by Langdon Cook
This was just the sort of fish that Rahr hoped to protect with his stronghold initiative. We took a photo and watched it slip from my hands and disappear back beneath the surface.
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ON THE DRIVE BACK to Portland, Guido told me a story to illustrate how nuanced and also how acrimonious the salmon-conservation game has become. He views the hatchery system as the most pernicious obstacle in the way of restoring wild fish runs. Everyone is addicted to the hatcheries, he said, and it’s easy to understand why elected officials from the Oregon Coast see it as politically expedient to whip up a frenzy in favor of more hatchery production. A feature documentary on hatchery fish was even made, with a bunch of talking heads from the fishing industry appearing in support of a system that directly benefits their own economic interests at the expense of wild fish—although they don’t put it that way. Rahr went to opening night of the film at the Mission Theater in Portland—in disguise, wearing a camo hat pulled low over his face, because it was hostile territory. Nevertheless, he was recognized and called out during a post-screening Q&A (he declined to engage at the time, something he now regrets).
It was in this climate that the Wild Salmon Center, working with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, managed to pull off the amazing feat of setting aside multiple watersheds up and down the Oregon Coast as wild fish refuges in 2014. As with most rules that get enacted in a state of polarized contentiousness, compromise was required of the WSC. In this case, they agreed to a boost in hatchery production on some rivers in exchange for no hatchery production on others. “The plan came out and some of the local legislators went crazy. ‘This is an attack on hatcheries. Blah blah blah.’ ” When it came time to go to the mat for the compromise, Rahr contacted his allies at other fish-conservation organizations, asking them to play ball. He told them he wanted to create the largest wild fish preserve south of British Columbia but would allow for some hatchery production, and he asked for their support. The other groups balked. “They couldn’t help themselves,” he told me. “When they saw the increased hatchery production on certain rivers, they attacked the plan with both guns blazing. I was livid. But guess what happened? The coastal legislators, seeing that orgs like the Native Fish Society were attacking the plan, thought maybe this was a good thing after all. So they ended up supporting the plan and we got it passed. It’s a microcosm of the crazy salmon politics.”
The new salmon-management plan could be seen in action all around us. Half the rivers that flow out of Tillamook State Forest are now set aside for wild fish. The Nehalem, Salmonberry, Miami, and Kilchis are wild fish only. Only the Wilson River allows hatchery steelhead. A few rivers that already had hatchery salmon, such as the Trask and Nestucca, will see additional hatchery plants, but those without hatcheries will remain that way. “We did it,” Guido said proudly. “We froze the hatchery program. It’s the biggest network of wild fish rivers south of Canada.”
ON A WET FRIDAY MORNING a few weeks later, I met Rahr in Salem, the state capital of Oregon, where he planned to testify at the Department of Forestry. “Look at this place,” he said as we walked up the path. “They’ve built themselves a nice little clubhouse with all their timber dollars.” Backing up on a creek that flows into the Willamette, with neatly trimmed grounds, the building reminded me of an English manor house. (Later, one of the administrators would joke that the department had been criticized for not using enough wood in its construction.) Inside the spacious conference room, sepia-toned portraits of Oregon’s state foresters hang on the wall, dating back to Francis Elliott, the first. It happened that the Elliott State Forest, named in his honor, was on the agenda today. County commissioners wanted to sell off this ninety-three-thousand-acre parcel of public land, which still held a few rare patches of coastal old-growth timber, to the highest bidder. The Eugene Register-Guard called the move “embarrassingly shortsighted,” noting that Oregon legislators were still “seeking ways to privatize public forests, all the while making archaic claims that more logging will create more prosperity. Neither history nor unbiased economic analysis supports their claims.”
