Upstream

by Langdon Cook

  Despite the protestations of Muir and his spiritual descendants, including the Sierra Club and the modern environmental movement, the next century saw the reengineering of nature in California on a scale that had never been seen anywhere before, not under the Mayans, not under the Romans, not under the Egyptians, not under any previous society that had successfully—if only for a time—bent nature to its will. In a region where water was king, the state diked, dammed, and exploited virtually every possible drop. The Central Valley Project, a waterworks scheme spawned in the Great Depression and imposed on the land for the next four decades, exemplified this to the point that California managed to achieve what God could not: make water run uphill. As a result, rivers such as the San Joaquin dried up from over-irrigation, and populations of native fish plummeted. In 1988, an organization called the Natural Resources Defense Council, along with a number of other NGOs, had the audacity to challenge this status quo in court, and—to everyone’s surprise—in 2006 they won (when the defendants decided to settle rather than face a judge’s ruling). The San Joaquin would flow again, or at least a small fraction of it would be allowed to escape to the sea. Downstream farmers and landowners, however, would still be allowed to recapture some of this water for irrigation. In this way, the settlement was seen as a model for balancing the needs of both farmers and fish.

  IF THE YUBA WAS A WINDOW into the past, the San Joaquin River was a look at the future. After our swim, I tagged along with Rene the next day to Fresno, in the heart of the Central Valley, where he planned to join both the plaintiffs and the defendants in the San Joaquin lawsuit to see the court settlement up close—that is, on the river itself—during a bus tour to view the watershed and the many obstacles to restoration that were slowing the process to a crawl. This is part of Rene’s job description. Though he is a scientist, he’s also expected to take complicated ideas and explain them to professionals in other disciplines, not to mention the public at large. Unlike many in his line of work, he enjoys this aspect of the job. It keeps him in touch with public perceptions and gives him a chance to gauge the possibility of effecting real change, not only in land-use policy but in larger philosophical arenas concerning how Americans actually view the natural world.

  We all boarded a Trailways bus together. A heightened sense of anxiety, brought on by increasingly erratic weather patterns that have included sudden shifts from flood to drought, hovered over this caravan of people, all of them connected by the vicissitudes of a natural resource increasingly in demand. There were managers from multiple city, county, state, and federal agencies, people responsible for managing water—the cubic feet per second of water, the irrigation exchanges of water, the reservoirs of water—plus a few worried farmers.

  One of those farmers was Joel from Bakersfield—lantern-jawed and tight-lipped, with the broad hands and build of a man who worked the land. Now that the settlement had mandated that 15 percent of the San Joaquin eventually flow downstream, he wanted to see up close what this might mean for his future. He was growing almonds and pistachios, thirsty crops that couldn’t weather a sudden dry spell, and right now he was putting carrots in the ground. The farms around Bakersfield supply 90 percent of the country’s carrots. As we drove by orchard after orchard, he pointed out a detail I never would have noticed. “See those?” he said, motioning to a grove of small trees planted in neat rows beside the highway. “Those are self-pollinating almond trees. They don’t need bees. It’s an expensive crop, but we hope it’s the future.” Farmers like Joel had to plan ahead. Lately, anyone who was paying attention had heard about a new unexplained phenomenon: colony collapse disorder. Planning for a world without bees was his job.

  Before our lunch stop, Rene stood up at the front of the bus as agricultural fields whizzed by in a hazy smudge. We had just left Friant Dam in the Sierra foothills and were now passing the fruits of its purpose in the valley below. Rene was allotted a few minutes to speak. Already there had been grumbling about how much money the court-mandated restoration effort of the San Joaquin was going to cost. It always came down to dollars. Yet the cost of not doing anything, of making like a scared ostrich, would be so much higher. “We spend a lot of money,” Rene began, “trying to engineer things that will allow us to keep behaving the same way.” He looked around. Was any of this sinking in? “It’s a good thing to keep in mind when you’re thinking about the cost of the project.”

