Upstream

by Langdon Cook

  Feathers from past depredations lay scattered in the dirt. “I’ve run chickens here for twenty years, and this is the first year this has happened. I feel bad for the birds—I’m supposed to protect them.” His efforts at shoring up the coop seemed to be working, though, and all the chickens were accounted for. We moved on to the incubator, and then the medical coop, where he kept the few survivors from the raven attacks sequestered while they recuperated, their heads bald and bloodied. Starks wasn’t much for small talk. As we made the rounds together, he asked me a question. It was a game he liked to play with a new acquaintance, he said, a simple binary question—his way of divvying up the world and making sense of it, on the order of “Ford or Chevy?” Or “Beatles or Stones?” “Matisse or Picasso?” He paused and gave me a look of bemusement, one I would soon realize he’d perfected over years, the slight curling of the lips that suggested his smiles had come at the expense of a lot of experience, then pushed his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose. “I ask everyone the same question. Ready…?”

  “Shoot.”

  “King or sockeye?”

  I thought about it. Certainly I loved them both. Choosing one over the other seemed unfair. Each had its own place. Both Jon Rowley and Kevin Davis would choose king—I was pretty sure of that. They knew exactly what they wanted. Me, I wasn’t so sure. “Is this a trick question?”

  “No, just the answer that lies at the pit of your soul. You’re stalling.”

  “Well, for texture I’d have to go with the fatty silkiness of king. But for taste…”

  “Sockeye hands down,” Starks interrupted, saving me from further equivocation. “On hanging day I’ll take a last plate of grilled sockeye, thank you.” Something in his voice told me that Starks had been keeping an imagined hangman at bay for years now.

  —

  RILEY STARKS’S LIFE COULD be reduced to two totems: fish and fowl. He had spent the better part of a lifetime learning how to produce the best quality of each for the table. Over the years they had oscillated in importance. “I’m actually a homebody,” he said to me matter-of-factly. It was a surprising admission for a commercial fisherman. “The thing about fishing is, it’s an isolating experience unless you’re in a tight fraternity of other fishermen and their wives, because you go away. I like land, a place, an identity. I was fishing Bristol Bay, and you make a ton of money. You mistreat the fish. It wasn’t satisfying in a deep way—at least not for me. For other people it probably is.”

  In 1991, Starks found this piece of logged-over property on Lummi Island in northwest Washington State. It was covered in stinging nettles, twenty acres in all. When he wasn’t fishing, he started doing construction. “I was trying to find something to do in the winters that connected me.” He built houses and sold off fifteen of the twenty acres. The last five-acre parcel he kept for himself. He wanted to see what five acres could do. Some might call Starks a zealot. Like so many American epicures before him, his on-the-road-to-Damascus moment came in the Old Country, during a vacation in France, eating a tomato in Valence. “It was just the best tomato. I realized I’d never really eaten one before.” The juices dribbled peachlike down his chin, and the tug-of-war between sweetness and acidity bowled him over. This wasn’t a product of American industrial ingenuity. It wasn’t uniformly round for easy sorting or hard as a rock for shipping coast-to-coast. It wasn’t even red. Standing there in a French marketplace, Starks took another bite from the misshapen thing, eating it like an apple, and vowed to grow his own.

  He sold a thousand pounds of them the first season.

