by Dylan Tomine
The salt shioyaki technique mentioned earlier further maximizes taste and texture. Ideally, you start by scaling the fish, which is easily done with a high-pressure hose nozzle before cleaning. Once I’ve cut the fillets into steaks, I apply about twice as much sea salt as I would if I were eating them immediately, and put them back in the fridge. The salt draws moisture out of the fish until the salinity inside the flesh equalizes. Then osmosis takes over, sucking the moisture back in and sealing the cell walls behind it. The result, when placed on a hot barbecue, is the crisp exterior and rich, juicy interior we crave. It’s a traditional Japanese method; my grandmothers cooked salmon this way, as did my parents, and now me. I imagine one day Skyla and Weston will, too.
One more thing: The skin. Using a technique from the great Thomas Keller’s French Laundry Cookbook, I take the blade of a knife and squeegee any excess water out of the skin just before cooking. Now the heat won’t have to remove moisture, but will instead crisp the skin in its own fat. The first bite of Columbia springer shioyaki – hot off the grill with skin attached – is nothing short of perfection.
There’s still daylight left, and the wind is dropping. At least it’s not whistling through our lines anymore. I put the fish on ice (which hardly seems necessary, it’s so cold out) and prop the cooler up on one end to tilt the fish’s head down. Then I run a sharp knife inside the gill plates to cut the main arteries and allow the fish to bleed out. When blood left in the meat oxidizes, it produces an unpleasant “fishy” taste, so this step is important. Given the weather and impending dusk, we don’t have time to admire this fish any further. We need to get back to fishing.
The difference between zero and one may be the greatest, but with one fish in the box, greed sets in. I hurry to get our gear back in the water. One is great. But two would be much better.
The one fish, though, has lightened our mood. Or maybe the weather really is improving? Either way, we are no longer cold or grim or tight-lipped. We laugh about the earlier part of the day as if it had happened to someone else.
Just as we cross back into the series of shallow, midchannel troughs where we got our springer, Sweeney’s rod folds over and the clicker on his reel buzzes. He sets the hook, and when I see he’s tight to the fish, I put the motor in neutral and let us drift. The fish comes to the boat quickly, then dives under it, and Sweeney has to scramble to get the rod tip in the water and work his way to the other side to clear the chine. The fish shatters the surface and darts away on a long run. My heart pounds in my ears. After long, tense moments of twisting back and forth just out of reach, the fish tires, and when it tips on its side, I put it in the net. We are stoked. Various celebratory gestures, embarrassing when performed by anyone over the age of 10 and not on an NBA roster, come into play.
The day has gone from brutal to decent to outstanding in less than an hour. The wind has come to a full stop and there isn’t another boat in sight – something we’ve never experienced in this famously crowded fishery. The surface of the big river flows in a smooth stream of metallic light. A brilliant double rainbow forms against the darkening sky over the Washington side. Sweeney pauses from washing down the floorboards and says, “Where’s the unicorn?”
Downstream, an eagle suddenly dives toward the water, flaring at the last moment before impact. Then, instead of swooping upward with its catch, it disappears beneath the surface, pulled under by some invisible force. In a great commotion of flailing wings and flying water, it thrashes back to the surface, clearly engaged in a frantic battle. This is better than the Nature Channel. The eagle has somehow latched onto a springer.
“Looks like he bit off more than he can chew,” Sweeney says. We wonder if the bird will hold on until it drowns, and debate the rural legend that says eagles cannot release their grip, once engaged. If that were true, how would they ever let go of tree branches? But if it’s a myth, why doesn’t this eagle open his talons now?
Gradually, the answer becomes clear. The eagle is slowly – almost imperceptibly amidst all the chaos – dragging its prize toward shore. But the salmon isn’t going quietly. It takes half an hour of incredible effort, but at last, the eagle lands its springer on a sandbar. Exhausted, the wily bird shakes out its feathers and rests beside the flopping prize. But only for a moment. Surrounded by a flurry of diving gulls trying to poach a meal, the eagle digs into the fish’s succulent flesh. Validation! Sweeney and I aren’t the only anglers willing to do almost anything for a meal of fresh Columbia River spring Chinook.
