Greed and Rainbows

Each and every Christmas, my wife, as one of those recurring holiday jokes, buys me the exact same gift: a calendar of the trout of North America. And although meant as a gag, it's actually a pretty neat gift that I enjoy much more than say, a tie. The calendar gives me 12 excellent paintings and a brief history of various trout species, subspecies, or strains, all of which I enjoy reading about, even if I will never be given an opportunity to fish for many of them

So today I finally got around to turning the page over to the current month (yes, I'm a little late), and for my March salmonid edification, I was greeted by a very nice rendition of a new-to-me piscatorial dandy called the Pennask Lake rainbow trout, which as you might deduce, is a strain of rainbow unique to Pennask Lake, which, according to the calendar, is in British Columbia (see, the things you learn...)

At any rate, this Pennask Lake rainbow, while not a particularly large strain of trout, possesses some admirable fighting qualities that once, a long time ago, greatly impressed a visiting sport...

(from the text...)

In 1927, James Drummond Dole, the "Pineapple King" traveled to a remote lake in British Columbia with the promise of hard-fighting rainbow trout for his fly rod. Dole was not disappointed and claimed the lake was "nearest to being the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, of any lake seen or heard of."

Dole, so enamored of these rare, hard-fighting Pennask Lake rainbow trout, did what any self-respecting tycoon would do when faced with something precious and beautiful and unique: he used his wealth and power to take it for himself and keep anyone else from enjoying it. Unless, of course, they had the proper cash and social standing to afford the experience.

The American industrialist and sportsman quickly set about to purchase the majority of the land surrounding the lake and established an exclusive sporting club, the Pennask Lake Fishing and Gaming Company.

Now why does that sound familiar? Why does it seem so, hell, I don't know, prescient, contemporary, even? Like there's something eerily similar playing out across the public lands of the United States right now, with wealthy and powerful interests casting a covetous eye at our public resources, our public lands, our public treasures, our public birthrights, and exclaiming - like the old Pineapple King himself when he first laid eyes on Pennask Lake - that such treasures are "nearest to being the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow." Surely not, right?

Greed and shitassery are the feedback loop that drives the great bulk of human history, its only constant, the shining north star that has guided and goaded eons worth of sorry jackasses across history's ever-shifting dunes. Empires and nations rise and crumble. Movements flare brightly, then fade to black, then flare into something else. Prevailing attitudes wax, wane, evolve, devolve, and shift in the howling winds of vagary, but the one great truth of human existence is there's always going to be some greedy shitass trying to take your rainbow and your pot of gold for himself, even if that rainbow and gold rightfully belong to all of us.

Who knew you could learn so much from a Christmas gag-gift calendar about obscure fish?