Upstream

by Langdon Cook

  It was time to prepare the hold. Ess shoveled flake ice and mixed it with buckets of seawater. Slush ice is the industry standard for keeping the fish cold. Each fish is laid in the slush and covered with more ice. Later they’re put into brailer bags, large mesh totes that can be hoisted out of the hold by the tender. On the next set, a sea lion surfaced right where a fish had just hit the net a moment before. “Thief,” Ess said without malice. You had to give them credit: They could pick a net faster than any fisherman. A few minutes later the sea lion was back. It cruised the length of the net, coming surprisingly close to the boat. There was nothing to be done. Though he had a pistol somewhere on board to scare away predators, Ess rarely brandished it. He used to use M-80s, but 9/11 had made that harder. “They know we don’t like it,” he said of the seals and sea lions. “They’re diabolical. I have a lot more tolerance than most fishermen. Can you imagine trying to catch a salmon with your mouth, no opposing thumbs to help you out?”

  Sea otters are a different sort of problem. “Once they learn about the net, they’ll pop over the cork line. Before they get trained up, they go through a learning stage when they get tangled and you have to help them out.” This means trying to gingerly unwrap a furious ball of fur and fangs. No one wants baby sea otters in their nets. But dogfish are just about the worst. The three-foot sharks come through in large schools that can destroy a net. “They’ll tear it in half. You can’t really pick ’em. There’s no market.” Ess looked out at the beryl-colored ocean, seemingly so benign. “There are a million ways to spend ten thousand dollars out here.”

  And there are also plenty of ways to die. Every year a few boats—and sometimes lives—are lost. Peeing off the boat is an easy way to fall overboard. “If I was smart I’d have a tagline all around, something to grab on to.” There’s this impression, popularized in the media, that half the fleet is on drugs. I asked him about it. “There’s a few,” Ess agreed, though not as much meth as some think. “You can’t perform out here on drugs—not that kind of drug. Meth people burn out. You have to be a smart thinker to stay on edge.” No, what weeds out the fleet isn’t so much drugs or alcohol or carelessness but work ethic. “Some of these guys will throw their net out and go to sleep or watch a movie. Everybody’s got a different way of doing it. Maybe ten percent of the fleet is really aggressive and works really hard to get tuned in.”

  Ess checked in with his radio group, a bunch of friends in the fleet who talk to one another over a scrambled frequency. They use code names. Ess is Mowgli, the feral child from Kipling’s Jungle Book, the one raised by wolves. His brother is Tenakey, a sly reference to one of Ashton’s first forays into the business world. “I just watched a sea lion steal a fish,” Mowgli reported. “I’m gonna pick up the net. I think they’re blowing off the beach for us. Getting some wind out of the cutoff. We’re hanging okay, but I don’t think it’s good fishing.” The idea is to share information with a small number of trusted partners—and also to stay safe. A gillnetter with the name Woody chimed in. He had just torn his net on a stump, an accident that would probably cost him a hundred dollars, paid to a net mender in town. Now he was to the south, doing short sets. “Pretty consistent. Ten fish every fifteen to twenty minutes. There’s a jumper here and there, but it’s chockablock full of boats down low. Kooky crowded. If you come up high on the east side, there’s room.”

  “That’s what I was expecting,” Ess told his friend. “We’re just hanging out and having fun.”

  “Yeah, it’s a nice day for that,” Woody agreed. “I’m just paying for propellers and web. We’ll do that after this water. A hundred fish. We’re almost done. Not getting rich, not starving.” Before signing off, Woody said that their engineering project—fixing Ess’s gas tank in his welding shop back on the mainland—would take only a few more beers. It’s a good business model, he added, one he could work with. Ess signed off and took a slug of coffee. “Woody’s a good aluminum fabricator and has a nice shop. He’s a benevolent father figure for a lot of guys and a good influence on the younger crowd.” Not everyone in the radio group works out. Ess could think of at least one guy they had to cut loose for sandbagging. “It was a tough call. He was a lifelong friend of ours. But he was always downplaying how many fish he was catching. ‘Oh, it doesn’t look like much, maybe thirty or forty.’ Two hours later he’s like, ‘Yeah, I had two hundred on that one.’ Finally we said, ‘Dude, give us the radio.’ He was kind of a dandy and didn’t fish very hard. His heart wasn’t in it. Now he’s got a bookstore in Homer, he’s got a coffee shop and a B&B, and it’s totally up his alley. It all works out.”

