by Langdon Cook
In keeping with a name that suggests a clogged bathtub, Drano isn’t really a natural lake. It’s more of a bay, a man-made impoundment with a narrow outlet to the main river channel. Fill from the Bonneville Dam project created it, and it’s fed by the icy flow of the Little White Salmon River, which comes plunging out of the mountains to the north. Anadromous fish nose into Drano during their migration up the Columbia, just like those Rogue River kings with which I’d first taken a swim, seeking its cooler temperatures as a place to rest and refuel. Up and down the Columbia River Gorge, fish and fishermen congregate at such places, as they have for thousands of years.
The gorge itself is a hundred-mile cleft in the Cascade Mountains. West of the Cascade Crest, the gorge slices through a damp region of evergreens; eastward, in the rain shadow of the mountain range, which runs north to south, it rends desolate badlands that receive as little as six inches of annual precipitation. Nowadays the crossover from wet to dry takes mere minutes on I-84. It’s stunning in its suddenness. Toward the end of the last Ice Age, about fifteen thousand years ago, colossal floods from ancient Lake Missoula carved the Columbia’s path to the sea as volcanic mountains rose and showered the area with debris. Exposed ramparts of columnar basalt tower above either bank, revealing this alternating sequence of deep scouring and uplift. Even from a car, which always strikes me as a banal way to confront any of our natural splendors, the sheer destructive power that formed this landscape is hard to miss. Imagining a wall of water, unleashed from a glacial lake nearly the size of Lake Huron and crashing through this desert terrain, gives me shivers. It was a massive reset button that was pushed every fifty years on average for about two thousand years. And each time the floods subsided, salmon, resilience etched into their DNA, reemerged from their refugia in various nooks and crannies throughout the watershed to repopulate the river.
To put the whole Columbia Basin in perspective, picture a region slightly larger than France that drains parts of seven western states and one Canadian province: a conglomeration of high glacial peaks, dense conifer forests, fragrant sagebrush plateaus, and arid canyons, all of this rugged topography incised by a capillarylike network of creeks, streams, and white water rivers that sends sixty-five trillion gallons of snowmelt to the Pacific each year. Before Euro-American settlement, it was the greatest salmon nursery on the planet and the locus of king salmon abundance in particular. Recent estimates suggest that as many as thirty million salmon returned annually to spawn (this is twice the outdated number that used to get bandied around), many of them the early-running spring kings that travel hundreds of miles upriver through cataracts and rapids to spawn in high-mountain tributaries. For thousands of years these were the fish that organized entire cultures of humanity. Long before the kings of the Copper River impressed us, there were the Columbia River spring kings. John preferred to call them spring chinook, or springers.
The term spring chinook is misleading. It’s a reminder of our need to name and categorize. The first Columbia River chinook of the year are counted as early as February at Bonneville Dam’s fish ladder, 146 miles from the river mouth, and they will continue to arrive at the ladder each subsequent month through the rest of the year, spawning from late summer through fall. We refer to these fish as spring chinook, summer chinook, and fall chinook, based on the approximate season of their entrance into the river. While there are distinct genetic differences, observable in the DNA, there is no clear dividing line in the run timing; rather, there is a continuum that reflects the diverse life histories of the fish. Generally speaking, the name spring chinook corresponds to the early-running kings that usually travel farther and hold longer on their spawning grounds than fish that arrive later in the year. Because salmon don’t actively feed once they enter fresh water, they rely on their fat reserves to survive sometimes for months on end before spawning. This is what had impressed Kevin Davis. Springers are noteworthy for having large stores of fat and for maintaining their silver-plated complexions, evolutionary adaptations that help them in the river leading up to the spawn. Unlike fall salmon of the lower river, which often turn dark and soft as soon as they enter fresh water, the springers stay shiny and firm. They have long journeys ahead and can’t shift all their energy into reproduction quite yet. Many of the Columbia’s fish are destined for headwater tributaries hundreds of miles from the salt, earning them another nickname: upriver brights. And because of their wonderfully rich, fatty meat, these were historically the most desirable salmon to Native American tribes living along the Columbia River, who caught and traded huge volumes of the fish, spreading their reputation far and wide.
