You'd think the Wall Street Journal would be a bit preoccupied right now, but then, maybe they're desperate for a little distraction. (Look! Over there - away from all those financial scandals!)

That explains the Journal's just-published article about Brownlining, which rightly features TU fave Singlebarbed, and also manages to work in a reference to The Trout Underground, which might make my mother happy, though probably not once she factors in the company I'm keeping online.



While I love the brownline movement, frankly, some of the major players scare me just a little bit. They seem like the kind of guys who relate to each other primarily via hand-to-hand combat (Singlebarbed even alludes to it in his latest proto-environmental brownline piece), and there's always the chance the water you're standing in will go up in flames.

It's heady stuff when waterways remarkable mainly for the variety of trash they contain become fodder for the national press, but then again - as someone who used to fish a murky, trashy apartment pond (complete with rotting decorative sailboat), I understand the urge just fine.

While the Journal's writer (SF-based Justin Schenck, whom I spoke to several times) focuses on several brown locations, this passage reeks of vintage Singlebarbed, who might be the most inventive writer in fly fishing today:

Exploring waters redolent of manure and marked by signs warning of mercury contamination, he caught pikeminnow, carp and bass -- species that traditionalists look down on as "coarse" fish. Mr. Barton soon realized that, whether a trout or sucker, "It swims away from you, which is really the only thing that most fishermen want."

Mr. Barton helped coin the name for his sport two summers ago. He recalls that a fly-fishing friend, Tom Chandler, called him to talk about "bluelining" -- scanning a wilderness map for the squiggly blue lines that represent remote streams and hiking into those valleys with a fly rod. Mr. Chandler had spent the day fishing in a cold, clear trout stream fed by Mount Shasta glaciers.

Mr. Barton had spent the same day casting his line into a slough littered with sofas, old cars and goat carcasses. "I told him what I'd just wiped off my shoes," recalls Mr. Barton.

All the usual suspects are mentioned (Roughfisher, Urban Flyfisher, Fat Guy Fly Fishing, and Michael Gracie).

What's next? For the Underground, that means I've conquered broadcast and the major newspaper media in the same year, so it's clearly all downhill from here.

For Singlebarbed, well he's already taking a cue from the Underground and pitching a movie deal, and I'd like to suggest that Harrison Ford play the pivotal TU role in the movie.

See you on the brownlines, Tom Chandler.