The first agenda item concerned the Tillamook State Forest and other state forests on the North Coast. The advisory panel, seated at tables in the center of the room, wanted to hear public comment on its plan to accelerate logging on state lands. The “70–30 plan,” as it was known, would open 70 percent of the Tillamook and other North Coast forests to industrial logging while maintaining 30 percent for conservation purposes. The chair called on Gwee-doh to speak. “Did I say that correctly?” he said fatuously. Rahr corrected him and launched into his testimony. As he spoke of passing down a natural heritage to future generations, the county commissioners and foresters fidgeted and looked on indifferently, one even shaking his head. They all stood to benefit from logging every last stick out of the state’s public lands, with the counties receiving two-thirds of the revenue and the Department of Forestry a third. Since the panel would recommend a plan to the Department of Forestry, this was an obvious conflict of interest, but it’s how things are done in Oregon.
“In California the runs are collapsing,” Rahr reminded the panel. “Willamette Valley runs are in trouble. The Columbia Basin is an absolute mess. Puget Sound is a mess. The Tillamook is this amazing little refuge where things are still working.” Guido paused. Did he notice the bored looks on the faces before him? “The question for all of us is what we want this place to look like in the future. The region is changing. Portland will be twice the size in forty years. All the pressures, demands, and expectations are accelerating. People’s expectations for the forest are changing. It’s not just about how many timber dollars you can generate from this forest. It’s about other things too. I want to see old-growth forest—giant old trees like my grandfather saw when he went fishing there. I want to know that my grandkids can come here to see that.”
Guido looked up from a page of notebook paper that had the barest of scribbled notes. He pushed it aside. “Personally, as you know, I love this place. I’ve been fishing here my whole life. My family has been involved for generations. It’s where I take my children. Floating down the Kilchis River in my little boat, the water so transparent it’s like a pane of glass, with chinook circling underneath…No one in California has this chance anymore, no one on the East Coast. Seventy–thirty will take this away. I’m asking you: Make pragmatic decisions, but don’t go to seventy–thirty. Let’s work together to diversify revenue for the Department of Forestry. Let’s end this long-running arm-wrestling match in this beautiful place. If we do these things, all of us can be proud about what we’ve left for the next generation.”
Rahr’s lieutenant, Bob Van Dyk, a former professor who had renounced tenure to be the Wild Salmon Center’s technical arm, showed slides depicting the result of a 70–30 plan. Huge swaths of red—logged forest—stretched across acreage owned by Oregonians, with tiny little blips of green illustrating the protected tracts. Van Dyk had gone through the difficult and time-consuming process of accumulating all the data on proposed changes to timber management and then overlaid it on maps of the current management plan, which was closer to a 50–50 split between logging and conservation. The difference was stark. No one said anything, but he’d made his point. Defenders of the logging testified next, including a representative from Hampton Lumber. They spoke of inventories, revenue, board feet, and so on. You wouldn’t know that a bunch of trees were involved, a forest. When the testimony was over, the chair polled county commissioners on the plan. One commissioner, from Clatsop County, was on the fence, but the others were vigorously in favor of the 70–30 plan and took the opportunity to discredit their opponents.
It was at this point that a curious interchange took place. At first I thought it was a joke, a bit of lighthearted theater. One of the county commissioners spoke disparagingly of “habitat,” saying that when trees are allowed to get too big, they’re under threat of being set aside for wildlife such as the secretive marbl
ed murrelet, a small seabird whose life history had only recently been sleuthed out. Though they spend most of their lives at sea, diving for baitfish, the murrelets build moss nests during the breeding season on the stout limbs of old-growth trees along the coast. Such trees are harder and harder to find these days, and now some of the birds fly miles inland looking for suitable nesting grounds. As a result, marbled murrelets have declined precipitously with the clear-cutting of the Pacific Northwest. The commissioner warned his colleagues that leaving such trees as habitat was like having a cancer, and the cancer would spread. “We have age stands that are greater than sixty-five years old that are starting to come online since the original cut. This is millions and millions of dollars’ worth of commercial timberland.” Older stands like this, he suggested, were in jeopardy of being permanently protected. He called them the camel’s nose under the tent.
The chair agreed. “What happens is, if you start creating old growth, it’ll spread across the landscape, just the way it did in the Elliott.”
“It’s a disease that grows,” his colleague reiterated. I was amazed. Had a couple of Oregon’s county commissioners, including the chair of the forestry panel, just called old-growth forest a cancer? And then, in a bizarre bit of self-consciousness, perhaps guilt or shame, the chair raised his voice and pointed toward Rahr and Van Dyk, who were seated in the gallery. “We’ve been taken to task by the folks in the back of the room. I read their stuff—I hear what they say.”
But the other county commissioner had worked himself into a lather. “Well, I don’t care,” he declared. “We’re elected to represent the people. I have to be accountable to the people I see at the grocery store. There’s a train wreck waiting to happen, and I don’t want to see those revenues go.” It was a foregone conclusion that this advisory panel would recommend increased logging in Tillamook State Forest—would recommend, in effect, a revenue increase for their own counties and the forestry department.
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AFTER THE MEETING, on our way back to Portland, Rahr filled me in on one of the testifiers, an employee of Hampton Lumber. When he was a child, Guido was best friends with one of the Hampton kids. Now they were on opposing teams. Hampton Lumber had built a new mill next to the Tillamook State Forest with the expectation of having plenty of timber to cut. As in a high-stakes chess match, the Wild Salmon Center was making its own countermoves to ensure that as much forest as possible remained intact. It was right out of Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion. “Sometimes I go to these meetings and there’s my old friend David Hampton.” Guido sighed. “I grew up with David. We used to zoom down the hill together under the chairlift at Mount Bachelor as ten-year-olds. He’s a wonderful guy, but now there’s this tension. He sees us as a huge obstacle.”
The timber wars, the salmon wars—they take a huge toll. And the fighting today is over scraps. In the Pacific Northwest, most of the big trees are long gone. The salmon runs are a fraction of their former size. Nature’s grandeur has been cut down. Guido shook his head, in sadness more than anger. “We’ll be at this a long time. David Hampton is as committed as I am, and I’m going to fight this until I’m an old man. My kids are going to fight it.” He was confident that a compromise could be worked out to conserve fisheries and still provide timber for the mills, but in the climate of constant acrimony that has spread across the country, the art of compromise is no longer seen as a skill. “Who knows,” Guido said at last, “maybe it’ll be my kids fighting his kids.”
CHAPTER 6
LAST RUN OF THE MIDNIGHT EXPRESS
We left the harbor a little after 6:00 a.m., throttling up to join a line of boats heading toward the fishing grounds. It was late August and in the forties. I was a long way from the dams and mitigation hatcheries and busy highways of the Lower 48, as Alaskans often call the rest of the country. Behind us, the town of Cordova was waking up, lights flickering on, pickup trucks idling on steep streets. I could see a few dark silhouettes of people, maybe spouses, standing on the Reluctant Fisherman’s outside deck in their Xtratuf boots, watching the exodus. The night before, I’d stood on that same deck at sunset, looking down on the harbor and having a beer with some of the fishermen I’d met in town. Michael Hand, wearing a Red Sox cap, and his wife, Nelly, were there, along with a friend of theirs from Texas who now made his living as a gillnetter. The seduction of Cordova is like that. A certain type of person can’t resist it. Nestled snugly between water and mountains—with its own ski slope on the outskirts of town—Cordova fits the popular image of an Alaskan fishing village. It’s one of those anachronisms still viable even as the rest of the world busies itself with fiber optics and cloud technology. The day before, I’d gone hiking with the Texan. He wore an enormous .44 on his hip, and I was glad for it. The grizzlies like the place too.
There’s no road into Cordova—you arrive by either boat or plane. Snowcapped peaks of the Chugach Range surround the place like a fortress. For years there was talk of trying to connect this beachhead of two thousand year-round residents to Alaska’s highway system, but the effort foundered. The most common bumper sticker in town expresses the sentiments of many in two simple words: No Road. I myself had flown in, arriving into Merle K. (Mudhole) Smith Airport, named after a legendary bush pilot who would become a director at Alaska Airlines. On the short drive to town I passed scores of anglers—some of them visiting sportsmen, others locals getting their annual allotment of salmon—and one moose.
I had come to Cordova to see where all those Copper River salmon that cause such a stir in Seattle came from and also because it’s one of a handful of communities still around with an economy that revolves almost entirely around wild food—salmon, of course, and to a lesser extent recreational fishing and hunting, which keep a number of residents busy as guides. All the fishermen I know, recreational and commercial, talk about the magnetic pull of Alaska. You can’t avoid it. At some point you have to go north. Guido Rahr, Jon Rowley, Kevin Davis—they all speak of the forty-ninth state the way some people talk about church. Rene Henery yearned to organize a wilderness float trip with a bunch of his biologist friends and spend a couple of weeks rafting a remote river from headwaters to salt, recalibrating his own shifted baseline. This was a dream for him, a fisheries ecologist who had never seen a properly functioning river ecosystem. Few have. Alaska is the last place in America where you can get into real wilderness, see nature the way it existed before white settlement.
To someone like Micah Ess, who was steering us toward the fishing grounds, the place means a chance at a livelihood that isn’t circumscribed by pavement, glass, or cubicles. But even here, the creature comforts of modernity exert their centripetal tug. He checked his cell phone for email messages and tossed it back on the dash. “These have made the job safer, no doubt,” he said, almost apologetically. Commercial fishing has a reputation for danger, as hyped on reality TV. But for plenty of born-and-bred Northwesterners I know, the Alaskan salmon fishery was just another summer job, an exciting and lucrative one to be sure, provided you didn’t get stuck on the slime line, cleaning fish. When I think about my own summer jobs as a teenager on the East Coast—caddying at a local country club comes to mind—there’s no comparison, except that maybe both involve the outdoors, one on freshly mowed fairways and the other on the remorseless ocean. Every now and then a kid falls overboard or loses a hand in some infernal contraption designed to guillotine fish heads. Those are the stories Martha remembers. She knows I’ll suggest Alaska when it’s time to ship our son off somewhere to make some college tuition, and I’ll probably have to put him on the night flight to Cordova while she’s asleep.
I ate a Dramamine and washed it down with coffee. Though the weather forecast was for clear skies and sun, with calm seas, I didn’t want to take any chances. Ess fiddled with a hunting knife. Fishing was almost over for the year, and his mind was elsewhere. He’d already earned his keep from the sockeye run. Now he was fishing for silvers, the last of the five species of Pacific sal
mon to spawn in the Copper River region, but there wasn’t much money to be made this late in the season. He was earning little more than a dollar a pound for the silvers—less than half the price paid for sockeye. Soon he would put the boat, a twenty-eight-foot bowpicker, to bed for the winter and rejoin his wife in Colorado. And then next year, if everything went according to plan, the Midnight Express would be someone else’s and he’d have a shiny new boat. Or, more likely, a shiny used one.
The bowpicker is the boat of choice for Cordovan gillnetters. First designed for the Columbia River fishery, it’s built to fish its net from the front. The fisherman stands in the bow, picking fish, while a hydraulic reel the size of a fifty-gallon drum gathers up net. Today’s bowpickers are a far cry from the early days of the Columbia’s commercial fishery, when gillnetters powered open boats by oar and sometimes with makeshift sails, pulling in their nets by hand. Modern bowpickers have a pilothouse in the stern for shelter, usually with an oil cookstove that doubles as a heating source, and a couple of bunks. Seeing the procession of boats that morning—a long line of them lit by running lights—reminded me of a muscle-car rally. All hood, with horsepower that put you in the back of your seat. Bowpickers had to be tough to perform in a place like this.