My lure was a boldly colored fraud in green and orange called a Mag Lip, carefully wrapped with a strip of herring that John had cured the day before, using a recipe he’d refined over the years. “It drives the fish crazy,” he said, his mood starting to lighten. I clicked the release on my reel and started paying out line, ten feet, twenty feet, forty, sixty…until John told me to stop, at exactly seventy-two feet. Once the lure was in the water, he explained his impatience. “This is when the bite started yesterday, and by six-thirty it was over. Done.” His clients had gone two for five and didn’t have another strike for the next eight hours, which is to say that in the space of an hour they managed five strikes, resulting in two fish landed. Measured in terms of an hour’s fishing, this would be a solid burst of king salmon action; measured across the span of a full day, it was something of a disappointment—though, when it comes to springers, any fish in the boat can be considered a success. Some years the spring chinook fishery doesn’t even open. Salmon runs in the Columbia are a fraction of what they once were, before the river was harnessed for power.
I admitted to John that I had never done this sort of fishing before and wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Most of my salmon angling up to this point had been with a fly rod, for species smaller than chinook. I asked him if the take would be obvious. “Oh gawd!” he said, shaking his head. “There’s no messing around with these fish. Just hold on tight and do what I say.” He was optimistic. The day before, 5,500 fish were counted coming over Bonneville Dam’s fish ladder, twenty miles to the west. Those fish would start arriving anytime this morning, and even here, more than 160 miles upstream from the river mouth, some of them would still be carrying sea lice. “They’ll be here,” John said, with the confidence of a missionary.
I wasn’t so sure. The salmon move through the Big River as if made of water themselves, their migration hidden from sight. We stare at the roiling surface and see nothing. Only when they enter the man-made fish ladders at the dams do they suddenly appear to us, as if someone has thrown a light switch, making the imperceptible almost knowable. These ladders are a jarring sight. The fish enter a chute below the dam, because they’re naturally drawn to current. Back and forth they swim through a hard-edged concrete channel that flows like a water slide, gaining elevation through a series of stair-stepping switchbacks, until they’ve summited and reached the reservoir on the other side. Many of the dams have a viewing chamber within their bowels, where the public can witness the effort. The salmon don’t seem to see us as they pass. Their unblinking eyes betray no recognition. Unlike a curious leopard or gorilla at the zoo, they move through with their otherness intact.
While I pondered this otherness, John gestured toward a boat fifty yards away in the blue light of early dawn, which washed across the gorge like a window cleaner, everything just a little brighter and more visible now. Standing in the boat was a friend of his, another guide, holding a big net vertically aloft as if planting a flag, waiting for the moment of capture as his client sat hunched, rod doubled over. Such moments are as close as we can get to knowing these fish.
THIS WAS ACTUALLY MY SECOND TRIP to the Columbia River Gorge that spring. A few weeks earlier I had attended a First Salmon ceremony at Celilo Village, one of the most hallowed crossroads in indigenous America. Situated between the Chinookan-speaking people of the lower Columbia and the Sahapt
in speakers of the Columbia Plateau east of the Cascades, Celilo has been referred to as the “Wall Street of Indian Country.” Lewis and Clark landed there on October 22, 1805. Noting the many different tribal groups gathered to fish and trade, they called it “the great mart” of the West. My destination was the Celilo longhouse on the Oregon side of the Columbia, two hundred river miles from the mouth and overlooking the site of the former Celilo Falls. Called Wy-am, which means “the echo of water upon the rocks,” the sound of these falls hasn’t been heard since March 10, 1957, when the Dalles Dam closed its gates for the first time and flooded the most sacred of all fishing sites in North America.
Despite its distance from the coast, Celilo Falls was the epicenter of the salmon universe for thousands of years. A new longhouse stands near the site of the former village. At one end of the gymnasiumlike interior, a large painting depicts the falls as they once were: a horseshoe-shaped choke point in the river, where cascades of white water crashed over basalt formations into frothing cauldrons below. Historically, native tribes from up and down the river traveled to Celilo each spring to catch salmon in dip nets from wooden platforms built precariously over the falls. The fishing couldn’t begin, however, until the salmon had been shown the proper respect. Variations of the First Salmon ceremony still take place throughout salmon country. They differ slightly from tribe to tribe, but the general outline is the same: The first salmon of the year is ritualistically shared among everyone in the community, and its skeleton is returned to the river and floated downstream. In this way, the ambassador from the salmon tribe can return to its underwater kin and tell of the respect it received from the human beings living upstream, so that more of its kind will ascend and nourish the Indian people. Once the First Salmon ceremony has been performed—with its associated rituals of drumming, dancing, fasting, and feasting, which might take place over the course of days—the fishing season can begin in earnest. Whether it was fully understood or not, the fishing closures built into such rites had the effect of allowing more salmon to reach their upstream spawning grounds, ensuring future runs for harvest. “Spiritual game management,” it’s been called.
During the powwow in the longhouse, which that day was open to the public, men and boys sat on one side and women and girls on the other. Most of the participants, a few hundred strong, were dressed casually in denim, though a few wore feathers, buckskin, and elaborate necklaces. Drummers stood beneath the painting of Celilo Falls while dancers paraded up the middle. Songs began with a drumbeat and gathered force. The lead dancer carried a bell, which he rang in time to the music, occasionally giving it a good shake for emphasis. The audience followed the rhythm, moving their hands back and forth as if ringing an invisible bell: the heart beating in time. There were songs and speeches and prayers, most of them unscripted, and the powwow went on like this for hours—as long as it took for everyone, especially the elders, to speak their minds, invoke memories from the past, and offer a prayer.
A man shuffled to the front, where a microphone awaited. His pigtails had gone gray and hung down the front of his black vest. He was a Vietnam vet, he said. He’d been at war all his life, abroad and at home, and he imagined a day when his people took back their land and the salmon were plentiful. Another elder came forward and spoke of the dams. “Up and down the river they flooded our longhouses. We’re strong people. We made it through the sickness. We’re still strong.” Then a very old man, older than the rest, with a beautifully beaded vest and moccasins, slowly made his way to the front. He stood before the crowd, as straight as he was able. “I’m at the end of my life,” he said, leaning into the microphone, hands clasped behind his back. “I feel the water rising all around me.”
Afterward, the elders waited inside; they would be served first, while the rest of us filed outside. It took the rest of the afternoon to feed everyone. Piles of spring chinook, their backs a lucid green with black spots, spilled out of burlap bags left on the ground, some of them showing net marks where they’d been caught. Tribal members gutted and filleted the big fish, and arranged them on sprawling homemade barbecues. They wrapped salmon heads in foil and tossed them on the grill. Off to one side, a few women tended to more traditional cooking methods, the salmon fillets staked out with sharpened sticks and left to roast by a fire. Skins of several freshly killed mule deer hung from a nearby chain-link fence, their ribs crackling on the grill. A woman sold fry bread for two dollars; another sold jewelry. I ate a big piece of fillet with a plastic fork while a man next to me used his fingers to carefully extract all the meat from a charred salmon head, its eyes cloudy white. He licked his fingers and looked up. “Good,” I said, not quite sure how to fill the space between us. He nodded and went back to excavating salmon heads. Nearby, a boisterous table full of self-identified social-justice warriors from Portland dug into platefuls of salmon, their blond dreadlocks swinging and brightly colored kaftans glinting in the afternoon sun. The Indians ignored them. We all washed our food down with Dixie cups of fruit punch. There wasn’t a drop of alcohol in sight.
