Upstream

by Langdon Cook

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  STARKS MADE ME ANOTHER CUP of coffee before my ferry ride back to the mainland. His cottage was filled with the meaningful things in his life: a popcorn popper that he used to roast his coffee beans; an espresso machine; back issues of Harper’s, just about the only reading he had time for these days; and an old guitar. Reading books was one of the casualties of his busy days. Besides preparing for the sockeye, he had plenty more work to do. Chicken farming wasn’t easy for him. “It’s expensive and I’m old,” he said, with a sigh that suggested he might never find that perfect hybrid he was looking for. “I’m not going to ever grow a lot of chickens again. It’s too hard. I can grow enough so that at least people who stay with me get to try a real bird.” Fish and fowl. That was still his mantra. People loved salmon and chicken. He’d been through the ups and downs numerous times, the price swings and market shifts. He’d seen oven roasters the size of turkeys come flooding out of Arkansas and insipid farmed salmon take over the world.

  “When prices started to collapse because of farmed salmon, we were told a rising tide lifts all boats. We all bought into that. Now we’ve pushed back and it’s exactly opposite of what it was in the eighties. Farmed salmon was considered wonderful back then. Now everyone knows it’s crap. They’re talking two dollars a pound for sockeye in Bristol Bay this year. Last time I saw a price that good was 1989. I think we as fishermen have done a nice job. I’m proud of that.” It took action. He knew a salmon fisherman who had resorted to guerrilla tactics. The guy would dress up in a full-body salmon suit—a hot, furry, claustrophobic affair that was nevertheless an essential part of his act. He’d show up uninvited to festivals and fairs, waving around a color chart with his fin, a SalmoFan—the same color chart that salmon farmers use when deciding what color to artificially dye their product. “People were shocked. They had no idea.”

  He handed me an espresso for the road. “My rule is, stop complaining and start doing something about it. Stand up and throw yourself in front of the fucking tank. That’s really what you have to do. It doesn’t always end well.” He was hopeful and also wary. “I have no idea what my future is. Normally the way it works in this culture is you accumulate wealth for retirement or you get emeritus status, like in academia.” What he expected or hoped for, he didn’t say.

  Just before I left, Starks pushed another one of his artifacts into my hands. “Just hold it for a bit,” he said. “But don’t drop it.” It was a piece of fossilized walrus tusk from St. Lawrence Island in the Aleutians. The tusk had been carved into a sled runner. I was holding the broken tip of the runner. Little holes indicated where a primitive hunter-gatherer had repaired it with leather jesses. The thin, sepia-colored piece showed scratches on the bottom. I handed it back to him. “Ten thousand years ago it broke and was repaired. Look,” Starks said. “Actual gravel marks from ten thousand years ago. I love this thing. It’s such a deep connection to the past.” He picked up the ancient reef-net anchor in his other hand, and for a moment he resembled the personification of balance, the weight of the past in each hand. Then he carefully replaced the tusk on a table and continued to hold the anchor, turning it in his hand. “This is a tool that some guy cared enough about to spend a lot of his life making and then passed down to his children. I knew what it was right away. I needed this. For me it has true value.” I made an awkward joke about Starks being anchored to the island. “Yeah. It gets lonesome out here,” he said. “I’m getting a dog. Maybe I’ll train it to hunt truffles.”

  As I got ready to make the trip back to the mainland, Starks invited me to return when the salmon were running. He said I should spend a day on one of the gears, hauling in fish. There was nothing like it, he said. Being on the water with the salmon and seals and eagles, distant islands shimmering in a blue mist, the current moving underneath. There was the waiting and there was the sudden spasm of excitement. “Anyway, think about coming back,” he said, “to see what a reef-net island is like when the salmon are here.”