  He built greenhouses on Nettles Farm and eventually grew eighteen different varieties of heirloom tomato. “It’s all about changing the paradigm of what you expect when you go to the store. Hard to believe it wasn’t very long ago, but it was radical.” Then he became a chicken farmer. At its height, he ran eight hundred laying hens and six thousand eaters. His wife contemplated a restaurant on the property, then reconsidered. They realized there were too many chickens, too much dust. It just wasn’t going to work. The ambience wasn’t there. Instead, in 2001 they bought a place down the hill, called the Willows Inn. Starks liked the juxtaposition of the names: scrappy Nettles Farm up the hill and the more refined Willows on the water. The couple built the restaurant into a destination eatery—not that this ensured any sort of financial success. “I used to stand on that deck on a Friday night and the restaurant would be completely empty, or maybe two people inside. The sun was going down and I’d say, ‘You gotta be kidding me. This is the best view in the world, and there’s no one here to see it?’ ” And then the Great Recession hit in 2008. One of the last things Starks did before selling the Willows at the end of 2012 (and getting divorced) was hire a young kid named Blaine Wetzel to be chef. Wetzel was a good hire, recently back from apprenticing at Noma in Copenhagen, a restaurant some were calling the best in the world. “I got to watch him from the beginning, and right out of the gate he was a prodigy.” Now Starks was fishing again and selling his salmon to Wetzel at the Willows, the restaurant he had put on the map.

  “I’m kind of in the process of remaking myself,” he told me as he measured out the chicken feed. He had two marriages behind him and a girlfriend who lived on the mainland. Nettles Farm was now a B&B, his main income for the past year. On the heels of his divorce he had tried to sell the farm and leave Lummi for good. “I never wanted to see this island again. I never wanted to see anybody I knew again. I’m lucky that I didn’t get out, because I had to face it. Now I’m friends with my ex-wife and I get to take care of this place. It’s had a lot of iterations. We’ll see where it goes. I’m getting to where I can enjoy it a little bit.” Enjoying it meant paring down his enthusiasms. Salmon season now took first priority. Tomatoes were out and he had cut way back on the chicken farming, running only poulet de Bresse and the Canadian poulet bleu. They take much longer to grow than a typical bird, caged on a feedlot and injected with hormones, but there is no comparison in flavor. He butchered them himself and sold the four-pound eaters fresh and dressed out for about thirty-five dollars apiece. One of his oven roasters, he said, could rival even sockeye for a last meal. Starks also had Asian pears, Jonagold apples, pie cherries, apricots, and strawberries. His asparagus was in demand. And, of course, the nettles: There were still plenty of nettles to pick and eat each spring, just as there had been in the early days, when he lived in a tent and made endless meals of nettle ravioli. You had to be careful with them—the sting was sharp and lingering—but with gloves to handle the bright-green stalks and a quick blanching in boiling water, they were transformed into an intensely flavored food that was bursting with nutrients, the perfect ingredient for a spring soup or pesto. An old French aphorism came to mind: A nettle in the farmyard is worth an extra egg in the pantry. Still true.

  Earlier that day he had met with fish buyers at Seattle’s Metropolitan Market, a high-end grocery chain that sells organic produce and carefully sourced meats and fish. He flashed his self-deprecating smile as he explained to me that this too was part of his new life. As the so-called marketing director for Lummi Island Wild, a cooperative effort of like-minded fishermen, he was doing more of a desk job these days. Maybe this was appropriate for a man in his sixties. Wasn’t life about moving through its various phases gracefully? Though he still thought of himself as a fisherman, now his job was to secure outlets for the co-op’s fish. He met with seafood vendors, restaurateurs, and supermarkets. The co-op had created a buying club, with customers all over the country. Starks traveled and sat in on meetings. It was the way things needed to be. Sometimes he had to laugh at the strange turns his life’s progress had taken. The sockeye fishery was little more than a month away, and it was his job to secure markets for the co-op’s salmon ahead of time. This year, he reminded me, was forecast to be the biggest sockeye run in the Fraser River since record keeping first began. The timing couldn’t be better. Starks—and the co-op—needed to make some money. They were building a tender,
a $1.4 million boat that would deliver the reef-net fleet’s catch to a processor on the mainland. A shipyard in La Conner, Washington, was halfway done, and it was scheduled to be ready for next year’s season.

