by Langdon Cook
Dishes started arriving at the table in twos and threes. Marinated squid with herbs and olive oil. Canning jars of duck rillettes. Salumi and cheese boards. And, finally, a trio of what the menu called “lightly smoked pink salmon.” The fillets were served skin up, which seemed odd, with a few feathery green fronds of fennel on top. They were slightly crispy on the outside and tender inside, with a smoked-salmon flavor that wasn’t overpowering in terms of either the smoke or the fish—the perfect sort of dish to complement a light glass of wine on a warm summer day. From my seat I saw a familiar face in the restaurant’s driveway, near the smoker. I excused myself and hurried over to see Blaine Wetzel. He was in his street clothes, carrying a colander with a single Asian eggplant in it. I asked him about the pink salmon on the menu and he didn’t hesitate. “I love how delicate the meat is. The skin is unlike any other salmon.” He’s right. Their scales are smaller and thinner than other species. Now I understood the skin-up presentation. This was a way to nudge the diner, to emphasize that the whole fillet should be enjoyed, skin and all. Jon Rowley would approve. Wetzel said he liked to smoke a pink fillet for just half an hour—long enough to take a little smoke but not so long to cook in full—and then he finished it in the pan with some butter, which gave it that crispiness we had all noted.
“They don’t teach you about salmon in culinary school,” he said. “I mean, you learn how to cook it some basic ways, but they don’t teach you about the five different species or how they’re caught.” Part of his learning experience as a chef was discovering the inherent virtues of each species, as well as learning how to differentiate between the various commercial-fishing techniques. He prefers reef-net salmon to any other. There ought to be a label, he went on, explaining the method used to harvest the fish—just the way there’s a label of origin, as required by law. Origin was relevant, sure, and so was the style of fishing. He treated the pinks like a big trout. Besides lightly smoking them, he liked to steam fillets in foil with herbs, or stuff whole fish and broil them in the oven. He loved the eggs, especially early in the run when they were still slightly undeveloped. He sometimes pan-fried the entire skein. He was even using the milt sacks of the males, poaching them in goat’s milk.
“The milt?” asked one of the reps back at the table. “That’s a line I don’t cross.” It was one I had yet to cross myself, though I’d often wondered about the opaque white liver-shaped glands.
After lunch I followed Starks back to Nettles Farm, where we went inside his cottage for a cup of coffee. He said he was tired. He had B&B guests scheduled to stay in the main house for most of the summer; the new tender was in the water, requiring his captain skills periodically; and the co-op’s business continued to ramp up. But I also understood his weariness to be more of the existential variety. Keeping an age-old tradition alive was physically and mentally draining, though recently Starks was pleased to hear that members of Vancouver Island’s Saanich Indian tribe had revived the practice, calling reef netting the “backbone” of society in earlier times. Using long canoes and a modern net, they hoped to catch their first reef-net salmon in a century later in the month, fishing historic grounds in the southern Gulf Islands near the U.S.–Canada border. Would there be Native American reef netters on Lummi Island ever again? Starks hoped so.
“Don’t look around,” he advised me after pouring us each an espresso. “Let’s have it outside.” We sat in cheap molded-plastic chairs in front of his cottage, more dirt driveway than patio, and sipped our coffee. Housecleaning was the last thing on Starks’s long to-do list. Right now he had to feed the chickens. “But we can sit for a moment,” he said, not ready to get up. At least the ravens weren’t beheading his birds any longer. He’d figured that one out. His dog, Stella, curled up at his feet. He was training her to find truffles. “We found three on the property with another dog,” he said optimistically.
Off to the side, a wrought-iron deck chair was in the middle of being refurbished. “I’m working on it in my spare time. It helps me relax.” Starks was lining the metal frame of the seat and chair back with bamboo, which he had harvested on his property and dried himself. Each piece was individually cut to fit and lashed to the other pieces with long strips of leather. He had a few other chairs waiting in the wings. They had come from a long-defunct restaurant owned by a friend of his, a place that brewed its own beer well before the microbrew craze and served upscale pub food. “It was way ahead of its time,” Starks said. When it came to business, timing could be everything. We both thought about this silently for a moment, and then Starks straightened up, admiring his work on the chairs again. They reminded him of old friends and the good times he’d had at the brewery in his younger days. Half finished, with a few strands of cracked and weathered reeds still attached to one section alongside the replacement bamboo, the chairs looked simultaneously very old and brand-new. “They’ll be comfortable too,” he added, smiling at himself for neglecting the most obvious benefit, as if the notion of comfort was an afterthought.
