Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species available in Paperback
Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species
- ISBN-10:
- 0807085499
- ISBN-13:
- 9780807085493
- Pub. Date:
- 05/12/2000
- Publisher:
- Beacon Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0807085499
- ISBN-13:
- 9780807085493
- Pub. Date:
- 05/12/2000
- Publisher:
- Beacon Press
Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species
Paperback
Buy New
$22.00Buy Used
$15.47-
-
SHIP THIS ITEM
Temporarily Out of Stock Online
Please check back later for updated availability.
-
Overview
House writes from streamside: "I think I can hear through the cascades of sound a systematic plop, plop, plop, as if pieces of fruit are being dropped into the water. Sometimes this is the sound of a fish searching for the opening upstream; sometimes it is not. I breathe quietly and wait." Freeman House's writing about fish and fishing is erotic, deeply observed, and simply some of the best writing on the subject in recent literature.
House tells the story of the annual fishing rituals of the indigenous peoples of the Klamath River in northern California, one that relies on little-known early ethnographic studies and on indigenous voices-a remarkable story of self-regulation that unites people and place. And his riffs on the colorful early history of American hatcheries, on property rights, and on the "happiness of the state" show precisely why he's considered a West Coast visionary.
Petitions to list a dozen West Coast salmon runs under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act make saving salmon an issue poised to consume the Pacific West. "Never before, said Federal officials, has so much land or so many people been given notice that they will have to alter their lives to restore a wild species" (New York Times, 2/27/98). Totem Salmon is set to become the essential read for this newest chapter in our relations with other wild things.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780807085493 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Beacon Press |
| Publication date: | 05/12/2000 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 248 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
IN SALMON'S WATER
Sometimes your storyline is
the only line you have to Earth.
SHARON DOUBIAGO
I am alone in a sixteen-foot trailer by the side of a river. It is New Year's Eve, 1982. The door to the banged-up rig stands open, and when the radio is off I can hear water in the river splashing endlessly over cobbles. The oven is on full blast. Its door hangs open too. The heat rises to the ceiling in layers, ending at the level of my chest. My face is hot, but my ankles and knees are cold and damp. On the radio the Grateful Dead and fifteen thousand celebrants woozily greet the new year at the Oakland Coliseum. Ken Nordine's deep beatnik baritone drones on. Ken Kesey babbles. Any moment now, Bill Graham, undressed as Baby Time, will be lowered from the rafters. The band lurches through the music, loses the thread entirely, and after a long time finds it again, the beat loose and insouciant throughout. The band seems to say, "See? Told you we could find it again." It all makes sense with enough LSD, I suppose, and I have sometimes lived my life as the Grateful Dead plays its music, drifting in and out of the right way to be, risking everything on an exploratory riff. But tonight I am focused and full of purpose. My only drug is a poorboy of red port, which I sip cautiously.
I turn the radio off and listen. Then, to hear better, I turn the lights off too. I am listening to the water. If you listen carelessly, the water in a rushing river sounds like a single thing with a great fullness about it. But when you begin to try tosort out the sound of one thing within the sound of the water, the moving water breaks into a thousand different sounds, some of which are in the water and some of which are in your mind. Individual boulders rolling along the bottom. The Beatles singing ya-na-na-na. The one sound breaks itself into separate strands that intertwine with each other like threads in a twisted rope. Some strands are abandoned as new ones are introduced, making a strange and hypnotic music. Listening to running water is a quick route to voluntary hallucination.
Among the many voices of the water, I am trying to distinguish the sound of a king salmon struggling upstream. It is a foolish undertaking and it never works. I hear a hundred fish for every one that is actually there, and then miss the one that is. The only sure way to locate a fish in this realm of sensation is to walk to the river's edge and play your light along the surface of the water where it passes through the weir. The king salmon may be large or small, it may weigh three pounds or thirty. If it has swum into the pen above the weir, I will pull the long latchstring that releases the gate that closes the mouth of the weir, so the fish can go neither upstream nor down. This doesn't happen very often in 1982.
A little more than three years ago, a state fisheries biologist told us that this race of native king salmon is done for. I am still not totally sure he wasn't right. The state Department of Fish and Game is spread thin. They can't afford to expend their scarce resources on a river that has next to no hope of continuing to produce marketable salmon for a diminishing fishing fleet. But a small number of residents of the remote little valley have not been able to bring themselves to stand by and watch while one more race of salmon disappears, especially the one in the river that runs through their lives. They have begun with little idea of what can be done. They've talked to other people like themselves, and also to ranchers, loggers, academic biologists, and commercial fishers. They have read books and sent away for obscure technical papers. They've developed a scheme that they hope will enhance the success of the spawning of the wild fish. Through stubborn persistence they've convinced the state to let them have a go at it.
By the last night of 1982, this little group has grown into a cohort of several dozen residents who are spending a great deal of time trying to forge a new sort of relationship to the living processes of their home place. We also have learned to deal with bureaucracies outside that place, and we have incorporated as the Mattole Watershed Salmon Support Group. We have raised money. We have entered into contracts. We are inventing our strategies as we go along.
I am part of that cohort. I am tending a weir with an enclosed pen behind it that is meant to capture wild salmon in order to fertilize and incubate their eggs. I am working by myself, which is unusual. Normally a crew of two or three would share these long nights. Most often, David and/or Gary, two of the people who initiated the effort, would be here. But it's a holiday. Everyone else has pressing engagements. The fish, however, know nothing of holidays. The spawning season is almost over, and we few who care for the salmon haven't come anywhere close to reaching the goals we have set for ourselves this year.
(Now, nearly twenty years later, we find ourselves with lots of company—hundreds in our own watershed and thousands in other places all over North America—and I write out of curiosity as to what motivated people, myself included, to act in such a way. It is my hope that by the time you close this book we will both have some of the answers.)
The weir looks like fish weirs have always looked on this coast, a fence angled upstream across the river from either bank at enough of a bias against the current so that it will not offer more resistance than it can endure. It closes off passage upstream except through a one-foot opening at its apex. In earlier times, a fisher with a net or spear might have stood behind or above the opening. For our purposes, the opening serves as the doorway to a trap, or to a pen. Although built from materials manufactured elsewhere, it has a funky look; it blends in. Panels of redwood one-by-one, grape stakes in another life, are spaced at one-inch intervals horizontally and lashed to metal fence posts pounded into the river bottom. Each panel has a chickenwire apron attached at its bottom. The aprons are held to the bottom by sandbags, gravelbags really, each one weighing about forty pounds. Filling and hauling the bags two at a time takes up most of the two-hour drill required for three or four people to install the temporary structure.
The salmon's progress upstream is one of many marvels of the salmonid life cycle. The grace and strength required to overcome waterfalls and other blockages, the stamina to endure floodwaters, the systematic persistence necessary to thread the maze that a big logjam presents—these are attributes so wondrous that we must consider them in the same realm as the mysterious intelligence that allows the creature to distinguish between the smell of her particular natal stream and the smell of the rest of the world of water. But when the fish swims into an enclosure that requires her to seek an exit downstream, she becomes slow and seemingly confused. It will usually take her some hours to discover the downstream exit that she found so quickly before, when it was the passage upstream. Her slow meanders seem now to lack purpose; escape from the trap, when it comes, seems almost accidental. It is as if nothing matters now that the path to the spawning gravels is blocked.
I had argued with my coworkers that we should take advantage of this weakness. We humans have little enough advantage dealing with such a marvelously functional aquatic creature, and I am a person who loves his sleep. Salmon have yet to recognize that we are trying to help them; they continue to evade us. We are social workers whose clients decline to be served. Use our terrestrial, linear intelligence, I said, to fashion traps that would hold the fish until morning. Wait to handle them until after a second cup of coffee. And we had, for two years, fashioned beautiful traps to stand at the mouth of the weir. The traps had been built from the same grape stakes as the weir panels, and they had cleverly hinged plywood covers opening out from either side of the top. A three-quarter-inch cable slung all the way across the river from the top of the gorge at either side allowed a running block to be installed. Another line running through the block attached the traps to a hand-operated winch for installing the heavy hulks of the things in their exact locations, or for pulling them out quickly when the level and velocity of the rising water threatened to tear them apart or sweep them away.
But there was something about the traps—the sound that the waters made passing through so much enclosure, or perhaps the shadow that the things cast in the liquid boil below—that seemed to prevent the fish from entering. We had observed fish moving at dusk work their way right up to the mouth of a trap and then, in an instant, turn and disappear downstream. When they did enter and stayed for the night, they leaped against the plywood covers looking for a way out, wounding themselves and threatening their precious manifest of unfertilized eggs. Such a trap was too obviously a construct in service of human comfort, and we were, after all, seeking to serve the ends of the other species. Thus we have switched to a system featuring the larger and less secure pen, and the alarm clock set at two-hour intervals, and the muddled brains of the attendants.
If the salmon are running in the deep night in December or January, it is likely that the moon is new, that the river is rising, and that the water is clouded with silt. It is probably raining. The salmon will use these elements of obscurity to hide them from predators while they make a dash toward the spawning grounds.
Tonight it is drizzling lightly, the air full of water only just heavy enough to fall to the ground. The drops cut across the beam of my headlamp and seem to be held there motionless, a black-and-white cartoon of rain. In the circle at the end of the beam, the black shag of redwood, and the huckleberry understory is everywhere weighted down with water and dripping.
I am in clumsy chestwaders that weigh seven or eight pounds. The rubber boot-legs join at the crotch and the garment continues up to just above the sternum, where it's held in place by a pair of short suspenders. The suspenders are never adjusted correctly; they are inevitably too tight or too loose. I lurch about like a puppet with too few moveable joints. Long-johns top and bottom against the cold. A Helly-Hansen raincoat and a black knit watch cap put on over the strap that holds my headlamp. To pee, I have to take off the coat, find a place to put it so that it won't get wet on the inside, undo the suspenders and slide the waders down to my knees, unbutton my Levi's, and fish around for the fly of the long-johns. The cap can stay on. I turn my back to the river out of courtesy.
The Mattole River runs through the westernmost watershed in California, cutting down through sea bottoms that have only recently, in geological terms, risen up out of the Pacific. It runs everywhere through deep valleys or gorges carved from the soft young sandstone.
Here, only a few miles from its headwaters, the river looks more like a large creek and is closely contained by steep banks. The fish are spooky during this culminating stage of their lives, which is why they run at night, and in murky water. Any light on the water, any boulder clumsily splashed into the stream, will turn a salmon skittering back toward the nearest hole or brushy overhang downstream. She may not try again until another night, or, in the worst case, will establish a spawning nest—a redd—downstream from the weir, in a place with too much current to allow her eggs to be effectively fertilized.
I inch down the bank crabwise in wet darkness, the gumboot heels of the waders digging furrows in the mud, the fingers and heels of my hands plowing the soaked wet duff.
On the bank of the river at the bottom of the ravine I hold my breath and let my ears readjust to the sounds of the water. I think I can hear through the cascades of sound a systematic plop, plop, plop, as if pieces of fruit are being dropped into the water. Sometimes this is the sound of a fish searching for the opening upstream; sometimes it is not. I breathe quietly and wait. I continue to hear the sound for a period of time for which I have no measure ... and then it stops. I wait and wait. I hold my breath but do not hear the sound again. There is a long piece of parachute cord tied to a slipknot that holds open the gate at the mouth of the weir. I yank on the cord and the gate falls closed, its crash muted as the rush of water pushes it the last few inches tight against the body of the weir.
And now that I am no longer trying to sort one sound from another in the sound of the water, it is as if the water has become silent. It is dark. If the world were a movie, this would be cut to black. When I hear the sound I am waiting for, it is unmistakable: the sound of a full-grown salmon leaping wholly out of the water and twisting back into it. My straining senses slow down the sound so that each of its parts can be heard separately. A hiss, barely perceptible, as the fish muscles itself right out of its living medium; a silence like a dozen monks pausing too long between the strophes of a chant as the creature arcs through the dangerous air; a crash as of a basketball going through a plate glass window as he or she returns to the velvet embrace of the water; and then a thousand tiny bells struck once only as the shards of water fall and the surface of the stream regains its viscous integrity.
I flick on my headlamp and the whole backwater pool seems to leap toward me. The silver streak that crosses the enclosure in an instant is a flash of lightning within my skull, one which heals the wound that has separated me from this moment—from any moment. The encounter is so perfectly complex, timeless, and reciprocal that it takes on an objective reality of its own. I am able to walk around it as if it were a block of carved stone. If my feelings could be reduced to a chemical formula, the experience would be a clear solution made up of equal parts of dumb wonder and clean exhilaration, colored through with a sense of abiding dread. I could write a book about it.
The coevolution of humans and salmon on the North Pacific Rim fades into antiquity so completely that it is difficult to imagine a first encounter between the two species. Salmon probably arrived first. Their presence can be understood as one of the necessary preconditions for human settlement. Pacific salmon species became differentiated from their Atlantic ancestors no more than half a million years ago. Such adaptations were a response to their separation from their Atlantic salmon parent stock by land bridges such as the one that has periodically spanned the Bering Strait. By the time the Bering Sea land bridge last emerged, twelve thousand to twenty-five thousand years ago, in the Pleistocene epoch, the six species of Pacific salmon had arrived at their present characteristics and had attained their distribution over the vast areas of the North Pacific. As the ice pack retreated, the species continued to adapt ever more exactly as stocks or races—each finely attuned to one of the new rivers and to recently arrived human predators. If indeed humans first arrived in North America after crossing that land bridge from Asia, the sight of salmon pushing up the rivers of this eastern shore would have served as proof that this place too was livable.
On this mindblown midnight in the Mattole I could be any human at any time during the last few millennia, stunned by the lavish design of nature. The knowledge of the continuous presence of salmon in this river allows me to know myself for a moment as an expression of the continuity of human residence in this valley. Gone for a moment is my uncomfortable identity as part of a recently arrived race of invaders with doubtful title to the land; this encounter is one between species, human and salmonid. Such encounters have been happening as long as anyone can remember: the fish arrive to feed us and they do so at the same time every year and they do so with an obvious sense of intention. They come at intervals to feed us. They are very beautiful. What if they stopped coming?—which they must if we fail to relearn how to celebrate the true nature of the relationship.
For most of us, the understanding of how it might have been to live in a lavish system of natural provision is dim and may be obscured further by the scholarship that informs us. Our understanding of biology has been formulated during a time of less diversity and abundance in nature; our sense of relationship is replaced by fear of scarcity. By the time the anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Erna Gunther were collecting their impressions of the life of the Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest, early in the twentieth century, the great salmon runs that had been an integral part of that life had already been systematically reduced. It may be this factor that makes the rituals described in their published papers seem transcendent and remote: ceremonial behavior that had evolved during a long period of dynamic balance has become difficult to understand in the period of swift decline that has followed.
It seems that in this part of the world, salmon have always been experienced by humans very directly as food, and food as relationship: the Yurok word for salmon, nepu, means "that which is eaten"; for the Ainu, the indigenous people of Hokkaido Island, the word is shipe, meaning "the real thing we eat." Given the abundance and regularity of the provision, one can imagine a relationship perceived as being between the feeder and those fed rather than between hunted and hunter. Villages in earlier times were located on the banks of streams, at the confluence of tributaries, because that is where the food delivers itself. The food swims up the stream each year at much the same time and gives itself, alive and generous.
It is not difficult to capture a salmon for food. My own first memory of salmon is of my father dressed for work as a radio dispatcher, standing on the low check dam across the Sacramento River at Redding and catching a king salmon in his arms, almost accidentally. The great Shasta Dam, which when completed would deny salmon access to the headwaters of the river, was still under construction. Twenty years later, as an urbanized young man, I found myself standing with a pitchfork, barefooted, in an inland tributary of the Klamath River, California's second largest river system. The salmon were beating their way upstream in the shallow water between my legs. Almost blindly, my comrades and I speared four or five of them. When the salmon come up the river, they come as food and they come as gift.
Salmon were also experienced as connection. At the time of year when the salmon come back, drawn up the rivers by spring freshets or fall rains, everyone in the old villages must have gained a renewal of their immediate personal knowledge of why the village was located where it was, of how tightly the lives of the people were tied to the lives of the salmon. The nets and drying racks were mended and ready. Everyone had a role to play in the great flood of natural provision that followed. The salmon runs were the largest annual events for the village community. The overarching abundance of salmon—their sheer numbers—is difficult to imagine from our vantage point in the late twentieth century. Nineteenth-century firsthand accounts consistently describe rivers filled from bank to bank with ascending salmon: "You could walk across the rivers on their backs!" In the memory of my neighbor Russell Chambers, an octogenarian, there are stories of horses refusing to cross the Mattole in the fall because the river had for a time become a torrent of squirming, flashing, silvery salmon light.
It is equally difficult to imagine a collective life informed and infused by the exuberant seasonal pulses of surrounding nature over a lifetime, over the lifetime of generations. But for most of the years in tribal memory of this region's original inhabitants, the arrival of salmon punctuated, at least once annually, a flow of provision that included acorn and abalone in the south, clams and berries and smelt in the north, venison and mussels and tender greens everywhere. Humans lived on the northwest coasts of North America for thousands of years in a state of lavish natural provision inseparable from any concept of individual or community life and survival. Human consciousness organized the collective experience as an unbroken field of being: there is no separation between people and the multitudinous expressions of place manifested as food.
But each annual cycle is punctuated also by winter and the hungry time of early spring, and in the memory of each generation there are larger discontinuities of famine and upheaval. Within the memory of anyone's grandmother's grandfather, there is a catastrophe that has broken the cycle of abundance and brought hard times. California has periodic droughts that have lasted as long as a human generation. And there are cycles that have longer swings than can be encompassed by individual human lifetimes. Within any hundred-year period, floods alter the very structure of rivers. Along the Cascadian subduction zone, which stretches from Vancouver Island to Cape Mendocino in California, earthquakes and tidal waves three to five hundred years apart change the very nature of the landscape along its entire length. Whole new terraces rise up out of the sea in one place; the land drops away thirty feet in another. Rivers find new channels, and the salmon become lost for a time.
Even larger cycles include those long fluctuations of temperature in the air and water which every ten or twenty thousand years capture the water of the world in glaciers and the ice caps. Continents are scoured, mountain valleys deepened, coastlines reconfigured, human histories interrupted. These events become myths of a landscape in a state of perpetual creation; they are a part of every winter's storytelling. The stories cast a shadow on the psyche and they carry advice which cannot be ignored. Be attentive. Watch your step. Everything's alive and moving.
On a scale equivalent to that of the changes caused by ice ages and continental drift are the forces set loose by recent European invasions and conquests of North America, the exponential explosion of human population that drives this history, and the aberrant denial of the processes of interdependence which has come to define human behavior during this period.
Somewhere between these conflicting states of wonder—between natural provision erotic in its profligacy and cruel in its sometimes sudden and total withdrawal—lies the origins of the old ways. Somewhere beyond our modern notions of religion and regulation but partaking of both, human engagement with salmon—and the rest of the natural world—has been marked by behavior that is respectful, participatory, and ceremonial. And it is in this way that most of the human species has behaved most of the time it has been on the planet.
King salmon and I are together in the water. The basic bone-felt nature of this encounter never changes, even though I have spent parts of a lifetime seeking the meeting and puzzling over its meaning, trying to find for myself the right place in it. It is a large experience, and it has never failed to contain these elements, at once separate and combined: empty-minded awe; an uneasiness about my own active role both as a person and as a creature of my species; and a looming existential dread that sometimes attains the physicality of a lump in the throat, a knot in the abdomen, a constriction around the temples. They seem important, these various elements of response, like basic conditions of existence. I am smack in the middle of the beautiful off-handed description of our field of being that once flew up from my friend David Abram's mouth: that we are many sets of eyes staring out at each other from the same living body. For the instant, there is a part of that living body which is a cold wet darkness containing a pure burst of salmon muscle and intelligence, and containing also a clumsy human pursuing the ghost of a relationship.
I have left the big dip net leaning against the trailer up above the river. I forget that the captured fish is probably confused and will not quickly find its way out of the river pen. I race up the steep bank of the gorge as if everything depends upon my speed. My wader boots, half a size too large, catch on a tree root and I am thrown on my face in the mud. The bank is steep and I hit the ground before my body expects to, and with less force. I am so happy to be unhurt that I giggle absurdly. Why, tonight, am I acting like a hunter? All my training, social and intellectual, as well as my genetic predisposition, moves me to act like a predator rather than a grateful, careful guest at Gaia's table. Why am I acting as if this is an encounter that has a winner and a loser, even though I am perfectly aware that the goal of the encounter is to keep the fish alive?
