The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

by Carl Safina

  On many days I understand the world as a tragedy, a bad time for things of great importance. Even with so fine a start to today, imperfections are evident. I know this, though: this morning, full of such rich, deep, savage beauty, where predators and their prey perform their rituals as they always have, indicates that there remain on Earth some remnants of a long-lasting world, some yardstick.

  * * *

  For a bigger yardstick of what still works, and a look at a place where everyone still has enough room to correct mistakes, I’m taking some of this warm weather and heading north to Southeast. Southeast Alaska, a place I’ve always wished to see.

  TRAVELS POLAR:

  BEAR WITNESS—SOUTHEAST ALASKA

  “That’s gonna leave an ugly scar,” says blond-haired Brenda Schwartz, a fourth-generation Alaskan commercial fisherman. She’s gesturing to a recent clear-cut just outside of town, frowning. She knows that forests grow salmon.

  Salmon also grow forests. Anan Creek runs through a forest—and we’ve heard that the salmon are in. From Wrangell, it’s an hour’s boat ride.

  A few miles from town, those clear-cuts fade. Big spruces and tall cedars rise thick on steep slopes, each tree terminating in its own worshipful spire.

  Brenda is telling me she tried living in several western states, “But after a while, you miss this wilderness. You think, ‘Y’know, Alaska isn’t such a bad place to raise a family.’ ” Now Brenda and her husband, John, are raising five kids, aged eight to eighteen. She’s still a fisherman (as most commercial fisherwomen prefer being called) and is again spending more time fishing as her kids grow.

  * * *

  To the end of vision now, it’s water, trees, sky. Slopes ascend into clouds, and clouds come cascading downslope as near-vertical streams.

  We beach the boat near the mouth of Anan Creek and step into rainforest thick with undergrowth, swollen with ripe salmonberries and huckleberries, cushioned with mosses hanging from every branch and padding the forest floor. The chittering of circling eagles fills the air, dominating even the proclamations of gulls and croaking ravens.

  The forest is as darkly near to enchanted as anything the imagination might conjure. That means a wild, dangerous place for those dwelling within—and perhaps more dangerous for those just visiting.

  Brenda loads her rifle and we begin walking along a shoreside path.

  The trail is stamped with bear tracks. “Let’s keep talking,” Brenda says, “to let the bears know we’re coming. You don’t want to surprise one.” She’s telling me stories of bears confronting people here, coming forward with ears laid down, and jaws snapping menacingly enough to generate warning shots near their feet. But no ugly contact—yet.

  Brenda’s committed to keeping it that way. “If a bear appears on the trail, do not run. They’re like puppies; they’ll chase you. Just stand facing them; they’ll have to think about what to do next. Then it will be very important that you follow my instructions.”

  More than usually alert, I’m noticing that the place is wet. You couldn’t sit without soaking your butt. To make a temperate rainforest you need: an ocean generating clouds and warmed sea air hitting cool air along mountains—thus felling the clouds as rain. Depending on where and how these uneven mountains tickle the clouds, parts of Southeast Alaska average over two hundred inches of rain a year.

  The air is so sodden, it seems the humidity merges land and ocean. So where’s the line dividing sea from land? Is it the high-tide line, the paths of salmon, the reach of ocean mists, the flight lines of fish-nourished eagles?

  * * *

  Deep, dark water is flowing through a thirty-foot-wide channel. Swift current. Any salmon entering Anan Creek must pass here, then enter a wide estuary whose sandbars are lined with Bald Eagles—dozens of white-headed adults and big, mottled juveniles. All here for the fish.

  Farther up, those braided channels converge into one main knee-deep watercourse. Here the stream bottom appears to be made of black stones—but I suddenly realize: they’re fish. Only right along the shore do they part enough to show light sand between them. I’ve seen a lot of fish, but this stream is, in places, packed with salmon—stacked with them. Pink Salmon, about five pounds each—thousands upon thousands.

  We walk uphill beside a series of pools and riffles. At the lowest riffle, a Brown Bear is pulling a salmon between the clutch of its claws and the clench of its teeth.