ON A CLEAR, WINDLESS MORNING just before Labor Day, the herders, as they called themselves, met at Duwamish Waterway Park for what would likely be the last time that season to commemorate their beloved urban fishery. Connected by the Internet, they came from Seattle, Portland, Yakima, Spokane, Bellingham, and elsewhere. They hauled analog-age kickboats, rafts, canoes, aluminum tubs, and other barely seaworthy vessels down to the river’s roily edge. Some of them I knew only from message-board banter, by their screen names. There was Trouthole and Bubba, Blue Stimmy and Snapdad. In a semi-ironic nod to the Wild West of Zane Grey, they called this roundup “the herding of the pinks.” The herders were mostly fly-fishermen. Every other year in odd-numbered years, they circled their sea-wagons in the busy commercial waterway to fish and enjoy one another’s company.
Everyone had his own theory about when the bite was best. “We’re too early,” Foghorn worried. He had come up from Portland and preferred high tide. “Give me an incoming tide,” yelled Paul over the ambient noise of a trash compactor working steadily on a diet of wrecked cars. Paul, who had been actively fishing the pink run since it first started ramping up in Puget Sound, in the early nineties, probably knew more about catching these salmon than anyone, “but I wouldn’t bet my life on it,” he demurred. Fish are always unpredictable. Mostly our preferences were based on past performance more than any studied triangulation of moon, tides, barometer, and whatever else might seem vaguely scientific. My own inclination was more in line with Paul’s. It seemed reasonable that energy-conserving fish would nose into the river with a rising tide at their backs. As we suited up, my friend Steve rowed up on his pontoon boat, greeted by a chorus of raspberries.
“Got my limit,” he said with typical angler’s brevity, deflecting any questions about where or what fly he was fishing. Steve beached his craft and wrestled a cooler with six iced pink salmon off the back. “Time to tend the smoker.” This is as much of a time-honored skill as the fishing itself. The fish needs to be filleted, brined overnight, rinsed off, air-dried for a few hours, and then smoked. Serious smokers tinker with their brining recipes relentlessly, trying exotic herbs and spices, adjusting the ratio of salt to sugar, adding new ingredients such as molasses or pineapple juice or cayenne pepper—and that’s just for the brine, which is meant to leach out some of the water in the meat and replace it with a preserving mixture of salt and sugar. The type of wood used as the smoking agent is also critical—alder, cherry, and apple being just a few of the usual varieties—as is the style of smoker itself. Mine uses burning coals rather than an electric element and keeps the meat properly moist with a water pan placed just above the fire. Smoking salmon is an art and pastime, occasioning lawn chair, fire poker, and six-pack of beer. The finished product, if well executed, will have a salty-sweet crust and succulent interior. Pink salmon, we all agreed, are best smoked.
A photographer known as Nope snapped a shot as we all got ready to launch. “Okay, gang,” he called out, twirling
a fist in the air with an imaginary lariat, “head ’em up and move ’em out!” A dozen pairs of oars dug into the dirty water and we made for the middle of the channel as a flotilla, passing an anchored tug and a barge the size of a desert atoll. The barge, everyone noted with dismay, was parked right in the middle of the best fishing grounds from two years earlier. One guy, who went by the Internet handle Unfrozen Caveman, from a Saturday Night Live skit about a Neanderthal on the loose in modern society, puttered past us in his new wooden dory. He and his son had spent the intervening two years building it themselves in the garage. A little outboard mounted on the stern steered them into range ahead of everyone else, and he let fly with a Paleolithic cackle.
The herders formed a circle, corralling a school of pinks, and started casting. Paul hooked the first fish and paddled out of the circle with his fins to land it, while the rest of us redoubled our efforts. My rod was a nine-foot model designed for large trout, my reel hand-tooled from anodized airplane-grade aluminum to protect against the salt. I was using a clear sinking line of about fifteen feet in length that enables the fly to get down a few inches in the water column, where a fish is more apt to strike. When they’re on the bite, pinks will take flies at any depth and even right on the surface, which is unusual for salmon. My fly was fuchsia-colored with dumbbell eyes, tied in the Crazy Charlie style—which is to say sparsely, with a slim crustacean look to it. Though fly choice is not crucial, hot pink is by far the favorite color, and sometimes chartreuse. What these two colors have in common is hard to know. I cast forty feet and stripped the fly back with a fishy-looking retrieve. This is probably the most contested part of the technique. Fly anglers will argue on behalf of slow retrieves, fast retrieves, and any number of speeds in the middle, as well as varying the strip with a quick jig or simply letting the fly hang suspended for a moment. All methods seem to take fish, though certain techniques will be more profitable on a day-to-day or even hour-to-hour basis, for reasons that are mostly beyond the fisherman’s understanding, no matter what he may claim.
