The footing is treacherous. I won't kill myself if I slip, but I'll roll a long way, probably bust up my fly rod, so I climb down carefully.
Below me I hear the roar of water cascading down 25 feet into my favorite trout pool. I wrap my arm tightly around a black birch tree that grows, perfectly plumb, out of the steep slope. Looking down into inky darkness, I see the white glow of foam churned up by the waterfall.
I have seen the sunrise from this lofty perch dozens of times since my wife first discovered this spectacular stretch of West Brook in the summer of 1998. She'd been out for a walk on a quiet dirt road up behind the house. She'd come back with wide eyes. "You won't believe what I found," she said, immediately leading me to this waterfall. An hour later, I returned with my fishing gear. I've been going back ever since, fishing nearly ever inch of West Brook from the Whately/Hatfield line up toward Conway.
As it turns out, West Brook is one of the most closely studied trout streams in the United States. I've run into many federal fish biologists who spend hours tracking, tagging and counting fish, including a strain of brook trout found nowhere else in the world and Atlantic salmon parr, which swim downstream into the Mill River watershed, into the Connecticut River and out to sea. The biologists speak enthusiastically about the stream and the important data it provides to researchers. But they also talk about its slow but steady degradation.
Despite the attention paid to the stream by scientists, West Brook has not been spared the ill effects of development. When I first started fishing there nine years ago, the road that follows the stream up toward Conway was dirt most of the way. It is now all paved, with new houses springing up at a steady clip. Northampton, meanwhile, draws most of its drinking water from the West Whately and Ryan Reservoirs, part of the same watershed that feeds West Brook.
Thanks to Northampton's dam on the West Whately Reservoir, little to no water flows over into West Brook in the summer. During this time, all the water in the West Brook comes from surfacing groundwater and smaller tributary streams. But as development continues, the flow of groundwater is altered, and West Brook is turned into a mere trickle in the warm, dry months.
As a fish biologist told me, it's easy to see what's happened to West Brook over the centuries: the deeply-cut banks tell of a river that once flowed mightily from its headwaters, in a time long before rampant development.
As I sit looking down into my favorite trout pool, I think of the endless parade of news stories I've read recently announcing plans by state and local government to reconsider laws protecting wetlands in light of perceived development needs.
In Northampton (as Kendra Thurlow's report on page 11 outlines), the City Council is working to modify its wetlands ordinance—a plan that city officials say will reinforce wetlands protections but that strikes some environmentalists as a recipe for degradation.
In Greenfield, the state Wetlands Protection Act is viewed by many as an onerous restriction that stands in the way of the development of a Big Box store on the French King Highway; Mayor Christine Forgey has purged the Conservation Commission of people such as Steven Walk, the longtime chairman and a fish biologist, to make room for members such as Dee Letourneau, the new chairwoman, who recently said she didn't want the Conservation Commission to be "a board that stops something."
The pressure by pro-development forces to tame wetlands protections they see as overly restrictive comes not just from local municipal leaders. This summer, Gov. Deval Patrick alarmed environmentalists when he proposed limiting residents' right to appeal state Department of Environmental Protection decisions on wetlands as part of an effort to speed up permitting decisions for developers.
The Massachusetts Wetlands Protection Act has been on the books since 1963, which means that all of the development we've seen in more than 40 years has been done within the existing laws, as has the development that's so changed West Brook since I began fishing there nine years ago. Before we let our elected officials whittle away at the laws protecting our wetlands, we should take a good look around and consider, not whether to relax the protections, but whether to make them more restrictive.
