by Langdon Cook
—
WITH THE SMOKING DRAGON nowhere in sight, we settled for the local taqueria and a plateful of Rene’s favorite comfort food, Mission-style burritos. Not a surprising choice, since he grew up in San Francisco’s Mission District (“when it was still the Mission,” as he likes to say) and later in the Western Addition. Though comfortable in a solid middle-class way, his parents encouraged their son to expand his horizons beyond their tidy home. Rene liked to get out of the city to go fishing, usually for panfish in one of the many foothill reservoirs, or for larger quarry in the salt. One summer his uncle rowed him out into Bodega Bay in a little dinghy, where he hooked a bright coho salmon within sight of Highway 1. He clammed and crabbed too and then watched as those places closed, one after another, because of pollution. Sometimes he visited rural areas with the Sierra Club, an education he would pay back later as a trip leader for Inner City Outings. Rene’s father is black, originally from Guyana, the “land of many rivers”—also a fitting description for a man whose ancestry included African, native South American, English, and even Chinese. His mother is white, a Californian of both Western and Eastern European descent. One of the things that Rene realized at a young age is that city people of color seldom venture beyond the urban boundary. In contrast, he fell in love with the wilderness. His grandfather on his mother’s side, a Unitarian naturalist and writer in the mold of Thoreau, was a major influence in this way, having homesteaded in Alaska’s Brooks Range, where he learned to outsmart Arctic char with lures made from old can openers and later taught his grandson to catch trout by twisting a cigarette rolling paper into a moth. To this day, Rene’s single most vivid image of angling skill is the memory of his grandfather coaxing a thirty-inch char from the depths of the icy lake behind his cabin with nothing more than a kiddie rod and four-pound test.
When he was older, a teenager, Rene backpacked with friends into Hells Canyon of the Snake River in Idaho, the deepest gorge in North America. The weather was perfect, but the boys didn’t bring enough food. That evening, weary from a long day’s march, they came upon a small stream that emptied into the river. At the mouth, large silvery fish floated up and down in the billowing current, behemoths heaving into view and then dropping again just as quickly, like emanations from beyond. Rene could just barely make out the rosy hue of a gill plate before one of them vanished again. It was a mesmerizing sight. The boys pooled their gear and contrived to make fishing tackle with whatever presented itself. “I think someone had a couple hot dogs left or some jerky.” Amazingly, the biggest rainbow trout they had ever seen took the bait. “We were falling all over each other on the bank. Pandemonium in Hells Canyon. We hauled that big-ass fish out of the river and went to bed with full bellies.” Not until much later would Rene realize they had caught an endangered Snake River steelhead. Retelling the story, he motioned with his arm like a referee throwing a flag. “Young and stupid, guilty as charged.”
The memory of that steelhead dinner in the high-desert wilderness stayed with him. As did more than a little shame.
After college in Portland, Oregon, Rene answered a newspaper ad and soon found himself working on the sixth floor of a run-down office building on 2nd Avenue in downtown Seattle, across the street from a needle exchange, for a little-known start-up called Amazon.com. Stacks of books covered Rene’s desk. As quaint as it might seem now, in 1997 his first job at the company, as a member of the catalog department, was to scan every new book cover by hand and put the images on the website. To other employees—such as me—he had the look of a global citizen, that impossible-to-pin-down physiognomy resulting from intermarriage between cultures. He was short, maybe five-seven, with close-cropped black hair and an ebony fang-shaped earring in each lobe. Every couple of days I brought down an armload of books from the editorial department for Rene to scan, and as the books started arriving faster and faster, in ever larger shipments, the wall around his desk grew taller, until I couldn’t see him in there any longer. A year later he was promoted to program manager, overseeing technical details of catalog projects at the company. Scientific inquiry suited Rene. Logic was his currency. In meetings he laid out carefully orchestrated point-by-point arguments that would leave his colleagues silent and his bosses, who might have other, less well-formed plans, feeling upstaged.
