Totem Salmon

Beacon Press

Chapter One

IN SALMON'S WATER

Sometimes your storyline is
the only line you have to Earth.

SHARON DOUBIAGO

I am alone in a sixteen-foot trailer by the side of a river.It is New Year's Eve, 1982. The door to the banged-up rigstands open, and when the radio is off I can hear water in theriver splashing endlessly over cobbles. The oven is on fullblast. Its door hangs open too. The heat rises to the ceilingin layers, ending at the level of my chest. My face is hot, butmy ankles and knees are cold and damp. On the radio theGrateful Dead and fifteen thousand celebrants woozily greetthe new year at the Oakland Coliseum. Ken Nordine's deepbeatnik baritone drones on. Ken Kesey babbles. Any momentnow, Bill Graham, undressed as Baby Time, will belowered from the rafters. The band lurches through the music,loses the thread entirely, and after a long time finds itagain, the beat loose and insouciant throughout. The bandseems to say, "See? Told you we could find it again." It allmakes sense with enough LSD, I suppose, and I have sometimeslived my life as the Grateful Dead plays its music, driftingin and out of the right way to be, risking everything onan exploratory riff. But tonight I am focused and full of purpose.My only drug is a poorboy of red port, which I sip cautiously.

I turn the radio off and listen. Then, to hear better, I turnthe lights off too. I am listening to the water. If you listencarelessly, the water in a rushing river sounds like a singlething with a great fullness about it. But when you begin totry to sort out the sound of one thing within the sound of thewater, the moving water breaks into a thousand differentsounds, some of which are in the water and some of whichare in your mind. Individual boulders rolling along the bottom.The Beatles singing ya-na-na-na. The one sound breaksitself into separate strands that intertwine with each otherlike threads in a twisted rope. Some strands are abandonedas new ones are introduced, making a strange and hypnoticmusic. Listening to running water is a quick route to voluntaryhallucination.

Among the many voices of the water, I am trying to distinguishthe sound of a king salmon struggling upstream. It is afoolish undertaking and it never works. I hear a hundred fishfor every one that is actually there, and then miss the one thatis. The only sure way to locate a fish in this realm of sensationis to walk to the river's edge and play your light along the surfaceof the water where it passes through the weir. The kingsalmon may be large or small, it may weigh three pounds orthirty. If it has swum into the pen above the weir, I will pullthe long latchstring that releases the gate that closes themouth of the weir, so the fish can go neither upstream nordown. This doesn't happen very often in 1982.

A little more than three years ago, a state fisheries biologisttold us that this race of native king salmon is done for. Iam still not totally sure he wasn't right. The state Departmentof Fish and Game is spread thin. They can't afford toexpend their scarce resources on a river that has next to nohope of continuing to produce marketable salmon for a diminishingfishing fleet. But a small number of residents of theremote little valley have not been able to bring themselves tostand by and watch while one more race of salmon disappears,especially the one in the river that runs through theirlives. They have begun with little idea of what can be done.They've talked to other people like themselves, and also toranchers, loggers, academic biologists, and commercial fishers.They have read books and sent away for obscure technicalpapers. They've developed a scheme that they hope willenhance the success of the spawning of the wild fish.Through stubborn persistence they've convinced the state tolet them have a go at it.

By the last night of 1982, this little group has grown intoa cohort of several dozen residents who are spending a greatdeal of time trying to forge a new sort of relationship to theliving processes of their home place. We also have learnedto deal with bureaucracies outside that place, and we haveincorporated as the Mattole Watershed Salmon SupportGroup. We have raised money. We have entered into contracts.We are inventing our strategies as we go along.

I am part of that cohort. I am tending a weir with an enclosedpen behind it that is meant to capture wild salmon inorder to fertilize and incubate their eggs. I am working bymyself, which is unusual. Normally a crew of two or threewould share these long nights. Most often, David and/orGary, two of the people who initiated the effort, would behere. But it's a holiday. Everyone else has pressing engagements.The fish, however, know nothing of holidays. Thespawning season is almost over, and we few who care for thesalmon haven't come anywhere close to reaching the goalswe have set for ourselves this year.

