by Langdon Cook
With the demolition of the two Elwha dams, the mouth of the river is once again taking on these characteristics. And it’s proving as attractive to people as to salmon. Teenage boys with surfboards sprawled on the white-sand beach, flirting with girls in bikinis. A decent rip curl broke across the bar. Rene, the Californian, was impressed. “That’s legit. Those aren’t closing out; they’re surfable waves.” The sets were new, ever since the liberated Elwha’s sediment load built the eighty acres of beach we were now standing on, but surfing here had already been going on for years, as much a reflection of youth’s ingenuity as anything. McMillan said that before dam removal, kids would surf the waves made by tankers moving through the strait.
Flocks of well-fed gulls and terns stood on the mudflats. We watched salmon fry schooling near the river mouth, a rare sight these days up and down the coast, since the tidewater sections of most rivers have been developed or otherwise made inhospitable to young fish. The past winter, huge schools of eulachon—a type of smelt also called a candlefish, for its high oil content—spawned in this stretch by the millions for the first time anyone could remember, luring a feeding frenzy worthy of Animal Planet. Seals, sea lions, eagles, diving ducks, and a host of other predators gathered in droves for the feast, a sight that brought out the citizenry of Port Angeles for several straight weeks. These were the same people who, after opposing dam removal for decades, had finally come around to seeing the benefit—to their lives and their home—of supporting the once unthinkable. Change was possible.
“Look how clean this water is!” We turned to see a petite woman in sweatpants and jogging shoes, a large camera hanging from her shoulder. She was standing on a sandbar that was slowly melting into the river under her feet. Fish dimpled the surface and moved beneath the glassy water like the shadow of a cloud. “It just shows you that nature is resilient.” She thought about this last statement for a moment and amended it: “We’re part of nature too.” The woman introduced herself. Her name was Melinda and she had just been to the dam overlook, the same place where we had started the day. Originally from California, she’d lived in Oregon for seventeen years and was now living near Olympia, Washington. “Steadily working my way northward,” she added, laughing. Her trip to the Elwha today had been inspired by a piece of art.
“I bought this picture from an art gallery when I lived in Oregon,” she said. “It was beautiful green and blue water. The name was ‘Rhythm of the River.’ I loved this picture so much and got so many comments on it. I didn’t know where it was—what continent even—I just wanted to go there. I actually called the artist. I said, ‘Where is this? Where did you paint it?’ And he said, ‘Oh, it’s not a painting. It’s a photograph of the Elwha River.” The artist explained that he’d taken it in spring, when everything was fresh. “It’s the light play,” Melinda said. “The way the green and blue reflects on a clear day. Blue, green, blue, green. I just love it. So here I am.” She pulled the camera off her shoulder. “And now I have this. I can’t take enough pictures of this beautiful river.”
Rhythm of the river. A good title for a photograph that looks like a painting. Rivers have a way of doing that. They have more rhythm than we can imagine, rhythms we are only now just learning about, and rhythms yet to be discovered.
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AFTER SAYING GOODBYE TO John McMillan at the mouth of the reinvigorated Elwha, Rene and I drove back toward Seattle. It was quiet in the car. We passed miles of clear-cut forest on the Olympic Peninsula, a sight that normally saddens me, but on this warm afternoon my mind was on the Rogue River in Oregon and its roadless canyon and primeval forest, where I had met my first salmon and steelhead. Like the Elwha, the Rogue had recently been the site of dam demolition, and there too the wild fish responded immediately. Rene had once caught a large chinook on the Rogue. He hoped to do the same on the San Joaquin in California someday. One of his favorite social occasions is the fishing derby on the river, a now-annual event hosted by Trout Unlimited to encourage youth angling. He called it the single most diverse event he’s ever experienced, with anglers of too many different ethnic backgrounds to count, all of them living in local Central Valley farming communities and brought together by a river coming back to life. “It’s a picture of California,” he said. “Everybody is fishing and everybody is stoked.” The fate of wild salmon, after all, rests largely in the hands of society. It’s ironic that the conservation community is often slow to understand this.
