Excerpt
Upstream
Chapter 1
Coming Out of the Woodwork on Copper River Day
The skies darkened all at once, as if a curtain suddenly dropped, and rain engulfed the city. Across Puget Sound to the west, the Olympic Mountains disappeared into pillows of low clouds that filled the horizon. A ferry bound for Bainbridge Island plowed steadily into the squall, cutting through slants of gray, its blue beacon flashing through the pall. At Pike Place Market—the collection of produce, meat, and seafood stalls overlooking Seattle’s downtown waterfront—throngs of people escaping the weather gathered around comforting displays of food. King and sockeye salmon, their scales burnished with a silver sheen, lay on beds of ice like mounds of treasure. A whole king of twenty or more pounds was selling for $38 per pound. Cleaned and filleted, the same fish was $60 a pound. It was mid-May, and the first Copper River salmon of the year had just arrived from Alaska that week. Trying to stay dry like everyone else, I wandered the stalls, admiring both the catch and the crowds that pressed in on all sides to take a measure of these handsome fish.
A young bearded musician with tattooed arms and a guitar case squatted down on his haunches to study a fifteen-pounder more closely at eye level. One of the fishmongers, a burly man who patrolled the front of his shop in bright-orange deck pants, hurried over and put his hands on his hips, drumming up a little theater for curious bystanders fingering their wallets, and asked the guy what his problem was—hadn’t he ever been introduced to the king before? The young man admitted to being from out of town and quickly added that he was playing a gig that night across the street at the Showbox, as if this disqualified his tourist status. “Color me impressed,” the fishmonger said loudly, looking around for another mark. The crowd tittered nervously. He turned his gaze on an elderly couple from Kansas. They didn’t hesitate, pointing to a smaller—and cheaper, at $20 per pound—Copper River sockeye, to be filleted and packaged for shipment home. The fishmonger barked a few words and tossed the six-pound fish to his colleague behind the counter, who made a backhanded circus catch before brandishing a large fillet knife that gleamed in his hand.
Flying salmon is a ritualistic practice at Pike Place Market, one that attracts mobs of onlookers as well as the negative attention of PETA. When the couple had left with their boxed sockeye, I asked the fishmonger if many people were ponying up for the more expensive kings. In the past it was my custom to get a whole fish each spring during the Copper River frenzy and fillet it myself, filling the freezer at home, but in recent years the price tag for kings had escalated to a level more in line with luxury goods, and I found myself reduced to the status of window shopper. This year was the highest price anyone had ever seen. The fishmonger beckoned me to follow him around back, where a thirty-eight-pounder lay submerged in a tub of slush ice, its shiny skin slightly flushed with a faint pink, a ring of deep-red meat visible at the collar, where the head had been removed. He hefted it up by the tail. “This one is already spoken for. The lady buys five thousand dollars’ worth of Copper River every year. She always wants the biggest fish.” Whipping out his calculator, he claimed his client could afford it—she was one of the first thirty employees at Microsoft, he said. The single fish came to $1,443.62. I asked if she would get a break on price as a regular customer. The fishmonger shook his head. “It’s Copper River. Nobody gets a break.”
The commotion generated by Copper River salmon amuses many locals, mystifies those not accustomed to the importance placed on salmon culture in the Pacific Northwest, and downright pisses off a few, who consider it all a marketing ploy. Alaska exports millions of pounds of salmon around the world each year—why get so excited about one particular river and its fish? And what about the salmon that can be caught right here in Puget Sound?