  The radio buzzed again. Another member of the group was way southeast. The tide had picked up and he was averaging a fish a minute. At least someone was catching fish.

  —

  THE RUSSIAN BOAT HADN’T moved in a while. Ess wasn’t surprised. “He hasn’t picked his net once. He’s watching movies or playing Xbox.” Ess wasn’t sure what to make of the Russians in general. They stayed to themselves. “There’s a lot of prejudice because they come flying into town and it’s bling-bling. The first thing they do with their money is spinner rims on their trucks and big sound systems. They can be quite a nuisance in a small town, peeling rubber everywhere.” Ess paused and thought about it. “We’ve got American kids that do that too. But the Russians tend to piss off a lot of people with their unruly behavior, with the fireworks and gun shooting, and it doesn’t help them out with their public perception. I think there are some universal laws to being a good human. I know culturally there are differences. But if you’re an asshole, you’re an asshole in every culture. I can’t really tolerate it. I try to keep them lined out.”

  It’s a good idea to have friends on the water. Ess was pretty sure he had a buyer for the Midnight Express, a young woman from Anchorage who was fairly new to the fleet and had struggled with mechanical issues with her boat, the China Cat, all season long. She was done for the year, having skipped today’s opener to go camping with her mother. “She’s making mistakes that beginners make. Not only do you lose out on fishing time but you need to pay for your mistakes. Ashton has taken her under his wing. She’s awesome and we like having her around. We want her to be successful, because we want people like that in our fishery. If she sells her permit, the person who buys it isn’t likely to be as awesome.” For his new boat, Ess had in mind one of the big inboard-jet boats that are popular on the flats. He expected to pay somewhere between a quarter and a third of a million dollars for it, the sort of money that required him to be ready when next year’s season opened in mid-May. Already he was drawing up plans for how he would tweak it with personal touches that fit his fishing style. “There’s a saying: The first boat you build is just a boat. The second you build is your boat.”

  —

  LATE-AFTERNOON SUN WARMED OUR faces as we sat outside on the deck, shooting the breeze. Loons taxied across the flats. A seal popped up and looked at us with its innocent-seeming brown eyes. On the next set Ess untangled a hen chum salmon, a different species. After picking up the net and laying it out again, he tended to a half dozen silvers and then found the chum wedged beneath the reel, already colored up with the telltale tiger stripes that distinguish chums from other Pacific salmon. Ess slit her open and pulled out two skeins of pearly red eggs. These went into a Tupperware and the rest of the fish went overboard. “I know it doesn’t look good,” he said, referring to the wastage, “but no cannery will buy a chum in that condition.” The fish was already in its spawning colors; the meat would be soft, all its vitality now in the eggs.

  The chum salmon is a conundrum. Less commercially valuable because of its lower fat content and softer flesh, it still represents the biggest catch percentagewise. That’s because chums are the second-most-plentiful species after pinks, which are the smallest and least valuable of Pacific salmon, and they’re the second largest by weight after chinook. Chums might have been the most abundant salmon historically. Their geographic rang
e is the widest. Formerly they spawned as far south as Monterey, California, with as many as a million in the lower Columbia River, and their northern range includes more of the Arctic than any other species. The Columbia runs are a thing of the past, with only a few thousand fish in an average year, and though they’re the most abundant species in Washington State, several runs around Puget Sound are extinct, with a generally downward trend in population size. Chums tend to spawn in the lower reaches of estuaries near tidewater, habitats severely degraded by urban development. In Alaska there are also chum populations that make long migrations, notably in the Yukon and Mackenzie Rivers.

