I am not devoted to graffiti but I once cut my initials on a rock by the Madison River in Montana. It was the first year I fished it and we had caught the peak of a salmon fly hatch. To my wife's surprise I impulsively took a chisel from the truck's tool kit and went to work, putting the initial where it wouldn't be seen unless you knew where to look. I have looked at it many times since, feeling a little silly and somehow surprised it's still there, 2,600 miles from my home. It'll be there long after you and I are gone, of course.

Distance lends enchantment for the returning fisherman. Some years ago when we fished the Kispiox River in British Columbia, a steelhead center for a colony of anglers who returned year after year to park their campers and trailers on the same plot of ground, I was approached at streamside by a stranger without a rod.

He asked about the fishing but didn't seem to listen to my answer, learning only that I was not a regular. It was only my second trip, I told him.

He couldn't fish any more for health reasons, he said, and launched upon a description of the river and its "drifts," beginning far upstream and going clear down to where the Kispiox joins the giant Skeena. It was like a memorized speech that had been oft-repeated, explaining the nature of each pool and giving the statistics of the trophy fish that had been caught from it. The man seemed unconscious of my presence and pursued his dissertation to the end, whereupon he appeared to snap back to reality, wished me luck, and said he was driving his camper back to the States immediately.

"I'll probably run into snow between here and Williams Lake," he said, looking up at the dingy late-September sky. He had driven those thousands of miles to look once more at his favorite river, which he could no longer fish, and his mind was filled with memories of happier years when he had come to the Kispiox at considerable sacrifice.

The regulars said he had been a little strange since his illness. But I understood him and I stopped short the other evening in the midst of rattling off a similar account of another river to a fisherman planning a trip. But he'd probably already decided I was a "little strange."

It is, of course, our absence more than our presence that somehow adds to the glamour of a faraway trout river. In mid-winter I think of the Gravelly Range, white under a cold sky, and of the nearby Madison filled with grating ice sheets, the brown trout making out somewhere in the few deep pools.

A trout stream greatly changed by man or nature is a shock to one who has fished it for many years. An old-timer told me he never fished a certain creek any more for the same reason that he didn't attend funerals. He wanted to remember it as it had been in better times. And although he is not noted for lofty sentiment I am sure a view of the dammed and diverted creek could scar his memories, however old. They are his memories and he has a right to store them intact.

It is repetition that builds recollections. Other fishermen had waded Armstrong's Spring Creek before I first fished it 25 years ago, but I was there before the dam went in and I know where the blue-winged teal usually appear in early fall and how the muskrats become irritable during late-season fishing after nearly all of the summer anglers have disappeared. I have cast to persistently rising fish through fine sleet that hid the peaks bordering Paradise Valley and I recall the late Merton Parks, one of the best of fly fishermen, standing in two inches of new snow with more falling and saying that was the best time of all.

There were those certain runs between the weaving underwater vegetation where especially large fish were likely to hold year after year and others nearly always guarded by youngsters. And there was one shallow undercut where a husky brown used to loaf and my wife explained that he occasionally gave forth a bubble to reveal his presence, whereupon she caught him with a single cast. But most of the bigger fish got away, breaking 6X tippets in the vegetation.

There are other streams I remember and when they are changed in any way I feel that something indefinable is lost forever, still knowing that change is ceaseless, even in a trout stream.