  Suddenly the vegetation explodes just ahead as a Black Bear bursts across the trail, loping toward the creek—and flooding me with adrenaline.

  Anan, on the mainland, is one of the few places where Black Bears mix with Brown Bears. Black Bears justifiably fear the much larger Browns. On the islands of Southeast Alaska it’s usually either Blacks or Browns (elsewhere called Grizzlies), not both. Although about seventeen thousand Black Bears and six to eight thousand Brown Bears roam “Southeast,” Blacks (and wolves) are absent from Admiralty, Baranof, and Chichagof Islands, where Browns reign.

  * * *

  A few minutes farther upstream, two steep bouldery banks pinch the flow. The constriction blasts a frothing torrent over a series of low falls that impede the fishes’ progress. To get through, a fish must wage prolonged propulsion. Water gushes the whole way. Any fish that manages to surmount the falls must keep its motor revved through a run of intense white rapids stretching about thirty yards. Above that, finally, is a calm pool that signifies success. But I see just one or two fish moving across that pool’s light bottom. The majority find the falls a serious inhibitor.

  Fish leap and fall back, leap and fall back, against the roaring blast of opposing water. Many get washed right back to the starting gate. Just below, salmon are traffic-jammed shoulder to shoulder. Salmon so densely throng the riffles below the falls that there seem to be more fish than water; they’re slithering over one another’s backs.

  * * *

  Pretty soon, two Black Bears emerge from between big boulders lining the opposite bank. Two others come from the woods behind us. Brenda and I watch from the tenuous safety of a low platform built specifically for viewing the bottleneck. In addition to these four Blacks, the large Brown Bear just downstream is stripping another salmon.

  That seems like a lot of bears, until the Black Bears increase to seven adults. Two have jet-black cubs. One has cinnamon twins. A fourth has a single youngster. The mothers with cubs act uncomfortable around other, potentially dangerous bears; they tend to take a fish and disappear into the privacy of the forest primeval, their little ones following.

  Bears come and go repeatedly from the shadows. Others keep squeezing through spaces in the jumbled boulders like muskrats in a stream bank. I lose track of who I’ve seen and who is new. Between their padded paws and the padded ground and the sound of falling water, we never hear them coming. At one point I am startled by a bear walking right past me.

  There must once have been a great many places like this, wherever creeks swelled with salmon, down to California. Black Bears live all the way across the continent, and must have once crowded even East Coast tributaries where sturgeon, American Shad, Alewives, Striped Bass, Blueback Herring, Rainbow Smelt, and Atlantic Salmon spawned in hordes. I try to imagine bears crowding pinched tributaries of the Hudson River in the spring of 1491. But what memory has recorded that; where in the rocks is it written?

  * * *

  Meanwhile, so many fish fill this stream that the bears hardly need to “catch” them. When a bear steps into the water, it has salmon swimming around its legs, under its belly. Bears just dunk their heads and clamp their jaws around a wagging fish. Bears too full to eat pluck salmon from the throng, take a bite or two, and then release their grip. The urgent hunger is gone.

  Bears and eagles benefit from many a salmon stopped short of the promised land. The salmon would seem to have a different agenda. But though the present interests of bears and eagles require that some salmon don’t complete their task, the bears’ and eagles’ future, too, depends on enough sa
lmon getting past them.

  These bears are—for the moment—spoiled. These wealthy bears, in the fattest bear country of all, can afford to be wasteful, self-indulgent, and picky. Laughing all the way to the stream bank, they often drop a fish on the ground and press on it to see if eggs appear. If the salmon is a male or an unripe female (about three-quarters of what they catch), they simply leave it. If the fish is a ripe female, the bear usually eats just its fat-rich, energy-dense eggs. They boost their profits by giving themselves only the best, discarding the rest. Poor bears from inland areas would greedily eat any salmon they could find—if they could find any. Even among bears, the rich get richer and the poor take what they can.

