Upstream

by Langdon Cook

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  THE U.S. HATCHERY SYSTEM began as an act of Congress in 1871 and broke ground in California a year later, when Livingston Stone, a former Unitarian minister, began serving the new U.S. Fish Commission by building the first national hatchery on the McCloud River, a tributary of the Sacramento River snatched away from local Indians. (That same year Stone published his life’s work, Domesticated Trout: How to Breed and Grow Them.) The hatchery location is telling. The Sacramento was one of the world’s premier chinook nurseries before white settlement, but a mere two decades of gold mining had already taken its toll by the time Stone arrived, to such a degree that the original pioneers of the canning industry, Hapgood, Hume & Co., had decamped from the region for the Columbia River to the north in 1866. Stone’s job was to restore the lost productivity, even if he couldn’t reverse the decline of the river itself.

  Born of ingenuity, sweat, and a spirit of exploration, the idea of making salmon was a product of its time. The root philosophy held so much promise: improve nature for the benefit of mankind. Fittingly, Stone’s first shipment of salmon eggs went east on the fledgling transcontinental railroad, in an effort to prop up the failing salmon fisheries of New England with non-native Pacific salmon. The McCloud River hatchery tried to raise chinook but found more success with rainbow trout, and so began the export of that game and food fish all over the world. Nevertheless, the know-how to produce all species would come shortly, and before long a belief metastasized that you could mitigate any insults committed against a river and its fish by building a hatchery.

  The key word is mitigate. They became known as mitigation hatcheries. Erect a dam? Build a mitigation hatchery. Clear-cut a forest? Build a mitigation hatchery. Dig an open-pit mine? Build a mitigation hatchery. Irrigate a river to death? Build a mitigation hatchery. Today one of these hatcheries is named after the country’s original aquaculturist. The Livingston Stone National Fish Hatchery squats in the shadow of Shasta Dam near Redding, California. There, hatchery employees are busy keeping the Sacramento River’s declining run of winter chinook on life support. Winter chinook are unique among Pacific salmon for a life history that involves migrating up the Sacramento in the winter months and then spawning in the heat of summer. This is possible because the Sacramento Basin once had tributaries fed by cold springs that kept the water temperature down. Shasta Dam (and Keswick Dam a few miles downriver) changed this. Now the winter chinook from those tributaries are all mixed together into a single population that spawns in the main stem of the Sacramento below the dams. Historically the population numbered about two hundred thousand returning adults; today it averages ten thousand, a 95 percent decline, mitigation hatchery and all.

  The dawn of modernism has many symbolic markers: railroads, machine guns, abstract painting. Add to the list the fish hatchery. Though it has its roots in Roman times two millennia ago, and even in dynastic China a couple of thousand years before that, the hatchery as we know it today is a largely American invention of the Industrial Age that coincided, not coincidentally, with dam building, hydropower, large-scale irrigation, and the taming of the West. Fish didn’t need a river and Americans didn’t need nature. A notion emerged—and still survives today—that the environment could be plundered endlessly for profit, and all you needed to do was mitigate the damage with a hatchery. Just as the canneries moved north from the Sacramento to the Columbia, so too would the burgeoning hatchery effort. By the close of the twentieth century, the Columbia Basin, with more than four hundred dams large and small, would become the most hydroelectrically developed river system in the world—with the largest complex of fish hatcheries to show for it.

  Most salmon hatcheries never fulfilled their promise and quietly got mothballed. Even those with some initial success required regular infusions of wild genetics to keep their stock from “wearing out,” beginning a reckless cycle of sacrificing a wild run in order to preserve its hatchery replacement; that sad process was supported by politicians promising more fish to their constituents, compliant fish-and-game agencies, and university fisheries departments caught up in the lucrative hatchery schemes that funnel money in and graduate students out. The cycle continues today despite widespread condemnation from wild-fish advocates. It turns out that the life histories of salmon are much more complicated than Livingston Stone—or generations of his adherents—realized. A chinook from a coastal rainforest isn’t the same as a chinook from the high-desert plateau. Though the same species, each possesses a site-specific set of adaptive genes that make it more fit for a certain sort of habitat or run timing. Even in the same river system, stocks from different tributaries have genetic makeups that give them an advantage in their particular niche. Hatcheries can’t possibly address all this genetic variation. Meanwhile, with the advent and proliferation of hatcheries, the hereditary diversity that has made salmon such vigorous survivors up and down the Pacific Rim—through volcano, earthquake, and Ice Age, through drought and disease—is now dwindling, as stocks go extinct in little tributary after tributary, victims of dams, overfishing, and development. Even more alarming, scientists now know that the hatchery fish themselves are hastening the demise of the last wild holdouts. They compete with the wild fish for food and territory, and sometimes they even spawn with the wild fish, diluting their genetics in the process.

