Letter from the Columbia River
Just beyond the high pass into Stanley, Idaho, at the end of a very long day, I ran out of gas. It was 1997, and I still remember the sound of the engine on my father’s thirsty old Bronco, first sputtering, and then dying. But I was somewhere around seven thousand feet in the Sawtooth mountains and had gravity on my side. I managed to keep rolling downhill for miles, taking the long curves in silence, fast enough at first, then slower, then slow. It was already getting dark, and when I finally coasted to a stop on the gravel shoulder, I heard, rather than saw, the river.....MUCH MORE
It was called, like so many others, the Salmon River. All across the 260,000-square-mile Columbia River watershed, stretching across seven states and one Canadian province, tens of millions of salmon had once coursed upstream from the Pacific Ocean each year, completing a typical life cycle of two to four years by breeding in the same freshwater streams where they were born. But in the 1860s, gold mining and timbering had begun to silt up the high mountain spawning beds, covering and suffocating their eggs. And by the 1880s, massive canneries at the Columbia’s mouth in Astoria, Oregon, were tinning a million salmon a year. The Columbia salmon population began to plummet. Between 1938 and 1979, the construction of eight huge hydroelectric dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers deepened the collapse to extinction levels.
But there, in the river, was one of them. In the dusk, standing beside the Bronco, I heard a tremendous splash in the shallows. I ignored it, but moments later it happened again, and in disbelief I stalked slowly up the bank. A monster was there, in the curve of the shallows, a dark shape against the light gravel of the riverbed. At first I could only see the thrashing splashes of her tail, but as I approached, I began to make out the mottled flesh of a four-year-old sockeye hen, struggling to clear an area for a redd, or nest.
Against the odds, despite a century and a half of human interference, she had managed to swim 900 miles and climb 6,200 feet into the Sawtooths. The pure, oxygenated water and lack of predators here were ideal for reproducing. If a male had made the same journey, and could find her, they would send hundreds of thousands of tiny smolts downstream in the spring.
The final moments of life are never pretty. The sockeye’s skin was peeling away, its flesh lumpy and gray. Literally falling apart, the hen nevertheless summoned the energy to sweep away the silt that might choke her eggs. Every few minutes, she felt the spur of her DNA, and gave one more abrupt splash of the tail, one more heave.
Eventually an old RV came squeaking down the hill. The driver gave me a gallon of gas and, reluctantly, took my money.
Twenty years later, I jumped over a chain-link fence outside Riggins, Idaho, into a salmon hatchery on the banks of the Rapid River, a tributary of the Salmon. The facility was unimpressive, mostly corrugated sheds and a few pieces of heavy equipment scattered around. It was closed, barely—the posted visiting hours had just expired—but I had been hopping a lot of fences with my trout rod recently, and it felt Western-normal. Anyway, I really needed to see a $68,000 fish.
Back in 1875, when salmon runs first started to crash, the Smithsonian scientist and U.S. fish commissioner Spencer Fullerton Baird was hired by the Oregon legislature to draft a plan. He knew and identified the real problems: overfishing, the degradation of high mountain streams, and an overabundance of dams, many with no fish passage. But Baird, calculating that there was no political will to solve the underlying problems, proposed a cheaper solution: hatcheries. The salmon life cycle would be reproduced by scientists, the eggs fertilized and sown into rivers like wheat into fields. For just $15,000 a year in operating costs, he promised an unlimited harvest, and Oregon and the rest of the Columbia watershed set about building hatcheries that cranked out billions of fertilized eggs over the course of the next century....
