you’re a Sebago angler, put in your two cents’ worth through MDIFW or the organizations Brautigam and Pellerin have solicited for comment: Trout Unlimited Sebago Chapter; Sebago Lake Anglers Association; Windham/Gorham Rod & Gun Club; Pine Tree Rod & Gun Club.