“When I go to meetings, I’m almost always the only person of color,” Rene went on. “What that tells me as an ecologist is that the ideosphere that’s driving conservation is homogenous and not resilient. By extension, the likelihood of successfully restoring a system that’s diverse and resilient is low until we diversify our own ideosphere. It’s going to make for a richer understanding of how people can live with nature and how we can live with each other.” He was confident that there would be a shift in this direction, eventually.
I had always called Rene an optimist, but now he corrected me. He was a scientist, he said, and as such he based his opinions on data. With salmon, as with so many other thorny issues that face humanity, there are multiple paths that can be taken. Science is just a tool to help make decisions. Rene said he was optimistic that science could work out a pathway that benefited both salmon and people. In fact, he was sure of it, because in the long run any change in our behavior that helped salmon would likely help us too. But the difficulty was not in identifying the right pathway among many possibilities. The hard part was going down it. It might take generations, he said.
I thought about a recent conversation with Riley Starks. The Lummi Indians were ready, after an absence of many decades, to begin reef netting again. He had called me with the news and left a long, excited message. The tribe had a site picked out to the north of Bellingham—Cherry Point, a site that, coincidentally, the coal industry also wanted to develop as a port for shipping American coal to China. “It will be interesting to see what happens,” Starks said with his usual understatement.
A showdown at Cherry Point seemed imminent. Native Americans were flexing their political muscle throughout salmon country. They were calling for changes to Grand Coulee Dam to allow fish passage, and for the restoration of salmon runs to rivers that had been barren of anadromous fish for decades. Not far from my home in Seattle, little more than an hour’s drive over a mountain pass, the Yakama tribe has been busy reintroducing sockeye to lakes in the Cascades that were cut off by irrigation dams in the early 1900s. East of the Columbia River Gorge, in a compromise with local irrigators, the Umatilla successfully reintroduced salmon to their namesake river. “We’re the ones putting salmon back in the rivers,” Kat Brigham told me one afternoon while pruning freshly planted petunias outside Brigham Fish Market. She invited me to a First Foods ceremony on the reservation near Pendleton, Oregon, where I met an Umatilla fisherman who said he had recently speared chinook in the traditional way for the first time in his life, how his grandfather watched from the bank with tears in his eyes. Farther south, a proposal to tear down four dams on the Klamath River near the California–Oregon border—already agreed to in theory by irrigators, tribes, and environmentalists but stalled in the do-nothing U.S. Congress—would supersede the Elwha as the largest dam removal in the country. The stakeholders were working out final details to rip out the dams with or without congressional approval.
The ledger is continually being rebalanced. But even as the Elwha’s story of hope continues to unfold for all to see, so much uncertainty remains. In Oregon, Governor John Kitzhaber, one of the few elected officials at the higher levels of government with an honest desire to save wild salmon, was forced to resign over financial improprieties involving his fiancée. Within days, Oregon’s timber industry took advantage of the power vacuum to demand an increase in harvest. Now the industry is calling for the Tillamook State Forest, owned by all Oregonians, to be opened to not 50, not 70, but 100 percent industrial timber harvest. Guido Rah
r is seeing his dream of wild salmon sanctuaries pitted once again against the lumber barons. Up in Alaska, a bumper harvest of Bristol Bay sockeye has been clouded by the widely condemned Pebble Mine, which refuses to go away, as well as by a proposed dam on the Susitna River, north of Anchorage. And recent studies are beginning to reveal that all those hatchery pink salmon unleashed into the North Pacific by the state are negatively impacting wild sockeye salmon. Rahr calls these studies the smoking gun.
Most of all, the specter of climate change now looms to such a degree that even deniers are coming around. As Rene and I made our way across the Olympic Peninsula’s denuded landscape, wooden signs on the roadside warned of high fire danger. After a long hot summer, the famously damp Pacific Northwest was officially in drought, with both Oregon and Washington asking for federal disaster relief. To the south, the ongoing California drought had no end in sight. The climate toll on salmon was mounting for all to see. With low snowpack resulting in little melt-off, combined with record high temperatures, the Columbia River, for one, had become a fish trap. Hundreds of thousands of sockeye salmon, some of them the long-distance marathoners bound for Idaho’s Redfish Lake, had already perished, their bodies disease-ridden and covered with lesions from the abnormal water temperature. Scientists and fisheries managers feared the mortality rate for Snake River sockeye could reach 99 percent.
Though recent years have seen higher-than-average returns in the Columbia Basin, most impartial observers attribute the numbers to favorable ocean conditions as well as to the fact that the Bonneville Power Administration has been forced, by the courts, to spill water over the dams to aid downstream fish migration. Bonneville is only too ready to take credit for the boost in salmon numbers, but anyone paying attention knows that the BPA views salmon as an impediment to its mission: the generation of hydro dollars. Some see a missed opportunity. The cycle of ocean productivity, guided by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and weather events such as El Niño, appears to be coming to an end, and yet few infrastructural changes of real consequence—such as breaching the lower Snake River dams—have come to pass during the temporary upswing. What will happen if ocean conditions deteriorate for a decade or more?
Fishing has always served me as a way to clear my head of such worldly concerns. I get lost in the elements, in the rhythm of the cast, and intrusive thoughts fade away. On our way back to the city, I suggested to Rene that we stop off at a place with one of my favorite names, Point No Point, on the northern tip of the Kitsap Peninsula, to try for a salmon. He was all for it. We had fly rods and casting rods in the back. I told him this was a great place to see marine mammals, including Dall’s porpoises, which look sort of like orcas, and plenty of harbor seals, those crafty salmon-eaters that sometimes try to pilfer your catch if you aren’t paying attention. It’s a fishy place, with strong currents, a lighthouse at the end of the point, and year-round anglers. But, as luck would have it, we got held up on the Hood Canal Bridge, the long, low span that crosses a fjordlike finger of Puget Sound not far from a large U.S. naval base. It’s rare to get stopped by the drawbridge.
There was nothing to do about it. Everyone turned off their engines and waited. A breeze swept through our open windows, cooling us down. We got out of the car and admired an eerie sunset over the Olympic Mountains. All summer, wildfires had raged across the Pacific Northwest. The single largest forest fire in Washington State’s history was burning just east of North Cascades National Park, along with dozens of other blazes around the state. There was even a months-long creeper burn in the normally wet rainforest of the Olympics near the Queets River. The wind shifted and the sky turned hazy to the point of seeming possibly unhealthy, the sun a glowing red orb that looked more like an angry moon or a stage prop. It all made for a foreboding yet pastel-beautiful sunset, and up and down the bridge, motorists got out of their vehicles to gaze and take pictures.
We had tarried at the Elwha, finding it too hard to pull ourselves away from the river, and now this unexpected delay meant we would miss out on the dusk bite at Point No Point. “Fish are rising up like birds….” went the song on the car stereo, a wry bit of coincidence that buoyed my spirits. Maybe we would get to make a few casts before nightfall after all. From the bridge deck we watched pigeon guillemots, slightly comical seabirds tuxedoed in black and white, as they made trips back and forth between the girders and a flat gray expanse of water below us, scudding to a less-than-athletic stop on their rear ends. They dove, for who knows what—herring? salmon smolts?—and popped back up like corks.
Looking across the water was like staring at the starry sky: a view that would never get old as long as there were humans to contemplate the mysteries of life. In all directions for hundreds, even thousands of miles, it was salmon country out there. The salmon had shaped this landscape as much as the Ice Age glaciers and the foaming volcanoes had. Maybe at that very moment, under the cover of impending darkness, there was a large school of silvers coming in from the North Pacific—“ocean hooknoses,” as they’re sometimes called by anglers—obeying an ancient urge to return to the river of their birth, funneling into the Strait of Juan de Fuca in a tight formation before veering south at Foulweather Bluff and gliding beneath the Hood Canal Bridge. For ten thousand years or longer, people in North America have imagined such schools of salmon on their miraculous journeys home.
We stared at the water, unable to see into its depths, the apocalyptic sun reflected on its ripples. The drawbridge was up. Would a Trident nuclear submarine surface and pass through the opening on its way to the naval base? They plied these waters too. I’d seen them here before, big tin cans with the capability to shell a coastline into submission. As the sun went down, we stood on the bridge with a crowd of people, thinking about submarines and the salmon of Point No Point, waiting to get to the other side.