(Now, nearly twenty years later, we find ourselveswith lots of company—hundreds in our own watershed andthousands in other places all over North America—and Iwrite out of curiosity as to what motivated people, myselfincluded, to act in such a way. It is my hope that by the timeyou close this book we will both have some of the answers.)

The weir looks like fish weirs have always looked onthis coast, a fence angled upstream across the river fromeither bank at enough of a bias against the current so that itwill not offer more resistance than it can endure. It closes offpassage upstream except through a one-foot opening at itsapex. In earlier times, a fisher with a net or spear might havestood behind or above the opening. For our purposes, theopening serves as the doorway to a trap, or to a pen. Althoughbuilt from materials manufactured elsewhere, it hasa funky look; it blends in. Panels of redwood one-by-one,grape stakes in another life, are spaced at one-inch intervalshorizontally and lashed to metal fence posts pounded intothe river bottom. Each panel has a chickenwire apronattached at its bottom. The aprons are held to the bottom bysandbags, gravelbags really, each one weighing about fortypounds. Filling and hauling the bags two at a time takes upmost of the two-hour drill required for three or four peopleto install the temporary structure.

The salmon's progress upstream is one of many marvelsof the salmonid life cycle. The grace and strength requiredto overcome waterfalls and other blockages, the stamina toendure floodwaters, the systematic persistence necessary tothread the maze that a big logjam presents—these are attributesso wondrous that we must consider them in the samerealm as the mysterious intelligence that allows the creatureto distinguish between the smell of her particular natalstream and the smell of the rest of the world of water. Butwhen the fish swims into an enclosure that requires her toseek an exit downstream, she becomes slow and seeminglyconfused. It will usually take her some hours to discover thedownstream exit that she found so quickly before, when itwas the passage upstream. Her slow meanders seem now tolack purpose; escape from the trap, when it comes, seemsalmost accidental. It is as if nothing matters now that the pathto the spawning gravels is blocked.

I had argued with my coworkers that we should take advantageof this weakness. We humans have little enoughadvantage dealing with such a marvelously functional aquaticcreature, and I am a person who loves his sleep. Salmon haveyet to recognize that we are trying to help them; they continueto evade us. We are social workers whose clients declineto be served. Use our terrestrial, linear intelligence, Isaid, to fashion traps that would hold the fish until morning.Wait to handle them until after a second cup of coffee. Andwe had, for two years, fashioned beautiful traps to stand atthe mouth of the weir. The traps had been built from thesame grape stakes as the weir panels, and they had cleverlyhinged plywood covers opening out from either side of thetop. A three-quarter-inch cable slung all the way across theriver from the top of the gorge at either side allowed a runningblock to be installed. Another line running through theblock attached the traps to a hand-operated winch for installingthe heavy hulks of the things in their exact locations, orfor pulling them out quickly when the level and velocity ofthe rising water threatened to tear them apart or sweepthem away.

But there was something about the traps—the sound thatthe waters made passing through so much enclosure, or perhapsthe shadow that the things cast in the liquid boilbelow—that seemed to prevent the fish from entering. We hadobserved fish moving at dusk work their way right up to themouth of a trap and then, in an instant, turn and disappeardownstream. When they did enter and stayed for the night,they leaped against the plywood covers looking for a way out,wounding themselves and threatening their precious manifestof unfertilized eggs. Such a trap was too obviously a constructin service of human comfort, and we were, after all,seeking to serve the ends of the other species. Thus we haveswitched to a system featuring the larger and less secure pen,and the alarm clock set at two-hour intervals, and the muddledbrains of the attendants.

If the salmon are running in the deep night in Decemberor January, it is likely that the moon is new, that the riveris rising, and that the water is clouded with silt. It is probablyraining. The salmon will use these elements of obscurity tohide them from predators while they make a dash toward thespawning grounds.

Tonight it is drizzling lightly, the air full of water only justheavy enough to fall to the ground. The drops cut across thebeam of my headlamp and seem to be held there motionless,a black-and-white cartoon of rain. In the circle at the end ofthe beam, the black shag of redwood, and the huckleberryunderstory is everywhere weighted down with water anddripping.

