by Langdon Cook
“A lot of people are upset,” I said.
“Well, something that conservationists need to wrap their heads around,” Rene continued, “is the connection between salmon and people. For thousands of years, Native Americans were the ultimate stewards of salmon populations. It may well be that we can’t have salmon recovery without the recovery of indigenous cultures.”
We said goodbye and I turned around. But instead of returning to Cascade Locks and the Bridge of the Gods, I took the exit for Bonneville Dam on a whim, driven by a feral dream, and followed the crowd of visitors. A greeter working the front desk at the interpretive center understood the main attraction. “You can see the turbines and generators and all that stuff later,” he said to several of us as we came pushing through the front door, our faces full of intent. “First you want to take the elevator down to floor one.” Floor one was the place to see the fish ladder.
As soon as the elevator doors opened, I heard the clamor. A group of tourists pressed their faces to the glass as chunky chinook salmon, dozens of them, moved silently through the ladder, a galaxy of bubbles rushing backward in the current. A few of the salmon sported fleshy adipose fins. “I’d like to have a couple of those in my truck,” murmured a man in coveralls. Nearby, a docent spoke to a tour group, gushing about the latest forecasts. Columbia River fishermen had their hopes pinned on a very favorable estimate of returning salmon, she said, a “potentially historic run,” in the words of state fisheries managers.
Well, historic since 1938, at least. It was true that charitable ocean conditions were aligning to promote a larger return than usual, maybe a million fish or so. But it was unlikely that salmon runs on the Columbia would ever approach anything like the pre-dam numbers, even with all those hatchery fish and the ongoing habitat-restoration work by the tribes.
As the chinook passed through the viewing room of the fish ladder, I watched them closely, falling into a trance. Flash of scale, glimpse of dark beady eye. The form of persistence. They moved through, several at a time, a few falling back in the current to try again. Did the salmon recognize differences among themselves as they schooled? The presence or absence of a little nub of flesh we called an adipose fin? In the ladder, the wild fish and hatchery fish come together like children on a school bus, innocent of what lies ahead, but upriver the wild ones will bypass the hatchery facilities and disperse across a watershed larger than many European countries, each tributary giving rise to its own slightly distinct strain of chinook, many of those strains now extinct. Some of these fish might even be the last holdouts in their particular stream, receptacles of rare DNA that might disappear entirely if they fail to spawn. Their ancestors survived countless generations—through flood, fire, and ice—in part because of all that genetic diversity. Diversity made them stronger. At one time, king salmon pushed as far upriver as northern Nevada. Now their spawning grounds in the Columbia Basin had been reduced by half, in less than a century. The man in coveralls went up to the docent. “Seriously, where can I get one of those?”
“The Bridge of the Gods,” she told him, a hint of skepticism in her voice. “You can get one under the Bridge of the Gods, if you really want to.”
CHAPTER 5
OF ZOMBIES AND STRONGHOLDS
Guido Rahr doesn’t hate hatchery salmon. Not completely. He’ll admit they have their role in a landscape overrun by civilization. But Guido, who pronounces his name Gee-doh, with a hard g like guitar, is devoted to wild fish, and in this way he is just the sort of environmental activist who is at loggerheads with Kat Brigham. Youthful at fifty-four, with tousled blond hair and a winning ability to laugh at both himself and the absurdities of salmon politics, Guido knows the Columbia Basin won’t be losing its dams or hatcheries anytime soon, so he has washed his hands of the greatest salmon river of the past to focus on the rivers of the future—the smaller, lesser-known reaches where a wild salmon might find a gravel bed to lay its eggs, far removed from the schemes of humanity. Such watersheds still exist on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, for instance, and even here on the Oregon Coast, where we were presently navigating the serpentine bends of an estuary in a small johnboat, puttering to one of his secret spots.