  CHAPTER 9

  THE BALLAD OF LONESOME LARRY

  Outside it was a blast furnace, a hundred degrees in the rabbitbrush, the summer sun showing no mercy. Rene Henery and I had been driving for two days, and our car smelled like onions. Walla Walla Sweet. The bulbs came flying off tractor-trailers like wild pitches. At Sacajawea State Park, in the arid southeast corner of Washington State—where the Snake River joins its turbid flow to the Columbia, both of these immense rivers looking like mirages in an otherwise dry and dusty landscape—we washed off the road grime and floated on our backs, watching lacy cirrus clouds slip across the sky. It hadn’t rained in weeks.

  The confluence—flat, unremarkable, surprisingly warm—belied the badlands upstream. This was where Lewis and Clark, guided by their Shoshone interpreter—a new mother, no less—would have realized they had reached the final leg of their journey to the Pacific, on October 16, 1805. They traveled in dugout canoes carved from ponderosa pine and built upstream with the aid of Nez Perce Indians, who showed the men how to use fire, clay, and urine to hollow out and strengthen their vessels. The juncture was more menacing then, with whirlpools and tricky currents to mark the marriage of two great wild rivers. Today it was pleasant, more like a lake than a river, a playground for an armada of motorboats and Jet Skis that left undulating patterns of waves waking across the surface.

  We toweled off back at the car. It was good to see Rene again. He had become a doppelgänger of sorts for me. I’ve always been drawn to the scientific, but the more technical aspects elude me—and, really, if I want to be honest about it, it’s the natural world that holds me within its compass, not so much the hard science that takes place in a lab or in a complicated statistical regression analysis. Rene could fill in my enthusiasms with his actual knowledge and expertise. Together we looked once again at the map and decided on our route. Unlike the Corps of Discovery, we were headed against the current, shadowing the salmon as they returned home to the spawning grounds of their birth, navigating what many consider the most arduous stretch, a passage made more deadly by twentieth-century desires and technology. We drove east into the high desert, following the Columbia’s largest tributary.

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  THE 1,078-MILE SNAKE RIVER rises near Yellowstone National Park in northwestern Wyoming and flows south along the foot of the Tetons, quickly gaining force and size from the many mountain streams surrounding Jackson Hole. It was in this country that I first learned to fly-fish, while working on a guest ranch one summer between semesters at college, pretending that I knew something about horses and wide-open spaces. In fact, I was a New England tenderfoot in full. The guests (dudes, we called them) came looking for an authentic Western experience. I led them astride gentle workhorses into the foothills above the ranch, through aspen glades and meadows, to see moose and herds of elk. In the evenings those same guests got to fish the Snake where it bordered the ranch, but the wranglers were expected to go elsewhere. We piled into a pickup and drove a half hour northeast into national forest, where the creek of my education, a lonely meander bordered by wildflower bluffs and stout conifer hummocks, came corkscrewing down from Wyoming’s Gros Ventre Range. To this day it remains the template of a perfect mountain trout stream in my mind’s eye. Cutthroats rose from hidden pockets to grab my pale morning duns, and it was all I could do to keep a sliver of composure and not yank the flies out of their mouths after each strike. We brought our catch back after dark to the ranch cook, a mustache-twirling Cajun who fried up trout breakfasts for us with spicy remoulades inspired by his Louisiana hometown. If you had told me then that salmon many times the size of these trout spawned in rivers not far away, I wouldn’t have believed you—though it probably would have raised my pulse anyway.

  When we think about this Rocky Mountain cowboy country, some of the most picturesque in the nation and commemorated by countless artists, we think of alpine climbers and white-water thrill-seekers, of nomadic Indians and grizzled fur trappers. It’s not a place associat
ed with salmon, even though these fish once populated rivers in Idaho right up to the Continental Divide. A few still do. The Snake River is the main artery through this expansive landscape. South of Jackson Hole, the river enters the Snake River Canyon (of Evel Knievel fame) and leaves Wyoming, heading west across the lava plains of southern Idaho before turning north along the Oregon border through a series of rifts and barrens, including the deepest gouge in our continental crust, Hells Canyon. A yearlong flood from prehistoric Lake Bonneville in present-day Utah carved these basalt-studded defiles 14,500 years ago. It remains some of the most remote and rugged territory in the West, with deep fissures and broad plateaus that frustrated explorers, who frequently got lost or turned around once they crossed the Divide from the east. Beguiling, yes, and also pitiless. The Snake River Basin bankrupted gold miners with dollar signs in their eyes and stymied homesteaders, who found the growing conditions marginal at best. The River of No Return Wilderness is here, as is Craters of the Moon National Monument. To this day, few roads penetrate the wilds of central Idaho. Rivers pouring off the Bitterroots and the Lemhis and the Sawtooths swell the Snake into the region’s signature watercourse, an improbable torrent of water in an arid land.