I am in clumsy chestwaders that weigh seven or eightpounds. The rubber boot-legs join at the crotch and the garmentcontinues up to just above the sternum, where it's heldin place by a pair of short suspenders. The suspenders arenever adjusted correctly; they are inevitably too tight or tooloose. I lurch about like a puppet with too few moveablejoints. Long-johns top and bottom against the cold. A Helly-Hansenraincoat and a black knit watch cap put on over thestrap that holds my headlamp. To pee, I have to take off thecoat, find a place to put it so that it won't get wet on the inside,undo the suspenders and slide the waders down to myknees, unbutton my Levi's, and fish around for the fly of thelong-johns. The cap can stay on. I turn my back to the riverout of courtesy.

The Mattole River runs through the westernmostwatershed in California, cutting down through sea bottomsthat have only recently, in geological terms, risen up outof the Pacific. It runs everywhere through deep valleys orgorges carved from the soft young sandstone.

Here, only a few miles from its headwaters, the river looksmore like a large creek and is closely contained by steepbanks. The fish are spooky during this culminating stage oftheir lives, which is why they run at night, and in murkywater. Any light on the water, any boulder clumsily splashedinto the stream, will turn a salmon skittering back towardthe nearest hole or brushy overhang downstream. She maynot try again until another night, or, in the worst case, willestablish a spawning nest—a redd—downstream from theweir, in a place with too much current to allow her eggs tobe effectively fertilized.

I inch down the bank crabwise in wet darkness, the gumbootheels of the waders digging furrows in the mud, thefingers and heels of my hands plowing the soaked wet duff.

On the bank of the river at the bottom of the ravine I holdmy breath and let my ears readjust to the sounds of the water.I think I can hear through the cascades of sound a systematicplop, plop, plop, as if pieces of fruit are being dropped intothe water. Sometimes this is the sound of a fish searching forthe opening upstream; sometimes it is not. I breathe quietlyand wait. I continue to hear the sound for a period of timefor which I have no measure ... and then it stops. I wait andwait. I hold my breath but do not hear the sound again. Thereis a long piece of parachute cord tied to a slipknot that holdsopen the gate at the mouth of the weir. I yank on the cordand the gate falls closed, its crash muted as the rush of waterpushes it the last few inches tight against the body of the weir.

And now that I am no longer trying to sort one sound fromanother in the sound of the water, it is as if the water has becomesilent. It is dark. If the world were a movie, this wouldbe cut to black. When I hear the sound I am waiting for, it isunmistakable: the sound of a full-grown salmon leapingwholly out of the water and twisting back into it. My strainingsenses slow down the sound so that each of its parts canbe heard separately. A hiss, barely perceptible, as the fishmuscles itself right out of its living medium; a silence like adozen monks pausing too long between the strophes of achant as the creature arcs through the dangerous air; a crashas of a basketball going through a plate glass window as he orshe returns to the velvet embrace of the water; and then athousand tiny bells struck once only as the shards of waterfall and the surface of the stream regains its viscous integrity.

I flick on my headlamp and the whole backwater poolseems to leap toward me. The silver streak that crosses theenclosure in an instant is a flash of lightning within my skull,one which heals the wound that has separated me from thismoment—from any moment. The encounter is so perfectlycomplex, timeless, and reciprocal that it takes on an objectivereality of its own. I am able to walk around it as if it werea block of carved stone. If my feelings could be reduced to achemical formula, the experience would be a clear solutionmade up of equal parts of dumb wonder and clean exhilaration,colored through with a sense of abiding dread. I couldwrite a book about it.

The coevolution of humans and salmon on the NorthPacific Rim fades into antiquity so completely that it isdifficult to imagine a first encounter between the two species.Salmon probably arrived first. Their presence can beunderstood as one of the necessary preconditions for humansettlement. Pacific salmon species became differentiatedfrom their Atlantic ancestors no more than half a millionyears ago. Such adaptations were a response to their separationfrom their Atlantic salmon parent stock by land bridgessuch as the one that has periodically spanned the BeringStrait. By the time the Bering Sea land bridge last emerged,twelve thousand to twenty-five thousand years ago, in thePleistocene epoch, the six species of Pacific salmon had arrivedat their present characteristics and had attained theirdistribution over the vast areas of the North Pacific. As theice pack retreated, the species continued to adapt ever moreexactly as stocks or races—each finely attuned to one of thenew rivers and to recently arrived human predators. If indeedhumans first arrived in North America after crossingthat land bridge from Asia, the sight of salmon pushing up therivers of this eastern shore would have served as proof thatthis place too was livable.