On the long drive home, drained by the weather and our 23-hour day, we’re already planning another trip next week. Springers do that to you.
CONVERSATION WITH A SIX-YEAR-OLD
Me: (from a cabin above the lake) SKY-LA! DINNER TIME!
Skyla: (no answer)
Me: (going down the staircase to the lake) SKYLA?
Skyla: (no answer)
Me: (reaching the dock) Skyla, what are you doing down here by yourself? All the other families are up at the cabin eating dinner. Skyla?
Skyla: (no answer)
Me: Catching anything?
Skyla: Oh, hi, Daddy. Not yet, but look at all the fish.
Me: Oh, yeah…looks like a bunch of baby bass.
Skyla: They’re chasing the fly around but won’t bite it.
Me: Hey, it’s dinnertime, aren’t you hungry?
Skyla: I know, but I really want to catch a fish. See, look…they won’t bite.
Me: Well, the other kids are all eating. Let’s head inside.
Skyla: Dad, I just want to catch a fish first.
Me: Well…I think we need a smaller fly. Let me see what I have up in the car. I’ll be right back…don’t lean over the water so much. And keep your life jacket on, okay?
Skyla: Yes, Daddy.
Me: Okay, let’s try this little hare’s ear nymph. There. Try that.
Skyla: Look, here they come…YAAAAY! Fish on!
Me: Nice work! (high fives) All right, now, let’s go get some dinner.
Skyla: Can we keep him?
Me: Nah, I think three inches is a little too small to eat. Let’s let him go.
Skyla: Okay…bye-bye, Bassy. (splash)
Me: Now, how about that dinner? It’s almost dark anyway.
Skyla: Dad…they’re really biting now. Can’t we please stay longer? I just want to catch one more…
Me: (trying to look stern) Well…okay. But just one more.
FIREWOOD I: INVENTORY
Madrona, Douglas fir, bitter cherry, bigleaf maple, hemlock, alder…these are the objects of my obsession, in descending order of appeal. It’s no coincidence that the order reflects the BTUs produced by each type of wood. A cord of madrona produces more heat than a cord of fir, which produces more than cherry, and so on. unfortunately, my list also happens to be in reverse order of availability. Madrona trees almost never fall, and when they do, every wood poacher on the Island races to claim them. Alders, on the other hand, tip over at the first breath of wind and tend to lie there until someone looks at his meager woodpile and desperation sets in.
Of course, each species has its own individual benefits and drawbacks: madrona, with its beautiful, sinuous form, can be tough to split and stack. When green, it splits more easily but can take a couple of years to dry. The dense, heavy wood takes a toll on your back and, if you load too much, your car springs. But boy, does it burn hot. Throw too much madrona on the fire and you’ll melt your stove, the old-timers say. Douglas fir grows straight and tall, splits easily, and stacks beautifully. Dripping pitch can make it messy to work with, but the fresh Christmas-tree scent makes up for it. You just have to stay away from the base sections, which have a fibrous grain almost impossible to split by hand. Bitter cherry takes a long time to dry, and you have to slice the leathery bark with a knife so it’ll split. Maple comes apart clean and burns well, if a little fast. Hemlock carries so much water that it’s brutal to haul when green, and it produces very little heat when dry. I hate hemlock. Alder
, well, not much to say about alder, other than there’s a lot of it around.
Cedar stands alone for its unique properties. The oils and resins that make it our weather-resistant building material of choice – Nature’s own pressure-treated lumber – also make cedar ideal for kindling. Small pieces light easily and produce the heat needed to get other wood going. And it’s a dream to split. The ax slides through cedar in long vertical planes, cleaving thin, even sections of wood straight as milled lumber. You don’t need a lot; all the snapping, popping, and projectile sparks keep us from using it as our main fuel. But scoring a few cedar rounds makes fire building easier all winter.
