In the fly-fishing industry, men have called the shots for a long time. While there have certainly been women of note in the craft—Joan Wulff was certainly a pioneering woman and proof that the long rod didn’t care about the gender of the individual casting it—the vast majority of fly-fishing “celebrities” have been men.

The glass is cool thickness on the pads of my fingertips. The pane is solid, sturdy and slightly vibrating. The mechanics of turning a river into a highway are humming through the clear divide.

I’m looking through a window at step 18 of 21 in the fish ladder along Ballard Locks in Seattle, Washington. The locks, there are two at Ballard, move boats into and out of Puget Sound. They raise water up and drain it down by as much as 26 feet multiple times a day. They separate freshwater and saltwater, trapping sea life in transition between the two liquids.