On this mindblown midnight in the Mattole I could be anyhuman at any time during the last few millennia, stunned bythe lavish design of nature. The knowledge of the continuouspresence of salmon in this river allows me to know myself fora moment as an expression of the continuity of human residencein this valley. Gone for a moment is my uncomfortableidentity as part of a recently arrived race of invaders withdoubtful title to the land; this encounter is one between species,human and salmonid. Such encounters have been happeningas long as anyone can remember: the fish arrive tofeed us and they do so at the same time every year and theydo so with an obvious sense of intention. They come at intervalsto feed us. They are very beautiful. What if they stoppedcoming?—which they must if we fail to relearn how to celebratethe true nature of the relationship.

For most of us, the understanding of how it might havebeen to live in a lavish system of natural provision is dim andmay be obscured further by the scholarship that informs us.Our understanding of biology has been formulated during atime of less diversity and abundance in nature; our sense ofrelationship is replaced by fear of scarcity. By the time theanthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Erna Gunther werecollecting their impressions of the life of the Native Americansof the Pacific Northwest, early in the twentieth century,the great salmon runs that had been an integral part of thatlife had already been systematically reduced. It may be thisfactor that makes the rituals described in their published papersseem transcendent and remote: ceremonial behaviorthat had evolved during a long period of dynamic balance hasbecome difficult to understand in the period of swift declinethat has followed.

It seems that in this part of the world, salmon have alwaysbeen experienced by humans very directly as food, and foodas relationship: the Yurok word for salmon, nepu, means"that which is eaten"; for the Ainu, the indigenous people ofHokkaido Island, the word is shipe, meaning "the real thingwe eat." Given the abundance and regularity of the provision,one can imagine a relationship perceived as being betweenthe feeder and those fed rather than between huntedand hunter. Villages in earlier times were located on thebanks of streams, at the confluence of tributaries, becausethat is where the food delivers itself. The food swims up thestream each year at much the same time and gives itself, aliveand generous.

It is not difficult to capture a salmon for food. My own firstmemory of salmon is of my father dressed for work as a radiodispatcher, standing on the low check dam across the SacramentoRiver at Redding and catching a king salmon inhis arms, almost accidentally. The great Shasta Dam, whichwhen completed would deny salmon access to the headwatersof the river, was still under construction. Twenty yearslater, as an urbanized young man, I found myself standingwith a pitchfork, barefooted, in an inland tributary of theKlamath River, California's second largest river system. Thesalmon were beating their way upstream in the shallowwater between my legs. Almost blindly, my comrades and Ispeared four or five of them. When the salmon come up theriver, they come as food and they come as gift.

Salmon were also experienced as connection. At the timeof year when the salmon come back, drawn up the rivers byspring freshets or fall rains, everyone in the old villages musthave gained a renewal of their immediate personal knowledgeof why the village was located where it was, of howtightly the lives of the people were tied to the lives of thesalmon. The nets and drying racks were mended and ready.Everyone had a role to play in the great flood of natural provisionthat followed. The salmon runs were the largest annualevents for the village community. The overarching abundanceof salmon—their sheer numbers—is difficult toimagine from our vantage point in the late twentieth century.Nineteenth-century firsthand accounts consistently describerivers filled from bank to bank with ascending salmon:"You could walk across the rivers on their backs!" In thememory of my neighbor Russell Chambers, an octogenarian,there are stories of horses refusing to cross the Mattole in thefall because the river had for a time become a torrent ofsquirming, flashing, silvery salmon light.

