Upstream

by Langdon Cook

  The gillnetters work just outside the Copper River mouth in an area known as the flats, where barrier islands take the brunt of the storms blowing in off the Pacific. To the immediate northwest, in Prince William Sound, another salmon fishery is at work, using different boats and gear. The purse seiners dwarf the bowpickers and require multiple deckhands. Seiners target pink and chum salmon, species used by the canneries rather than the fresh market. The seiners will locate large schools and circle them with a net, using a smaller support skiff. The net is then pulled tight like a purse, hoisted out of the water, and emptied onto the deck. When the fishing is hot in a particular area, seiners will line up and take turns, one after another, with each haul in the hundreds of thousands of pounds. Today, at the end of August and with only a few openings left, Ess was after a different species: coho salmon—or silvers, as they’re called by almost everyone, whether you’re on the Oregon Coast, Puget Sound, or the Gulf of Alaska.

  On the Pacific salmon’s evolutionary tree, silvers occupy a branch closest to chinook. Like their larger relatives, they spend more time in fresh water after hatching than other species, a strategy that won’t serve them well as the Anthropocene era progresses, with increasingly degraded river habitat a barrier to their success. They’re the second-least-abundant species, after chinook, but in much of Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska they’re the chief saltwater game fish. Puget Sound in a good year will see close to a million returning silvers in the late summer and fall, split about 50–50 between wild and hatchery fish. Clayoquot Sound to the north, on Vancouver Island, is another place where anglers from all over the world travel to tie into a strong, hard-fighting silver. Fast and streamlined, these pursuers of baitfish are voracious predators that rely on speed to chase down their prey. They’re the cheetahs among salmon, averaging six to twelve pounds, with the largest on record weighing in at twenty-six pounds. Anglers call the big males hooknoses because of their distinctive kypes, a biologist’s term for the elongated and hooked snout that gives the Pacific salmon genus its name, Oncorhynchus. It’s thought that the larger and more pronounced the hook, the more likely a male is to attract a mate. No surprise, then—or it shouldn’t be—that wild fish have demonstrably larger kypes than do hatchery fish.

  Silvers are aggressive and sometimes foolhardy. They’re known to chase flies and lures with abandon near the surface, sometimes right into the beach in just inches of water, and once hooked they’re the most acrobatic of all the Pacific salmon, going aerial and testing a fisherman’s tackle with hard-charging runs. I’ve taken silvers at my feet on a Seattle beach, standing in ankle-deep water, and stripping my fly practically to the tip of the rod. One time I surprised another angler next to me, a recent immigrant uneducated in the ways of silvers. A small school flashed by in the breakers just a few feet from us. They turned and came back. I put my fly in front of the pod and watched as three fish all attacked the hot-pink confection at once. Feeling a tug, I struck hard and landed one of them in the same motion, right on the gravel behind the other angler. “These fish are crazy, mon!” he exclaimed in a deep East African accent. They’re also tasty. Though not quite as admired as kings and sockeye, their flesh is firm and bright red with orange tints, and perfect for the grill.

  Though silvers will spawn in the tributaries of large rivers, they’re best known for using small coastal streams, some of them barely seasonal rivulets. This makes the silver a popular fish among kids up and down the Pacific coastline, who find the adult fish and their progeny in little neighborhood streams and even urban creeks clean and cold enough to support salmon. As every kid knows, a stream with a bunch of fallen trees in it is much more fun to explore than one without. Yet, for more than a century, the parents of such kids have been busy cleaning and manicuring these streams, removing the woody debris to make the water courses more navigable or, in their eyes, more pretty. A stream without logjams, however, is also one without deep pools, braided meanders, and gravel bars. Lacking structure, these creek beds are scoured and channelized by winter storms, which wash out the spawning gravels. The result is a fishless stream.

  At one time, silvers were synonymous with the north coast of California. Fisheries ecologists like Rene Henery think of them as the redwood fish. Silver salmon and the great fog-shrouded coastal forests evolved together, with the salmon making use of all those redwood-shaded streams that purled and pooled off the coastal hills. The big trees created slow bends and deep, sanctuarylike holes where they fell, slowing the gradient of the rivers cascading down from the mountains and allowing spawning gravels to accumulate in the tailouts. Before the timber industry logged out these unique riparian zones up and down the California coast, silvers spawned in hundreds of small creeks from Monterey to the northern limit of the Redwood Empire just over the border at Brookings, Oregon. Colored up a garish pink in the spawning season, sometimes rolling about in streams that couldn’t even cover their backs, the fish were easy to spot.

  My first salmon hooked from a beach was a silver, caught on a rod-and-reel combo that I bought at the now-defunct Warshal’s Sporting Goods in downtown Seattle for about thirty dollars. I took it one weekend to Whidbey Island with Martha. A local tackle shop supplied me some lures, the ever-popular Buzz-Bomb, in neon shades of pink and green. “Just walk down to the beach,” the clerk at the tackle shop advised. “You’ll see what’s going on.” He was right. I could see what was going on. There were fishermen up and down the beach, flinging their lures out into the chop, and every now and then someone would yell—“Here they come!”—and we’d all look down the beach to see a parade of jumping and splashing advancing toward us. The silvers were swimming right on by, close to the shore, announcing themselves. With any luck, you could put a lure right on one’s nose. Anglers on either side of me did just that and hauled in beautiful salmon, and then it was my turn. A fish grabbed my lure and took off. I apologized as I staggered out in front of other fishermen, trying to avoid their lines. Eventually I got the fish under control and fought it into the shallows. “Haul it up,” someone advised. This dragging of the fish out of the water and up on the cobbles struck me as somehow unsporting, but it was clearly the only choice with a seven- or eight-pound silver that leaped and thrashed like a hellion. Moments later I had my first salmon on the beach. The fish flopped on its side and then over again, its gills gasping for water. Martha looked at me. “Now what are you going to do?”

  WE IDLED IN JUST FOUR FEET OF WATER, holding our position a few hundred yards offshore with a five-knot breeze blowing against a five-knot current in a comfortable stalemate. I was still getting used to these unlikely depths. The coastline around Cordova is like a big bathtub. You can hop out of the boat a mile from shore and land in knee- deep water. At low tide the place is a huge mudflat. And the water: Take away those mountain vistas all around and you might think you were bobbing in the Gulf of Mexico, not the Gulf of Alaska. Aquamarine as far as the eye can see. Ess told me to not be fooled. “That’s unadulterated ocean out there. We’re fishing in some of the biggest tides in the world. All of this water in a matter of six hours flows out of here, and it’s riverlike conditions.” He pointed to the south—Pacific Ocean for thousands of miles. “It’s like Hawaii Five-0 out here.” And virtually all of it within our line of sight was open. Ess could go another eight miles offshore—over the horizon line—to fish.

  I studied the beach. Behind it, a flank of snowy peaks rose in the distance like a white wall—and indeed, those mountains, part of the Chugach Range, receive more snowfall than anywhere else in the world and proved impenetrable to explorers for a long, long time. Even today they reward arrogance with their own special form of vengeance. Recently a friend of Ess’s had tried to backpack from Cordova north to Valdez, about fifty miles as the crow flies but much longer on foot. He showed up back in Cordova a few weeks later, emaciated and clinging to life.

  Since the season was nearly over, Ess was fishing closer to town than usual today. “Everybody’s got t
heir little spot they prefer. I like to go really far away. Once we come around the corner here, you start heading down the coast of Alaska. You can go all the way down to Juneau. I love that feeling of being on the edge of the world. So I go way down past everybody, way southeast. It takes a couple three hours to get to where you want to fish; that’s why we’ve got to wake up so darn early.” Not today. A six o’clock departure was downright civilized. In a few minutes—right at 7:00 A.M., as determined by Alaska Fish and Game, and not a second earlier—Ess could start rolling out his gill net. The opening was twenty-four hours in all, though he didn’t plan to fish past dark; the change in tides would work against him, and there was no point in dealing with shallow bars and darkness for just a few extra fish. Three days had passed since the last opening. The fishermen call it cleanup—they’re cleaning up the fish that have accumulated in the area over the last few days. The salmon come in from the North Pacific and follow the beaches, schooling up and loitering off points. “They’re following the current, and once they smell a little Copper River mixed in the surface lens of the water they start keying in, and depending which way the wind is blowing, they angle in and pile up on the beaches. Silver salmon like to hang out for a while. Sockeye push right through, so you can miss a big wad of fish if you’re not in front of them.”

