Upstream

by Langdon Cook

  I pulled on some hip boots and waded out into the middle of one of the rice paddies, trying to keep my footing on a soft, squishy bottom. Katz unraveled what looked like a miniature beach seine, six feet long with a floating cork line on top and a lead line that dragged along the bottom. Holding either end with a wooden stake, we dragged it across ten yards of bottom to the shore. Brief flickers of lightning leaped from the net—young chinook salmon, each just a few inches in length. Judging from their ample bellies, they were well fed.

  “Floodplain fatties!” cried Katz as he gathered up the fish.

  Rene held a fingerling in the palm of his hand. It might as well have been a filigreed shard of porcelain from a Chinese tomb. Faint parr marks engraved its silvery flanks. A bejeweled eye rotated in its socket. The fish coiled and flopped in Rene’s hand as he lowered it into the pond and let the water rise like a flood tide. The young salmon righted itself and swam back into the murk. For Rene, this was a moment that he hoped to repeat soon on his own experimental plot to the south, where he was working with both public and private landowners to a similar end. For that project, he would be taking a river—the San Joaquin—that had been even more abused and attempting to jump-start the natural engines of productivity once again. “Fins, feathers, and floods forever,” he called the effort, or “F/X.”

  Rene’s game plan was similar to Katz’s: allow the river to spread out beyond its leveed walls to provide habitat for both waterfowl and fish. In the case of the San Joaquin, however, instead of rice fields, thousands of acres of restored wetland and floodplain habitat already existed near the river in the form of wildlife refuges and duck clubs—a postage stamp–sized memory of the once-vast marshes and swamps that historically characterized the San Joaquin Valley landscape, but high-quality habitat nonetheless. The only problem was that those wetlands were separated from the river channel by levees. “Unfortunately, fish don’t have wings, so the levees are more of an issue for them,” Rene quipped. Gates were being installed in the levees to allow water to flow in and out. One of the tricky engineering feats is the drawdown in spring, which needs to be timed perfectly to encourage the young salmon to leave such bountiful foraging grounds and continue their migration downstream. Drain too slowly and they don’t get the message to leave, ending up beached; drain too quickly and they panic and seek cover in the deepest holes.

  Later I would meet one of Rene’s partners in the project, a Central Valley farmer named Billy Grissom, who remembers big runs of salmon on his property as recently as the eighties. “Hundreds would come through, big ones, and their backs would stick out,” Grissom told me. “People would line up on the bridge to watch all the salmon.” Besides being a farmer, Grissom was a duck hunter. He understood the value of habitat and kept a portion of his farmland unplowed in conservation easements, despite the cost. As we stood looking at a dried-up section of wetland that would soon get flooded for salmon habitat, he pointed to a copse of trees in the distance. “When I was a boy, I was sittin’ shooting ducks by a vernal pool over there. All of a sudden a cowboy pulled up in a pickup. He got out and was like six-four.” Grissom is about five-four. “The guy’s name was Bert Crane. Big rancher. ‘What are you doing there, boy?’ I says, ‘I’m shooting some ducks, sir.’ He says, ‘We don’t allow that. This is private property. You gotta leave.’ I was scared to death. I was sixteen. I got up and started through the fence and tore my shirt almost clear off me trying to get out of there.” Grissom looked at me to see if I understood what he was saying. “Fifty years ago I bought that property. This is the Crane Ranch.” A lot of change had happened in the past fifty years, and much more would happen in the next fifty, he was sure of it.

  Rene and I followed Katz back to the shed where he kept his tools. He tromped buoyantly along in his waders and boots, looking like a big kid in a mud puddle. Sometimes he liked to don a cowboy hat—the fish wrangler—while working outside at his various project sites. “It’s our job, Rene’s and mine, to integrate a knowledge of biology into the operation of this system. If we can do that, we end up with a system that works better all around.” Katz hung up his nets and seines and turned around to face us. “It’s not a compromise. It’s not fish versus farms. These solutions we’re putting forth save the state billions of dollars. You don’t start to see that until you see the price of mismanagement.”

