Dreaming of Salmon |

Dreaming of Salmon

Dreaming of Salmon
by Kurt Hoelting
This essay was published in On Nature: Great Writers On The Great Outdoors, Edited by Lee Gutkind, (Jeremy P. Tarcher / Putnam, New York, 2002).

I grew up by the shores of Puget Sound, dreaming of salmon. All my childhood summers were spent on Liberty Bay, in a cabin near Poulsbo. It’s where my strongest memories were wrought. Winters were passed somewhere in the confusion of the city. But with school’s ending each spring, we made a bee line for the cabin, and life began again. From earliest memory the waters of the Sound pulled me to them as inexorably as the tide.

There was magic in those waters, and nothing held more power in my imagination than the elusive salmon. My father worked in the city right through the summer, and had no interest in fishing, so I did the best I could, drop line in hand, working my way up the ladder from bullheads to sea perch to dogfish; always dreaming, dreaming of salmon. I read books about the salmon, drew pictures of them in fine detail, plotted endlessly and fruitlessly to lure one onto my hook. My brother was almost always with me when we went in search of salmon. Yet only once, in all those youthful summers, did we actually approach our quarry. Trolling a spinner behind our rowboat, with dusk coming on, my brother hooked what could only have been a salmon. His pole nearly jumped from the boat, line singing off the reel. In one majestic run, the fish stripped the reel, snapped the line and was gone.

To this day, the memory haunts me. It’s part of the enduring lore of our family.

We never did catch a salmon in Puget Sound. Nor did we suspect how many had already been lost. No one told us about the Elwha River kings that commonly reached 100 pounds, or the Quinault River sockeye that were coveted by Indian tribes in trade up and down the coast, all gone. We didn’t hear tales of Greywolf pinks, Soleduck summer coho, Satsop steelhead, Skokomish chums. No one was there to tell us.

We knew little, and understood less, about the true stature of salmon in the ecological and cultural heritage of our bioregion. But we knew our own yearnings. And the tenacity of our efforts to catch a salmon for ourselves, however futile, was testimony to the intrinsic power of this astonishing creature. Our lives were shaped in part by the strength of the encounter, even if this encounter occurred only in our imaginations. Years later, as a college student working on a salmon seiner in Southeast Alaska, I finally catch salmon myself. I also witnessed the spectacle of wild salmon returning in huge numbers. In a place far to the north, I caught a glimpse of the lost legacy of my native Puget Sound. Year after year, through college and graduate school, I left the Sound to head north for the salmon rich waters of Alaska during the summer, “just one more time.”

Somewhere along the way I figured out that this annual migration was my life, not merely a prelude to a “real” job in the city.

This summer will be my 25th season fishing in Alaska. The passing years have done little to diminish my enthusiasm for catching salmon, or for being present at the return of the world’s last great wild runs. But I am more reflective now, more aware of the tragic ironies that pit one region against another, healthy runs against threatened runs, wild salmon against their genetic step-cousins from the pen. These ironies offer themselves now as a metaphor for our times, a poignant case study in our efforts to rethink the place of human beings in the natural world. For me, the contrasts are jarring. The last two seasons in Bristol Bay, for example, have each seen returns of over 40 million wild sockeye salmon, making them the first and third largest runs on record. When the Bristol Bay fishery dies down in late July, I travel to the Southeast Alaskan pahandle to purse seine for pink salmon. With returns of over fifty million pinks the last two seasons, these numbers are breaking century-old records at just the time when once-great runs to the south are sliding toward extinction, and coast-wide closures are being ordered in a desperate attempt to save them.

My own life is divided between two worlds, one to the north, one to the south, one of plenty, one of want. I am framed by the contrasts, unsettled by the collision of opposites. For years I have taken for granted the necessity of traveling long distances away from home to find what was once the heart and soul of my own region. I have become intimate with the waters of Bristol Bay and Southeast Alaska, while remaining a stranger to Puget Sound itself, even though more of my time is spent here than in Alaska. With the eclipse of the salmon in the Sound, the region slides toward economic irrelevance. Never mind that Microsoft is busy producing millionaires, and Boeing is filling the earth’s skies with ever larger jets. The salmon is gone, and with it goes the biological and cultural context that has held the region together since the retreat of the last ice sheet.

The cultural historian Thomas Berry has observed that our sense of the divine is linked inextricably to the diversity and splendor of the natural world. Nature provides the raw materials, the primordial soil out of which all imagination grows. As the exterior world shinks and decays, so goes the seed stock of natural inspiration. Perhaps it is our capacity for wonder that is the final victim of an unbridled devotion to progress. What does it mean to our collective imagination to gaze out on waters emptied of wild salmon? What does it mean to have scattered the cloud of witnesses – bear, wolf, orca, eagle, seal – who gathered so faithfully each year through the centuries to celebrate the salmon’s return? To my mind, nothing can ever replace salmon in the cultural imagination of the Pacific Northwest. The poet Gary Snyder is on the right track. He has suggested that we prepare a Ten-Thousand Year Plan for the Management of our National Forests. I propose a Ten-Thousand Year Plan for the restoration of wild salmon runs in Puget Sound. It’s a reasonable proposal, precisely because it offers a time frame that wild salmon understand. I’ll believe we have a chance when such a plan is proposed not by poets and philosophers, but by engineers and politicians. We will have reason for hope when, as a people, we understand that our endowment of the future extends far beyond the pittance of time that is granted ourselves and our immediate offspring. That endowment must include wild salmon, if we want it also to include children who dream.