Returning To the Home Stream

Returning to the Home Stream: My Story As Told By Salmon

Talk by Kurt Hoelting

Skagit Watershed Council Annual Meeting

July 16, 2008

LaConner, WA

When Shirley Solomon called me in May with the invitation to give this talk, I thought for sure she must be mistaking me for someone else, and I told her so. Surely she was looking for someone with a lot more knowledge of the issues facing salmon in the Skagit.

But she insisted that, no, she had the right person, she’d read a bit about what I’m up to, and thought my story would be a good fit for this year’s annual meeting. She was persuasive enough to talk me into it, and the more I learn about the Skagit Watershed Council, the more honored I feel to have been invited to come.

The title of my talk takes a cue from David James Duncan’s book called My Story As Told By Water. If you’re familiar with Duncan’s work, you know that it is possible to be a fierce advocate for salmon and be outrageously funny at the same time. God knows we need some humor to leaven this work. I devoured Duncan’s novel The River Why about twenty years ago while I was working on a salmon gillnetter in Bristol Bay, and I still count that novel among the top ten books I’ve ever read. It is an unabashed love song for wild rivers and wild salmon, and it also proves that grief and laughter have a lot to learn from each other. “Even today”, Duncan has written, “I know a few coastal canyons where salmon and steelhead outnumber fishermen by hundreds to one. And I’ll share their locations gladly – if you hold a knife to my throat.”

Duncan once confessed to being “struck by a boyhood suspicion that rivers and mountains are myself turned inside out.” He speaks of the deep kinship between our water-filled bodies and this water-covered planet, and it is this kind of kinship love that I’m sure is behind the fact that each one of you is sitting here today, and why you are part of the Skagit Watershed Council. It is this kinship with salmon, and with our own unsurpassed mountains and rivers and estuaries and inland sea that connects me to you, and is why I am standing before you today.

I grew up by the shores of Puget Sound, dreaming of salmon. As a child I spent my summers in a rustic cabin on the shores of Liberty Bay near Poulsbo. This was long before email, the internet, video games and cell phones, so these were unplugged summers, and the older I get, the more grateful I am that I had the chance to grow up this way. When we left the cabin in the morning we sometimes didn’t show back up until dinnertime, and it would be hard to exaggerate how much I was shaped and chiseled by those childhood summers on the Sound. Even though my dad never touched a fishing pole, I had fishing in my genes, and I spent countless hours on a nearby pier with a drop line fishing for whatever I could dredge up – mostly bullheads with an occasional sea perch or dogfish. I didn’t think I really needed more than that until one night, when I was about eight years old, I stayed out on the dock later than usual. I remember it was high tide, with the kind of quiet evening calm across the water that sinks all the way down to the bones. Darkness was coming on. I was just about to pull up my drop line when I saw the shape moving toward me in the water. The creature, as I recall, was about six feet long and weighed maybe 300 pounds. Even though I had never seen one before, I knew instinctively it had to be a salmon. It moved slowly toward me, with a kind of regal grace I had never seen in a fish before. It ignored my drop line as it swam under me, then faded off again in the murky water. It was one of those moments that changes a life. It was like an arrow shot to my heart. Although there was no precedent for this in my family, by the time I got to college I crewing on a salmon seiner in Southeast Alaska every summer. Fifty years after that first encounter, my life and livelihood is still largely built around this amazing creature, and I have never ceased to be astonished by salmon.

I no longer fish commercially for salmon in Alaska, but my daughter and son do. My daughter Kristin gets home tomorrow from her season in Bristol Bay on a boat that caught 150,000 pounds of sockeye salmon. That’s 30,000 sockeyes caught by one boat. My son Alex seined last summer on a boat I fished on twenty years ago, and caught almost a million pounds of pink salmon. 250,000 pinks caught by one boat. I have been in Bristol Bay when two and a half million sockeyes were caught by the fleet in a single tide, and I’ve seen fifteen thousand pink salmon taken in a single set on the West Coast of Southeast Alaska. My children now know by direct experience, as I have known, what it feels like to be present at the return of the last great wild salmon runs on the planet. What would we give for a small fraction of those numbers for an entire run of Chinook salmon here in Puget Sound? Last year 43 Chinooks returned to the Stillaguamish River, and 29 Chinooks made it back to the South Fork of the Nooksak. Two people could count these entire runs on their fingers and toes.