Guido Rahr is first and foremost a fisherman. “If you tell anyone about this,” he cautioned, “just say a North Coast river. Nothing specific.” Like prized mushroom patches, his fishing holes are the result of determination and detective work, adding up to a cache of streams whose names shall not be spoken. It helps that, as the president and main architect of the Wild Salmon Center, a nonprofit based in Portland that has worked to protect more than eight million acres and ten thousand river miles of Pacific salmon habitat in both North America and Asia, he enjoys privileged information about where and when these fish might be lurking. And though Guido is as wily as they come as an angler, he likes to think of his professional presentation in boardrooms and fundraising banquet halls as totally aboveboard. “I’m not tricky,” he stressed to me. “My style is open and transparent. I’m not organized enough to be anything but candid. The first rule about running an organization like the Wild Salmon Center is to find someone else who can help run an organization.” Guido has several of these people, including scientists, researchers, and policy wonks, who do the running, which gives him the time to strategize on two continents—and take well-heeled potential donors fly-fishing when time allows. Today’s trip with me wouldn’t add anything to WSC’s coffers. It was more like a vacation.
The water, greenish and slightly opaque from recent rain, was more unassuming than I expected. These coastal rivers don’t have far to go to reach the sea. From mountain source to lower estuary might be thirty miles or less. To cross them on Highway 101 is to pass sluggish, blackberry-choked sloughs in the blink of an eye. But closer to the salt they spread out and meander through tidewater—the place to drop a crab pot or reach for your birding binoculars. After anchoring the boat, Guido pulled out an assortment of large fly boxes. One fell from his threadbare tackle bag with a thud, revealing a hundred identical flies inside; all of them were chartreuse and tied to look like a small baitfish, a pattern known to fly anglers as a Clouser Minnow, after its inventor. “I like to find something that works and stick with it,” he said, laughing abashedly. A second box had another hundred identical flies, carefully aligned in rows, only red. He called those Red Devils. After taking a glance upriver and then down, and then up at the sky (which was clear), Rahr made a decision. “Try one of these,” he advised, plucking a sparsely dressed chartreuse fly out of a box and passing it to me.
While I tied on the fly, he explained the rules. These were almost certainly all wild fish. Females would be released, should we be lucky enough to catch any, because they had eggs. Males over fifteen pounds would also be released, because they were big, and chinook have been steadily shrinking in size for the past century and a half from intensive commercial harvest that selects for the largest fish. “And smaller bucks?” I asked. It’s a judgment call, Guido said. “I’m not doctrinaire. We can keep a small male if we feel like it when the time comes, if the Pleistocene hunter-gatherer in us is up for it. Let’s see what happens. A fifteen-pound chrome-bright buck eats as well on the plate as anything that swims.”
Guido took the rod from my grip and stripped several yards of line off the reel in quick bursts, checking the drag tension. The coils settled about his feet in the bottom of the boat. He handed the fly rod back to me, a stout 10-weight. “These are powerful fish. You can’t pussyfoot around.” We were anchored beneath an overhanging tree, with little room for a back cast. He told me to roll-cast downstream and not worry about the presentation. Chinook are notorious bottom-huggers. The trick is to fish deep without getting snagged up on a rock or root wad—and to find a willing fish. If salmon are difficult to hook once they enter fresh water, they’re especially difficult to hook on a fly. Flies tend to rise in the current even when they’re attached to sinking lines, passing over the recalcitrant fish. But occasionally a
chinook will chase a fly out of instinct or territorial aggression. To improve my chances, I had a thirty-foot head of fast-sinking line to get the fly down. Everything about the setup—the fly, the line, the downstream presentation, the retrieve—had been puzzled out by Rahr and his companions over the course of many years of fly-fishing Oregon’s coastal streams for big wild kings. While the average guy hoping to stack salmon fillets in his freezer trolls cut-plug herring or drifts gobs of smelly roe through a hole, Rahr and his friends have figured out how to catch kings on a fly, a pursuit that most anglers consider quixotic at best. This sort of fishing isn’t a numbers game. The satisfaction comes from that one fish outwitted by a likeness of nature, using an ancient technique refined over centuries.
