Finding your Home Waters with the Big Here Quiz

If two fly anglers meet in a strange fishy corner of the planet, one question will invariably be asked:

What are your home waters?

I may have already asked you. It's a question I ask in my introductory notes to new CFS members, and in our classroom introductions.

It's a question that established our most popular Freshwater Trust T-shirt design. And, it's a question I'd like you to try and come up with an answer to, through your angling practice, or just in life.

Exploring from your couch

If you aren't sure about your home waters yet, don't fret. This isn't something you have to have fished for decades to establish. But, it does require a little bit of getting-to-know-you, specifically getting to know where you are on the planet.

Yes, one part of finding your home waters where you're building your angling practice requires fishing. And maybe even auditioning between a few possible home waters to see which one you like good enough to adopt.

Here's one thing that's cool: Your home waters doesn't have to be the closest one, just the one you like fishing, and being around, most.

But, we can do a significant amount of finding out just by thinking about where we live, and relating to some of the critical natural and infrastructural processes that keep things going, civilization and natural-resources wise.

A divining rod for finding home waters

One tool we use to help us on this quest came to me courtesy technologist and thinker Kevin Kelly. Kevin has built a compendium of what he calls "Cool Tools" over the past several decades. He's got a book of the same name tat's worth tracking down. His tool of choice when it comes to finding your place in the world is The Big Here Quiz, something he adapted with some help based on the work of a naturalist named Peter Warshall. Here's what Kevin writes:

You live in the big here. Wherever you live, your tiny spot is deeply intertwined within a larger place, imbedded fractal-like into a whole system called a watershed, which is itself integrated with other watersheds into a tightly interdependent biome. At the ultimate level, your home is a cell in an organism called a planet. All these levels interconnect. What do you know about the dynamics of this larger system around you? Most of us are ignorant of this matrix. But it is the biggest interactive game there is. Hacking it is both fun and vital.

Here's the quiz, as Kevin writes, "30 questions to elevate your awareness (and literacy) of the greater place in which you live"

Members can find my guesses at the answers, for where I live (about a mile from the Columbia River, in its drainage, in the Cascadia bioregion, of the North Pacific Rim of the Pacific Basin of Planet Earth) and the more-thoroughly-researched corrections below.

1. Point north.
2. What time is sunset today?
3. Trace the water you drink from rainfall to your tap.
4. When you flush, where do the solids go? What happens to the waste water?
5. How many feet (meters) above sea level are you?
6. What spring wildflower is consistently among the first to bloom here?
7. How far do you have to travel before you reach a different watershed? Can you draw the boundaries of yours?
8. Is the soil under your feet, more clay, sand, rock or silt?
9. Before your tribe lived here, what did the previous inhabitants eat and how did they sustain themselves?
10. Name five native edible plants in your neighborhood and the season(s) they are available.
11. From what direction do storms generally come?
12. Where does your garbage go?
13. How many people live in your watershed?
14. Who uses the paper/plastic you recycle from your neighborhood?
15. Point to where the sun sets on the equinox. How about sunrise on the summer solstice?
16. Where is the nearest earthquake fault? When did it last move?
17. Right here, where you are, how deep do you have to drill before you reach water?
18. Which (if any) geological features in your watershed are, or were, especially respected by your community, or considered sacred, now or in the past?
19. How many days is the growing season here (from frost to frost)?
20. Name five birds that live here. Which are migratory and which stay put?
21. What was the total rainfall here last year?
22. Where does the pollution in your air come from?
23. If you live near the ocean, when is high tide today?
24. What primary geological processes or events shaped the land here?
25. Name three wild species that were not found here 500 years ago. Name one exotic species that has appeared in the last 5 years.
26. What minerals are found in the ground here that are (or were) economically valuable?
27. Where does your electric power come from and how is it generated?
28. After the rain runs off your roof, where does it go?
29. Where is the nearest wilderness? When was the last time a fire burned through it?
30. How many days till the moon is full?

The Bigger Here Bonus Questions:

31. What species once found here are known to have gone extinct?
32. What other cities or landscape features on the planet share your latitude?
33. What was the dominant land cover plant here 10,000 years ago?
34. Name two places on different continents that have similar sunshine/rainfall/wind and temperature patterns to here.

The Big Here Quiz answers for my home waters: