Upstream
Page 6
Even more effective was the use of political power to wrest traditional fishing sites away from Native Americans. Within a few decades, the Columbia River’s mostly subsistence fishery was fully transformed into a market fishery, with displaced Indians working in the canneries in addition to putting up their steadily shrinking subsistence quantities. The year 1911 saw the peak commercial catch, with nearly forty-seven million pounds of salmon packed, but the river was already in decline by then. In fact, some observers believed the decrease in chinook, the most economically valuable species, had begun as early as 1886, just a few short decades after the arrival of the first white settlers. The 1893–94 edition of the Fish and Game Protector Report compared the State of Oregon to a profligate: “For a third of a century, Oregon has drawn wealth from her streams, but now, by reason of her wastefulness and lack of intelligent provision for the future, the source of that wealth is disappearing and is threatened with complete annihilation. No private individual so wasteful and improvident of his resources would receive the least sympathy from his fellows if he died in poverty and was buried in the potter’s field.”
While overfishing was the first threat to the Columbia’s prodigious salmon runs, darker clouds hovered on the horizon. On September 28, 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, fulfilling a campaign promise from five years earlier to electrify the Pacific Northwest, dedicated a new hydroelectric facility on the river. Bonneville Dam, forty miles east of Portland, was the first step in his vision for unifying an entire region via cheap electricity, irrigation, and shipping. The dam went online with much pageantry from local boosters, most of whom had called the place home for only a generation or two, and few at the ceremony would have given much thought to a small gathering of people off to the side, who watched grimly as their way of life was engulfed by unstoppable forces.
In 1941, the Bonneville Power Administration, the federal agency that markets Columbia River electricity, hired a folksinger to exhort the virtues of hydropower and jobs. Woody Guthrie, or anyone else, for that matter, could not have guessed how much the New Deal and World War II would transform the basin over the next twenty years. That same year, on the eve of war, Grand Coulee Dam went online. Located on the Columbia Plateau nearly six hundred miles from the river mouth, it remains the largest electricity-generating facility in the country—and since no provision was made for fish to pass, twelve hundred miles of spawning grounds above the dam are now closed to salmon. A 1947 memo from the Department of the Interior put it bluntly when it came to dams versus salmon: “Overall benefits to the Pacific Northwest are such that the present salmon run must if necessary be sacrificed.” Between 1954 and 1971, eight more hydroelectric dams were built on the main stem alone (plus another three in Canada between 1973 and 1984). Large tributaries of the Columbia, such as the Snake River and the Clearwater River—watercourses that play starring roles in the founding narrative of America—received their own impoundments, flooding a wealth of ancient artifacts and slowing their dash to the sea. The newcomers, for the most part, didn’t worry about the salmon, and they certainly didn’t worry about the people who had lived along the Columbia “since time immemorial,” as it was usually put (because no one really knew how long it had been). They looked to the future, not the past, and the word progress trembled on their lips. The spring chinook that had nurtured countless generations slipped into obscurity.
JOHN DIDN’T SEEM TOO INTERESTED in hearing about the First Salmon ceremony at Celilo Village, though he did agree that springers were the finest eating of all the salmon and what a damn shame it was that they were so pitifully squandered. If anything, he said, it was a crime so many still ended up in Indian nets today, and what’s more—
He jumped up from his seat at the tiller and pointed to the screen of his high-tech fish-finder. “That’s a fish right there!” We watched a red line scroll horizontally across the screen, and it was nearly as exciting as seeing the thing itself. The lone salmon was at a depth of about twenty-seven feet, a good ten feet below my offering. But a glance upward and it might just decide to suddenly give its powerful tail a shake and rise through the water column to grab the offending lure. We waited, motionless, watching the screen. The red line vanished.
By the time the sun poured over the northeastern rim of the gorge and into the bay like molten lava, the main body of Drano Lake was done for the day. We’d seen exactly one fish landed among the dozens of boats trolling back and forth. I reeled in. John cut off the Mag Lip and switched to bait, which involved tying on a heavy round weight about the size of a Ping-Pong ball and a bright-green reflective plate called a flasher, to attract attention. It was a setup that could just as easily hook a guide as a fish. “Don’t hold it up in the air,” he warned me, “or it’ll end up a kite.” With an east wind blowing—the near-daily result of low-pressure weather systems on the coast sucking all the hot desert air out of eastern Washington and Oregon through the gorge—hats, tarps, tents, and anything else that wasn’t nailed down, flashers included, was at risk of taking flight. At last he threaded a brined pink shrimp onto a hook and secured its tail with a loop of line. We made straight for the Toilet Bowl.
Drano Lake’s outlet flows under a railroad trestle and Highway 14, where it meets up with the wind-tossed main stem of the Columbia. The Toilet Bowl is right at this outlet, where migrating salmon entering and leaving the lake are funneled into a narrow channel. Fishermen have learned how to exploit this conflation of natural instinct and man-made impediments, and with so many of them jostling for position in a small area, an informal system has evolved. Boats slowly circle counterclockwise, making one pass after another at the sweet spot near the bridge, dragging their lures and baits as they go. Today it was relatively calm; there were only two dozen or so boats circling. At the height of the run there might be twice that, all lined up, nose to tail, endlessly rotating this piece of high-value watery real estate. “You should see it,” John said. Some days there could be near bedlam, with simultaneous hookups, fishing lines knifing through the water, boats locking horns, words exchanged, anglers and guides frustrated with their fellow human beings. And that’s just among the boaters. A whole different contingent was busy flinging its enticements from shore. The bank anglers were like an aggrieved minority—they had no claim to power as they hurled their neon-colored Mag Lips and Wiggle Warts from the firmament with a mixture of hope and resentment, trying to penetrate the wall of boaters for a few seconds before reeling limply back to land. Occasionally one of the bankies hooked a fish despite the odds, and it was cause for celebration up and down the shoreline.
We took up our position in the line of boats and started circling the bowl, waiting—hoping—for a bite. “I had a real job once,” John said. He’d worked construction, until an injury relegated him to a desk job. I tried to picture him this way, dressed in a button-down shirt, staring at a computer monitor. His craggy, sunburned features were handsome in the way of someone who works a physical job outside, a cowhand or housepainter. I couldn’t imagine him interpreting a spreadsheet for his boss, adjusting his bifocals rather than a pair of menacing wraparound sunglasses. That job didn’t last, he went on. The company “changed direction” and he decided it was time to jump from hardcore recreational angler to professional. He resisted the urge to go to Alaska and guide for a lodge. That was a young man’s game. This way he could stay relatively close to home and his family. Even so, he still spent weeks away in the spring, renting a house with a couple of other guides, getting up at three in the morning to cure bait, tie knots, and beat the crowds at the boat launch. The dirtbag fisherman’s life, some called it, a mix of admiration and dread in their voices.
With a high-noon sun slowing the already sedate action even more and putting a few anglers visibly to sleep, chins tucked into chests, their heads lolling with the swells, I got my first and only strike of the day. It was a few minutes past the hour when the rod tip bent savagely once, twice, and I felt the pull of a strong fish. Why would an a
nimal with no desire to eat be fooled by a preposterous pink shrimp? Whether this is a territorial behavior or some sort of muscle memory from a predatory life at sea, no one can be sure. In any event, there was no point dwelling on such unanswerable questions in the moment. The reel strained, and my guide demanded that I not let the fish get under the boat. Now it was his turn to stand with a long-handled net as if ready to plant it like a victory flag in the bilge. Once I had the salmon tired out and close, he dredged it up in a spume of water and quickly knocked it over the head with a little wooden billy club. We both sat down and caught our breath. It was a beautiful fish, about twelve pounds, its opalescent sides shimmering in the glare as the faintest crimson spot pooled at the jaw. I looked a little closer. The fish was missing a small, thumb-shaped nub of flesh between the tail and dorsal called an adipose fin. The adipose is a vestigial fin that gets snipped off at a fish hatchery, to mark its man-made origins and distinguish it from a wild fish. Only fin-clipped spring chinook can be kept on the Columbia. The wild fish—those hatched naturally in gravel beds, adipose fin and all—have to be released, because they’re in such short supply. A majority of the Columbia’s salmon these days are of hatchery origin.
I wasn’t surprised. The river is hemmed in by major arterials on either side for much of its length. We were fishing next to a busy highway and a railroad line. I could hear the roar of long-haul truckers and the whine of freight trains on the tracks. Across the river, Interstate 84 chugged along, its four lanes busy with traffic. Both banks are made of riprap. More than a dozen hydroelectric dams on the main-stem Columbia alone have transformed a brawling river into a series of reservoirs more suited to transporting goods than salmon. Barges plow downriver, carrying wheat from Lewiston, Idaho, to Portland. Given all this, who would expect to catch a wild spring chinook in such a place?
Unlike other types of popular seafood, salmon spend a crucial part of their life cycle among us. They push deep inland to spawn. South of Canada, those spawning grounds are seldom far from outposts of humanity. I was reminded of what my old friend Rene Henery, a fisheries ecologist in California, likes to say: The world we give to salmon is the same world we must live in. He likens the homogeneity of the human landscape—endless sprawl bending nature to its needs—to the homogeneity of hatchery salmon. One begets the other.
Take these Columbia River springers. They’re all about the same size and shape: cookie-cutter fish produced in a fish factory, the piscine equivalent of strip-mall architecture. In a landscape that’s been homogenized, we’ve populated a tamed river with a domesticated run of salmon. But without them, the argument goes, there would hardly be any springers at all. Having just caught one and looking forward to seeing its thick red fillets on my grill, it was impossible to not have mixed feelings. The fish itself would taste just fine—would, in fact, be indistinguishable to the palate from a wild fish, since both have to feed and survive in the ocean. And certainly it was better than a farmed salmon, one raised in captivity, never knowing the freedom and danger of the sea. Still, the more I stared at that empty space where a small fin should have been, the more I had to concede that hatchery salmon are an illusion. An illusion that everything is okay. The missing adipose is all too obvious. It signifies loss. If people understood this, I wondered, would they stand for it? What if all those Copper River kings and sockeye were hatchery fish rather than wild? Would the marketplace still be mobbed? The issues facing salmon all over the world are complex, and hard to unravel. Just about every fish market in the country sells farmed salmon. You can catch a hatchery salmon in the Columbia nearly any day of the year. Why so much fuss, one might ask, over these fine distinctions between the wild ones?
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TUMBLING RIVERS TURNED INTO reservoirs; spawning grounds replaced by hatcheries; the deep blue sea scaled down to a salmon farm. Recently scientists have begun revising their theories about the adipose fin, this supposedly inconsequential limb that gets lopped of at the hatchery in a process called, unfortunately, marking. Studies suggest it may in fact have implications for how salmon choose their mates, making it one of many cues in the ongoing drama of natural selection. The little adipose might as well be a blinking billboard trying to get our attention: There is no substitute for natural ecological processes.
Like me, John would prefer to catch and eat a wild fish, adipose and all. That isn’t possible any longer with Columbia River spring chinook. The deal, our bargain with the fish, has changed. Instead of husbanding wild runs, we now make facsimiles in a lab. Perhaps this is why their reputation as the best eating of all salmon is a thing of the past. You rarely see Columbia springers in the market now. Commercial gillnetters are allocated few openings in the spring, for fear they’ll take too many wild fish in their indiscriminate nets, and both Oregon and Washington have agreed to phase out gillnetting on the main river altogether. Sport fishermen are ecstatic, of course, because their long, contentious battle with the commercial fleet over the Columbia’s shrinking resource is almost won. But the fight is mainly over hatchery fish, the figment that keeps my guide and many others like him in business.
John would also like to see the river cascading over Celilo Falls again, he confessed, but the sight of Indians netting salmon out in the middle of the river—an area closed to non-tribal anglers—now, that was an affront to him. Why should they get any special dispensation, he wondered aloud. The Indian Wars are history. Times change. Had I seen all those welfare redskins selling salmon under the Bridge of the Gods downriver? What a racket. He held up my springer by a gill so I could admire it. “Congratulations,” he said, putting it away in an ice chest. “Now you don’t have to go buy a salmon under the bridge.”
CHAPTER 4
BRIDGE OF THE GODS
The Bridge of the Gods is a wonder of geometry. Completed in 1926, it spans the Columbia River Gorge from Oregon to Washington where the river cuts through the Cascade Crest, its steel trusses converging at every conceivable angle like a kid’s Erector set gone mad. Drawn back to the Big River mere weeks after catching my first spring chinook, I parked my car in the bridge’s complicated shadow and started walking into the town of Cascade Locks, Oregon. The Columbia, that famous wind tunnel, was surprisingly calm on this summer-solstice morning. Barges pushing downriver contended with neither whitecaps nor errant sailboarders. Mount Hood’s melting glaciers looked dirty and spent as turkey vultures made low, listless turns on the horizon. A phalanx of skyscraper-sized wind turbines on a far ridge stood motionless. The power, as usual, was in the river.
Beneath the bridge, a dozen or more Native American fishermen from different tribes tried to sell me a salmon. Despite what I’d heard from white anglers about “old boots rotting in the back of a pickup,” these fish looked good—and at $8 a pound, the price was right. The memory of my springer—how it tasted grilled with a little olive oil and rosemary—was still with me. Martha called it the best piece of salmon she’d ever had, even if it was a hatchery fish. But I kept walking, ignoring the sales pitches, until I came to Brigham Fish Market at the west end of WaNaPa Street, in a choice location across from the Cascade Inn and down the block from the Eastwind hamburger stand. The two-thousand-square-foot building, designed by Kim Brigham Campbell and built by her husband, was made of stone and cedar and embellished with fish-themed metalwork by a local artist. Colorful steelhead wind socks dangled from the eaves. A crowd had gathered outside the new storefront, completed a few months earlier, waiting for the blessing to begin.
Campbell was behind the counter with her sister, Terrie Brigham. They looked a little frazzled. The place was jammed, and more people kept coming in off the street to see what was going on. Brigham’s was selling freshly caught chinook fillets for $10 a pound—cheaper than a farmed salmon in nearby Portland. Someone asked where the fish came from, and Campbell glanced over her shoulder at the back door.
“More and more these days, people want to know where their fish and their food comes from and what’s in it,” Terri
e Brigham quietly explained to me. “We can tell you when our fish was caught and who caught it.” She said that the family’s relatives and friends did most of the catching. I pointed to a fillet with a deep-orange color. “I caught that one!” she exclaimed. Usually Brigham was on the river fishing while Campbell ran the store, but today was different. Everyone in the family was here for the ceremony.
Their mother, Kathryn Brigham, sat by herself at a lunch table by the window, chewing on some chinook jerky. She offered me a piece—maybe I’d want to buy a few bags for the road, she suggested. Air-dried and leathery, the way it would have been generations ago, the preserved meat was updated with spicy chili peppers. “It has some kick,” she said approvingly, smacking her lips. The commerce of salmon was nothing new to her, even if ceremonial and subsistence fishing came first. “When my mom was alive, she’d trade salmon for vegetables and canned foods. People come down to the river and they give you a box of apples or a box of cherries.” The fish have a higher purpose, though, she said. The commercial part comes later, when enough salmon have been put away for the year and the many spiritual rites performed, like the First Foods ceremony in April. Though the tribes mostly use modern methods these days—motorboats and gill nets—there are still plenty of traditional fisheries up and down the Columbia and on suitable tributaries such as the Klickitat, where the river people gather to net salmon in a roaring basalt slot canyon that’s nearly narrow enough in spots to jump across. “Our goal is to keep those scaffolds open,” she added, referring to the scaffolds that hang over the Columbia in a few places where Indians can work a dip net in the old way. About 15 percent of the salmon in the store came from the scaffolds, the rest from gillnetting.