by Langdon Cook
“My nature is to scout for obstacles and then look for a way through,” he said from his perch. “But this is sketchy.”
He slid back down and we picked our way up the cobble-strewn beach. Rene had invited me to California to get a glimpse of both the past and the future. The former was on display all around us. Upheaved earth and piles of rock and gravel told a story right out of the history books. The Gold Rush started within fifty miles of here. Forty-niners worked this stretch of Yuba riverbank in the 1850s, stamping their signature on the land in ways that are still visible today. Wielding enormous hydraulic hoses that could reroute a bend in the river and blast a man to smithereens, they peeled back layer after layer of geologic time to reveal its secrets, then leached precious discoveries out of the rock with mercury mined from the coastal ranges. Today the river’s wealth is simply the water itself. The state was in the middle of the worst drought on record. Meanwhile, its farmers were bawling for more water. And swimming up this liquid gold? As fanciful as it seemed, salmon. In some circles, I was learning, they had no value at all.
Around the next bend we found calmer water. My wetsuit hadn’t seen action in a while. A beat-up Farmer John model, four millimeters thick with reinforced elbow and knee patches, I mostly use it in Puget Sound to dive for shellfish. Metal hooks at the crotch are corroded from salt, and my gloves have holes left by irate Dungeness crabs. I spat in my mask to keep it from fogging, then waded awkwardly into the current in my flippers before falling backward into the river’s cool arms. Icy water rushed in where it could, forming a thin layer under the suit that warmed against my body. Rene dove ten feet down to the bottom of a deep-blue pool, and I followed him. A shoal of suckers with large yellow scales drifted backward at our approach, reluctant to leave the dinner table.
I didn’t need a fisheries ecologist like Rene Henery to tell me we were too late for this stretch of river. The salmon were already gone from the riffles and stacked in the sandy bottoms of pools, where currents had arranged their spawned-out carcasses, pale white and stiff with rigor mortis, into morbid formations that were at once grotesque and beautiful. Suckers fed on them greedily, like inheritors at a wake. The shapes of smaller fish hovered on the periphery, barely visible and always close to shelter, no doubt taking advantage of this feast when an opportunity presented itself. These were young salmon, hatched in the spring, and their presence went a long way toward answering the question: Why do Pacific salmon die after spawning? So the next generation can live. A few jacks scooted by too, looking for live females on nests. These were precocious males, smaller than fully adult salmon but still able to spawn. Returning to the river a year or two earlier than the rest of their cohort, they were a hedge against disaster, nature’s insurance policy. Rene was reassured to see all these variations of the salmon life cycle: spawned-out adults, jacks, and juveniles in one stretch. This was what you should see in a working system.
We explored a few more pools with the same results, each of them decorated with carcasses. You had to admire these fish even in death—especially in death. A spawning run is a suicide mission, the biological imperative a toe tag. Here in California the rallying cry of “Spawn till you die” was complicated by a litany of obstacles that, in Rene’s view, made the Columbia Basin to the north seem almost functional. Yet a few wild salmon continued to hang on after decades of abuse, and this tenacity, this failure to go quietly, was setting the stage for a showdown. As we bobbed in the slow current, Rene talked excitedly through his snorkel. “The fish are on a downward trajectory and doing everything they possibly can,” he said. “The same can’t be said for us. We need to do more. We all need to work together.” This is Rene’s worldview in a nutshell. Yes, he’s a scientist, but his true calling is in the art of building bridges. Every day he has to insert himself between warring factions of people—farmers, ranchers, urbanites, environmentalists—and try to coax them into taking a shared responsibility for what happens on the landscape, to help them see commonalities rather than differences. Though hard science is his vocation—research, data, peer-reviewed hypotheses and conclusions—it’s the softer science of the sort utilized by his wife, a psychologist and counselor, that he finds more useful in some ways: the ability to talk to people, to find common ground, to work through problems with nothing other than a conversation. He’s also ungoverned by the conventions—the walls, you might say—that typically separate the object of study from the studier. Pacific salmon culture in North America is a dance between fish and humanity. For that dance to continue, the human partner needs to pay attention to nature’s music. What’s more, the human partner might need to take some dance lessons from the salmon themselves, which thrive on diversity, adaptability, and resilience. Nowhere is this more on display than in California.