  * * *

  These returning salmon originally hatched in this forest stream. The forests are, in a sense, the salmon source. Streams drawing from the mossy forest “sponge” flow more evenly, more dependably. Shade helps stabilize and cool stream temperatures. Fallen logs form eddies that break the current, giving rest and shelter to young fish and—when channels flow hard with swelling floods—protecting them from prematurely getting swept out to sea. Forests also produce insects that help feed young salmon.

  The ocean clouds deliver rain. Everything then flows downhill. After all, gravity isn’t just a good idea; it’s the law. Nutrients in the form of fallen leaves and falling bugs, for instance, get into rivers and wash toward the sea. So salmon are here, in part, because of the trees.

  Now, what if I told you that the trees are here, in part, because of salmon? That the trees that shelter and feed the fish are themselves built by fish? That’s the biggest secret about the size of these forests.

  Ocean nutrients traveling uphill? Against gravity and into the forest? It’s never happened. At least, not in a way people really noticed. For a long while, no one thought to ask, “Hey, what about all these salmon?”

  Defying gravity and all good sense, salmon flow uphill. From the heart of the ocean, salmon beat upstream and inland like flowing blood, until, lodged in a thin film of water in a tiny tributary, each is a corpuscle in a capillary. This upstream influx, this invasion, creates extraordinary effects. Salmon are energy. They are matériel. Follow that thought uphill: the trees are made largely of salmon.

  * * *

  Again a bear drops a fish, then turns back to the stream and nabs another. In this version of catch-and-release, the fish dies; what’s released includes all the things the fish was: protein and fat and nitrogen and phosphorus and more. These forests are where the ocean comes to die—and be reborn as trees.

  A fish grows by absorbing and superconcentrating the ocean. Salmon are the ocean incarnate. The salmon run becomes one long self-propelled infusion of ocean nutrients. Even before they hit freshwater, they have plenty of chances for reincarnation: feeding seabirds, seals, sea lions, porpoises, and Killer Whales. By the time they begin ascending streams, there is no turning back. They’ve ceased being mere fish and turned themselves into delivery packages of ultraconcentrated nourishment.

  Bears, eagles, and other middlemen take hefty cuts before passing the goods along. Bears or no, these salmon will still die after spawning. Their carcasses will still draw gulls, crows, jays, and ravens. They’ll still put smiles on the snouts of mink and martens and the four dozen birds and mammals—even mice, even deer—that nibble salmon.

  But without bears, most salmon carcasses would just wash downstream. In some streams, bears move more than half of the salmon mass into the nearby forest. A bear might carry forty salmon from a stream in a day’s work, leaving a couple hundred pounds of ocean flesh on the forest floor. Insects, slugs, and other invertebrates move in and lay eggs. Next, the ocean will transmogrify into insect-eating birds.

  Plenty of forests stand where no salmon live or perish. But it’s no coincidence that the world’s densest salmon runs and the world’s lushest rainforests go together. Bears bring so many salmon into forests that nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations near some Alaskan streams exceed recommended applications for commercial fertilizer. Up to 70 percent of the nitrogen in the leaves of nearby shrubs and trees is of ocean origin, brought by salmon, delivered by bears, drawn into the roots of plants. Sitka Spruce grow up to three times faster along streams that raise salmon compared to streams without salmon.

  Salmon forests, it turns out, grow more wood—more living weight per acre—than any forests in the world. More than the Amazon; more than anywhere. Not tropical rainforests—salmon forests.

  So why does this region harbor eighty bears for every one in interior areas far from salmon streams? Why do bears feeding on abundant salmon often have three cubs? Why is the Bald Eagle more abundant here than anywhere else in its cross-continental range? Why do these forests grow such massive trees? Now you know the answer: they are all salmon in disguise.

  That’s nice, but for all this to keep working, many of these salmon must attain the spawning reaches. For that, the fish must still vanquish the falls.

  In late afternoon, something injects new motivation into the salmon. The whitewater thickens with leaping fish as many more assault the falling water.

  Many find themselves in a sheet of foam falling over a big, slick-faced boulder. They skitter skyward against the pressure hose. Those gaining the first step face either a nearly impassable overhanging waterfall or a run over a boulder up a short, steep, blasting channel. They must choose quickly. Many get washed back into the roiling eddies. There, salmon are appearing and vanishing like dark rice grains in a rolling boil.