  Along with pinks, chums are the main target of the Prince William Sound seiner fishery, with most of those fish-hatchery origin. Though the bulk of the catch goes to canneries, there’s an increasing demand for fresh-market chums—provided they’re still silver and haven’t begun to change into their spawning colors. They’re sold as “keta” or “silverbrite” salmon, at a fraction of the cost that you’d pay for chinook or sockeye. Lower in fat and oil, fresh chums from the salt have mild, flaky meat. Once they start to turn, however, the flesh quickly softens. Their skin changes from silver to green, with a red and black calico pattern of stripes down the flank, and males develop a slight hump and a snaggletoothed kype with canine fangs. They look fierce and not at all palatable. Chums are also called dog salmon, because northern peoples feed them to their sled dogs. For all these reasons, chums have historically been less valued than other species, but this was changing. In Japan, chums are revered for the eggs, with brined and seasoned roe fetching a premium at specialty fish markets and sushi restaurants. The large red orbs pop in the mouth with a salty taste of the sea. Sometimes I make my own salmon caviar at home. A wire cooling rack—the sort used for cookies—is a handy way to separate the eggs from the stringy tissue of the skein membrane. I rub the skeins over the rack and then brine the eggs in canning jars. Added salt gives them an attractive semitransparency. For ikura, I add soy sauce, aji-mirin, and dashi broth. After a night curing in the fridge, it’s ready to eat. The Japanese consider chum roe the sine qua non for ikura.

  Guido Rahr once told me that pinks and chums were Alaska’s “dirty little secret.” While most of the country’s so-called wild salmon harvest comes from Alaska, the word wild is slippery. It’s used, unsurprisingly, to draw a distinction between the Alaskan catch and the farmed salmon that have taken such a big economic bite out of fishing communities since the 1980s. But if we want to get technical about it, a large percentage of Alaska’s salmon harvest is actually hatchery fish, with most of those fish being pinks and chums. The state has made a concerted effort to boost its hatchery production. The result is an increasingly complicated issue for wild-fish supporters to dissect. For commercial gillnetters in Cordova, who target mostly wild runs of Copper River sockeye, silver, and chinook, the pink and chum seiner fishery to the north in Prince William Sound is a blessing. The relatively small fleet of purse seiners can scoop up huge hauls of these less valuable hatchery fish and sell them to the canneries, taking the pressure off the wild fish and allowing the gill-net fleet to keep fishing. It’s like having a neighborhood Walmart that doesn’t put all the small local stores out of business.

  David Reggiani, a biologist with the Prince William Sound Aquaculture Corporation (PWSAC), told me that this homegrown Alaskan effort had learned from past mistakes to the south. “We’re a supplemental hatchery program,” he said, drawing a distinction between that and the mitigation hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest, which are meant to compensate for salmon-killing dams and habitat destruction. “We’re just trying to make more of the local salmon.” But local conditions in the rugged terrain around Prince William Sound aren’t always favorable to salmon or fishermen. Reggiani pointed to two main limiting factors: extremely cold temperatures in winter that can kill salmon eggs, and torrential rainstorms that periodically scour the spawning beds. Because of these natural events on the ground, every few years the salmon runs crash. The nonprofit PWSAC started in 1974 as a result of one of those busts, when the pink salmon fishery collapsed. It began with a low-budget, grassroots effort by the fishermen themselves, carrying gunnysacks of concrete on their shoulders to build rearing ponds along a creek and forming a bucket brigade to seed these initial efforts with fertilized eggs. This stab at increased salmon production grew into a complex of five hatcheries, which now produce six hundred million smolts annually. The fishermen themselves voted to impose a two percent tax on their catch to fund an annual budget of $11 million. Of the five hundred million pink fry released each year, about four percent survive to adulthood, providing commercial fishermen a catch of twenty million.