  Mismanagement. Rene grimaced at the word. “We’ve created false silos in our mind that are costing us,” he agreed. He listed a few of the euphemisms for river: flood-control channel, ag water-delivery canal, urban water-delivery canal. These are just different management terms for the same thing. “Managing all these as if they’re separate has a significant cost associated with it and prevents us from capitalizing on the benefits of seeing them as integrated.” Floodwaters provide seasonal habitat, fertilize soils, and allow groundwater recharge for badly depleted aquifers—the definition of a win–win. Rene took a swig from his water bottle and then held it out so that the sun’s rays lit it up like a lantern. “If we put the pieces back together and begin to see the landscape and our rivers as a single thing providing multiple services, we can recover species and save ourselves a bunch of money and time in the process.”

  We watched the sun set over Knaggs Ranch from a nearby observation tower. Flocks of waterfowl fell out of an orange sky to feed at dusk. Canada geese, teal, pintails. A pickup pulled into the muddy parking lot below us, and out stepped a man in gumboots with a pair of large binoculars around his neck. He climbed the tower steps and sidled up to us, eyeing our waders and boots. “Looks like someone had some fun in the muck today.” He was a friend of the ranch owners, a duck hunter. The season would reopen in a week, and he planned to have his blind ready to go in the most popular foraging spot. Right now, as he scanned the rice paddies with his binoculars, he was trying to decide where that spot should be.

  “Look at all them specks!” he said, glassing a paddy below us. Locals call the chunky white-fronted geese “specklebellies,” for the spots on their lower abdomens. Many hunters prize specks over all the other species of goose. But there was an alarming number of skinny geese this year, the hunter told us. Katz had heard the same thing. Recent conservation efforts in California and elsewhere had been so successful that there were too many birds trying to cram into too little habitat. Some were starving to death as a result. The hunter shook his head at this strange turn of events. “Could be worse,” he decided aloud.

  —

  BEFORE I HEADED BACK north, I came across a recent article that was making the rounds in the Bay Area. It summarized many of the current tensions in the region—tensions that mimic those in my own hometown, Seattle, where schoolteachers, nurses, firefighters, and airplane machinists find themselves increasingly priced out of the city by a rising technocracy. Written by a lifelong San Franciscan and delivered as a speech at Stanford, it eulogized the city that for one hundred sixty-five years had been such a beacon to misfits, artists, and dreamers around the country, a place now reduced to a sad synecdoche: the Google bus. Provocatively titled “Don’t Be a Stanford Asshole,” the article lamented the moneygrubbing, materialism, and decline of basic human ethics in the region and wondered why the famous bastion of education and enlightenment nearby wasn’t providing a necessary injection of humanism. What happened to the idealism? The conoclasm? The brotherly love? The city and surrounding suburbs were awash in venture capital, not to mention all that human capital, busily concocting ever more digital distractions for people everywhere. Silicon Valley was changing the world at an unprecedented pace, its programmers coding away in banks of cubicles lit by diodes and cold cathode light, dialed into infinite combinations of ones and zeroes, walled off in their own private levee system. Connected yet disconnected, from both nature and society.

  I asked Rene what he thought about the speech, and he shrugged it off. “Our perception of landscape will always, collectively, mirror our perception of ourselves and our cultural divides,” he said. Studies
in Alaska are revealing that indigenous human populations were previously tied to salmon returns. When salmon numbers went up, so did human numbers. A severing from place, though, caused the relationship to break down, with humanity exerting ever more population pressure on the natural environment. Yes, he mourned for the city of his youth, now unavailable to most. But there’s a path forward, he said, one that involves bringing people together, valuing ecosystem functions, and reimagining a sense of place within the landscape. “Binary distinctions don’t hold up any longer. Nature and civilization are too complex for that sort of thinking.” Programs like the Nigiri Project and F/X are using innovative approaches to reintegrate a semblance of the wild into an engineered landscape. Perhaps more significant, he added, there is an increasingly loud call across the conservation community to bridge cultural and economic gaps, an effort that can only broaden the community and make it stronger. San Francisco was struggling with this, sure, as were so many other communities across the country.

  Rene’s core belief—for both salmon and people—could be summed up in a few words: strength through diversity. He looked forward to a great reconciliation.