  It’s not an easy case to make, the case against hatcheries. Most people assume the hatcheries are saving salmon. My daughter came home from school one day with exciting news. The entire fifth grade got to skip classes and go on a field trip to a fish hatchery. They piled into a bus and drove east from Seattle across Lake Washington to the suburb of Issaquah, nestled in the Cascade foothills in the shadow of Cougar Mountain. There they visited the Issaquah Creek salmon hatchery. The hatchery has been operating since 1936. It was built to address depressed fish runs after the completion of the Lake Washington Ship Canal. But the fish runs continue to slide even as the hatchery pumps out more and more juvenile salmon. Some of the state biologists promoting the hatchery effort say they just can’t understand why this is so.

  “There was a big black bucket with more than two hundred fish in there,” my daughter reported. She got a paper cup with two babies with very different personalities. One hardly moved. “He was shy.” The other was active and tried to jump out of the cup. She walked down to a calm stretch of the creek, where the temperature was fifty-five degrees—ten degrees warmer than usual, someone said. One of her fish jumped out of the cup and made “a huge splash” and was gone. The other was reluctant to leave the cup. He finally swam out and he “just sat there.” Then the shy salmon met another fry and they swam away together. She beamed with the telling. A happy ending.

  What was I supposed to say to that? Explain to my daughter that this hatchery was promulgating a lie—that we can engineer salmon just the way we engineer our cities? In some ways, a hatchery is a kid’s dream, the ultimate do-it-yourself science experiment. I have a friend, a grown-up, who has his own illegal hatchery. He’s raising steelhead. The fry live in ponds on his property. Wires strung across the ponds discourage kingfishers, herons, and gulls. When the fry are ready to smolt—the process salmon go through to prepare for salt water, which includes changing into a new silvery set of clothes—they leave the safety of the ponds via a creek that flows through my friend’s property and leads to the main river. Of the hundreds of fish that vacate his ponds, only a few make it back each year from travels at sea, as six-, seven-, even ten-pound adults. Imagining a steelhead of this size propelling itself up a tiny stream to reach its rearing pond is a thrill. Each summer, my friend wakes up one morning to find a small school of giant fish in his backyard. It isn’t difficult to see why he’s breaking the law.

  Guido listened to my stories. He heard this sort of thing all the time. He understood the appeal of my friend’s trout ponds, of the school field trip. Children are exposed to so little nature as it is; how can you possibly complain about a visit to a salmon hatchery? His critic
s like to cast him as a villain determined to take everyone’s fun away, when in fact his opposition to the hatchery complex is more nuanced than that. But nuance is the first victim in today’s contentious politics. If anything, Rahr is fighting for a compromise.

  Today, just about everyone committed to the idea of wild fish wants to see the hatchery system overhauled. The exceptions are commercial fishermen, who can’t make a living without the hatcheries, sport-fishing guides (same reason), and Native Americans, who depend on salmon for ceremonial and subsistence purposes. In San Francisco I met a commercial fisherman named Larry Collins, a community organizer who has advocated on behalf of beleaguered Bay Area fishermen for decades. On the issue of hatcheries he was clear: “Gotta have ’em.” Without fishermen, the argument goes, Big Ag would claim all of California’s water for itself, and Collins agreed. “When I started fishing, there were five thousand salmon boats in the state,” he said while unloading bushels of Dungeness crab from one of the boats in his co-op. “That was in eighty-four. This last year there were nine hundred boats and only about half those fish. In thirty years we’ve lost ninety percent of the fleet. If you look at the amount of water taken out of the Sacramento–San Joaquin system and the amount of acreage of almonds and shit that’s planted, it’s a direct correlation. They’ve made a decision about what to use the water for. The farmers got it all and the fleet got fucked. Water is everything.” For Collins, building hatcheries to pump out catchable salmon is a no-brainer.