I never did catch a salmon in Puget Sound until just a few years ago. And as that child seeing his first salmon swim by in the water, I had no way of knowing how much had already been lost. No one was there to tell me 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. I didn’t hear tales of Greywolf pinks, Soleduc summer coho, Snohomish steelhead, Skagit chums. I knew little, and understood less, about the true stature of salmon in the ecological and cultural heritage of my home bioregion. Only years later, in a place far to the north, did I catch a glimpse of the lost legacy of my native Puget Sound. And with each passing year I am more aware of the tragic ironies that pit one region against another, healthy runs against threatened runs, wild salmon against hatchery salmon, and all of them against their genetic step-cousins from the pen. I am aware that this quagmire is a metaphor for our times, a perfect case study in our efforts to rethink our human place in the natural world.

For years I took for granted the necessity of traveling a thousand miles north to find what was once the heart and soul of my own home region. I have become intimate with the waters of Bristol Bay and Southeast Alaska, while remaining a relative stranger to the waters of Puget Sound itself, even though this is where I was born and raised. I’m not willing to accept this any more. Never mind that Microsoft is still churning out millionaires, and Boeing keeps filling the earth’s skies with new fleets of jets. The salmon is disappearing, and with it goes the biological and cultural bedrock that has held this region together since the retreat of the last ice sheet.

The culteral historian Thomas Berry has observed that our sense of the divine is bound together with the diversity and splendor of the natural world around us. He has written that “Our interior life shrinks exactly in proportion as the exterior world shrinks.” Nature provides the raw materials, the primordial context out of which all imagination grows, and as we strip away that living richness, so goes the seed stock of natural inspiration. What does it mean to be people of the Skagit or Snohomish or Duwamish once we’ve emptied these great rivers of wild salmon? What does it mean to be people of place if the next million people who arrive in Puget Sound have no knowledge or experience of this bedrock species, and thus no incentive to make sacrifices for their restoration? These are the painful questions that we are choosing to hold on behalf of all who will come after us. How we sustain our own inner resilience in the face of these loses is as important a question as how we hold the line on additional habitat destruction, or move back in the direction of real restoration for salmon and for our Puget Sound watersheds as a whole.

A couple years ago I testified in the final public hearings in Seattle on the proposed Shared Salmon Strategy for Puget Sound. This is an endeavor that I’m sure you’re acquainted with, and probably have mixed feelings about. As a fisherman, I had followed this planning process with a lot of interest, and appreciated the intention, at least, to bring such diverse stakeholders to the table, watershed by watershed, to hammer out salmon restoration plans that might lead to some progress on the ground. After a long line of scientists and policy specialists had taken aim at the plan, my turn came to testify, and I took a different tack. I introduced myself as a fisherman, and said I thought this was an historic effort. I said that the success of this plan will depend on a lot more than just policy expertise and political exertion. The real issue is whether we can teach ourselves and each other to actually care for something so much larger than our own personal self-interest. I acknowledged that the real work lies ahead in implementing these plans, and it was going to be damn hard work. But I also said that this was the first time I have been given reason to hope that we might actually make progress in restoring Puget Sound’s salmon runs.

The next day I was surprised to see the salmon hearings featured on the front page of the Seattle P.I., and even more surprised to see that the highlighted testimony in the caption box quoted a fisherman who said, “This is the first time I have been given reason to hope that we might actually make progress in restoring Puget Sound’s salmon runs.”

Of all the people who testified, I’m sure I had the least knowledge of the plan’s details, and I certainly didn’t consider my testimony more important than that of the experts who had worked so hard to bring a credible plan forward. I think it was just that I was the only one who bothered to point out that we will not work to save that which we do not love. What do all our efforts add up to if they don’t generate some reason to hope that we can actually start to bridge our stubborn divides, that we are capable of collaboration and even community with those we have defined as adversaries, that some shared interest is possible that is larger than the sum of its parts? Hope, and our hunger for evidence that hope is still possible, is something that we seem to be ravenous for after eight years of George W. Bush. This seems to be equally true for Republicans as well as Democrats. It’s no wonder that this hunger for hope has been such a conspicuous part of the current presidential campaign, and that the candidate who best understood and tapped into that longing is the one who finally emerged as the Democratic candidate in next fall’s election.

Yet the hope we hunger for is not some guarantee that things will go our way, or that we’ll all come around to a comfortable consensus, for example, about what will bring people and salmon into renewed harmony here in the Skagit basin. Hope is more primal than that, not so easily tamed by our human will, or by our tendency to take ourselves too seriously in the positions we hold. Strange as it may seem, learning to let go of our attachment to specific results seems to be a prerequisite to authentic hope. Vaclav Havel, who endured years of prison under the Soviet regime before becoming the first President of the new Czech Republic, has said, “Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

Such certainty that things makes sense, regardless of how they turn out, is painfully difficult to hold onto when the outcomes we’ve worked so hard to achieve are encountering setback after setback. What I’m suggesting here is a difficult case to make, and always has been. The devil, after all, is in the details, and in your case those details include such thorny issues as in-stream flow, tidegates, and a host of other nuts-and-bolts concerns about which there is passionate disagreement. The Skagit, after all, is a microcosm of the collision of cultures globally that has thrown away our ancient reliance on habitat-based wisdom and culture, and taken out of anyone’s hands the capacity to be sole arbiters of truth. Yet one thing we may share biologically across all lines of personal and cultural difference is an innate capacity to find reasons for optimism, regardless of the circumstances. We have endured plagues and starvation and war and holocaust for scores of millennia that have given us every reason to choose despair, but as a species we refuse to do that. We’re just not wired that way, and it’s a good thing, too, given what we have in front of us. I think the Dalai Lama got it at least partly right when he said, “Choose to be optimistic. It feels better.”

Even unwarranted optimism deserves its day in court when we are honest about the odds against us. There are famous longitudinal studies that show that people who test high for optimism early in their lives tend to outlive their pessimist counterparts by a country mile. But there is more to hope than just optimism. Real hope is an orientation of the heart that has a pragmatic genius connected to it. Part of the power of hope, it seems to me, is that it always roots itself in the present moment, beginning with present circumstances, and strives to move forward from here, regardless of how deep the losses may be. Hope’s cup is by nature partway full, and searching for the next source of water.

In the case of Northwest salmon, not to mention the long-lost nations of salmon in Continental Europe and Great Britain and Norway and the East Coast of North America, the Industrial Revolution has left a disastrous legacy. We could spend a lot of time fighting over who is most to blame for these losses, but that would still leave us precisely where we are. And the scale of loss we now face in an era of human-induced climate change will serve no one’s private interest if we are unable to find a very different kind of road map into the future that isn’t based, as it has been for so long, on winners and losers. There is no one in this room, no one in the Skagit Valley, indeed no one on planet earth who doesn’t have an equal stake in our finding an authentic way of resolving our differences that makes room in the boat for all stakeholders. This is why I think the very fact of our stuck-ness, combined with the urgency of our task, represents such a great moment of opportunity. The trickster Raven in all of our local Native traditions would find a lot to like about the situation we find ourselves in. Raven might even be to blame. Who knows? On so many fronts, we have come to a time when we have no choice but to stretch beyond our comfort zone, to seek allies where before we found only adversaries, to deeply examine our own assumptions, and to acknowledge where we are hindered by forms of ignorance that cannot be overcome only in the company of those who think like we do.

