One of the highlights of our annual meeting at Gaylord was the presentation of The Riverkeeper of the Year award to Roderick Daane by The Anglers' president, Rusty Gates.

Dick Daane is an attorney with the firm Hooper, Hathaway, Price, Beuche & Wallace in Ann Arbor. He has been a member of our executive board for many years and a member of The Anglers since its inception.

He lives with his wife, Mary Ann, and their English setters, in Ann Arbor, but often they can be found at their cabin on the North Branch.

Dick has been an active, invaluable, and irreplaceable member of our board of directors since our first year. From the beginning he has offered his wise and ready counsel to Rusty and many other members of the board.

On a personal note, he has served your editors and your newsletter as a well-reasoned and expert associate editor. He not only has freely given us his sagacious advice on legal matters, but has been an erudite and accurate editor. We have become dependent on Dick as another set of eyes when it comes to the task of editing, but also on his good sense when it comes to content. In recent years, he has been an active member of an unofficial editorial board.

He also has been a major contributor: his River Law columns, his articles on the Antrim development, and his stories about dogs and upland birds.

Dick has also willingly served as the designated Anglers' spokesman whenever we have needed his oratorical skills. The most notable examples were during the Camp Grayling EIS hearings and when he presented our position to the Camp Grayling Management Advisory Committee.

All of the above, and more, would be sufficient reason for Dick to receive the Riverkeeper Award.

However, the main reason for the award was that three years ago Dick stepped up and took the Antrim gas developers (vis a vis the DNR and the Michigan Environmental Protection Act) into court. It has been a long, arduous, and demanding case, but Dick Daane, representing Michigan Environmental Trust, Ltd., The Anglers of the Au Sable, and Trout Unlimited, has prevailed.

It has been an outstanding victory - one that Dick should always cherish, and one in which we, the plaintiffs he represented, will find great pleasure. It is also a victory for all environmentalists who, in these dismal times - represented by the reign of Governor Engler, and the attacks on environmental laws by the new Congress - need the sustenance so obtained.

It is, moreover, a victory for all trout and river lovers. Can anyone name a greater threat in our lifetime to the trout streams of northern Michigan than that represented by the unchecked development of the Antrim resource? If there is one, it is that now in our sights: the splitting of the DNR. But that may be a future skirmish.

For now, for all the present and future trout fishers and lovers of rivers and the land that nurtures them, we salute Dick Daane, a true Riverkeeper. RWOL