Outside work, Rene was devoted to the natural world, to climbing and mountain biking and fishing. The Pacific Northwest appealed to him. He started fly-fishing for sea-run cutthroat on the Stillaguamish River, for desert redsides in the Yakima Canyon, and for twenty-five-pound chinook salmon on the Rogue. He loved the rivers and their environments as much as the fish, the meditative pursuit of what one angling writer has called “standing in a river waving a stick.”
A couple of years later, right around the turn of the new millennium, he sent out an email to friends and family with the tantalizing subject line “My Tenebrous Future.” As is typical with a Rene Henery missive, more than one recipient had to look up the adjective (Oxford: “dark; shadowy or obscure”). In the email he declared his intention to leave his job and pursue as-yet-unknown pastures. Selling a bunch of stuff to millions of people was not, he said, his life’s mission. He solicited advice and suggestions. Several replies came back with just one word: “Water.”
The next several years were a blur. Rene moved back to California to study salmon, earned his PhD at UC Davis, and managed a summer field station in the headwaters of the Sacramento River, near Mount Shasta. He quit recreational fishing during these years; as long as he was killing as many salmon for research as he was, he felt he couldn’t take any more. One of his professors in the doctoral program was a mentor and hero to his fish-crazed students. He reminded them that no one went into this for money. Even jobs in the private sector couldn’t offer the sort of compensation that Rene had enjoyed at a profitless Internet start-up. No, they went into it for love. “Do you feel that inside?” this prof would ask his students when they were hard at work on some esoteric branch of piscine biology. “That’s your heart.”
Rene’s first day in the field as a graduate student nearly ended in tragedy. He was helping out on a salmon survey in the Yolo Bypass of the Sacramento River. He joined a biologist to check a fyke trap—a large funnel-shaped pen—that held a heavy-bodied female chinook. “The big salmon was just starting to turn a beautiful copper color,” Rene remembered. Once they freed the salmon from the trap and examined it, taking its measurements and some scale samples, he asked the other scientist to snap a photo of him with this great fish. After some fumbling around, during which they had to change camera batteries, they got the picture and Rene waded back into the river with the salmon to release it. Immediately, the chinook listed to its side and started floating back downriver. “Oh well,” the other biologist said. “We lose some.” Rene was beside himself. He caught it by the tail and tried again. “Don’t worry about it,” his superior reassured him. “It happens.” The scientist said it was part of the work, that the young ecologist would have to get used to this aspect of the job. But Rene wasn’t having any of it. He waded deeper into the current with the fish—and that’s when he lost his footing in the mud. Water poured over the tops of his waders, anchoring him to a soft river bottom. He still wouldn’t let go of the salmon. The other biologist ran back to the truck to get a rope. Meanwhile, unable to clamber out of the mud and onto the bank, Rene felt himself slowly pushed deeper into the current as he cradled the salmon like a baby. The water rose above his chest, to his throat, to his chin. He tried to stand on his tiptoes. At that moment he saw the chinook’s gills flare. Its body came back to life, the muscles rippling beneath his hands, and it powered out of his grip into the depths. Rene held his breath, went under, and let the current push him downstream, where he found footing on a rocky ledge and hauled himself out. The other biologist shook his head. “I sure as hell wasn’t about to lose that fish because I wanted a picture,” Rene told me.
Eventually, Trout Unlimited hired Rene to be their
lead California scientist. It was a good fit. Even the organization’s name appealed to him, the sense of boundless opportunity. TU, as its supporters know it, is an organization that counts on its strength coming in equal measures from a large membership and science-backed advocacy. It was started in 1959 in Michigan and now has four hundred chapters across the country, from Maine to Alaska. Like its equally successful namesake, Ducks Unlimited, the organization focuses on habitat—preserving, improving, and rehabilitating rivers and riparian areas in North America for salmon and trout. And just as good waterfowl hunting is integral to Ducks Unlimited, good fishing is at the center of Trout Unlimited’s charter, the idea being that a lifelong angler will also be a steward of the water.