Since we generally only burn windfall or standing deadwood, we don’t have a lot of say about where and when trees become available to us. Which means proximity to a road, steepness of terrain, and the density of surrounding vegetation all make a difference when assessing the desirability of a given tree. And then there’s the number of side branches (knots make logs harder to split), how long the tree has been dead (green wood is heavy to haul; rotten wood is worthless for burning), and size (too big and I can’t carry the rounds by myself, too small and it’s a waste of time) to consider.
It has been pointed out on more than one occasion that I might be a little obsessed. You’ve heard about men undressing women with their eyes? I undress trees. I can’t even look at someone’s ornamental bonsai without mentally cutting, splitting, and stacking it.
The neighbors know I’m always looking for firewood, so when a tree falls, our phone rings. And I have to be careful about the details before agreeing to anything. Last year, for example, a neighbor called, anxious to get a recently fallen tree out of her yard. “What kind is it?” I asked. “I don’t know…fir?” she said. Hmmm… “How big?” “Medium.” Whatever that means. “Can I get to it easily?” “Yeah, it’s in the middle of the yard.” At this point, Stacy, having overheard my side of the conversation, held up a note that said DON’T BE AN ASS. I told the neighbor I’d take it.
I should have asked more questions. Or gone over there in person and looked at it first, but that always leads to awkward situations if I decline the offer. I’ve found that looking a gift tree in the mouth does little to promote neighborly feelings. When I got there with my saw, I discovered it was in the middle of the yard all right, their backyard. Did I mention these particular neighbors live on the edge of a ravine? The tree was about 75 yards down a 30-degree slope. And it wasn’t a fir. Or medium-size, for that matter. It was a humongous green hemlock. As noted above, nothing’s heavier than green hemlock. I ended up spending two long, backbreaking days cutting and hauling that sucker out of there. When it was finally dry enough to burn, it went up like balsa wood.
Another time, my friend Steve, who lives up the road and knows a thing or two about firewood, told me he had a perfect fir come down on his property. He was laid up with an injured hand, the result of a freak home-brewing accident (don’t ask), so he offered it to me. I accepted sight unseen. What I didn’t realize – and Steve conveniently failed to mention – was that it had fallen into a hellish patch of tangled, thorny blackberry brambles. Cutting it up was like running a chain saw in a barbed-wire factory. There was a consolation prize, though. While I was thrashing around in the briar patch, I found a huge standing-dead madrona, which Steve generously let me have. It ended up being my best tree of the year.
My preoccupation with firewood may be, as some have suggested, a symptom of obsessive-compulsive tendencies, but there is at least a little reason behind it. When we bought this house, it came with an old slab-steel Western woodstove that burned through enormous quantities of wood while producing the heat equivalent of a Bic lighter. Even a small fire resulted in vast clouds of noxious smoke pouring from the chimney. We could hardly bring ourselves to use it. After several years of outrageous heating bills, we finally stepped up and bought a new, highly efficient, Canadian-made Osburn stove. It’s cold in Canada, and Canadians know how to build stoves. Its secondary burn chamber squeezes every BTU from each log and incinerates most of the pollutants in the process, producing less than 1½ grams of emissions per hour (the current EPA limit is 7½ grams). If we burn good, dry wood, you can’t see even a trace of smoke leaving the chimney.
Fallen or dead trees are about as close to a sustainable, carbonneutral heat source as we can find. A recent study by researchers at Queens University in Ontario found that modern, clean-burning woodstoves essentially produce the same amount of carbon that would be released by a naturally decaying log. We’re accelerating the process, but nowhere near the level that occurs with the liberation of carbon trapped in fossil fuels. In contrast, burning propane produces 15 times more CO2 than burning wood. If coal-fired generation plants contribute to your power supply (I was surprised to find that even here, in the hydro-happy Pacific Northwest, 36 percent of our family’s electricity still comes from coal), a woodstove makes even more sense. Sure, we burn some gas cutting and hauling logs, but considering the BTUs provided by a single tree, it’s a minimal footprint.
Our stove’s combination of radiant and convective heat warms the entire house, allowing us to keep the inefficient electric furnace (basically a giant toaster in the crawlspace) off, for the most part. The first winter we used the Osburn as our primary heat source, we knocked 60 percent off our monthly power bill. Sixty percent! Even in the land of “cheap” electricity, this adds up fast, and our new stove paid for itself in less than two years.