  I glanced over at a few of the water users on board who considered Rene an archnemesis, the irrigators who had gone head-to-head against him in meeting rooms all over the Central Valley. They sat stone-faced. This wasn’t the Wild West anymore, and while no one was about to draw a pistol, several pairs of eyes drew a cold bead on the scientist’s forehead.

  He continued. “In the North Pacific, if there’s a keystone species, it’s salmon. They move nutrients from the ocean—the origin of all life—to inland areas in the form of their bodies. There are studies that trace salmon nutrients in bears, birds, bats, and redwood trees.” He went on to outline some of the restoration goals and then sat down. An uncomfortable silence filled the bus. At the next stop, as we filed across a gravel driveway, Rene peeled off from the group. He had spied the remains of an animal next to a barbed-wire fence. It was the cranium of a barn owl, ivory white and perfectly cured by the relentless sun, its sharp upper beak still intact. He reminded me of Hamlet pondering Yorick’s skull. What had been this owl’s fate? A diet of poisoned rats, maybe, or predation by the larger great horned owl, a species that thrives in fragmented human habitats. He pocketed the skull for closer examination later. It would make a perfect addition to his fireplace mantel at home.

  Where the Merced River empties into the San Joaquin, not far from where John Muir had tended his flock, we met up with a Bureau of Reclamation biologist named Don Portz, who was netting chinook salmon for an experimental population upriver. These were strays from a hatchery on the Merced. For whatever reason, some of the salmon failed to make a left turn at the tributary, continuing instead up the main stem of the San Joaquin despite a complicated metal barrier across the river designed to keep them out. Securing the fish for this experiment involved an intimate knowledge of the bureaucracy and a willingness to work around it. The salmon were officially designated as “lost fish” once they made it past the barrier. At that point they were netted, outfitted with acoustic tags, and released many miles upriver below Friant Dam, a monolithic 319-foot-tall wall that impounds the San Joaquin into Millerton reservoir and delivers irrigation water in two concrete canals running in opposite directions: one thirty-six miles north to Madera County, and the other 152 miles south, all the way down to Kern County and the outskirts of Bakersfield. Friant, an early component of the Central Valley Project, was the deathblow that dried up the San Joaquin.

  So far, Portz had netted and released ten females and thirty-five males. “Everyone knows guys don’t ask for directions,” he said. Some of the released fish were already building redds. Fry spawned by these salmon would be trapped and hauled away. Those that avoided capture were doomed; they would find a dry river downstream when it came time to migrate out to the Pacific. The data collected from these experimental fish is critical to the restoration effort. One day, if the San Joaquin flows to the sea again, as mandated by the settlement, the biologists will know exactly where in the river the fish prefer to spawn. It was necessary for Portz to use “lost fish” because the hatchery managers on the Merced can’t donate fish without local irrigators crying bloody murder and saying there must be enough fish after all for such a program to exist. Declaring the fish lost was the only way to sidestep the politics. “Kabuki” is what Rene calls this dance between agencies.

  It had been a long day, and my mind was wandering. As Portz moved about in his waders, tending his nets and scouting for fish, I watched the San Joaquin from a shady bank. The river rolled by with the consistency of spilled house paint. It didn’t look real. Everything out here seemed slightly off or even fake. Earlier
that day I had stood out in the middle of the flattest landscape I’d ever seen. You could hardly call it a watershed. There were no forests, little in the way of riparian growth. Birds were few, mostly starlings and other non-native species that ruled in a kingdom of diminished biodiversity. Plowed fields stretched to the horizon without a single tree to interrupt the two-dimensional flow. A network of canals and irrigation ditches crisscrossed agricultural land so valuable that most of the farmers’ little ranch houses didn’t have backyards. A furrowed line of plowed soil wrapped around each house like a boa constrictor. There was just enough room for a gravel driveway out front and a couple of pickups. Kids’ play structures stood in the dirt.