THE CLOCK OF FALL, BY FRANK BOYDEN
For the Boydens, Frank and Bradley, who opened the gates to the river—
And for my parents, Lyn and Langdon, who encouraged me to walk through
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Chasing wild salmon is dependent on the weather, the seas, the rivers—and the human element. Upstream would not have been possible without the enthusiasm and cooperation of a diverse cadre of salmon devotees. A heartfelt thank you, first and foremost, to fisheries ecologist Rene Henery, of Trout Unlimited in California, who took part in the initial conversations that spawned this book and then happily became my sounding board, technical adviser, and road companion along the way.
Riley Starks of Lummi Island Wild generously introduced me to life on a reef net island in Puget Sound while his crew obliged my desire to “grab web”: Thank you, Ian Kirouac, Josh Thomason, Cara Blake, Morgan Shermer, Ben Siegel, Sean Croke, Sierra Montoya, and Jerry Anderson (emeritus). Blaine Wetzel, head chef at the Willows Inn, shared his intimate knowledge of reef net salmon cookery.
The community of Cordova, Alaska, graciously invited me into their homes and onto their boats. Thank you to Micah Ess and Kent “Curly” Herschleb for a crash course in gill netting on the Copper River flats, and also to Michael and Nelly Hand, Blair Hansen, Alec Herschleb, Kristin Carpenter of the Copper River Watershed Alliance, Danny Carpenter, Phil Alman, Jeremy Botz of Alaska Fish and Game, David Reggiani of the Prince William Sound Aquaculture Corporation, Ashton Poole, Dennis Zabra, Austin Ring, George Covel, Copper River Seafoods, and the many other commercial fishermen who shared their knowledge and stories.
I am indebted to Guido Rahr, of the Wild Salmon Center in Portland, who treated me to chinook on the fly on the Oregon Coast and then helped me navigate the twists and turns of salmon conservation. Also in Oregon, the Brigham family, including Kim Brigham Campbell and Terrie Brigham, kindly opened the doors of Brigham Fish Market in the Columbia River Gorge, while matriarch Kat Brigham invited me to the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Pendleton for a memorable First Foods ceremony.
Staff at Idaho Fish and Game and the Eagle Fish Hatchery near Boise, Idaho—
including Travis Brown, Dan Baker, Mike Peterson, Ken Felty, and Christine Kozfkay—took time at the height of the longest salmon run in the Lower 48 to personally introduce me to endangered Redfish Lake sockeye.
In California, Casson Trenor served up wild salmon sushi—and forthright conversation—at his San Francisco restaurant, Tataki Canyon, while biologist Jacob Katz of California Trout showed me where salmon-friendly sushi rice is grown in the Sacramento Valley.
Closer to home, I owe a debt of gratitude to Kevin Davis, chef-owner of Blueacre Seafood in Seattle, who brought me into his busy kitchen during the Copper River frenzy, and Jon Rowley, who shared culinary wisdom and memories in the dining room. My longtime fishing pal Bradley Boyden, of the Dutch Henry Institute of Technology, was a font of angling lore and all-around good action; Frank Boyden, his brother, dispensed additional good action along with his beautiful artwork, Clock of Fall, reprinted on this page. John McMillan of Trout Unlimited showed me the power of an undammed and reinvigorated Elwha River on the Olympic Peninsula.
Thank you to the many others who shared their passion for salmon, including David Barmon, Joseph Bogaard, Larry Collins, Aaron Dufault, Bob Van Dyk, Amy Grondin, Rocky Hammond, Sara LaBorde, Ryan Lathrop, Jim Lichatowich, Wayne Ludvigsen, Duane Massa, Helen Neville, Don Portz, Jim Price, Joe Ray, Becky Selengut, Jon Speltz, Silas Stardance, John Sundstrom, the crew at Pacific Seafoods, including Brian Hayes, Stephen Kelly, and Kevin Hert, and the many other friends and acquaintances who spent time with me in salmon country during the research and reportage of this book.
