E-14: The End is Now The Beginning

As we put a cap on Extravaganza 2014, I want to reach out to each of you who joined us here in Montana this year and to thank you for spending as much quality time with us as you did.  Most importantly, as you recall with affection the smells, sights and sounds of Montana that you were blessed with, I would like to pass on to you the following wizened words from famed fishing author Thomas McGuane (appropriately, a resident of Sweet Grass County, MT) from his book The Longest Silence—A Life In Fishing—words that you have now taken to heart in your wonderful E-14 support of both the National Wildlife Federation and Montana’s Outdoor Legacy Foundation:

 

                “We have reached the time in the life of the planet, and humanity’s demands upon it, when every fisherman will have to be a riverkeeper, a steward of marine shallows, a watchman on the high seas.  We are beyond having to put back what we have taken out.  We must put back more than we take out.  We must make holy war on the enemies of aquatic life as we have against gillnetters, polluters, and drainers of wetlands.  Otherwise, as you have already learned, these creatures will continue to disappear at an accelerating rate.  We will lose as much as we have lost already and there will be next to nothing, remnant populations, put-and-take, dim bulbs following the tank truck.”

 

In your name and stead, and with your continued support, I will continue my work with both of our E-14 supported groups in the hopes that each of our grandchildren, when they attain our ages, will have the same bountiful and unobstructed opportunity before them as each of you had during E-14.  United together, along with thousands of other likewise kindred and appreciative souls we will bring to the cause, we will protect and preserve what today’s Montana proudly showed off to you this past month, in response to which your grandchildren in concert with their grandchildren will look back and say, “Thank God that they not only cared but they acted and were not mere ‘dim bulbs following the tank truck’”…to that end, to the best of my ability, I’ll work to keep the light on for y’all!!

 

Best to all in the concluding scene of it all,

 

Rock Creek Ron

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