  Like me, Rene Henery had experienced transformative moments in this forsaken country. There was an alpine lake high in the headwaters of the Snake that had become a touchstone for him, a place to go back to every few years, to recharge and ponder changes in the interim. He’d been there in early summer, when blooming sage filled the hanging valleys of the Sawtooths with its sharp scent, and he’d returned in winter to push through ribbons of powdery snow that took flight on the wind and scattered like crystal ashes. The route was easy enough at first, just a hiking trail through the woods. Near tree line, with the hulks of whitebark pines bending over like penitents, he would leave the main path on a faint climber’s spur to ascend a scree field of granite boulders the size of minivans. After a rock-hopping traverse that ended at what felt like the rim of the world, he could stand on a stone slab looking across the glassy surface of a lake nestled in a jagged bowl, its color as azure as a Caribbean lagoon. It was here, years earlier, that Rene had fallen for cutthroat trout. They cruised the shoreline and he sight-cast to them, savoring that precious moment between the rise and the take when his mark could be hooked or lost and the lull felt like infinity. They were some of the most beautiful fish he had ever seen: luminous jade flanks dotted by small black spots, a supple cream-colored belly, and those telltale orange slashes beneath the gill. The cutthroat was one of the signposts along the way that guided him into the life of a fisheries ecologist.

  Rene was eager to get back into the mountains once again, maybe even return to his formative alpine lake, but first we needed to make our way through the lower reaches of the Snake in Washington State, including one of the most contested lengths of river in America: the hundred-mile stretch where four hydroelectric dams have divided citizens for decades over the prudent use of the nation’s natural resources.

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  PLACE NAMES ARE AN important part of calling a region home and recognizing its attributes. The Snake River is reputedly named for a misunderstanding. The Shoshone used a hand sign to denote the river, one that depicted salmon. Early explorers interpreted the gesture to mean the slithering reptile. The confusion is telling. This was an unfamiliar landscape to the first Euro-Americans, who had no experience with wide deserts, towering rock formations, and limited water. To the settlers, it was not a home. It was a harsh landscape to be crossed to reach greener pastures and, later, a wilderness to be conquered, so that it could be remade to seem like home, or at least to yield a profit. Rene laughed at the obviousness of it all, the sort of marginalia scrawled by an undergrad in his textbook: “man vs. nature.” In college he had studied colonial literature. You didn’t need to know your Frantz Fanon to see what was going on here. Money and myopia—two commodities never in short supply when it came to settling the West—had conspired to impose their will on the land, typified by four fish-killing dams on the lower Snake.

  “We make decisions about what should happen and then try to force the landscape to match our desired outcomes,” Rene said solemnly. At a trash-strewn turnout overlooking the first of the four, Ice Harbor Dam, we watched the river churn through the dam’s penstocks. There wasn’t another human being in sight. A green-winged teal in otherwise perfect condition lay inexplicably dead in the middle of the tarmac, as if it had just dropped out of the sky for a nap. Nearby, the scattered remains of a red-tailed hawk littered the sagebrush. Bad omens all around. Rene collected four of the dead raptor’s tail feathers for our car’s growing dashboard shrine, which also included a sockeye plush toy picked up at the Bonneville Dam gift shop the day before, a droll talisman for the journey.