Well, for one thing, the sound is no longer the fishery it once was, local iconography aside. Most of the boats docked at Fisherman’s Terminal in Seattle make the long trip up to Alaska to fish. The rivers of Puget Sound wind through timber farms, golf courses, and housing developments with names like Cedar Grove and Crystal Waters—apt descriptions of what they’ve replaced. The Copper River, by contrast, embodies the attributes many customers have come to expect from wild salmon. The river rises out of the untrammeled Wrangell Mountains and races through some of the most breathtaking territory anywhere in the world before reaching the Gulf of Alaska. Wrangell– St. Elias National Park, a sweeping jumble of high volcanic peaks, protects the headwaters, while the lower reaches flow through the temperate rainforests and open tundralike expanses of Chugach National Forest. At nearly three hundred miles long, with a watershed draining twenty-four thousand square miles, the Copper is the tenth-largest river in the United States and is known for its broad delta, an important rearing ground for waterfowl and shorebirds. Full of bears, eagles, and salmon, this vast watershed is worthy of the finest nature documentaries, and just knowing that a place like this still exists makes people happy. There was a time, not that long ago, when much of the West Coast of North America was as wild and bountiful as the Copper River region is today.
I pushed my way through the crowds to another stall. A blue banner from Seafood Watch, the environmental-watchdog organization run by the Monterey Bay Aquarium, vouched for its 100% sustainable seafood. Handwritten signs festooned the displays of others. “We sell only wild salmon caught by wild fishermen!” boasted one. “First of the season Copper River king salmon,” promised another.
The king is the most celebrated species of Pacific salmon and has been for longer than anyone can remember. Native Americans called it tyee, which means “headman” in Chinook Indian jargon, the common language of trade and commerce among Northwest tribes in the 1800s. Today the king is also called chinook in honor of those same people, who lived along the lower Columbia River and depended on it. For a multitude of reasons, from high fat content to great size and countenance, the species enjoys a mythopoeic position atop the salmon totem pole, and, befitting a headman, it dwarfs other salmon, with occasional reports of giants in excess of eighty pounds. But the king is also the least common of all Pacific salmon, and it is declining in number throughout its range along the West Coast, from Nome, Alaska, to Ventura, California, the result of human impacts known and probably unknown—another reason for its value relative to other species.
My own interest in salmon, however, began on the opposite coast. Though I live in Seattle now, the taste of salmon is one I used to identify with my New England childhood. Every year on the Fourth of July, my grandparents served a baked Atlantic salmon at their cottage on Cape Cod, along with fried potatoes, steamed green peas, and a tureen of egg cream sauce. In our family, salmon was viewed as a regional delicacy and something reserved for special occasions. My grandmother bought the salmon at Wimpy’s, a local fish market with an attached bar, where she might have had a few belts before navigating a giant wood-paneled Chrysler station wagon back home. Years later I would realize that the fish riding shotgun beside her, wrapped in brown butcher paper, was not actually local, as we all assumed (the Cape being a place with a long history of commercial fishing). In fact, it was almost certainly a farmed Atlantic salmon from overseas—a distinction my family didn’t know enough to make at the time. Back then we didn’t give food-sourcing much thought.
While it’s nice to think of a crusty New Englander hauling in his catch somewhere off the coast of Massachusetts, our Independence Day salmon likely began its life in a sanitized egg tray before being hatched in an indoor rearing facility and eventually transferred to a net pen anchored in a Scandinavian fjord, where it was fed a diet of fish meal laced with chemical colorants to give its gray flesh the expected pinkish hue. By the time I was old enough to buy and cook my own salmon, such farms, pioneered in Norway, were being replicated in Scotland, Ireland, Canada, Chile, Australia, New Zealand, and on both coasts of the United States, without much thought given to what they had replaced. The Connecticut River, not far from my childhood home and once a productive Atlantic salmon breeding ground, hasn’t seen a viable wild population in decades, possibly not since the American Revolution. An ambitious plan to restore runs to the Connecticut was finally abandoned in 2012 after forty-five years of effort and countless dollars. Other than a stream or two in Maine, New England is no longer home to wild Atlantic salmon in any sort of meaningful way, and very few people alive today have ever even tasted one. As the wild fish were traded in for the farmed variety on both sides of the Atlantic, the will to safeguard wild populations eroded, and now wild Atlantic salmon are mostly a memory across Northern Europe and the East Coast of North America, a memory that may soon wink out altogether.