  Ess pulled on his bright-orange fishing bibs, not bothering with a jacket. It looked to be the first sunny day in a while. The Midnight Express rocked in the breakers just off the beach. He shifted a gear knob on his reel into free-spool mode, attached a big red buoy to the front end of his net by a carabiner, and tossed it overboard. Now all he had to do was put his boat into reverse by activating a second set of controls, mounted near the bow, and the gill net would pay out from the free-spooling reel. The net was 150 fathoms long—about nine hundred feet—and twenty feet wide. Small Styrofoam buoys painted white and yellow floated on the top of the net—this was called the cork line—and weights sank the bottom of the net—the lead line—so that it hung in the water like a curtain. Ess motored backward away from the breakers until all 150 fathoms stretched in a line nearly perpendicular to the beach. Salmon swimming easterly along Hinchinbrook’s southern shore toward the Copper River would entangle themselves as they tried to pass through.

  Contrary to popular belief, the fish often sense the net. “They know it’s a barrier,” Ess said. They can feel it, almost the way we might hear something that alerts us to danger. “Their lateral line is a giant eardrum. They can sense the net is in front of them by the vibration the net’s making just from the water passing over the filaments.” But that input doesn’t save them. They’re headstrong, with a place to be. They try to pass through the net and it snares them. Sometimes they’ll run into it and try to back away, catching a gill plate. Other times it’s just the tip of a fin or a lip, enough to become entangled. Struggle makes it worse, as they get wrapped up in the mesh. You can see the fish splashing from the boat. On a good day, fish will start hitting the net as soon as it’s laid out, and there will be sloshing and corks bobbing up and down the line.

  Right now we were fishing the net, as Ess put it. It was still tied onto the boat, and he maneuvered his outside controls to make small adjustments to each of his engines. This way he could tweak its shape as it hung in the water—give it a C shape or an S shape, depending on what the wind and current were doing. Sometimes he disconnected from the net and let it drift freely in the current. Early in the season, while fishing for sockeye, he looks for big splashes. These are kings. He’ll disconnect and steer in the direction of the splash, nosing his bow up to the disturbance and using his dip net to bring in the fish. “The big suckers don’t last long in the mesh. They don’t get caught by much more than a fin or a lip. Luckily, they’re fairly docile creatures. When they hit they just lay in the web and they’re not too motivated to get out. If you do everything perfect—you get up there and pull the cork line and get the dip net around them…and then…ahhhh…get him before he gives a couple big kicks—you’ve got him. Losing a king is a pretty emotional experience. Sometimes the wind will drift you onto the net and you’ll have to reach back and hit reverse. The net stretches out and you lose the fish and curse a little bit. I got about a dozen big kings this year. I kept them all. They’re a good bargaining fish. I give them to my doctor, my chiropractor, people who I feel I need to reciprocate with something special. I don’t try to target them. The guys who try to catch kings are missing out on a lot of sockeye. This year the lion’s share came from sockeye.” In early June, battling eight-foot seas, Ess made thirty thousand dollars in just two days by hauling in fourteen thousand pounds of sockeye.

  Several hundred yards away, a boat that had been idling now started laying out its net. Ess said it was a Russian. He could tell by the hull, which stood out of the water with a high, sharp profile. “They build their own boats. They look like Terminator boats.” I gathered there was some friction. Fishing communities, like other communities dependent on natural resources requiring careful husbandry, can be insular. In such a climate, any small act—even if unintentional—takes on a larger significance. Technically this was an Alaskan Russian to our port side, a U.S. citizen, probably from Homer, where there were a couple of Russian Orthodox communities; these were populated mostly by fishermen who had left their native country long ago, in a diaspora that included migrations to Portugal, South America, and even China, before they formed tight communities in Alaska. I’d read about them in The Atlantic before coming to Alaska. The article referred to the Russians as “Old Believers” looking for a remote place where they could be left alone—a commonality among Alaskan homesteaders of all kinds. It also said “the Russian fishing fleet today has a reputation for aggressive tactics and self-policing. Americans in the surrounding communities can share stories about the Russian fleet setting nets too close to other boats, ignoring calls from the Coast Guard, and only responding to help if it comes from another Russian.” I asked Ess if this was true. He thought about it for a moment.