  Joel, the Bakersfield farmer, told me that about 70 percent of the Central Valley’s produce was exported abroad. “We’ve learned how to sell rice to the Chinese,” he said, grinning. Another farmer, Cannon Michael of the Bowles Company, a direct descendant of land baron Henry Miller, swept his outstretched arm before him. He owned everything in sight. Standing amid the clods of newly plowed soil in black cowboy boots and a pin-striped dress shirt, he frowned at the gathering of water managers. “As landowners and farmers who do large projects only when we have the money to do them, we have big concerns,” he said. “Over a hundred million has been spent on the river to date and it’s still exactly the same. Not a shovel of dirt has been turned and California agriculture is starving for water. As farmers, we take things and we fix them. We don’t pretend a magic money fairy is coming down.” Everyone nodded. It was true that the river restoration, after being tied up in the courts for years, was taking a long time to gain its footing. If anything, extra care was being taken so that farmers like Cannon Michael would be impacted as little as possible.

  “I drove across the Bay Bridge the other day,” Rene spoke up. “It was built one day at a time. Same with the Golden Gate.”

  “What about ruining economies and taking land from people?” the farmer shot back.

  Just then a group of white pelicans circled overhead, an incongruous spectacle that offered welcome relief, and I found myself watching the big ivory birds until I could no longer stare into the sun. The first settlers complained about huge flocks of birds. They said they sounded like freight trains in the night, waking them up at all hours with their taking off and landing. Since then, more than 90 percent of the Central Valley’s wildlife habitat has been lost. Where there were once 20 million to 40 million waterfowl, now there are a million. “We feed the world,” Cannon Michael went on. My head was pounding—several of the participants also admitted to having splitting headaches. A hydrologist quietly said she’d felt nauseated for most of the day. The land as far as the eye could see was being bombarded with chemicals—chemicals to kill the weeds, chemicals to kill the bugs, chemicals to fortify the soil, chemicals to combat the unintentional side effects of other chemicals. It was chemical warfare out here in the Central Valley, and every last piece of artillery was being deployed in this war against nature. At that moment, the idea of eating a single fruit, vegetable, or nut from this place turned my stomach.

  Generations of people from all over the world have migrated to California with hopes and dreams. Imagination is a defining characteristic of the state. Rene Henery will tell you it takes imagination to envision a landscape that supports both people and salmon. Like so many Californians before him, he’s optimistic. “Is the solution to continue to pour our resources into an unsustainable food-production system that’s sucking the life out of everything?” he asked the bureaucrats, many of whom would have had him bound and tied on the next train out of town. “No, let’s create better systems and find a balance.”

  —

  A WAKE APPEARED IN the current, snapping me back to the San Joaquin, this river turned irrigation canal. Don Portz, the biologist, saw it too. “That’s a fish!” he yelled, running upstream along the river and pointing. Everyone turned to look. “It’s going right for the net,” someone called out. The salmon had managed to get past the fish barrier, probably finding a gap near the bottom and using all its strength to muscle underneath. Whether it was simply straying, as salmon are known to do, or whether somewhere in its DNA, muddied by years of hatchery genetics, the allure of the upper, dewatered San Joaquin still exerted influence, no one knew. We all rushed over to the edge of the embankment to see the action, following the fish’s progress. The farmer from Bakersfield was there, his hand shielding the sun so he could see better. So was the canal manager who admired the fraudulent land-grabbing technique of Henry Miller. So were all the dam operators, hydrologists, and government pencil pushers. We all stood together on the embankment, watching what would happen next. Portz waded out toward his net, which was shaped like a giant wind sock. The wake continued upstream, heading directly for the biologist. An urban planner from Sacramento let out a gasp and instinctively covered her mouth.

  “The pull of these big salmonids is too much for us,” Rene whispered to me. He was right. Something about these persistent fish had grabbed me the first time I saw one heading up the Rogue River in Oregon. We all stared at the water as if hypnotized. There was a hush as the wake vanished, then a pause, and finally palpable disappointment. The fish had dodged the net and reappeared farther upstream, swimming into a muddy river that would offer little spawning habitat before going dry altogether. It was beyond a lost fish now. It was a ghost fish. Rene tapped me on the shoulder.

  “You feel that?” he asked me.

  I did.

  “That’s your heart.”

