Upstream

by Langdon Cook

  Salmon and their kin have been vaulting through our imaginations since the dawn of time (the name comes from the Latin salmo, “to leap”). More recently they’ve been turning up frozen in time in the fossil record, revealing their evolutionary path. The first salmonlike fish, Eosalmo driftwoodensis, lived about fifty million years ago, soon after the first primates appeared, and was discovered in Driftwood Creek, British Columbia, in 1977. So began the Salmonidae family, which includes a number of species with confusing common names that defy taxonomic sorting, including trout, salmon, and char. At some point, with continental drift and the uprising of the Pacific Rim, the lineage split between Atlantic and Pacific basins, perhaps as far back as twenty million years ago. The genus Salmo includes Atlantic salmon and brown trout, while the genus Oncorhynchus, which means “hooknose” in Greek, includes the Pacific salmon such as king, coho, sockeye, chum, and pink, as well as two other species, which we call rainbow and cutthroat trout; all of them will develop, to a lesser or greater degree, a curved or hook-shaped jaw at reproductive maturity.

  Salmon evolved during a period of geologic tumult. To survive in an age of intermittent glaciation, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions, they devised migratory ways and a hankering for the wide-open ocean. The term is anadromy: Both the Pacific and Atlantic salmon are anadromous, which means they spawn and rear in fresh water but mature in salt water. A life spent largely at sea protects the fish from the upheavals on land, and when it comes time to spawn, if their natal river is unexpectedly iced over by glaciers or flooded with a torrent of volcanic debris, they might search for nearby streams or freshets that will suffice. In this way, they abandon or recolonize habitat as it disappears or emerges with the times. The other noteworthy detail in the Pacific salmon’s life cycle is that the fish dies after spawning. Pacific salmon-bearing streams, if they’re productive, are often spectacles of death and decay, which in turn promote an abundance of life, from the many small invertebrates that feed on spawned-out carcasses to other fish, birds, and mammals that join the feast. Even the great old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest have literally taken root on the backs of decomposing salmon. In this sense, the salmon’s life cycle is an object study of the virtuous circle.

  It’s also fair to say that salmon represent more subjective values we hold most dear in ourselves: strength, beauty, resilience. A willingness to fight upstream. They nourish both body and spirit. At Pike Place Market, overlooking Elliott Bay—the scene of a flourishing salmon culture through the ages—I thought about the ties between salmon, people, and place as I ducked into one fish stall after another and watched a surge of customers mesmerized by these charismatic fish. In the American tradition of starting a new life through mobility, I had crossed the continent and made a home for myself in the Northwest. Even though I was a recent arrival, I understood that great runs of salmon had shaped this landscape as much as the glaciers and volcanoes and waves of new immigrants. Now that Martha and I were raising a family in salmon country, I wanted to see what sort of future our children would inherit. Would they feel a connection to the region’s most indelible natural resource? Would wild runs of salmon, diminished as they were, still continue to shape the character of the place and its inhabitants?

  There are people throughout salmon country who have devoted their lives to these fish in one way or another: commercial fishermen, tribal fishermen, scientists, activists, anglers, merchants, chefs, and so on. Many of them see the health of wild salmon runs as indicators of our own health as a society. I resolved to search them out. Like the salmon, they struggle against a prevailing current.

  WHILE I EXPLORED THE MARKET, Brian Hayes sat in his cubicle on the first floor of a featureless office building in a suburb north of Seattle, waiting. A fitful wind rustled the new foliage of big-leaf maples outside as yet another rain shower rolled in off Puget Sound, dousing the streets and causing traffic jams up and down I-5. But Hayes, a Pacific Seafood Company sales representative based in Mukilteo, Washington, didn’t notice the weather. He sat in his cubicle waiting for fish. Two in particular.

  Hayes didn’t have time to contemplate the mysteries of fish or the idyllic spawning grounds of Copper River salmon right now. He had sold all of what he called his “Day One kings,” and he needed more. Every year restaurants from coast to coast jockey to list Copper River salmon on their menus. As the first major salmon run of the year—and one that’s been promoted with a savvy marketing machine for more than two decades—the wild kings and sockeye caught by the fishing fleet based in Cordova, Alaska, make for an annual event. Earlier that week, the inaugural Alaska Airlines shipment had arrived in Seattle to much fanfare, with 24,100 pounds of fish. After touchdown, the pilot emerged with a bloodstained forty-eight-pound ceremonial king and carried it down the gangplank to a waiting trio of chefs, who served up grilled hunks of bright-red salmon to reporters and local dignitaries such as the sure-footed field-goal kicker for the Seattle Seahawks. Clients like Canlis, Salty’s, Ray’s Boathouse, and the restaurant atop the Space Needle absolutely needed to have the first Copper River salmon of the year. And that was just Seattle. In New York, the Grand Central Oyster Bar was serving a six-ounce pan-seared fillet of Copper River sockeye with an artichoke-garlic beurre blanc, competitively priced at $29.95. Who knew where they were getting it, maybe from another one of Pacific Seafood’s sixteen distribution centers, or perhaps from Ocean Beauty, one of their main competitors.

  In the first week of the Copper River fishery, Hayes fielded a lot of calls from would-be customers who had never bought an ounce of fish from Pacific Seafood before. Soon, maybe a week or two from now, when the market was flooded with Alaskan salmon, these same customers would stop calling. Hayes’s boss, Stephen Kelly, had the final word on who got fish and who didn’t. “It all comes down to loyalty,” Kelly likes to say. He calls it “Coming out of the woodwork on Copper River day,” because so many restaurants and supermarkets come knocking for the first time. “You either make friends or you make enemies on Copper River day. You can make people extremely happy or you can piss them off. There’s always collateral damage.”

  Openings for the fishery—those days when the fishermen are allowed to fish—would continue up in Cordova on Mondays and Thursdays throughout May and June, subject to the blessings of the state biologists, who busy themselves analyzing sonar graphs that show salmon escapement upstream—escapement being the weirdly appropriate term for salmon that escape the nets and make it to their spawning grounds. If the run looks healthy, openings can be bumped up to twenty-four-hour and even thirty-six-hour shifts. The airfreight would go on daily for another couple of weeks, until there was enough salmon in the pipeline to incentivize trucking them down from Anchorage instead, at which point eighteen-wheelers loaded with thirty-two thousand pounds of fish would make the twenty-four-hundred-mile haul to Seattle in fifty-two-hour marathon drives. The majority of these salmon would be smaller sockeye, the main target of the fishery. Estimates by Alaska Fish and Game put the Copper River harvest at 1.6 million sockeye and 22,000 kings, this catch differential partially explaining the price disparity. The larger, fattier kings are considered by most consumers to be the finest of all the Pacific salmon. The biologists who manage the run take extra care to ensure that enough of these big kings make it to the spawning grounds, which is why the fishery is kept outside the inner waters of the Copper River Delta, in mostly deeper water, where the bottom-hugging kings can avoid the nets. Not so the sockeye, which school higher in the water column, where the gillnetters lie in wait. Every now and then a king makes a mistake and lands in the net. These are the fish everyone wants.

  Now it was “Day Two,” as Hayes called it. The second opening had taken place the day before, another twelve-hour stint of fishing. The two kings he needed for a longtime client had been caught in a gill net, a long stretch of nylon mesh that hangs like a curtain in the water and snares salmon by a gill or fin as they try to pass. After delivery to a dockside processing plant in
Cordova, the salmon were cleaned and relieved of their heads before being airfreighted to Seattle–Tacoma International Airport. He was expecting two hundred eighty pounds of Copper River kings in total, about sixteen fish give or take, all of them spoken for days ago. The kings had arrived that morning at Sea–Tac, where they were loaded by a driver and delivered to the Pacific Seafood distribution center in Mukilteo, an hour north of the airport in light traffic. The wholesale price hadn’t dropped a nickel. These highly anticipated salmon would fetch $26 per pound by the time they sold to supermarket chains and restaurants all over the country, flying out the door regardless of price. In the minds of many, Memorial Day weekend—right around the corner—signaled both the kickoff of the outdoor grilling season and the first fresh salmon of the year.

