If your life depended on moving upstream, you’d care more about culverts.

Poorly constructed road culverts have been devastating for many creatures, from tiny aquatic organisms to big Atlantic salmon, and for my favorite fish, officially designated by the legislature as a Maine Heritage Fish, our wild and native brook trout.

My father and grandfather believed, like their fathers and grandfathers before them, that everything on earth was put here for the use of mankind. “And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.’” (Genesis 1:26)

The Maine legislature killed a proposal to create a free saltwater angler registry in the final week of this year’s legislative session. Federal officials will now establish a fee-based registry. Maine saltwater anglers will have to register with the feds beginning January 1, 2010.

The legislature considered two bills: LD 1331, creating a saltwater fishing license and fee, and LD 1432, creating a free saltwater angler registry.

The license bill never had a chance. But the registry did until political maneuvering killed it.

If you have a private swim area in Maine, it’s time to haul in the swim line. The Maine Legislature decided roped-off, private swim areas on waters owned by the public should not be permitted. Some exceptions are granted for licensed camps and government entities.

Actually, they’ve never been lawful. But few people knew it and roped-off swim areas are common on many lakes and ponds.

After 32 years together, we had a routine that satisfied us both. After a day’s fishing, I’d jump out of the canoe and start carrying up all the gear, except my rod, to the truck. Meanwhile, my husband George would sit on the shore, smoking a cigarette and gazing peacefully at one of his favorite spots on earth.

Remember Pollyanna? She’s the title character of a 1913 best-seller and 1960 movie and her name has become a synonym – often a sarcastic one – for an optimistic philosophy. It centers on her "Glad Game," which involves finding something to be glad about in every situation. She learned it from her missionary father one Christmas when Pollyanna hoped to find a doll in a barrel of donations, but discovered crutches instead. And how can you be glad about that? Because "we don't need them!" her father said.

It’s been more than a decade since Dr. T.K. Lee, a microbiologist at the Maine Health and Environmental Testing Lab, taught me to see the raccoon rabies virus as a wave of sickness, death and fear engulfing towns and counties one by one.

It’s bear hunting season. No, not the time of year when people hunt bears (that starts in late August). Bears are hunting hard for food and they could end up scrounging in your backyard.

Spring and nothing but buttons and charcoal briquettes left where snowmen stood so recently. Rhubarb like little red fists pushing up out of the ground among the ruins of last’s year’s prodigious foliage. A young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love. A middle-aged guy’s thoughts, too — sure, love — but also thoughts of dirt, and before long beet greens, lettuce as well, a few odd asparagus spears, maybe a cool June morning with a carefully cuff-wiped radish hot in the mouth.