  CHAPTER 8

  THE REEF NETTER’S OFF-SEASON

  One time, during a heated exchange between Rene Henery and another biologist about the effects of commercial fishing on salmon stocks, I listened to Rene make an impassioned plea for the ancient occupation. It was true, he admitted, that some species, notably chinook, were getting smaller after more than a century of intensive harvest at sea that selected the biggest fish. But the alternative—no fishing—struck him as a worse fate. “At Trout Unlimited, we don’t want the commercial fisherman to disappear,” he went on. “One, because we all love fish and respect fishermen, and two, because fishing is one of the main linkages between the public and caring about salmon. People are mostly disconnected from their food these days. The bulk of our seafood still comes from the ocean. If we lose commercial fishermen, we’re truly dealing with the wild in abstract.”

  The wild in abstract. I thought about this as I left the mainland, chasing a rumor. Winter had turned to spring and another salmon season was upon us. For so many people stuck indoors—in their homes, in their cars, in the mall—the changing of the seasons has become an abstraction, even though for millennia it was a way to make sense of that ultimate abstraction, the passage of time, from birth to death. The new season was taking me to an island in Puget Sound with a long history of salmon fishing. The salmon hadn’t arrived yet, but preparations for their homecoming were already under way.

  I’d been hearing about the reef netters of Lummi Island for years. Supposedly they used a centuries-old technique to catch salmon in a way that was both sustainable and made for an exceptional piece of fish. Most commercial fisheries at sea are not selective—that is, they cannot distinguish between healthy stocks of fish and threatened or endangered stocks. With salmon, this is especially true, since many stocks school together. Whether caught by a troller on a hook and line, in a purse seine, or in a gill net, a salmon from an endangered stock is not likely to survive even the most well-intentioned release. The reef-net fishery, I kept hearing, is an exception. I drove aboard a small ferry near the Canadian border and made the short crossing to Lummi to find out why.

  —

  NETTLES FARM IS NOT the sort of place with a blue-chip view of the sound and surrounding islands, not like the Willows Inn down the hill. It’s a working farm. The only view is of unkempt pasture and trees. You take the road just past the Willows and climb through a grid of small houses that form a typical beach community, with open lo
ts facing the water. A long gravel driveway leads higher still, entering the dark shade beneath a canopy of second-growth Douglas fir and leading to a cluster of chaletlike buildings in a clearing. Tall thickets of salmonberry and blackberry encircle the houses as if in the final stages of a siege. I arrived to a cacophony of birdcalls. Roosters crowed from near and far. The flutelike song of a Swainson’s thrush echoed from the woods in ascending arpeggios. Hummingbirds chased each other about. This was Riley Starks’s toehold on the land.

  Starks was pulling on a maroon canvas work shirt when I arrived. He had just gotten back from Seattle and needed to feed his chickens. More to the point, he was anxious to check on their welfare. Throughout the spring he had been engaged in a pitched battle with five ravens. Already they had decapitated seven of his pullets. I walked with him through a small orchard of fruit trees to one of his coops. A pair of ravens flew overhead at our approach and made loud croaking noises. “They’re pretty raucous. If you know any Native American tales, the Indians really understand the raven. They live to be forty. They’re smart. They work together. They probably have a call just for me.” He said this with a rueful laugh. He had short-cropped graying hair and a scraggly beard. His glasses were round and wire-rimmed. Dressed in blunt-toed cowboy boots and jeans, he looked the part of a man who worked the land, but the Southwestern belt buckle with its inlaid turquoise suggested whimsy, perhaps a need for the finer things occasionally. He folded back a brown tarp from one of several coops and started counting chickens while filling their water. The pullets moved around nervously, making pitiable peeping noises. They were no match for a corvid, in brain or brawn. Starks said the ravens had figured out how to work as a team—a team of executioners, he called them. One would fly down onto the coop and scare all the pullets into a corner, while its partner waited out of sight on the other side of the fencing until it could grab a cowering chicken and pull it through the pen. Though a whole pullet was too large to fit through the fence, the head was still a prize. The ravens pecked it right off.