With Guido’s counsel in mind, I roll-cast my fly downstream, raising my rod tip just high enough for it to flex forward without tangling in the branches behind me. The graphite rod’s surprising force sent a rip curl of line unfurling across the water. I gave it several seconds to sink and then started slowly stripping it back toward the boat, my fingers nervously registering every little twinge on the line that might be a big fish nipping at my fly.
—
EARLIER THAT MORNING, Rahr and I had crossed the Coast Range from Portland to Tillamook Bay in his Land Cruiser. On the far side of a squirrelly mountain pass, we caught our first glimpses of what would become the river. It was just a headwater creek at this point in its journey to the sea—small, dark, and mysterious, dodging in and out beneath a soaring canopy of conifers that rose like a green wall on either side of the winding two-lane blacktop. Guido pointed out old-growth Sitka spruces looming over the road. The “beauty strip” of unlogged trees gave way to reasonably large second-growth forest that marched down the hillside into a ravine, where it gave adequate shade to the salmon-bearing stream percolating below. Yes, most of the forest in this corner of the coastal mountains had been cut, but it had also been given a chance to recover, and now it was part of a functional ecosystem. This was why Rahr’s organization had staked its hopes on the Oregon Coast. Though heavily logged in the past, this swath of territory, which runs more than two hundred miles from north to south along the left-hand margin of the state, differs markedly from places like Puget Sound and the Willamette Valley in a couple of salient ways: a lack of people and a smaller hatchery footprint. Urban development is confined to a narrow strip along the ocean beaches, with Newport the largest city north of Coos Bay at ten thousand people. At the other end of the watershed—the mountain headwaters, twenty or more miles inland—the landscape is only affected by timber harvest. And while there are salmon hatcheries on some of the rivers, other coastal rivers have little or no hatchery presence. For Rahr, the success of wild salmon in this part of the world depends on limiting the influence of hatcheries and promoting the influence of healthy forests.
In his twenties, when he was taking a crash course in Pacific Northwest salmon and steelhead, Guido would drive the same route on a Friday night after work and sleep on the dusty floor of a dilapidated Tillamook Bay bait shop so he could get up before first light and catch the dawn bite. The bait shop is gone now, burned to the ground, but the memory of that cold floor lingers. “I did a lot of crazy stuff in my youth,” he said, as we surveyed the bare foundation of his former crash pad from the road. The river flowed beyond it, larger now and more purposeful. Looking at him—this married father of three, in scholarly spectacles that hardly diminished the boyishness of his features—I wondered how far away that youth and those crazy times really were. Guido took one more look and stepped on the gas. “That’s where I learned how to fish for coastal steelhead and salmon, down there with all the curing bait. It stank. I was just a fishing bum for a while. That’s how you learn. Locals were skeptical about the fly-fishing thing for salmon, that’s for sure. They still are.” He’d had a fishing show in college, on local cable TV, called On the Fly. With typical self-effacement, he described it as “pretty primitive stuff, one long take of me standing there wearing a khaki shirt with a fly-tying vise. ‘Today we’re tying a Woolly Bugger’ or whatever.” Later he became a reporter for the ten o’clock news, doing little outdoor features. Guido enjoyed poking fun at himself. It wasn’t hard for me to picture some big-shot captain of industry, whiskey flask tucked into his waders, taking a shine to him out on the stream and handing over a small chunk of the family fortune to the Wild Salmon Center after Rahr got him into his first chinook on a fly.
A few miles down the road, near tidewater, we stopped to look at the river again from an abandoned lot near a convenience store that advertised ICE on its large faded sign. Dark green now, the river had gathered the strength of countless creeks and rivulets along its mountainous course, and it sauntered across the floodplain with the slower, more languid confidence of an elderly flâneur out for a morning constitutional. No sooner had we looked over the chain-link fence than a fish rolled in a lazy bend where trees leaned over the river as if to spy on the current’s secrets. Rahr ran back to his car, begging me to hurry up. No boats! The hole was empty! We jumped in and took off once again. A couple more miles down the road, we crossed a plowed field where he had an agreement with the farmer. He backed his trailer down a rough launch, and in a few minutes we were motoring upstream toward the hole where we’d seen the fish roll.