If my first taste of salmon came at a young age, it wasn’t until I was an adult that I actually saw a live one in the wild, in southwestern Oregon’s Rogue River Canyon. I was in my early twenties, a born New Englander recently relocated to the Pacific Northwest, new to salmon country. That year I took a leave of absence from my schooling to caretake a secluded homestead in the coastal mountains, a couple of hours from civilization via rough forest roads. The owners of the homestead, two brothers, unlocked a pair of heavy steel gates, the sort that typically close off a logging road, to let me in. These gates might as well have opened up a new continent, a new dimension even. I entered the domain of bears, cougars, and salmon. The Rogue River is one of the few large watercourses left in the contiguous United States that isn’t dogged by a road or highway for most of its length. In July, as the roadless canyon heated up, reaching triple-digit temperatures, the air heavy and nearly viscid, I swam daily in the Rogue to cool off. The trail to the river, built by a German-born mule skinner in the mid-1800s, dropped eight hundred feet in less than a mile through a fragrant grove of old-growth Douglas fir and Pacific madrone. My summer swims coincided with the upstream spawning migration of king salmon, which stack up by the hundreds at creek mouths along the river course to rest and drink in the cold, highly oxygenated water that tumbles down from fir-clad mountains. Where a rushing tributary called Kelsey Creek marries its flow to the Rogue, I jumped off twenty-foot cliffs into the river’s refreshing embrace and paddled among the salmon that lingered around the creek mouth. Exhausted and lethargic from their journey, they didn’t spook at my alien presence in the pool. Thirty-pounders finned right past me to reach the cool outflow, some of them brushing against my bare legs, their rippling sides exposing equal measures of strength and vulnerability.
The Rogue River is where I first began to see the long-standing bond between people and salmon. The owners of the wilderness homestead gave me flies tied by their late father, a heart surgeon, and the gesture made me feel as though I belonged to a heritage that stretched back to a time before words could make sense of it. Every summer as boys they had come to this remote canyon, and it was here that they had learned to fish, hunt, and travel through the backcountry. One became a high school biology teacher, the other an artist who models nature’s elegant forms into his work. I was now a part of that tradition. In the fall, I walked the river trail every day in late afternoon as the sun slipped behind canyon walls, packing along my fly rod. The first time a fish rose off the bottom to take my feathered ruse, I was too surprised to set the hook. A swirl of quicksilver and it was gone. Lucky for me, the fish hooked itself in its ardor and I was attached to my first steelhead, the most prized game fish in the Northwest, a seagoing trout in the same family as Pacific salmon. The line between us went taut. It was a tether, both a connection to the past and a lead to the future. I’ve been chasing salmon ever since.
Not long after returning to the city, I attended a Tulalip Indian sweat lodge ceremony. My girlfriend, Martha (who would become my wife), taught English at a college in Everett, Washington, near the reservation; one of her students invited us. The sweat lodge was a foxhole in the earth covered with tarps. A rickety wooden ladder led into the hole. We climbed down to join a dozen others seated around a fire pit filled with hot rocks. Someone outside threw a blanket over the entrance, and everything went dark. Martha gripped my hand. An elder slowly beat a small skin drum and explained that we would go around the circle, giving thanks. He sprinkled water over the rocks; steam hissed in the darkness. Already, sweat was rolling down my cheeks. We each gave thanks in turn.
Many of the Indians (as they preferred to call themselves) thanked grandparents or distant relatives who had raised them or otherwise gotten them to school, kept them out of trouble. I thought about the abject poverty I had seen as we drove through the reservation earlier that morning. Next the elder asked us to offer a prayer and a hope for the future. He threw more handfuls of water on the rocks. I could hear moaning all around me as the temperature rose and the claustrophobia mounted in this damp, dark hole in the ground. I squeezed Martha’s hand tighter. Some of the sweat lodgers had brought wet towels inside with them, and now they wrapped their heads in the towels. We hadn’t known any better, and I worried I might pass out from the heat. At the same time I didn’t want to bring any dishonor upon Martha or myself. I can’t recall exactly what sort of prayer for the future I offered. I do remember feeling embarrassed by it. It was trite and inconsequential in comparison to those of my fellow sweat lodgers, who spoke of traditions that went back centuries or even millennia and were now in jeopardy of falling to pieces.