Part of the problem is that we humans mean so many different things by the word “home”, and we have so much ambivalence about it. I want to talk a bit now about my own pilgrimage back to the “home stream” during this year that I’ve called Circling Home, and how much I continue to learn from salmon as I wrestle with my own understanding of what “homecoming” still might mean.

Seven months ago, on the winter solstice in 2007, I decided to pull back on the throttle for a few months, and to create a kind of self-styled sabbatical. I took a vow to not get in a car for a full year, and to live within a sixty-two mile radius of my home on Whidbey Island. I chose sixty-two miles, or 100 kilometers, because it turns out that this circle fairly exactly traces the contours of the Puget Sound basin, from the southern tip of the Sound through the San Juan Islands to the north, and from the crest of the Olympics to the crest of the Cascades. To my amazement, I discovered also that this circle drawn with my home as its center-point, passes directly over the summits of Mt. Olympus, Mt. Baker and Glacier Peak. In a real sense I’ve taken refuge in this circle for a year, and thrown myself back on my own resources, first of all out of a deepening concern for climate change, and my growing discomfort with the gap between my convictions about this new peril, and the way I’ve actually been living my life. This was a gap I could no longer tolerate. Circling Home has been my first shot at realigning my life with what I now know to be true about the impact of our human activity on global climate. But I also had more selfish reasons. Self-interest and the common good do not always have to be in opposition. My work as a teacher and naturalist was taking me further and further from home, more and more often. This was not only amping up my carbon footprint to twice the national average, it was eroding my sense of a grounded and satisfying life here on my home ground. Something had to give. I was tired of blaming everyone else for not making the first move – tired of blaming politicians and corporate leaders and auto makers and extractive industries for my own failure to act and change. I had no idea where to even begin, so I finally just dove in. I drew a circle around my home, parked my car for a year, and vowed that I would do everything I could to make a virtue of this necessity, to transform my sense of frustrated responsibility into a local voyage of discovery. It hasn’t been easy or convenience, and I didn’t expect it would be. But seven months into the experiment, I haven’t regretted the choice. Coming here today to speak to you was typical of my life these days. Several hours by bus and bicycle got me here, and it will take several hours to get home by the same means. But slowing down and traveling this way has also opened my eyes to so much of what I’ve been missing right in front of my nose in preoccupation with getting somewhere else.

As I was planning for this year, I spent a lot of time staring at maps of Puget Sound asking myself, “Where are the riches? Where are the hidden treasures that I’ve never given myself time to seek out? Where do I feel most at home within this circle, and why? What is the ecological heart of the region, and how can I get myself out into it under my own power?” When I asked myself that last question I kept coming back to the rivers, and to salmon. I noticed that Whidbey Island wraps its long, thin arms around three great river deltas – the Snohomish, the Stillaguamish and the Skagit. The more I looked, the more I wanted to see for myself. So the first trip I took under my own power was a 130-mile walking trip through these three river deltas, including the Tulalip and Swinomish Reservations, and the great Skagit delta that you all call home, then back down the full length of Whidbey Island. The whole trip took me ten days during January and February, including the two days that my wife Sally joined me for my walk through the Skagit from Stanwood to LaConner. We stayed with friends on Fir Island one night, and with friends in LaConner on another, walking through snow and hail and sun, and through storms of Snow Geese and Trumpeter Swans that made the Skagit feel at times like it was still a Pleistocene river. I visited with good friends from the Swinomish Tribe on my way through the Swinomish Reservation, who reminded me how important it is to remember that in this difficult work of restoration we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors, and they are always there to help us in any move we make back toward balance. On my way home I discovered that Whidbey Island isn’t one hour long, as I used to think, but four days long, because that’s how long it took me to walk the length of it. Since then I’ve taken several long bike trips through the Puget Sound basin, one of 500 miles that took me across all but a couple of the great rivers that flow into Puget Sound. Last week I rode my bike to Mt. Baker and back, and while I didn’t make it to the summit as I’d hoped, I got well up onto the Boulder Glacier before the rain forced me to turn back. In a few weeks I plan to paddle my kayak from Whidbey Island to Cowichan Bay on Vancouver Island to witness the native canoe rendezvous that will be hosted by the Cowichan Tribe this year. If it took climate change to get me to do all this, then in a strange way I am in its debt. Sometimes it takes a 2X4 across the side of the head to remind us what a gift it is to be alive, and how many riches are laid out right in front of us.

