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.. "How the River Taught People to Talk" by Daniel Kemmis THE NORTHERN LIGHTS Richard Ormsbee has served on the Bitterroot Conservation District's Board of Supervisors for the last eleven years. He has lived in or around Hamilton since 1922. In the Bitterroot, that doesn't actually qualify you as an old-timer, as Ormsbee acknowledges, but still, he "has been around long enough to see the valley change." When he was a boy in Hamilton, no one paid much attention to fish, Ormsbee says. He doesn't mean that they didn't fish. They just didn't make much fuss over it. There were no fancy graphite rods, no candy-colored neoprene waders or other high-tech paraphernalia. "We just used wee flies and caught lots of big fish." But over the years, the river has changed, mostly from people shoving it around. Not that the river ever stayed the same from one season to another anyway. As Ormsbee says, the stretch from Corvallis to stevensville is particularly unstable. Working its way through a sea of gravel, the river "never knew from one season to another where .it was going to live." As people came to farm along the banks, they urged the river to settle down so they would know where it was going to be when they needed it. The more mechanized their agriculture became, the more machines they had to "fix" the river with. Often, the fixing meant straightening out a curve here and there. The curves added up, slowly. Orsmbee calculates that the river is now a good two-and-one-half miles shorter than it was when he fished it as a boy. But fixing the river in one place usually means that it will move someplace else. Often, it moves away from the shade it has established. Fish like the shade--the coolness of it, the bugs that drop from the trees. Some of the changes have been more inadvertent. Big logs used to float the river, jamming occasionally, putting curves of their own in the river and creating deep, cool places for fish. As the lower slopes were cleared of the big trees, this dynamic changed. . Over time, a struggle developed between fishermen and farmers. Rainfall is so slight in the Bitterroot Valley that without irrigation, most of the valley would be a desert. Under those circumstances, the conflict is straightforward enough. Farmers want to take water out of the river, and anglers want it left in. Nothing very new or different about that--or about the kind of political confrontations it produces. But the Bitterroot does spawn a plain-spokenness which can make the confrontations especially sharp. Ormsbee tells about a former director of the Montana Department of Fish, wildlife and Parks arguing with a room full of Bitterroot farmers over how much water should stay in the river. In arid country, that question becomes a crude matter of power, and power can become an equally crude matter of numbers, as this fellow reminded his listeners. "There are a lot of people who like trout who don't necessarily like you," he