It is equally difficult to imagine a collective life informedand infused by the exuberant seasonal pulses of surroundingnature over a lifetime, over the lifetime of generations. Butfor most of the years in tribal memory of this region's originalinhabitants, the arrival of salmon punctuated, at leastonce annually, a flow of provision that included acorn and abalonein the south, clams and berries and smelt in the north,venison and mussels and tender greens everywhere. Humanslived on the northwest coasts of North America for thousandsof years in a state of lavish natural provision inseparablefrom any concept of individual or community life and survival.Human consciousness organized the collective experienceas an unbroken field of being: there is no separationbetween people and the multitudinous expressions of placemanifested as food.

But each annual cycle is punctuated also by winter andthe hungry time of early spring, and in the memory of eachgeneration there are larger discontinuities of famine and upheaval.Within the memory of anyone's grandmother'sgrandfather, there is a catastrophe that has broken the cycleof abundance and brought hard times. California has periodicdroughts that have lasted as long as a human generation.And there are cycles that have longer swings than canbe encompassed by individual human lifetimes. Within anyhundred-year period, floods alter the very structure of rivers.Along the Cascadian subduction zone, which stretchesfrom Vancouver Island to Cape Mendocino in California,earthquakes and tidal waves three to five hundred years apartchange the very nature of the landscape along its entirelength. Whole new terraces rise up out of the sea in oneplace; the land drops away thirty feet in another. Rivers findnew channels, and the salmon become lost for a time.

Even larger cycles include those long fluctuations of temperaturein the air and water which every ten or twenty thousandyears capture the water of the world in glaciers and theice caps. Continents are scoured, mountain valleys deepened,coastlines reconfigured, human histories interrupted.These events become myths of a landscape in a state of perpetualcreation; they are a part of every winter's storytelling.The stories cast a shadow on the psyche and they carry advicewhich cannot be ignored. Be attentive. Watch your step.Everything's alive and moving.

On a scale equivalent to that of the changes caused by iceages and continental drift are the forces set loose by recentEuropean invasions and conquests of North America, the exponentialexplosion of human population that drives this history,and the aberrant denial of the processes of interdependencewhich has come to define human behavior during thisperiod.

Somewhere between these conflicting states of wonder—betweennatural provision erotic in its profligacy and cruelin its sometimes sudden and total withdrawal—lies the originsof the old ways. Somewhere beyond our modern notionsof religion and regulation but partaking of both, human engagementwith salmon—and the rest of the natural world—hasbeen marked by behavior that is respectful, participatory,and ceremonial. And it is in this way that most of the humanspecies has behaved most of the time it has been on theplanet.

King salmon and I are together in the water. The basicbone-felt nature of this encounter never changes, eventhough I have spent parts of a lifetime seeking the meetingand puzzling over its meaning, trying to find for myself theright place in it. It is a large experience, and it hasnever failed to contain these elements, at once separate and combined:empty-minded awe; an uneasiness about my own active roleboth as a person and as a creature of my species; and a loomingexistential dread that sometimes attains the physicality ofa lump in the throat, a knot in the abdomen, a constrictionaround the temples. They seem important, these various elementsof response, like basic conditions of existence. I amsmack in the middle of the beautiful off-handed descriptionof our field of being that once flew up from my friend DavidAbram's mouth: that we are many sets of eyes staring out ateach other from the same living body. For the instant, thereis a part of that living body which is a cold wet darkness containinga pure burst of salmon muscle and intelligence, andcontaining also a clumsy human pursuing the ghost of a relationship.

I have left the big dip net leaning against the trailer upabove the river. I forget that the captured fish is probably confusedand will not quickly find its way out of the river pen. Irace up the steep bank of the gorge as if everything dependsupon my speed. My wader boots, half a size too large, catchon a tree root and I am thrown on my face in the mud. Thebank is steep and I hit the ground before my body expects to,and with less force. I am so happy to be unhurt that I giggleabsurdly. Why, tonight, am I acting like a hunter? All mytraining, social and intellectual, as well as my genetic predisposition,moves me to act like a predator rather than a grateful,careful guest at Gaia's table. Why am I acting as if this isan encounter that has a winner and a loser, even though I amperfectly aware that the goal of the encounter is to keep thefish alive?