The math only works if you get the wood for free, though. A cord of firewood around here goes for $150 (green alder) to $350 (dry madrona) a cord, and if you’re buying it, running the giant toaster starts looking like a bargain. So, for us, it comes down to a constant search for wood and countless hours spent cutting, hauling, splitting, and stacking. Note that when I say “free,” I mean that no money is exchanged, not that there isn’t any cost. I pay plenty in smashed fingers, creaky joints, and the occasional back blowout.
My full-time wood obsession starts around the end of winter salmon season most years. On a routine trip out to the woodshed, I suddenly notice the dwindling stack and a certain panicky feeling sets in. Next thing I know, I’m sharpening saws and apologizing to the neighbors for not getting back to them about that hemlock that fell last November.
In our wet climate, it takes almost a full year, sometimes two, for green wood to dry. And dry is paramount: Burning sappy or even rain-wet cordwood negates all the efficiency and cleanliness of the modern stove. Even worse, it clogs chimneys with creosote, which can lead to dangerous chimney fires. Wood we plan to burn next winter needs to be split and stacked for drying by April at the latest. When I’m really on it, I have next year’s wood done in February, with everything after that set aside for the following year.
The last (and only) time our beloved Seahawks made the Superbowl, I had spent the winter months so wrapped up in salmon fishing that I’d completely neglected my firewood duties. We were clearly going to be short the next winter. Wasting three daylight hours every Sunday glued to the television while our team marched through the playoffs hadn’t helped any, either. We had a party planned for the big game, but a fierce windstorm Saturday night blew out power all over the Island, and the game went on without us. My buddy Glen and I spent a blustery Superbowl Sunday cutting up a giant old fir that had fallen across the neighbor’s driveway. We were bummed about missing the game until we discovered that the monstrous tree had spent its whole life growing in the shade, giving it growth rings packed so tightly, it would burn like coal. I was saved from my supply predicament, and the Seahawks lost the game anyway. A year later, we were still burning that old fir long into spring.
Now it’s raining again and Skyla, Weston, and I are out back stacking the last of next year’s wood. A week ago, they were hunting Easter eggs around the unfinished woodpile; we’re a little behind schedule. But a hot summer will make up for lost drying time, and we’ll remember to burn this wood last, giving it almost a year. “Here it
is, Daddy,” Skyla says, handing me a medium-size chunk of fir, “the last piece of wood.” “No,” Weston says, “I got…this…madrona.” It’s too heavy for him to carry, so he’s dragging the log toward me by one end. I take it from him, put it on top of the stack, and we’re done.
I step back and look at a little more than six cords of wood, neatly stacked in a crisscross pattern for better airflow. A year’s worth of work. Now it just has to sit there and let the weather do its job. The fir we got this year looks good for the most part, tight and dense enough to burn through long winter nights. There are a couple of nice madronas in there, too, which we’ll save for serious cold snaps. The big old maple that fell in the woods behind our house is beautiful – clean and almost dry already. Too much hemlock, but what are you going to do? That pissant alder was a waste of time, but it’ll burn. Do we have enough? I doubt it. But I say that every year.
OFF THE DEEP END
The robins, tiring of their winter worm diet, abandon the soggy lawn to feast on unripe salmonberries, though the hard, green fruit is so sour you can hardly touch it to your tongue. Five of my strongest new raspberry canes have fallen to some mysterious insect growing within their finger-thick stalks. The schizophrenic weather swings wildly, blessing us with warm summer sun one day, then roaring about in a fury of cold wind and rain the next.
In other words, it’s May.
And that means spot prawns, although there’s no natural cause for the season to take place this month. The shrimp are always there, roaming around the deep waters of the Sound. But our growing population and appetite for these succulent crustaceans has forced us into an increasingly restrictive fishery. Not long ago, people dropped pots whenever they had a taste for shrimp and the energy to pull them up from 250 feet of water. Then, to protect spot prawns from overharvest, the season was reduced to spring. And then a single month. And now, we’re down to four days in May, between the hours of 9:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m.