  CHAPTER 13

  HERDING THE PINKS

  The approach to the herding grounds takes a mere fifteen minutes during off-peak hours. From my home in Seattle’s south end, I negotiate the busy intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Rainier Avenue, near the new light-rail station, then climb Beacon Hill for brief views over downtown before dropping back down into the heavy industry of Georgetown, lately a mecca for hipsters and ill-paid public servants who, increasingly in this twenty-first-century capital, can’t afford to live outside the contamination zone. Lucile Street jogs me under I-5 to the city’s hub of Old Economy commerce, where I turn at Harbor Freight Tools and skirt a collection of upstart businesses on Michigan Street: Orca Car Wash, Foxy Lady Latte, and I Luv Teriyaki. Here I catch my first sight of muddy green water from the 1st Avenue South Bridge.

  It’s a journey into Seattle’s former self: the blue collar past of resource extraction, Wobblies, and Jet City, when the city was known as an industrial port rather than a high-tech campus. Once disdained for its unsightliness, Old Seattle is now taking on a patina of nostalgia as New Seattle looks increasingly unattainable. Tent cities, with their blue tarps and upended grocery carts, sprawl beneath the overpass—the built environment proving as vulnerable as the natural one. On the far side of the railroad tracks I pass more monuments to the past: SeaPort Petroleum (“Less friction”), Standard Steel, Old Dominion Freight, and geometrical stacks of shipping containers in jaunty primary colors. A new iconography emerges, almost unnoticed, in the underpass below Highway 99: a slightly creepy mural of chromatic fish and disembodied human hands. Next to Fire Station No. 26, a metal guidepost announces the mostly Hispanic neighborhood of South Park with a figurine salmon, leaping into the unknown, a seemingly incongruous touch in this hard-hat sea of industry. A few quick dodges through a residential section of duplexes leads to Duwamish Waterway Park, where my fellow anglers are gathered. Directly across the river is a long, windowless airplane factory at Boeing Field. Test flights come in low and loud to land on the adjacent runway. On our side of the river, a hydraulic excavator moves the twisted metal carcasses of junked cars as easily as a kid playing with Lego blocks. Tugboats with tires lashed to their gunwales chug upriver and down.

  This stretch of the Duwamish long ago gave up any claim to the pastoral notion of “river.” It’s a “waterway” now—and an EPA Superfund site at that—and it would be tempting to call this a glimpse of angling’s future, though none of us does. The future we imagine is of a braided, tree-lined river in the heart of a bustling metropolis, and when the pink salmon are running, it seems just a little bit more possible. At the peak of the run, around Labor Day, I make this short commute for several consecutive days in an old beater VW campervan, in which I’ve got my pontoon boat packed. I park on the street and carry the light aluminum frame, already assembled, over to the park’s lawn, then return for two folded bladders zipped into abrasion-resistant nylon covers and a foot pump. I inflate the pontoons, each one six feet long, and attach them to the frame with handy D-ring fasteners. Oars in the oarlocks, ice chest bungee-corded to a metal shelf behind the seat. I slip into my waders and cinch a wading belt extra tight. My rod is already rigged from yesterday, in two pieces bound with twist ties. I drag the pontoon boat twenty yards across the grass—past a sign warning residents in English and Spanish not to eat the shellfish—and down a sandy embankment, a rare gap in the waterway’s rocky riprap shoreline. Bank fishermen perch on boulders like gulls, turning their heads in unison to watch me ease into the dark water before turning away again.

  It doesn’t take long, maybe a minute, to row out into the channel and intercept the bulk of the salmon run that’s splashing by, mostly out of reach of the bank casters. I decide to start directly opposite the Boeing plant, where old wooden pilings add structure that comforts the fish in their upstream migration. Two centuries ago the Duwamish would have been an obstacle course of logjams—unnavigable by boat but inviting to salmon; today, migrating up a channelized waterway, the fish will have to make do with the consolation of rotting pylons. The current here is barely perceptible to the naked eye, yet it’s steady. I pull on my flippers so that I can hold my position in the water with an easy foot stroke and make minor adjustments to cast at visible fish. A few Boeing employees on break lean on the outdoor railing that runs the length of the factory above the waterway, a few hundred yards in all. Some of them will return with rods after their shifts.