Thirty yards downstream, a dorsal fin broke the surface and the fish rose nearby. This behavior—the splashy porpoising and tail-chasing—is yet another behavior that isn’t properly understood. Is the salmon acting territorial? Is it responding to a change in salinity? To its own physiological changes? Most anglers believe the strike is a form of aggression, a way for the fish to assert its seniority, or perhaps a foreshadowing of the competitiveness that kicks in once the fish are paired up on their spawning grounds. The fishing lure isn’t food so much as something to be dominated. In any event, pinks spend a lot of time near the surface, where they’re susceptible to flies. Sometimes the schooling fish, which are known to follow shorelines, barges, and other shadowy underwater structures as they move upstream, appear to get confused by the armada of fishermen in their pontoon boats and start slashing wantonly at any fly in front of them. Why they do this is a mystery. As with so much of fish biology—so much of nature in general—we don’t know the answers. We can only hope that the objects of our study will be around long enough to one day reveal their secrets.
The fish boiled again. I aimed my fly for what trout fishermen call the “ring of the rise” and stripped it back. A swirl appeared behind my fly, and then I felt the take—an electric jolt that buzzed through my body, lighting up ancestral bulbs like a well-played pinball machine. I set the hook, and the rod doubled over. Pinks are not jumpers. They’ll usually sound, taking some line off the reel, though nothing like a coho or steelhead, which might send your reel into paroxysms and leap a few times before you even register the strike. Just the same, a five-pound pink on a light fly rod is a thrill. A good fish will tow an angler on a pontoon in circles for a few minutes before it can be tired out and landed, and many fish are lost right at the boat during the frenetic, low-angle process of trying to net the thing without dumping into the drink.
Once the fish was safely in the net, I secured my rod and removed the barbless hook (required to protect endangered runs). It was a very large male, at least six pounds, still silver from the salt but showing the green upper body of a fish beginning its spawning transformation. I’ve caught a few pinks even larger, though most are three to five pounds. I slipped a finger through the mouth and gill for a good grip, brandished my net handle in my other hand, and performed the necessary chore. The fish quivered and its eyes stared blankly. I put down the net across my other saddlebag and used my free hand to tear the gills on both sides so it could bleed out. Pound for pound, pinks have more blood than any other species of salmon, and that blood can taint the meat if not given a careful letting. A few spurts from the still-pumping heart cascaded down the fish’s body, turning it a dark crimson. I washed it off in the water before using my knife to cut a slit from the anal fin to the gill and removing all the internal organs. Now it was ready to be put in the cooler lashed behind my seat. I would fillet it later at home.
Before I could get my fly back in the water, Paul was into another fish. The horn blast of a container ship out in Elliott Bay echoed across the water, momentarily drowning out the noise of Boeing Field to our south. I spotted the Unfrozen Caveman across the river, in his homemade boat, reaching for his own net. He was fishing in the shadow of a giant barge, one of many that dock in the waterway, its hull freshly painted blue. The barge towered over him like a steep, brilliant cliff. His young son stood in the bow, wearing a bright-red life vest, trying to hold on to a spinning rod that was suddenly alive in his hands. “I’ve got one!” the boy declared across the river, a phrase as old as language itself. “I’ve got one! I’ve got one! I’ve got one!”
CHAPTER 14
RHYTHM OF THE RIVER
“They took my fishing hole away.”
A man in a red plaid shirt and mirror sunglasses shuffled along the interpretive trail, looking dumbstruck. Newly paved, the path followed the ramparts of Glines Canyon Dam to a fenced overlook more than two hundred feet above the Elwha River in Washington State’s Olympic National Park. Though the dam was gone now, demolished in 2012, fragments of its concrete tailraces hung down as a reminder, looking aged, moss-bound, and weather-beaten. The bed of the former reservoir, Lake Mills, spread out below, its dry basin cut through by the force of a free-flowing river. A blue mosaic of untouched forested hills receded into the distance on this cloudless September morning, their folds revealing the zigzag course of the river, which tumbled into view several hundred yards to the north, dodging and feinting across the floodplain to find its fastest route to the sea. Where the river ran beneath us, a respectable bungee jump below, it funneled into a choke point and disappeared around a bend into the shadowy slot of the canyon.