Even after years of conservation efforts, salmon populations are continuing to decline in the Golden State, while water is more precious than ever. The specter of federal action looms. Listing these fall chinook as endangered would effectively end commercial salmon fishing in the state, hamstring agriculture, and pit Big Ag directly against the Endangered Species Act, with far-reaching repercussions well beyond California’s borders. Even environmentalists want to avoid such a listing, fearing blowback of game-changing proportions. “Nobody on either side wants it,” Rene admitted of his biggest tool in the toolbox, the ESA, as everyone calls it. “It’s a big wuzzle we’ve tied for ourselves.” But the fish need help, and writing off as insignificant even a single run—such as this struggling Yuba population—has larger implications. For one thing, a diverse group of stakeholders that includes Rene’s employer, Trout Unlimited, has already gone to the mat for the river, signing the Lower Yuba River Accord in 2006; the landmark deal ensures a safe supply of clean, cold water in the river, where the salmon need it. If local advocacy-minded coalitions can’t reverse the decline without federal action, who can? Besides, the Yuba is just a single piece in a larger puzzle.
“It’s easy to say we might not be able to restore this or that particular river,” Rene explained, “not fully recognizing that the entire Central Valley is one watershed, a giant portfolio of salmon populations. Historically they were all connected and intermixing.” Formerly the biggest wetland in North America, the valley is fed by countless rivers and streams coming down out of the mountains and foothills of the Sierras, for hundreds of miles up and down the state, all of that water converging at the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta before heading out to the Pacific through the Golden Gate. The salmon that survive their oceanic odysseys and pass back through that same gate return to a river system very different from that of 165 years ago. Take the Yuba. It has seen more streambed excavation than the Panama Canal. Fish-blocking dams hold back deadly mine tailings. And a toxic inheritance will continue to contaminate river sediment for years to come with high concentrations of heavy metals such as arsenic and mercury. Yet this ravaged stream remains one of the last holdouts for wild chinook salmon in the Central Valley—and it’s an example of fish-friendly coalitions thinking creatively. For all these reasons, the implausible run of Yuba River chinook is on Rene’s radar.
We got out of the river and drove a few miles downstream to meet another biologist at a public campground. Duane Massa stood in the middle of an aluminum skiff in his waders, waving around what looked like a giant pair of hedge clippers. The tool, it turned out, was homemade. He used it to decapitate the corpses of spawned-out salmon on the river bottom, collecting tags from their heads as well as a small piece of piscine anatomy called an otolith, the fish’s inner-ear bone, which helps date a salmon the way rings date a tree. Tall, with a ponytail and a laid-back demeanor, Massa welcomed us aboard. “Hop in, but don’t sit over there,” he advised merrily. Over there a pile of fish heads stared blankly back at us. Earlier in the day Massa had used his makeshift clippers to neatly sever a dozen chinook heads from their decomposing bodies. After cleaning weeds from his jets with a screwdriver, he fired up the engine and took us a mile upstr
eam. “Don’t worry,” he shouted above the noise as we skipped over tight-fisted rapids, “you’ll see some spawners.”
This stretch of the river looked like a Montana trout stream. Surrounded by dry hills, the stream alternated with riffled straightaways and deeper bends, taking its time to wander back and forth across the valley. Massa kept a firm hand on the tiller as he guided us through a rock garden at full speed. Rene caught my eye. “Duane is the man.” Though Massa worked for a large interstate agency, the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission, and Rene for a nonprofit, the world of salmon scientists is a small one, with collegial bonds that stretch across political borders. “There’s gotta be some reason why I do this,” Massa yelled over the roar of the jets. “It’s not the boatloads of money.” Like so many in his profession, he’s made sacrifices to unravel the secrets of fish. Below a steep embankment where the river makes a slow turn, he cut the engine. “Have a nice swim, boys—but don’t miss the takeout. It’s five miles of angry water after that.” We slipped off the stern and let the current take us back down into riffles where the river spread across a wide tailout, bumping chest-first over the sort of baseball-sized cobbles that chinook prefer for their spawning gravel. I saw my first live fish holding beside a dead tree in the river, in just a foot of water, its pectoral fins working like frayed Chinese fans to keep it upright, the delicate lavender color turned a jaundice yellow. At twenty pounds, this fall chinook salmon seemed all out of proportion to its surroundings. The fish had turned dark, its snout nearly black, while white scars from obstacles encountered in its 150-mile journey upstream from the ocean stood out in sharp relief. Only a few days from death, and it was still a master of its underwater medium. Pelvic fins twitched slightly, making minor adjustments in the current. The salmon shifted to one side and I drifted past it, held tightly in the river’s grasp.
The nests, called redds, were just a couple of feet beneath the surface and easy to spot—some as big as a king-sized bed, their gravel bright as a window in the sun where algae had been scraped away by the female’s vigorous tail-scouring. Some of these redds might have contained as many as five thousand eggs, deposited by a single female. Rene surfaced downstream with his hands in the air. “One just swam right under my armpit!” he shouted like a kid. Though almost forty, he still got carded whenever the fisheries biologists lifted a pint at the local, and even now, after years of handling salmon, a close encounter was a thrill. Most days were spent at a desk. I kicked over to him and together we floated downstream through light rapids, counting salmon as we went. Some of the fish, nearly spent, barely moved to the side to let us pass, while others, still alert and vigorous, darted out of the way, startled by the unexpected encounter. I suppose I felt a melancholy sort of joy at the natural drama unfolding here, one repeated annually for millennia. Considering how much abuse had been heaped upon this river in just the very recent past, to see any fish at all seemed beyond astonishing.
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THE YUBA RIVER IS a tributary of the Feather, which is in turn a tributary of the Sacramento, the sprawling river system that drains a good portion of interior Northern California between the Sierra Nevada and the Coast Range, more than twenty-seven thousand square miles in all. Spanish explorers were so taken by the valley’s “chattering birds,” its big fish “darting through pellucid depths,” its “champagne air,” to quote from an early expedition, that they “drank deep of it, drank in the beauty around them,” and christened the river “Most Holy Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ.” The Sac, as modern-day users know it, is the state’s largest river and was once a salmon producer on par with the Columbia and Fraser Rivers to the north. Today it’s thought of as one of California’s two main faucets, the other being the San Joaquin. Together these rivers irrigate the Central Valley, the agricultural region that stretches more than 450 miles, from Red Bluff to Bakersfield, and provides Americans, by some accounts, with nearly a third of what they eat.
The transformation from wilderness rivers to irrigation plumbing happened quickly enough that no one, save a few proto-environmentalist worriers, put up much of an argument. Explorers and early settlers in the mid-nineteenth century found a valley that looked considerably different from the one that exists today. The Sacramento and San Joaquin were so braided and meandering at their outlet to San Francisco Bay that it was nearly impossible for boatmen to find a main channel deep enough to proceed upriver. In 1844, explorer John Frémont reported seeing elk “running in bands over the prairie and in the skirts of the timber” along the San Joaquin. This might have been the high point for game animals in California. With Native Americans nearly wiped out from disease and war, and the Gold Rush, white settlement, and market hunters still a few years off, herds of deer, elk, and antelope roamed the grassy plains of the Central Valley in herds more typical of an African veldt. Grizzlies and wolves patrolled the perimeter. Waterfowl blackened the skies. California was a land of plenty, the salmon numerous enough to be an afterthought. They returned to the Central Valley by the millions. Then the whites arrived.
Trappers and miners came first. Trapping out the beaver changed the hydrology of the mountain streams, eliminating structure that gave salmon fry places to hide, while gold mining destroyed the rivers wholesale, a legacy that’s still with us. The settlers came next. Much of the valley was either too arid or too marshy for the first homesteaders. The Mediterranean climate meant hot, dry summers and cool, wet winters. Rivers reduced to trickles by fall would roar back to life with spring floods from the melting mountain snowpack. But soon the farmers figured out how to drain the marshes, impound the rivers, and irrigate the desert. They waded into streams with pitchforks to waylay an easy source of fertilizer. The Central Valley flowered with new crops, and the salmon began their swift slide into irrelevance. Today, with anthropogenic climate change as the newest challenge facing salmon, the question was not just whether past damage could be undone but whether such efforts would make any difference at all in a hotter world.
I stood up in the middle of a riffle and took my bearings. Salmon surrounded us. To my right I could see the dorsal and tail fins of a female on her redd. Closer to the bank, a large male wallowed in a pocket of slow water, listing from side to side, fins worn down to cartilage and white fungus covering much of his dorsal side. Native Americans have a name for big old warriors gone long in the tooth: mossback. Just the same, he sprinted out of his pocket at my approach with several quick tail shakes and glided easily into the middle of the river, where the current swept him backward. These were his final hours. Without DNA testing it was impossible to know the genetic makeup of these fish. Though they looked and acted like the sort of chinook salmon that people in the Central Valley might have encountered a century ago, in the intervening years so many runs have been influenced by hatchery efforts that skeptics call them mutts and wonder whether truly wild salmon still exist in this part of California at all.
Mining, agriculture, hatcheries, climate change. It’s so easy to just throw your hands up and cry surrender. People like Rene Henery and Duane Massa are not about to do that, and I admire them for it.
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AFTER OUR SNORKEL, we drove into town for lunch. To the west, the Sutter Buttes reared up out of the haze like shark fins. Unique for being the smallest mountain range in the world, the buttes are the remnant lava dome of a Pleistocene volcano—exactly the sort of geologic activity that caused salmon to evolve the way they did, using both fresh and salt water during their life cycle, vacating habitat as it gives way to cataclysm, reclaiming it as it reemerges. Rene shifted his gaze from the far-off buttes to modest ranch buildings on the other side of the road. Somewhere around here was a lunch spot he wanted to find, but it was proving elusive. The last time he’d eaten there, one of the waitstaff had served up a surprise. She was an old Chinese woman, very possibly a descendant of the coolies who built the railroads to California and later dug all the irrigation canals, work deemed too menial for even the most dirt-poor
of whites. “Do you want to see the dragon?” she had asked cryptically. He and his colleagues had nodded—yes, they did want to see the dragon. “She takes us out back and there’s this insane—I mean, amazing—huge junk sculpture of a dragon. It’s super ornate, with old musical instruments built into it. We’re looking at it and we’re like, this is incredible. And she says, ‘Yeah, I thought you guys would appreciate it.’ ” As Rene and his companions were marveling at the dinosaur-sized sculpture, the old woman reached her hand inside it and flipped a switch. The dragon started to move, blowing smoke out its nostrils. Though he left it at that—what storyteller wants to explain the moral of his tale?—I wondered if the dragon somehow represented for him the triumph of creativity over adversity in a harsh place. Certainly the Chinese woman had been tested throughout her immigrant life. The dragon might have been a link to her past and also a view of the future.
Lately, Rene had been thinking a lot about imagination and the environment, how human beings needed to envision a landscape of possibility that included both people and salmon. When he wasn’t studying fish, one of his favorite pastimes was hunting for and displaying natural objects as found pieces of art. Hanging from his living room wall was a skeletal spread of driftwood manzanita. It looked like a shade tree in miniature, the sort you might see in winter—bare of leaves and bony-fingered, an oak or maple—yet it was worn entirely smooth by water. He had found it in a subalpine lake near Castle Crags to the north, where he sometimes worked with graduate students on fisheries projects. The icy lake had preserved the tree branch in all its dendritic intricacy until it began to resemble a leafless bonsai. Collecting it without damaging any of the limbs had been a painstaking operation. In Rene’s kitchen gurgled a water feature built from volcanic rocks gathered in the channeled scablands of eastern Washington. An owl’s wing took flight over the fireplace mantel. Nature’s artworks decorated every room.