  The hatchery system, at its heart, was designed to give people fish to catch, not to save or enhance native fish populations. Hatchery fish behave differently from wild fish. Confinement teaches them to crowd together rather than spread through the system. They nip at one another and compete aggressively for food. Studies show that their bullying pushes wild fish out of the best habitat. Yet this aggression doesn’t help them in the long run. Untutored in the ways of nature, they end up on predators’ menus more often than their wild counterparts do. Whereas the shadow of an osprey or merganser passing over the surface will scatter wild salmon fry, the hatchery fish might mistake such cues for the hand that once fed them and swim right toward their fate. Because they survive at a lower rate, hatchery fish have to be produced in the millions. Certain genetic traits—or lack thereof—are even visible to the naked eye, the sort of traits that take thousands of years of evolution and local adaptation to show up. Hatchery steelhead, for instance, rarely exhibit the burly “shoulders” that characterize large male fish and presumably make them more attractive to female steelhead. They look like clones, all about the same size and shape in any given plant. Anglers sometimes call them zombies. When the zombies go feral and try to spawn with wild fish in the river, the result is a dilution of genetic variability in the offspring. Hatchery fish left to their own devices dwindle over time, each generation less fit than the previous one. So even in quality habitat, a run of hatchery salmon will require regular infusions of genetic material to remain viable.

  As Rahr pointed out in an editorial for The Oregonian, the largest wildlife-restoration effort in world history has so far been a failure: “Despite the investment of $15 billion since 1978, no race of wild Columbia Basin salmon or steelhead has recovered enough to be removed from the federal endangered species list.” Meanwhile, there are still wild runs that don’t require anything more than a functioning river to keep coming back year after year, a remarkable gift from the sea. Why, he asked me, isn’t there any investment to keep those runs healthy? “Every hospital has an emergency room, but that shouldn’t be your first line of defense. If you really want to have salmon in a hundred years, you have to target strongholds, get in early, and prevent bad things from happening. It’s easier to prevent a dam from being built than to tear one out.”

  The river we were fishing that morning was one of those strongholds. It had stable populations of wild salmon in a functioning ecosystem. The stronghold concept is a key part of what Rahr and the Wild Salmon Center are trying to do. “It’s a concentration of abundance and diversity that’s stronger than the surrounding population,” he explained. There are global strongholds, such as the sockeye salmon of Bristol Bay, Alaska, and regional strongholds, like the salmon of the Tillamook. In both cases, the fish have access to a high-quality habitat. The Tillamook is interesting from a conservation point of view because in some ways it’s a forgotten forest. Though parts were logged, large tracts of old growth burned in the early 1900s before they could be set upon by industrial timber harvest, and when the chain saws moved on, the forest was largely abandoned by the forces that would transform most of the Oregon Coast Range. Many believed that the fires had burned so hotly that dense woods would never return. It was during this period that Rahr’s mother, in her Portland girlhood, helped reforesting efforts by planting hundreds of conifer seedlings. The efforts paid off and the burned areas, all told more than five hundred square miles, slowly recovered. Now the Tillamook is once again full of merchantable timber, the same sort of timber that provides good salmon habitat.

  For more than a century, the forests of the Pacific Northwest were ruthlessly logged with little regard for salmon. Clear-cut logging dumped egg-smothering sediment into the rivers, and a lack of shade warmed the water beyond the fishes’ thermal tolerance. Loggers built splash dams to transport timber; when the dams were dynamited, the resulting flood surge moved the cut logs downriver, scouring the streambed. Despite a fever pitch of work that transformed the great old-growth forests into tree farms in less than a century, the logging communities remained poor and rudderless. By the 1990s, with just small remnants of old growth left—less than 10 percent by most accounts, mainly in high-elevation wilderness preserves—the timber heyday came to a close, with the implementation of the Clinton Administration’s Northwest Forest Plan and a call to action to revitalize communities in timber country with job retraining and environmental restoration. Even so, twenty years on, the timber interests are still crying out for more wood to cut. In Oregon, politicians on both sides of the aisle want to open the woods again to increased logging. Unlike Washington State, Oregon doesn’t have Boeing, Microsoft, or Amazon. State legislators believe its well-being is still dependent on Old Economy resource extraction. Once again the Tillamook has been put on the chopping block. “It’s like the 1950s,” Rahr said. “To really understand what we’re up against, you need to attend one of the state forestry meetings.”