  “They went the long way around the earth before ending up here. They’re refugees from a pretty gnarly regime, still shell-shocked. They won’t even look you in the eye. Part of their identity is to not integrate.” Ess was annoyed by the fact that the boat had waited to see what he would do. Now it was upcurrent from us and would intercept any fish coming our way. Though not close enough to qualify as corking—when a fisherman lays out his net right in front of another—it was still an irritation, given how spread out the fishery was today. “I’d hold him to a higher standard if he wasn’t Russian,” Ess said finally, letting it slide. He ate another donut. Today’s fishing wasn’t going to change his annual income too much, so there was nothing to get stressed out about, though it still irked him. The money was in sockeye, not silvers. He took a look through his binoculars. It was probably a teenager, barely old enough to drive a car. “Most of them are kids, eighteen, nineteen years old. They’re out here because their dads make them.”

  Nearly half the gill-net fleet in Cordova is now made up of Russian Americans. “They perceive prejudice. They think we think they’re weird. If he was drifting on top of me, I’d say, ‘Hey, can you give me some room.’ Start mellow. And if he goes, ‘Ahh, fuck you,’ if it’s a young guy, I’d say, ‘You’re being a dick and I’m gonna be a dick right back to you, if you don’t mind.’ So I’d set right in front of him. He’ll pick up and set in front of me. I’ll go talk to him. When I go to talk to him, I’ll take my engines out of gear but I’ll still be going forward and I’ll lay up right against him, ram him a little bit, scratch the shit out of his boat. It’s a psychological thing. I have a boat I don’t care about—well, I do, but what I want him to know is that I’m willing to take crazy to the next level. It’s the whole ‘mutually assured destruction’ thing, so I kind of feign on that. If he knows I’m willing to trade some paint, he’ll back off. Even though it’s a ruse.”

  Ess poured some coffee from his thermos and fell silent.
Maybe he’d told me too much. We both watched the boat to the west rising and falling in the swells. “It makes me all anxiety-ridden,” he said at last. “I’m not a confrontational guy, but you have to go there in your head. Otherwise it will always happen. Earlier this year I bumped someone. You never call it ramming. ‘Oops, sorry. My bad. I’m not very good at steering.’ It just lets them know you’re not happy and you’re not gonna be pushed around. Word gets out. ‘The Midnight Express came over and bumped me.’ It’s scary. You never know if they’ll pull out a gun and go, ‘No, fuck you!’ Some of the non-Russian guys in town, the heavy drinkers and old-time salts, they’ll pull a gun on you. They know the game. All of a sudden you’re playing a game you don’t want to play.” Ess’s wife gets protective when she comes aboard, despite being very non-confrontational in other aspects of her life. She yells at fishermen who cork her husband. The fishing life is like that. One’s livelihood is on the line.

  At 8:00 A.M., Ess put his foul-weather gear back on and went outside to haul in his first set of the morning. On a busier day he might make half-hour sets or even ten-minute “flyer sets” to sample a spot; today he could see already that fishing was slow and there was no point in making faster sets. He reattached the net line to his reel and put it into gear. With his foot on a trip wire to control its speed, he watched his net as it came off the water and over a roller before winding onto the reel. When a fish appeared, he cut the power. The first salmon was bright and silver, about twelve pounds. It was already dead, its gill plates forced shut by the net. Ess untangled it and used his gloved hand to rip the gills so it would bleed out. He gently dropped the fish to the deck and it slid toward the hold in a watery pool of its own blood. The next fish was a flounder, requiring careful extraction due to a poisonous spine behind its fin. Ess flipped it back out into the breakers like a Frisbee. “You wouldn’t believe how tough those guys are,” he said with admiration. He’d caught and released the same flounder multiple times in the past, none the worse for wear. The next salmon was a male, about fourteen pounds, and active. It kicked its tail and tried to free itself, to no avail. Ess picked a few more from the net and knocked some jellyfish out. Six fish in a set was pretty sad; not even a hundred dollars’ worth. He hauled up the rest of the net. The reel moved back and forth laterally on a spindle—just like the reel of a spinning rod—winding up the net evenly. Ess didn’t need to worry too much about today’s small haul. Fortunately, his season was already made.