Guido Rahr comes from a well-to-do Midwestern clan that made its money from beer—the family business is called Rahr Malting—though he’s careful to point out that most of what was left for his generation of siblings and cousins was in the form of shared vacation homes rather than banknotes. In the past, this sort of lineage might have come with a rustic getaway lodge on a Canadian Atlantic salmon stream, in New Brunswick or Quebec, where angling is divided into “beats”—private sections of river that can only be fished by one or two anglers each day, and strictly on the fly. But Rahr had gone west instead, following the family’s maternal line (his mother was from Portland), and fallen for Pacific salmon and public water (albeit keeping the slightly upscale trappings of the fly angler). His inclination to work for the family business was nil, and he hadn’t forgotten the day his own father was called back to Minnesota to take up the reins, how heavily that decision had weighed on him.
As Guido fussed about in the boat, rigging up an assortment of rods and reels for our day on the water, I asked him if he’d ever eaten a wild Atlantic salmon. It was a question that surprised people, one they had to think about. Rahr was sure he had. He told me about some connected friends of his who owned a cottage on Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula, home of the Grand Cascapédia River, one of the most famous and storied Atlantic salmon rivers in the world. In 1995 he got an invitation to visit and managed to catch a very nice wild Atlantic salmon on a fly, which he released. A few of the other fish weren’t so lucky. Their fillets were laid in rock salt and brown sugar overnight, then rinsed and bathed in Grand Marnier, after which they were cold-smoked in an old wooden smokehouse at eighty degrees, where they hung for forty-eight hours. Rahr closed his eyes. He could taste the smoked fillets. “They came out with a little bit of a crust, and oh my God. You thin-slice it and you just want to eat it by the handful. It was so good I only ate half a fillet and froze the other half. I thawed it out two years later and it was still amazing.” At the time, having a bite of wild Atlantic salmon didn’t seem like such a noteworthy event. But despite plenty of money and elbow grease, salmon populations on the East Coast and in Europe have not recovered. If anything, their age-old claim is as tenuous as ever.
Which brought us back to Pacific salmon. I stripped in my fly and cast it out again, trying for more distance. Guido said there might be thirty or forty wild chinook milling around in the deep pool below us. Such a gathering of native kings is a rarity in Oregon these days. No one wants to see the Pacific fish go the way of the Atlantics, yet the forces arrayed against them are basically the same, if only ramped up. “Starting at a hundred thousand feet,” he said, speaking with the authority of someone who has given th
is speech before, even as he used his teeth to tighten knots, “we’re seeing the steady erosion of wild salmon populations going from south to north, climbing up both sides of the Pacific Rim, just like they did along the Atlantic. What’s driving it is global population going from seven to nine billion within fifty years. Even more of a threat is the emergence of two-plus billion people into the new middle class. They’re going to have the same patterns of consumption and same expectations we have. If you look at available protein, fiber, and so on, within fifty years there just won’t be enough to go around. The globe can’t deliver. We’re standing on a burning platform.”
Like many successful environmentalists, Rahr has a knack for delivering bad news without judgment. The reasons for the pickle we’re in are self-evident, and—let’s face it—we all have a hand in it. “From a salmon’s standpoint,” he continued, “everything that’s happening now is going to get a lot worse and start happening a lot faster: increased competition for water, increased competition for land—we’ll see the steady fragmentation of timber and agricultural land and steady pressure on public lands—and also pressure on the fisheries themselves. And then you have the impacts of climate change. Tillamook Bay was almost seventy degrees this year in June. That’s lethal for salmon. The places we’re targeting are those we think have the best long-term chance of making it.”
This requires money, he added, and money tends to follow the problems, not the opportunities. In many ways, the Endangered Species Act, though absolutely essential for environmental protection, is something of a hindrance when it comes to salmon conservation. “The ESA is driving policy. We’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the Columbia Basin trying to restore wild salmon and I’m not optimistic it’s going to succeed, in large part because no matter how much habitat restoration you do, if you can’t get wild fish back into the system, it’s not going to work.” The problem, in a word, is hatcheries.