  Lower Monumental Dam looked like something out of a Star Wars movie: alien, imposing, ready to do battle. Late-afternoon sun lit up the ramparts of the third, Little Goose, with an incongruous alpenglow. High above us, a concrete fish ladder spiraled up and over the wall holding back the Snake. Ocher cliffs rose in the distance, and eroded ridgelines receded into shadow. Again, there was not another person in sight, even though the landscape in all directions invited a sense of adventure, flights of imaginative fancy. People didn’t want to hang around a handcuffed river. Though visitors’ hours were over, the door to the fish-ladder viewing area was ajar, so I pushed it open. “Let’s not get nabbed for B&E,” Rene said before following me inside. “I don’t want to end up in Gitmo.” The place was full of nonnative fish clogging up the algae-stained ladder: bass, bluegill, carp, assorted minnows. In the back, a lone steelhead with a seal bite near its tail ghosted in and out of the murk. We could hear the fish counter in his office, tapping away at a computer keyboard. A night janitor appeared with his push broom and told us we’d better get going before the electronic gate closed.

  We decided to skip the fourth, Lower Granite, the last of the dams to go online, in 1975. Anyway, the unintended consequences of that one would be apparent soon enough when we arrived in Lewiston, Idaho, 465 river miles from the Pacific, the most inland port on the West Coast. Lower Granite’s reservoir, it turned out, was filling with sediment from the Clearwater River, the largest of the Snake’s tributaries. Because of the dam, there was nowhere for the silt load to go. As a result, the city was now in danger of catastrophic flooding. Many dams are built to alleviate this problem. Lower Granite Dam was causing it. Lewiston was looking at a costly retrofit to raise its levees, further walling off the river from the community—a disconnect from nature in metaphor and reality.

  The lower Snake River dams embody the cultural divisions in America. They are simultaneously the most hated dams in the country and a point of pride among rural residents of the inland Northwest who don’t want anyone—especially city folks from the coast—telling them what to do with their infrastructure, never mind that these dams are examples of “big government” federal projects built and managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. As with so many other cultural issues that divide Americans, both sides of the argument are easy to support with a cannonade of facts, readily downloaded from the Internet, although the strictly economic argument for the dam is becoming untenable over time as independent auditors try to weigh a complicated ledger of costs and benefits—math that doesn’t add up as clearly as dam supporters would like. The fact is, these dams provide a tiny fraction of electricity to the region and little in the way of irrigation that couldn’t be achieved without them; their biggest selling point—that they allow goods (mostly grain) to be barged downriver—is dependent on federal subsidies and could be replaced by road or rail. The dams represent an idea more than any tangible benefit—the idea that our total control of nature is a key to prosperity.

  For salmon and steelhead, this control is plain lethal. Mortality comes in any number of ways. Turbines and spillways pummel migrating juveniles, at least those not already trapped and hauled around the dams, a costly process tha
t anti-dam wags liken to flying geese south in an airplane. The young fish that manage to survive this ordeal still face a torpid river made more dangerous by slack-water predators and pathogens. A migration that once took a matter of days during the spring freshet now lasts weeks as the young fish struggle through reservoir after reservoir, dodging foes and trying to find their way downstream in a sluggish current. They get lost, diseased, and stuck in culverts. One predator of young fish is emblematic of our engineering. The Caspian tern, a handsome gull-like bird with a rakish black cap and bright orange bill, preys on the smolts in dramatic headfirst plunges into the river. So bountiful is this feast that colonies of terns have taken up residence on man-made islands (a result of dam building and dredging), feeding their nestlings with endangered salmon and steelhead. One tern colony was estimated to have eaten 22 percent of Snake River steelhead in a year. Now the Army Corps of Engineers wants to evict these federally protected birds from their rookeries. Another predator, the northern pikeminnow, formerly called a squawfish, has a bounty on its head. “You can help save salmon and get paid to do it by going fishing!” a federal website trumpets. The most competent of pikeminnow paid assassins can make a full-time job of it, with the top earners grossing more than one hundred thousand dollars annually.