  All morning Hayes had been in contact with the transport guys. As a sales rep, Hayes had his book filled with eighty restaurant clients, a few of whom were very on edge now that it was Copper River time. His office looked like a boiler room in a penny-stock outfit—everyone wearing headsets, taking orders on the phone, calling customers, brokering deals. He worked with a dozen or so other salesmen on his side of the room; all of them repped restaurants. On the other side sat just two reps, who handled all the retail clients between them. After a late lunch, Hayes put down his headset and went to find his fish. He grabbed a smock off the rack outside the break room, where a digital clock announced that 377 days had elapsed since the last workplace accident. The smock, bleach-white and knee-length, was an XXL. At six-four, with the build of a quarterback, Hayes looked younger than his forty-one years and was still competitive in a game of touch with his two teenage sons. He pulled a hairnet over his head, then stepped into a tray of antibacterial water.

  Hayes knew the routine. He had been at Pacific Seafood for seven years, and though his office smelled like a shrimp cocktail, he had long since stopped noticing. He walked through rubber curtains into a chilly, high-ceilinged warehouse. The temperature was thirty-four degrees—downright balmy in comparison to the freezer storage at the far end, with its windy zero degrees and a breakaway door in case of emergency. Forklift drivers maneuvered their vehicles, building up and taking down towers of pallets, their warning lights flashing yellow and backup alarms ringing out in the cavernous building. Hayes wove his way deliberately through the obstacle course of pallets into an aisle that would be familiar to any Costco customer. Boxed products with company logos sat stacked on metal shelving that reached twelve feet in the air. The aisle opened into another yawning room, where mostly Latino employees filleted and skinned salmon. The woman with the scimitar-shaped knife that might have been a machete in an equatorial country was a world-champion skinner with her name on a trophy; she undressed a fillet in seconds, with a single fluid motion. Another employee worked a specialized machine that pulled pin bones from the fillets, an otherwise tiresome, time-consuming chore that many chefs approached with a pair of pliers. The floor was littered with thin white bones and pink liquid. A mist of bacteria-killing ozone water filled the air.

  Finding the boxes he was looking for, Hayes cut them open and started sorting through nearly three hundred pounds of fresh H&G salmon (headed and gutted), some of which were still in rigor and stiff as a board. He was after two in particular for a regular client. The day before, Kevin Davis, the chef-owner of Blueacre Seafood in Seattle, had complained about one of the fish he had received, calling it “thin in the belly.” Hayes hadn’t picked that fish, but he wanted to keep his client happy. He found two almost identically bright twenty-four-pound kings and heaved them into a box, iced it, strapped it, invoiced it, and carried the box to his own car, a white ’98 Buick Regal, which waited at the loading dock. He put the thousand-dollar box in his trunk. Normally the company used typical delivery vans and drivers, but not during the first couple of weeks of Copper River season. The clock was ticking. Hayes took a quick look around him. The sun had come out and a faint mist rose from rain-washed streets. Rush hour was just starting. He jumped into the driver’s seat and took off with his single delivery. He knew the route by heart. It was exactly twenty-two miles to Blueacre Seafood.

  CHAPTER 2

  THIRTEEN SECONDS

  After a few hours at the market, I continued up Pike Street and jogged north on 7th Avenue to the corner of Olive Way. The sun felt good. A group of twenty-somethings shouldering messenger bags sat outside amid the puddles at a table littered with empty cans of Rainier, their bikes stacked nearby. It wasn’t quite 5:00 P.M., and the long mahogany bar inside was nearly full with happy-hour drinkers. With seating for 260, Blueacre Seafood can accommodate many customers with different agendas. A few couples eating early dinners or late lunches sat at scattered tables in the main dining room. Larger groups of businessmen—and they were all men today, with their ties off and top buttons undone—occupied banquet tables in an airy, glass-ceilinged room facing Olive Way. A hostess brought me into the kitchen, where Kevin Davis was briefing his waitstaff.

  Davis was not the stereotypical rotund chef, maybe because he spent time in the outdoors and went fishing whenever he could finagle a day off, which wasn’t often enough. He had the sort of open face and wide, unsuspecting eyes that people naturally trusted, an asset in a business with such high employee turnover. This briefing was a daily feature. Davis didn’t care for drama. There would be no surprises. Dungeness crab was limited, he told the staff. “I don’t know what’s going on with the crab fishery. Anyone wanna go catch some crabs?” Instead he had soft-shelled blue crabs from Maryland, a seasonal and short-lived special that would be given a Cajun treatment. A new server asked why the menu specified sea scallops as “dry pack.” The chef explained how scallops shipped wet lost much of their flavor to leaching. The finned offerings looked good for the evening. They had plenty of the staples from Alaska—halibut and rockfish—and now, fortunately, wild salmon. Davis looked over his clipboard. A large group had called ahead and preordered a set menu. They wanted the albacore tuna, lightly seared. He rubbed his forehead and put the clipboard away. Why would anyone order tuna when the most desirable fish in the country had just landed in Seattle?

  The pre-dinner staff meeting adjourned, and Davis made a beeline for the cooler, where a special delivery had just arrived, thanks to his personal fish picker at Pacific Seafood, Brian Hayes. Davis had a half hour or so to prepare the night’s allotment of Copper River king salmon before the rush started. Blueacre Seafood is strategically located downtown, across the street from the convention center. Business people from out of town came into the restaurant after meetings, and they expected salmon. This was Seattle, after all. Didn’t you order salmon in Seattle? Never mind that the commercial-fishing fleet had been shrinking for decades or the fact that most of the salmon came from Alaska anyway. In Seattle you ate salmon. But even as recently as the 1990s, the salmon might have been a rock-solid log caught months earlier and needing a good thaw, with maybe a little freezer burn, the meat dry and mealy, requiring restaurants to cook it into submission and cover it with a mango salsa or some other indignity.

  Kevin Davis owns three restaurants downtown. Years ago, when he was starting out, he would have waited a few weeks, until prices had come down, to put Copper River salmon on the menu. These days, as a chef who specializes in seafood, he can’t afford not to serve the name-brand fish from the get-go. Tourists expect it. Along with bluefin tuna, it’s the most in-demand fish on the planet. But unlike bluefin, the salmon sold under the Copper River name are carefully managed to be sustainable, and many of the environmental costs of doing business, unlike those of so many other products, are built into the price. Customers are not discouraged. “Everyone has Copper River salmon these days,” Davis told me with amazement. “It used to be that you saw them only in Seattle or New York.” Now an aspirational restaurant in Peoria might have the fish as a special of the day. It’s in this competitive climate that an experienced chef can really prove his mettle. Davis has worked in Australia, Napa, New Orleans, and the s
outh of France—all places where fresh seafood is on the menu. He’s been around fish all his life. But cooking the fish expertly is just half the battle. The other half is choosing wisely. Davis knows fish. He’s an angler and a pescatarian. He personally orders fish for his restaurants every day of the week. This sometimes means navigating a cutthroat business in which someone is always getting screwed.

  Blueacre has a sizable cooler with a sink and filleting table. It’s big enough for one person to work comfortably in, with a jacket on. Like the Pacific Seafood warehouse, it’s kept at thirty-four degrees. A line cook shouldered past to grab a tin of halibut cheeks. “Those were like three bucks a pound when I first started,” Davis said. “No one wanted them. Now they’re fourteen dollars.” With food awareness come price jumps. Similarly, every year it’s harder to get the choicest salmon. The previous night they only had a single Copper River king and some sockeye, burning through thirty and forty orders of each respectively before 8:30 P.M., leaving nothing for lunch today. A king of about eighteen pounds, caught on a baited hook by a troller out at sea, its head still on to distinguish it from a net-caught fish, lay on a lower rack, awaiting the smoker. It was from the Washington Coast, also bright silver, with sea lice (a pea-sized type of parasite that looks like a miniature horseshoe crab) still attached near the tail and indicative of its freshness. “A lot of people who fish for salmon, the old school, this is what they want. They call them feeder kings,” Davis said, looking it over. “They’re at the apex of their life cycle, still eating.” These are just the sorts of distinctions aficionados like to debate—the subtle differences in flavor between different runs of salmon, how and at what stage of their life cycle they’re caught. Most everyone agrees, though, that once a salmon’s silver scales have turned dark with its spawning colors, the meat will be off. All the salmon’s vitality shifts to the reproductive task ahead and the flesh goes soft. “Old boot” is how some describe such a fish.