  That a fish might conquer this ferocious challenge seems almost beyond reasonable striving. But nothing compels salmon to be reasonable.

  I see a couple of fish get through. And now several are gliding gracefully over the light sand of the broad shallows above, their goal—spawning—nearly assured.

  * * *

  In the 1940s, fishery managers wanted bear populations across Alaska “culled.” Why? Because salmon-eating bears inflict “economic damage” that could push Alaska into “financial and social collapse.” But as we’re seeing right in front of our eyes, salmon increase bear densities, and bears make forests more productive by planting them with salmon. Productive forests create salmon-friendly stream habitat and hatch insects that fall into streams, prompting young salmons’ robust growth, boosting salmon survival—helping maintain strong salmon populations.

  The fear had been that the number of bears limits the number of salmon. Turns out, the reverse is true; there are so many bears because there are so many salmon. And there are so many salmon, in part, because there are so many bears helping turn salmon into trees.

  * * *

  Just a few yards away, an adolescent bear ascends a hemlock, simply to rest. A little raccoon-sized cub of another bear decides to follow. When the adolescent swipes at it, the cub moves out onto a branch. From there, it can’t get down. This isn’t trivial; cubs can get killed when they find themselves alone with grouchy strangers.

  Now we have a situation. The cub begins bawling. Mother comes running from the creek and bounds up the tree with astonishing speed. Now the edgy adolescent, seriously threatened, begins snapping its jaws, stomping the thick branch, then urinating and defecating on the angry mama below.

  Complicating matters, Mama’s second cub has climbed a nearby tree, gotten stuck there, and is also bawling. This sends the distraught mother running from tree to tree, with Brenda and me almost directly in the middle.

  Mama calls the second cub down, and they both climb the tree containing the first cub and the adolescent stranger. Now four bears are in the same tree, twenty to thirty feet up. The mother wants the other bear away from her cubs. The other bear is highly conflicted. It wants to come down and flee, yet the angry mama continues trying to press the stranger higher. The more Mama presses, the more defensive the adolescent gets.

  This standoff continues for half an hour, until the mother—with much snarling and jaw snapping and many lightning-fast bluffs that prove intimidating to the strang
er (and to me)—forces the stranger higher. When she feels like she’s achieved enough space, she turns her attention to getting her cubs down. Then she, too, climbs down, and the threat is defused.

  When everything is back to normal—normal for here meaning the woods are crawling with bears and the creek swarming with fish and the sky infested with eagles—Brenda and I, too, feel it’s safe (enough) to head back down the trail.

  I tell Brenda how much I loved every moment of our adventure, and thank her for the privilege. Brenda is pleased, but she says, “More and more, I see people who say they like nature but, truly, it’s not really that important to them. I call it the Discovery Channel mentality. And I’m seeing the people who actually want to come and see things like this. People today are so accustomed to manipulating every detail of their personal environment with the press of a button, they’re very, very uncomfortable with a reality in which they aren’t in charge. They don’t like that humbling feeling you get in a place like this, where we’re not in control. People are always asking me questions like ‘What is the bear going to do?’ and I’m like”—she shrugs—“ ‘Whatever it wants.’ ”

  * * *

  Alaska’s panhandle remains a place for people seeking to lose or find themselves. It’s a place of transients, transplants, and deeply rooted native—Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian—peoples. Of ancient and varied origins, the islands of Southeast Alaska lie along the edge of the continent like geologic driftwood. Within the region—500 miles long and 120 miles wide (800 by 190 kilometers)—a thousand-plus islands create 18,000 miles of coastline. In the lower states, the longest stretch of undeveloped coast is about 30 miles.

  I’m here to see a tinkered-with place that has saved all its parts, and to try to understand why it’s still working. What will surprise me is that it’s not so much virgin and pristine—though there’s a lot of that, too—as recovered and recovering. It’s a place where people have had the luxury of learning from their mistakes. And there’s a reason for that, too.