  It’s true that this blighted reach of a long-abused river is a Superfund site, and it’s true that the shellfish and ground fish are not fit for consumption. But the salmon come from the relatively clean, cold water of the North Pacific and pass through this contamination zone in the time it takes for a tidal change, heading for more clean, cold water upstream. They’re fair game. Looking downriver, I can see them coming: dozens of fish jumping in the current as they make their way upstream toward me, an advertisement of surprising abundance. For each fish I can see, there are probably many more that I can’t. I kick my fins and maneuver into position.

  —

  SINCE SEATTLE’S FOUNDING IN 1852, the Duwamish has served as food source, transportation artery, power generator, and dumping ground. Its headwaters historically included three color-coded tributaries to the east, rising from the steep volcanic uplift of the Cascade Mountains: the Green, White, and Black Rivers. The White, prone to flooding, was rerouted in 1911 and now empties farther south, into Tacoma’s Commencement Bay. The Black was also diverted and then rubbed out of existence with the completion of the Lake Washington Ship Canal in 1917. That left the Green as the only major tributary—a tributary of one—making for a confusing nomenclature. In all, the river flows ninety-three miles from its mountain source on Stampede Pass to Puget Sound, changing names from Green to Duwamish near the city of Tukwila, twelve miles from the mouth. The original watershed included more than a million acres; with the diversions it was cut in half. Much of the watershed was logged between 1880 and 1910. Its tidelands were filled, diked, and drained right up until World War II, and channelization would continue for another forty years, until 1980. In the postwar era, the lower river was further developed for commercial, industrial, and residential use. A final indignity, Howard Hanson Dam, near the town of Enumclaw in the Cascade foothills, came online in 1962, blocking fish from their spawning grounds upstream.

  Despite all this, wild populations of salmon continue to hang on in the river, if barely. My angling preference, like most, is for a cool mountain stream without man-made affront. But I live in a city, not in the mountains, and there’s something beautiful about fishing out my own back door amid the strangely compelling landscape of urban America, alive with container ships, trash compactors, cranes maneuvering overhead, tugs blowing their horns, and a silhouette of skyscrapers rising in the distance. It’s not sc
enic in the traditional sense—it’s no Montana as portrayed in A River Runs Through It—though it has its own appeal, which certainly has something to do with the fact that this is one of the most democratic fisheries in the world. Everyone is out here among the riprap, from dot-commers in their yachts to barely employed drifters. They all have a shot at the salmon passing through. Nearby there’s a homeless camp, where a friend of mine delivers his catch each night to the residents, who cook the fillets on donated camp stoves.

  Historians and ecologists tell us that the estuary where the Duwamish meets Elliott Bay was once one of the great tidal wetlands of the West Coast. Extensive eelgrass beds nursed salmon fry, crabs, oysters, and countless other marine organisms. Shorebirds and waterfowl gathered in huge flocks during migration to fatten up for their journeys. Elk and deer roamed bottomland woods. The Duwamish Indians survived on the diverse bounty, as did the first Euro-American settlers who founded Seattle, which is named for a Duwamish chief. Back then, with all this abundance, the pink salmon was viewed with derision as the smallest and least valuable, in monetary terms, of the five species of Pacific salmon that spawn in North America—a reputation that has shadowed it ever since. With a two-year life cycle, pinks return to their natal rivers every other year. They turn olive green on top, develop a crocodilelike snout, and, worst of all, the males grow a hump. With this metamorphosis complete, the flesh goes soft, hardly the stuff of a successful backyard barbecue. Anglers through the ages—through millennia—have disdained the pink’s size and silly appearance, not to mention the quality of its meat in comparison to fattier and more flavorful relatives such as chinook and sockeye. Pity the poor pink salmon. It’s sometimes called a humpback or—echoes of Quasimodo—a hunchback. Most people call them humpies. The hump has been an object of mirth for as long as people have been fishing for pinks. Indian boys of yore made fun of them. Salish mythology depicts the pink salmon as self-conscious and insecure: “The Snoqualmie young people are going to laugh at me, coming up the river,” laments a pink in one tale. “They laugh at me because I have a humpback, coming up the river.”