I retrieve the dip net and return more slowly down thedark bank to the river. Flashing the beam of my headlamp onthe water in the enclosure, I can see a shape darker than thedark water. The shape rolls as it turns to flash the pale belly.The fish is large—three or maybe four years old. It seems aslong as my leg.

Several lengths of large PVC pipe are strewn along theedge of the river, half in the water and half out. These sectionsof heavy white or aquamarine tubing, eight, ten, andtwelve inches in diameter, have been cut to length to providetemporary holding for a salmon of any of the various sizesthat might arrive: the more closely contained the capturedcreature, the less it will thrash about and do injury to itself.I remove from the largest tube the perforated Plexiglas endplateheld in place by large cotter pins.

I wade into the watery pen. Nowhere is the water deeperthan my knees; the trap site has been selected for the rareregularity of its bottom and for its gentle gradient. The penis small enough so that anywhere I stand I dominate half itsarea. Here, within miles of its headwaters, the river is nomore than thirty feet across. The pen encloses half its width.I wade slowly back and forth to get a sense of the fish's speedand strength. This one seems to be a female, recently arrived.When she swims between my feet I can see the gentleswollen curve from gill to tail where her three to five thousandeggs are carried. She explores this new barrier to herupstream migration powerfully and methodically, surgingfrom one side of the enclosure to another. Using the handleof the net to balance myself against the current, I find theedge of the pen farthest from the shore, turn off the headlamp,and stand quietly, listening again.

The rain has stopped. Occasionally I can hear her dorsalfin tear the surface of the water. After a few minutes I pointmy headlamp downward and flick the switch. Again the surfaceof the water seems to leap toward me. The fish is irritatedor frightened by the light, and each of her exploratorysurges moves her farther away from me, closer to the shore.

The great strength of her thrusts pushes her into waterthat is shallower than the depth of her body and she flounders.Her tail seeks purchase where there is none and beatsthe shallow water like a fibrillating heart. The whole weightof the river seems to tear against my legs as I take the fewsteps toward her. I reach over her with the net so that she liesbetween me and the mesh hoop. I hold the net stationary andkick at the water near her tail; she twists away from me andinto the net. Now I can twist the mouth of the net up towardthe air and she is completely encircled by the two-inch mesh.I move her toward deeper water and rest.

There are sparks of light rotating behind my eyes. Thestruggle in the net translates up my arms like low-voltageelectricity. The weight of the fish amplified by the length ofthe net's handle is too much. I use two hands to grasp the aluminumrim at either side of the mouth of the net, and I restand breathe. After a bit, I can release one side of the frameand hold the whole net jammed against my leg with onehand. I reach for the PVC tube and position its open mouthwhere I want it, half submerged and with the openingpointing toward us. I move the net and the fish around to myleft side and grasp through the net the narrow part of herbody just forward of her tail—the peduncle—where she isstill twice the thickness of my wrist.

I only have enough strength to turn the fish in one directionor another; were I to try and lift her out of the wateragainst her powerful lateral thrashing, I would surely dropher. The fish is all one long muscle from head to tail, and thatmuscle is longer, and stronger, than any muscle I can bring tobear. I direct her head toward the tube, and enclose tube andfish within the net. I drop the handle of the net, and move thefish forward, toward the tube.

There is a moment while I am holding the salmon andmesh entwined in elbow-deep water when everything goesstill. Her eyes are utterly devoid of expression. Her gillspump and relax, pump and relax, measured and calmly regular.There is in that reflex an essence of aquatic creaturehood,a reality to itself entire. And there is a sense ofgreat peacefulness, as when watching the rise and fall of asleeping lover's chest. When I loosen my grasp, she swimsout of the net and into the small enclosure.

Quickly, trembling, I lift the tail end of the tube so thather head is facing down into the river. I slide the Plexiglasendplate into place and fasten it, and she lies quietly, the tubejust submerged and tethered to a stout willow. I sit down besidethe dark and noisy river, beside the captured femalesalmon. I am sweating inside my rubber gear. The rain hasbegun again. I think about the new year and the promise ofthe eggs inside her. I am surrounded by ghosts that rise offthe river like scant fog.

Continues...
Excerpted from Totem Salmonby Freeman House Copyright © 2000 by Freeman House. Excerpted by permission.
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