Glines Canyon had been an obvious choice for a dam at a time when there was little opposition to such an intrusion, at least among the white settlers, and though this dam and its counterpart eight miles downriver, Elwha Dam, had blocked the upstream migration of salmon and steelhead since 1913, the non-Native locals were accustomed to fishing for equally non-native species in the reservoirs. Now the man-made lakes were dry and the rejuvenated river was closed entirely to angling, to give remnant anadromous fish populations a chance to recover after the temporary trauma of dam removal, which had dislodged a century’s worth of trapped sediments—about twenty-four million cubic yards in all, enough to fill more than two hundred thousand dump trucks.
The man took off his sunglasses in disbelief and rubbed his eyes. “Just took it all away, is what they did,” he said again, to no one in particular and to everyone. He put the glasses back on and turned to face us, as if we might have an answer that was acceptable. The mended Elwha Valley reflected in miniature across his lenses, but he couldn’t really see it.
“Before long you’ll be able to fish for chinook salmon here,” John McMillan spoke up, trying to console him. McMillan is a fisheries biologist and he’s been studying the Elwha River for years, first with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and now with Trout Unlimited.<
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“That’s all bullshit government talk.”
“Actually, it’s science.”
“Scientists!” The man laughed outright and started to walk away.
McMillan flashed a big fake smile and cursed under his breath. For a moment I thought there might be a confrontation. Rene Henery, reading one of the interpretive signs nearby, shot me a look that said he was willing to intervene if necessary. Rene knew that his colleague—looking deceptively like a harmless vacationer today in shorts, sandals, and neatly trimmed beard—didn’t put up with a lot of guff. No pencil neck, McMillan came from a “dirt poor” backwoods family by his own account and put himself through college and grad school, eventually earning a master’s degree in fisheries science—not exactly a discipline guaranteed to pay off student loans. He preferred rural life, finding the people, with occasional exceptions, easier to talk to about balance and sustainability, words that got bounced around in the cities ad nauseam, with little real effect. McMillan had warned us earlier that he hadn’t gotten his proper dose of morning coffee, and he wasn’t one to shy away from a fight.
The plaid-shirted man took one last look over his shoulder, snorted in disgust, and shambled back toward the parking lot, secure in his belief that undoing the past was a waste of time and money. McMillan held his tongue. Watching the scene unfold, I was reminded of a story Rene had told me about meeting a retired canal supervisor during one of his community town halls on the future of the San Joaquin in California. A big, elderly, gray-bearded man, looking as if he had just pulled up on his Harley, took him aside at the end and introduced himself. “I really liked what you said about the salmon,” he began. At first Rene was surprised at the compliment and wasn’t sure whether the former canal supervisor was pulling his leg. He’d met a lot of veterans of the water wars, old-timers who had fought pitched battles with both nature and bureaucracy. They had played politics, taken it to the streets, and sometimes gone around the law. In many ways, California’s Central Valley was theirs, its land the spoils of war. Rene nodded, keeping up his guard. “You know what,” the gray-bearded man said at last. “I’m gonna tell you something. Your restoration program will succeed, and I’ll tell you how I know.” He looked intensely into Rene’s brown eyes. “Don’t take offense by this. When I was growing up, there was one black family that lived in this area. They were tolerated, but no one liked them being here. When I had kids, my daughter had a black boyfriend. I wasn’t a big fan. My wife was a little better with it. Now I have grandkids, and one of them is getting married to a black guy—and my daughter is totally fine with it. When my grandparents were living here, this was a really hard place to be. They worked so that each generation could have more opportunities, so that life wouldn’t be so hard. We’ve done the same thing for our kids. Each time, we’ve been successful and our kids have been getting more and more liberal. They care more. They care about other people and the environment and about people getting along and finding common ground. We do all this work to make things easier. For that reason, I’m sure that your restoration will succeed, because that’s the way things are going.” The old man paused, looked around the room, and lowered his voice. “But it’s gonna take a little while. Because a bunch of people my age still need to die.”