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SALMON HAS BEEN ON the menu in North America for a long time. At the height of the last Ice Age, forty-five thousand to thirteen thousand years ago, when water was locked up in glaciers and the world’s sea levels were much lower than today, hunter-gatherers from Siberia made a slow migration across the Bering land bridge to an unpeopled continent. By the time they arrived on the other side centuries later and started infiltrating interior Alaska, they were a changed people, genetically speaking. Archaeologists now call these first Americans Paleo-Indians. With warming temperatures, the ice sheets retreated, opening pathways down the continent. Some of the Pleistocene foragers settled on the banks of the Columbia, where they eventually became known in indigenous America as the river people, or people of the salmon.
Fishing sites along the Columbia represent the longest continuous human habitation in the Americas, at least ten thousand years. But the river people didn’t become full-time fishermen right away. Evidence suggests they continued to hunt land mammals as their primary food source until about four thousand years ago, when, for reasons that are not entirely clear, they shifted their efforts to salmon. Did new technology allow them to more fully exploit the fish runs? With the end of Ice Age floods, did the fish themselves increase in number enough to allow the shift? We just don’t know. We do know that Native Americans from all over the greater Pacific Northwest and sometimes from as far away as the Great Plains would gather along the Columbia River at favored fishing sites like the Cascade Rapids and Celilo Falls when the salmon started running in the spring. They represented many tribes and language groups, and intermarriage created loose affiliations. Some lived in seasonal villages; others pitched temporary camps. They fished, socialized, bartered, picked berries, hunted, played games, and gambled. A man could catch enough salmon in a month to feed his family for the year. The women preserved the fish by drying it in the sun, smoking it, and pounding the jerklike meat with berries to make pemmican. Surplus was traded for other necessities or given away as a show of personal wealth to reinforce bonds within the community.
Before the first white settlers arrived, the region’s economy was rooted in subsistence living and trade rather than profit. Lewis and Clark encountered scores of indigenous villages and camps as the Corps of Discovery floated down the Columbia in October 1805. The encampments were full of fishermen and drying fish, but despite this abundance, the Indians were loath to trade any of their harvest, preferring instead to give a dog to the hungry explorers. Though early written accounts of the river people depicted primitive communities living in an Edenlike setting of inexhaustible bounty, modern historians paint a different picture. Evidence shows that many tribes had developed sophisticated fishing cultures using a variety of tools and techniques, from spears and weirs to dip nets and gill nets, and through a process of trial and error over the course of centuries had learned to exploit salmon runs to the fullest extent possible without depl
eting the resource. Before postcontact disease, war, and dispossession eliminated more than 90 percent of the Native American population in the Pacific Northwest, the river people along the Columbia might have caught as much as forty million pounds of salmon in a year, a figure that’s nearly equivalent to the height of the white industrial fishery in the 1880s.
Not long after published accounts of Lewis and Clark’s expedition appeared, white settlement in the Columbia Basin began, led by fur traders and Christian missionaries. By the 1830s, mountain men chasing furs had trapped out much of the territory. In 1846, the United States ended its land dispute with England, claiming everything south of the forty-ninth parallel; the Mexican War, which had begun that same year, concluded in 1848 with the spoils of California and the Southwest. Soon after, the Oregon Trail saw a steady increase of wagon trains, with a peak of seventy thousand settlers migrating west in 1852. Isaac Stevens, territorial governor of Washington and superintendent of Indian Affairs, persuaded (i.e., coerced) tribes of the Pacific Northwest to sign treaties in 1854 and 1855 that ceded sixty-four million acres of what would become the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana to the “Great Father.” The first cannery started packing Columbia River salmon in 1866. By 1883 there were fifty-five canneries on or near the river. Advances in the canning process and completion of a transcontinental railroad opened new markets, encouraging an ever-greater catch. The white newcomers enjoyed technological advantages, such as the fish wheel, an ingenious mill-like contraption that turned in the current, scooping up salmon in the process. It was so effective that both Washington and Oregon eventually abolished it.