  Even Alaska, it turns out, is tampering with the natural order of things. I had to wonder about all those hatchery fish. Nature always has a way of reminding us of the law of unintended consequences. Ess agreed with that logic. “We’re out here as environmentalists,” he said. “It’s hard to imagine that, because we get lumped in with coal miners and loggers, and it’s hard to imagine that we actually care. But we’ve been raised to care. There’s a lot of people like my brother and me that would shut down in a heartbeat if it meant saving this ecosystem. We’ve got a lot of options. There’s untapped bounty.” He ticked off a few products that an entrepreneurial sort might try to market: composted sea kelp, mussels and clams, wild berries. “There’s hardly any export out of Alaska for our wild blueberries. They’re everywhere.” So was driftwood. For now he was on the fence about the hatcheries. “I’m split down the middle,” he said, mulling it over. “For lack of any real evidence, I think it’s a good thing, but I’m willing to change my mind if I start catching fish that look dumb. I can tell how smart a fish is. If they start acting a little inbred, I’ll start worrying.”

  A long silence followed; I noticed a warm rosy bloom beginning to form along the jagged top of the Chugachs as the sun went down over the Pacific. It was a gorgeous sight. The mountains and the sea: It all looked perfect, unblemished. Ess perked up. “I’m trying to keep my environmentalist perspective in check, because I naturally gravitate to the opinion that we shouldn’t be fucking with any of it. If it’s good enough for nature, it’s good enough for me.” We watched the day’s last light creeping down the peaks. “I don’t want to be on my deathbed thinking back over my life, wondering if my moral decisions were influenced by economic gain.” A note of self-doubt crept into his voice. “We’re still a frontier town up here. I haven’t seen any problems with hatcheries in my life, so I can’t just jump on the anti-hatchery bandwagon. I do like having augmented fisheries. I can make my living right here on the flats. Part of the reason I’m successful is because the fleets are divided up. If the hatcheries weren’t here, there would be a lot more competition. So I guess my opinion is skewed by the economic incentive of having the hatchery.”

  Ess put his coffee cup down with a thud and swiveled in his seat to face me. “I’m definitely swayed by the money,” he decided at last. “It’s probably not a good thing, to be honest. But it could be worse.”

  —

  IT WAS DUSK WHEN we delivered our load to the tender back in town. Much of the gill-net fleet was already in the harbor, even though another twelve hours remained in the opening. Ashton was back, and so was Curly. Another year of fishing on the flats was winding down. Ess had hunting, not fishing, on his mind, and he was eager to get back to Colorado to see his wife. They had decisions to make. Lately he’d been thinking about selling the peach orchard and finding a new home. He wanted to be in a wetter part of Colorado. The climate was changing—anyone could see that. Water would be increasingly important. He wanted to be surrounded by moist woodlands, in a place where he could raise a family.

  As for me, I had already decided I would go south before the year was out, where even more profound changes in water usage were under way. Little more than a century ago, California was the Alaska of today. Resource rich, sparsely populated. A grizzly bear still lumbers a
cross the state flag, the Golden Bear of legend. Between 1848 and 1849, the city of San Francisco grew from a mere thousand residents to a population of twenty-five thousand, in a spasm of excitement that reached from coast to coast and beyond. My friend Rene Henery said exciting things were happening again in California. He wanted me to see the fish in a way I never had before.

  CHAPTER 7

  A TENEBROUS FUTURE

  We suited up quickly beneath the hot sun of Timbuctoo, the old Yuba River mining district that, as legend has it, was named for an escaped slave turned gold panner, originally from Timbuktu, Mali. It was a good day for a swim, another one of those high blue California mornings, lately a specialty of the drought-stricken state, and I was eager to get in the water before succumbing to sunstroke in my heavy neoprene wetsuit. Already a thin veneer of perspiration had formed on Rene Henery’s brow below his hood. He wiped the sweat from his eyes and took a few tentative steps in his rubber booties down to the waterline.

  We weren’t the only ones feeling the heat. Ghost pines in the foothills looked ready to burst into flames at the slightest provocation. A gauzy yellow haze hung suspended in the valley bottom below, with its implication of fallow fields and dust storms. In front of us, an improbable roller coaster of white water thundered past, too much and too fast. Rene, a rock climber in his spare time, with a compact, muscular frame, pulled himself atop a large boulder to get a better view of the river.