By joining TU as a scientist, Rene became part of a young new guard taking over key positions in the environmental-science community. As their superiors began retiring—mostly white men who had grown up under the influence of business-as-usual resource extraction rather than ecosystem restoration—the new guard started replacing them in the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and in the nonprofit sector. It was a more diverse group. They weren’t dour end-of-the-world sign-holders from New Yorker cartoons either. They had a sense of humor, used analogies their peers could relate to. Salmon conservation, Rene liked to say, was like learning to snowboard. “At first it was all about avoiding obstacles—not running into a tree or falling in a hole. After a while it was about picking a line and moving gracefully around the obstacles. Now it’s about using those same obstacles for leverage—jumping off a rock and expressing the beauty of the vision.”
Sometimes the vision was conveyed with a flourish, a little self-conscious bit of showboating to get attention. Rene’s colleague Jacob Katz, for instance, was working on a restoration of the Sacramento River floodplain, in an area that historically flooded during the rainy season of most winters, giving juvenile salmon access to hundreds of square miles of productive forage. With the diking and channelizing of the river to prevent such floods—and to keep cities like Sacramento dry—the survival of young fish has been severely diminished. “We’ve been sending our salmon to the ocean grossly undersized,” Rene told me. “It’s like sending a peewee-football team up against the ’Niners defensive line.” His colleague Katz is now collaborating with rice farmers in the valley to intentionally flood their fields in winter—or jumping off the rock, to use Rene’s snowboard metaphor. It’s a process that’s good for rice production and good for salmon. Studies are revealing that young fish in these managed floods grow much faster than those confined to the river proper. Katz calls them “floodplain fatties,” and the program was christened “The Nigiri Project,” for a variety of rice used in sushi. This is the sort of hook that gets you front-page coverage in the Los Angeles Times.
The salmon of California can use a little ink. Even Californians have forgotten that their state once hosted epic runs. The reasons for the collapse, in a little over a century, are not hard to understand. More than 80 percent of the Sacramento River’s historic spawning habitat has been lost behind dams; more than 90 percent of the historic floodplain habitat is gone. As a consequence, the state’s most productive salmon river is on life support. The San Joaquin, the other major artery of the Central Valley, has fared even worse. It hardly resembles a river in the true sense of the word. “Ditch” is how some describe it. The San Joaquin has been diked, dammed, channelized, and dewatered. Because more water has been promised to irrigators than actually flows through the San Joaquin in an average year, the river runs dry for more than forty miles between Gravelly Ford and Mendota.
But it’s about more than rivers and fish for Rene and his colleagues. It’s about people. It’s about how human beings living in a society deal with this problem. “We’ve been avoiding the big issues and trying not to make the real change that’s required of us, the change of working together, the change of looking at the ways we’ve been living and adjusting our behavior.” Behavior is connected to values, and neither is fixed, Rene firmly believes. Both can change. “We need to look at our value system. Salmon are always maximizing every possibility nature gives them. We’re not doing that—we’re not maximizing our survival potential. We’re just trying to maximize earning potential.”
Not everyone doing the work of salmon conservation is enamored of Trout Unlimited’s approach. Because of its large membership and its geographic reach, TU enjoys a position at the center of the fish universe, but a constellation of smaller nonprofits with less to lose revolves around it. A commercial fisherman friend of mine calls these the “Merry Pranksters of salmon politics.” Organizations such as the Wild Salmon Center, the Wild Fish Conservancy, the Native Fish Society, and others all take a less compromising view, and their mandate is for the fish themselves, not fishing or fishermen. They have no qualms about suing government to have fisheries shut down entirely in order to protect dwindling stocks of wild salmon and steelhead. TU has to walk a careful line with its diverse membership over fish hatcheries, for instance, which provide angling opportunities at the expense of struggling populations of wild fish. The smaller groups want hatcheries done away with once and for all, and some of these organizations can’t be bothered to think too hard about salmon conservation in California; in their eyes, the state is a lost cause.
—
IN 1867, EXACTLY ONE HUNDRED YEARS before the “Summer of Love,” a Wisconsin-raised amateur botanist named John Muir, having recently recovered from an industrial accident that nearly blinded him, embarked on a long, meandering journey of self-discovery that would eventually land him in the young city of San Francisco. It was a course that would be repeated with generational regularity. Unlike adventure-seeking pilgrims of the next century, he used his two feet and a steamer ticket rather than an outstretched thumb, walking all the way from the Midwest to Florida before sailing to Cuba and catching a boat to the West Coast. In 1869, with mountains on his mind and assurances from his new employer that he’d have ample time for high-meadow rambles, he went to work as a shepherd in the foothills above the San Joaquin Valley, setting out with a flock twenty-five hundred strong on June 3 near French Bar, on the south side of the Tuolumne River. He and his sheep gained elevation through the rest of spring and into summer, crossing into the Merced River watershed to the south and finally emerging into the vaulted hanging valleys of Yosemite country, which had been his goal from the beginning. On July 15, 1868, he wrote: “Nearly all the upper basin of the Merced was displayed, with its sublime domes and canyons, dark upsweeping forests and glorious array of white peals deep in the sky, every feature glowing, radiating beauty that pours into our flesh and bones like heat rays from fire….Never before had I seen so glorious a landscape, so boundless an affluence of sublime mountain beauty.”
California had been admitted into the Union as a free state in 1850, though many of its first settlers came from the South and brought with them distinctly Southern mores, including a penchant for growing water-intensive crops like cotton. By the time of Muir’s arrival, nearly twenty years after statehood, the transformation of California was already well under way. Wrested from Indians and Mexicans, its landscape succumbed quickly to the ministrations of gold miners, homesteaders, cattle barons, loggers, and empire builders, perhaps nowhere more visibly than in the Central Valley.
Thanks to the Southern Pacific Railroad and a host of federal land giveaways, including the Military Bounty Act, the Morrill Act, and the Swamp and Overflowed Lands Act, the place was already more of an oligarchy than it had been under the previous landlord, Mexico; 516 individuals owned nine million acres of land—and under the tenets of Manifest Destiny and all the other unwritten laws of American exceptionalism, no one could tell these pillars of society what they could and could not do with their land. Men such as Henry Miller and Charles Lux ripped this mosquito-ridden country away from nature’s grip and made it bloom. They were called industrial cowboys. The vast holdings of the Miller and Lux Corporation and their competitor
s raised mostly cattle. But the smart ones saw the writing on the wall. They secured the water rights through any means possible and eventually started farming the land instead. I once met a canal manager who spoke with admiration of their pioneer spirit, a spirit that apparently included a willingness to commit fraud. “If you could prove you had gone across this land in a boat, then you could pick it up for practically nothing,” he explained. “Henry Miller went across in a boat. The boat was on a wagon pulled by horses, but he was in a boat. That was good enough. He got all this land here.”
Draining marshes, irrigating desert, and planting monocultures had the unintended effect of encouraging pests such as the grape-killing phylloxera and that scourge of vegetation everywhere, the jackrabbit. The fledgling communities of the Central Valley organized rabbit drives as a form of animal control and entertainment for valley residents.
By the 1880s, it was common practice for whole towns to gather for a rabbit slaughter and then have a picnic. A phalanx of citizens—men, women, and children—would march through the fields, flushing the rabbits before them, until they converged on a V-shaped fence that corralled the unruly animals into a pen, at which point the deadly work was done with clubs. In this way, more than 370,000 rabbits met their demise between 1888 and 1895 in 115 separate rabbit drives, a statistic that is as chilling in its exactness (such civic pride in the control of nature!) as in its outcome. Another resident of the Central Valley, the California tule elk, was considered extinct by the late 1870s, a victim of habitat loss and market hunters. While draining Buena Vista slough at the southern end of the valley, Miller and Lux’s reclamation crew happened upon a lone pair of the ungulates, thought to be the very last in existence in the San Joaquin Valley. In a grand gesture, Henry Miller demanded the elk be protected—as he continued to drain and plow up their last stand.