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  ROLL-CASTING THIRTY FEET OF heavy sink-tip line from underneath the branches of a fly-stealing oak tree was less than balletic, but after a few false starts I managed to get my fly out into the riffle, and the current did the rest of the work, pulling another thirty feet of line through the guides until my fly was deep in the hole several pool lengths away. Now I started to very slowly strip it back in. All at once the rod turned in my hand and I felt slack. Rahr pushed his glasses back on his face. “You need to lean into these fish,” he said calmly. A few casts later and the rod jumped again. I lifted the rod tip to set the hook, then watched helplessly as line raced through the guides and the line went limp once more. “You really need to lean into them,” he repeated a little more firmly. “These aren’t normal fish.”

  Rahr first learned how to fly-fish for what he calls “monster chinook” in Alaska. “There’s a place on the Kenai. They’re giant, the biggest in the world. A few of the local guides were fly-fishing. They turned me on to it.” After getting a tip from one of them, Guido watched the river more carefully. Every now and then a massive king rolled on the surface, showing its broad silver flanks—and, more to the point, revealing its lie. Guido would cast and let his fly swing through the salmon’s holding water. “My fly came across and then stopped suddenly. I lifted my rod tip and lost the fish.” He gave a little shudder, as if the loss was still painful. “The guides on the bank said, ‘You idiot, what were you thinking? Don’t do that. That’s not how you set a hook in these kings. When the fly stops, you take two steps back and, with yo
ur whole body, you pound that hook. Pound it, pound it, pound it—until you think the rod’s gonna break. That’s how you set the hook in a big king.’ ” The next morning he went back down to the riverbank. A huge fish rolled right in front of him. He cast his fly across and felt it stop once again. “I took two steps back and went wham. I look at the rod and I hear this buzzing sound. All of a sudden, boom! The rod shatters just above the cork. It was like a gun going off. The tip slides down the line into the water and boinks the chinook right on the nose and the thing just explodes. It cartwheels out of the river and takes off on a screaming run. I’ve just got a reel. The rod’s gone. The line’s gone. The fish is gone. Everything’s gone.”

  “You’re saying I need to set the hook more forcefully? So the rod detonates?”

  Guido took the rod from my grip and demonstrated on an imaginary fish. With the full force of his body, he nearly jumped out of the boat while yanking the rod back with both hands. The maneuver made him stumble over his tackle bag and we rocked dangerously, fly boxes scattering across our feet. “See what I mean?” he said, handing the rod back to me.

  “I’ll try not to flip us.”

  Guido reminisced about his Alaskan adventures as I got ready to cast again. Soon, I told him, I would have similar tales to tell. I was going to Cordova, the small fishing village that had made such a big name for itself with Copper River salmon. Guido suggested a few little-known streams where I might want to cast a line. The big state to our north, he agreed, was rightly a place of myth and yearning—yet even Alaska, he said gravely, was susceptible to the forces working against the wild. “And you don’t have to go there to catch a monster king. You can do that right here.” That’s when I noticed a slight disturbance with my fly, a little tic-tic-tic that might have been some debris near the river bottom or possibly an annoyed chinook swiping at my fly. When I felt a distinct pull, I struck as savagely as I could without destroying the rod or swamping the boat. There was a long pause, during which I might have reflected on the high blue sky that morning, the wind whistling through my guides, white gulls wheeling in the distance. The boat dipped on one side, then the other. After what seemed an eternity, I felt the weight of a fish realizing it’s hooked. It blasted across the river and went to the bottom with most of my line. Ten minutes later—which felt more like an hour—Guido helped me net a bright twenty-pound hen with a conspicuous adipose fin.