I retrieve the dip net and return more slowly down the dark bank to the river. Flashing the beam of my headlamp on the water in the enclosure, I can see a shape darker than the dark water. The shape rolls as it turns to flash the pale belly. The fish is large—three or maybe four years old. It seems as long as my leg.
Several lengths of large PVC pipe are strewn along the edge of the river, half in the water and half out. These sections of heavy white or aquamarine tubing, eight, ten, and twelve inches in diameter, have been cut to length to provide temporary holding for a salmon of any of the various sizes that might arrive: the more closely contained the captured creature, the less it will thrash about and do injury to itself. I remove from the largest tube the perforated Plexiglas endplate held in place by large cotter pins.
I wade into the watery pen. Nowhere is the water deeper than my knees; the trap site has been selected for the rare regularity of its bottom and for its gentle gradient. The pen is small enough so that anywhere I stand I dominate half its area. Here, within miles of its headwaters, the river is no more than thirty feet across. The pen encloses half its width. I wade slowly back and forth to get a sense of the fish's speed and strength. This one seems to be a female, recently arrived. When she swims between my feet I can see the gentle swollen curve from gill to tail where her three to five thousand eggs are carried. She explores this new barrier to her upstream migration powerfully and methodically, surging from one side of the enclosure to another. Using the handle of the net to balance myself against the current, I find the edge of the pen farthest from the shore, turn off the headlamp, and stand quietly, listening again.
The rain has stopped. Occasionally I can hear her dorsal fin tear the surface of the water. After a few minutes I point my headlamp downward and flick the switch. Again the surface of the water seems to leap toward me. The fish is irritated or frightened by the light, and each of her exploratory surges moves her farther away from me, closer to the shore.
The great strength of her thrusts pushes her into water that is shallower than the depth of her body and she flounders. Her tail seeks purchase where there is none and beats the shallow water like a fibrillating heart. The whole weight of the river seems to tear against my legs as I take the few steps toward her. I reach over her with the net so that she lies between me and the mesh hoop. I hold the net stationary and kick at the water near her tail; she twists away from me and into the net. Now I can twist the mouth of the net up toward the air and she is completely encircled by the two-inch mesh. I move her toward deeper water and rest.
There are sparks of light rotating behind my eyes. The struggle in the net translates up my arms like low-voltage electricity. The weight of the fish amplified by the length of the net's handle is too much. I use two hands to grasp the aluminum rim at either side of the mouth of the net, and I rest and breathe. After a bit, I can release one side of the frame and hold the whole net jammed against my leg with one hand. I reach for the PVC tube and position its open mouth where I want it, half submerged and with the opening pointing toward us. I move the net and the fish around to my left side and grasp through the net the narrow part of her body just forward of her tail—the peduncle—where she is still twice the thickness of my wrist.
I only have enough strength to turn the fish in one direction or another; were I to try and lift her out of the water against her powerful lateral thrashing, I would surely drop her. The fish is all one long muscle from head to tail, and that muscle is longer, and stronger, than any muscle I can bring to bear. I direct her head toward the tube, and enclose tube and fish within the net. I drop the handle of the net, and move the fish forward, toward the tube.
There is a moment while I am holding the salmon and mesh entwined in elbow-deep water when everything goes still. Her eyes are utterly devoid of expression. Her gills pump and relax, pump and relax, measured and calmly regular. There is in that reflex an essence of aquatic creaturehood, a reality to itself entire. And there is a sense of great peacefulness, as when watching the rise and fall of a sleeping lover's chest. When I loosen my grasp, she swims out of the net and into the small enclosure.
Quickly, trembling, I lift the tail end of the tube so that her head is facing down into the river. I slide the Plexiglas endplate into place and fasten it, and she lies quietly, the tube just submerged and tethered to a stout willow. I sit down beside the dark and noisy river, beside the captured female salmon. I am sweating inside my rubber gear. The rain has begun again. I think about the new year and the promise of the eggs inside her. I am surrounded by ghosts that rise off the river like scant fog.