So let me bring this back around to salmon, who have a thing or two to teach us about the art of homecoming, and how to use our energies most efficiently when we are swimming upstream. While Americans typically change their place of residence every five years, salmon know exactly where Home is. They know to the precise tributary where their journey began, and after traveling thousands of miles through the North Pacific to Asia and back, they lay down their very lives in the effort to come home to that precise stream to spawn. There is still so much we don’t know about how they do all this, how they find their way through a chartless ocean, only to come back to the exact place they began.

Yet when they have to, salmon are also great pragmatists, and surprisingly adaptable. When Mt. St. Helens erupted in 1980, the resulting mud flows filled the Toutle and Cowlitz Rivers at the worst possible time for salmon, just as they were preparing to enter those river systems to spawn. When these Cowlitz fish found their way blocked, they didn’t just beat themselves against this unexpected wall. They diverted course to the Willamette and Deschutes and other nearby tributaries of the Columbia. Over the last ice age, as glaciers have advanced and retreated, salmon have repeatedly adapted, colonizing new river systems as the glaciers pulled back and released them. It is thought that the six species of Pacific salmon, five of which spawn on the North American side, have evolved from stray Atlantic salmon that wandered across the Northwest Passage during a lull in the last ice age just a few million years ago. Such staggering variation and such adaptability in such a short span of evolutionary time. But always built upon a fierce loyalty to place that humans seem to be in danger of losing.

No one who has witnessed the great runs of wild salmon in Alaska, as I have been privileged to do, can come away unmoved and unchanged. But the flip side of that honor is the grief I know we all share at the loss of formerly great runs here in this once-great Salmon Nation in Puget Sound.

I’m not going to stand up here and say that if we just to this or that our efforts will be rewarded, and it will all turn out well. Let’s be honest. Nobody knows how it’s going to turn out. But that’s just the point. Whether we’re talking about Skagit salmon or climate change or anything in between, we’re in the tongue of some great new rapids that no one has ever been asked to run before, and we literally don’t know if we’ll make it through alive. All we know for sure is that we’re already in the rapids, ready or not, and that our old strategies won’t get us through. It seems like we’re living our whole lives in the rapids now, and there’s hardly time to catch our breath. No wonder we find ourselves flailing around, groping for handholds. No wonder we’re at loggerheads. The only thing we know for sure is that we can’t turn back now, and it’s going to be a wild ride.

This is not all bad news. We’ve surprised ourselves many times in the past as a species when everything has been on the line. We can change really fast when it finally sinks in that our own survival, and not just that of the salmon, depends on finding another way to ride this out.

This is the context in which the Skagit Watershed Council must do its work. This is the context in which the whole human family finds itself as we accelerate toward this unknown canyon of backswirls and eddies and haystack swells. I’m in the boat. You’re in the boat. Everyone, it turns out, for the first time in human history, is in the same boat. Maybe we don’t all know it yet, but it’s true. Loggers and fisherman and farmers and native tribes are in the same boat. Asians and Africans and Europeans and North Americans are in the same boat. The salmon are in there too, and the polar bear, and the orca and the marbled murrelet. We’re all in the same boat, entering the same rapids. This is what we’ve been preparing for all our lives, perhaps for the whole life of the human species. Who could ask for a greater adventure than this?