Standing knee deep in the Boise River along the Bethine Church Nature Trail it is easy to forget you are in a city of 200,000 people.

The river in the fall is very different than the river of summer, filled with inner tubes and rafts. The fishing is as good as any outside of Idaho’s roadless and wilderness areas.

The addition of steelhead adds a layer of experience that takes me back to my days on Lake Superior streams, where the fall brown run was artificial but wonderful. There the fish ran up the rivers and spawned naturally but seemed slightly out of character for the place they existed.

There are no pretensions about the Boise River’s steelhead and salmon runs these days. Idaho’s Fish and Game trucks the fish raised in Idaho Power hatcheries from below the dams the utility build so Boise could become the city it has.

Some anglers may consider themselves above such manipulation but I have never been a snob. But neither do I consider it recovery in any biological sense.

The caddis are hatching and I catch a small rainbow on an elk hair caddis fly, perhaps the state’s most utilitarian pattern. It caught me native cutthroats in June on Big Creek in the middle of the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. I think I caught my first fish on a fly in Idaho on one on the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River in 1985.

Upstream the Boise River reservoirs are filled to 45 percent of capacity already. Across the state the reservoirs are at their highest level in 10 years, a welcome change for both farmers and anglers.

That means the chances crops and fish habitat will be left dry next year is down. So many of Idaho top fishing holes, the South Fork of the Boise, the South Fork of the Snake, the Henry’s Fork and others are dependent on upstream reservoirs for their quality.

Still others such as the Teton River remain quality fisheries because reservoirs aren’t sitting on top of them. I caught smallmouth bass this year where the state wants to study once again the long passed over Galloway Dam on the Weiser River.

The view of Idaho and Boise from knee deep in its rivers is exquisite if not incomplete. Jack Hemingway once wrote of his own shortcoming having seen so much of the West looking up from its canyons without getting to the top and looking down.

I thought about that view this week as I looked down from the ridge that divides the Payette River Canyon from Jerusalem Valley north of Horseshoe Bend where I hunted deer.

From there I could see rolling foothills rising into the Boise National Forest from pastoral fields of harvested hay dotted with Black Angus cattle. The does I saw laid in the grass, their ears waving in the wind as they relaxed in the sunlight.

The wolf tracks reminded me of another change in the landscape as significant as the dams and the trucked steelhead. I return today from a week off and now see this Idaho through reporter’s eyes.

Help me to see it clearer with all its nuance and purpose.