NEW YORK'S CHAUTAUQUA COUNTY

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Today, in a slim, seven-mile band along Lake Erie where the soil is well drained and the growing season is lengthened to 167 days by the lake's presence, every square inch that is not a front lawn or cemetery seems to be planted in grapes. Chautauqua County is New York's biggest source of wine and jelly grapes by far, and is one of the leading counties nationwide. But as the area's topography slopes quickly upward from 570 feet alongside Lake Erie to roughly 2,000 feet on the Allegheny plateau along the Pennsylvania border, the climate becomes less forgiving and the soil more clay-laden and infertile. (There are exceptions, particularly in river bottoms and along the flood plain of Chautauqua Lake.)

Clearly not the land, not the resurgence of industry, not tourism, nor anything on the horizon is about to alter the fortunes of Chautauqua County, where per capita personal income is at present only $9,897 per year, painfully lower than the state average of $13,014. And what most depresses government officials, what makes them often speak as if the county were a place with only a past, is the persistent exodus of residents, mostly young people looking elsewhere for a future. Because of this drain, Chautauqua County's population of roughly 147,000 is only 11,700 more than in 1950.

"If you're looking for work here, at anything more than minimum wage, then all I can say is `lots of luck!' " says Paul Cybart, 35, lifetime county resident, owner of the Pro-Angler sport shop in downtown Dunkirk and sometimes charter captain for parties of sport fishermen on Lake Erie. "But if you're like me, if you love the outdoors and you already have a job, then there's no better place to live than Chautauqua County. Let me put it like this: Even if I were to win the lottery, there's no way I'd move away from here. It's a sportsman's paradise.

" At 6:45 a.m. we are already five miles out of Dunkirk Harbor, burbling along in Cybart's 18foot outboard, the Black Horse (named after a local ale Paul enjoys). We've strung out a variety of lures at a variety of depths from 17 to 35 feet in an attempt to attract Lake Erie's two most popular indigenous fish, the finefighting smallmouth bass and the fine-tasting walleye pike. As we move west, keeping a halfmile offshore, Cybart enthusiastically rattles off his list of reasons why the county is the best place to live in all the world. Predictably, they have a certain sameness to them—good muskellunge fishing in Chautauqua Lake, good fishing for brown and rainbow trout in Cataraugus Creek, good spawning runs of coho and Chinook salmon in Canadaway and deepgorged Chautauqua creeks, good canoeing on Cassadaga and Conewango creeks, good downhill and cross-country skiing and good deer and turkey hunting throughout most of the county. Most important of all is the wonderful fishing in Lake Erie itself, not only for most of the above scaled creatures, but also for lake trout, perch, sheepshead (a freshwater drum), smallmouths and walleyes.

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