  But that was next year. This year was the time to show that reef-net fishing was a superior way to catch fish. Part of the deal with Metro Market involved the future: They could have his sockeye—a fish that was in demand—now, but only if they agreed to take pink salmon next year. Pinks are the most numerous salmon in the Pacific; the trick is getting customers to appreciate their relative merits in comparison to more sought-after species. No one likes pinks. They’re thought of as a cannery fish—a high-volume, low-quality filler of cans. They have less fat than other species, flesh that’s pink rather than a deep red. Anglers like to say, “They smoke up okay,” which is another way of saying they aren’t fit for the grill like a king or a sockeye. But that reputation is starting to change. If handled properly and rushed to market, they can make good table fare. “Cook them like a trout,” those in the know say. Starks came away from the meeting with a handshake, which he considered better than a signed contract.

  —

  STARKS BOUGHT HIS FIRST REEF net the same year he moved to Lummi Island. It would take him another five years before he got up the gumption to learn how to use it. One winter afternoon he went for a walk on the beach. It was during halftime on Super Bowl Sunday. Though not much of a football fan, he felt an obligation as owner of the Beach Store Café—a new venture for him—to make sure the island’s sole meeting place (other than the pricy Willows) was open for the game, a borrowed TV blaring its traditional rituals from a corner.

  That day, as on every other, the water was the bigger draw for Starks. Recently, Puget Sound had weathered a hundred-year storm, and he figured there was a good chance the tide had exposed a secret or two. Though Lummi could boast plenty of beaches, Starks decided to take his halftime walk near Village Point, on the northwest side of the island, a place where Native Americans had gathered for generations in temporary makeshift camps to fish for salmon. The northern end of Lummi is shaped like an arrowhead aimed at Canada. Village Point, a triangular thrust of land jutting into Rosario Strait, forms the left barb on the arrowhead and looks west to Orcas Island. Pacific salmon returning to rivers that empty into the Salish Sea must pass through a deep channel separating Vancouver Island and the Olympic Peninsula—the Strait of Juan de Fuca—and then either turn south into U.S. waters or north toward Canadian territory. Village Point is perfectly situated to intercept Canada-bound fish, especially those headed for the Fraser River, just over the international border to the north.

  The Fraser, the longest river in British Columbia, is one of the great salmon nurseries south of Alaska, along with the Skeena to its north and the Columbia to the south. Named for explorer Simon Fraser, it’s a huge system fed by a multitude of lakes, draining more than eighty-five thousand square miles, an area larger than Nebraska. Takla Lake, Chilko Lake, Harrison Lake, Williams Lake, Adams Lake, and Kamloops Lake are just some of the large lakes in its watershed. The river rises at Fraser Pass near the Alberta border and flows northwest along the Rocky Mountain Trench before turning south at Prince George, gaining size and strength as it’s joined by the Nechako, Quesnel, Chilcotin, and Thompson, all famous salmon rivers in their own right. The geography of the basin is especially suitable to sockeye because of all those feeder lakes. Sockeye are unique among Pacific salmon in their requirement for a lake environment during their life cycle. While adults spawn in the gravel beds of streams like other species, they can also spawn around the periphery of the lake itself if there’s sufficient groundwater welling up or streams emptying into the lake to give the eggs a necessary jolt of oxygen. After hatching, young sockeye rear in the lake for a year or two, until ready to head to the ocean. The world’s sockeye concentrations are all in places with large lake systems connected to the Pacific: Bristol Bay, Alaska; Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula; and the Fraser.

  Though bright silver like other salmon in their prime, on its spawning grounds the sockeye is equally—if very differently—attractive, earning another nickname: red. When the average person pictures a spawning salmon, this is what they envision: a fish in brilliant Christmas colors, with red body and green head. The sockeye’s name has nothing to do with footwear or sight—it’s just a bastardization of a Salish Indian word used by people living along the lower Fraser River: suk-kegh, meaning red fish. Here on Lummi Island, as in many other salmon capitals, the sockeye is the prize fish. While chinook are heftier and command a higher price in the marketplace, and pinks are more numerous, year in and year out sockeye salmon remain the most valuable species of salmon, because of their high quality and dense concentrations. Larger than pinks, averaging four to seven pounds, sockeye spend longer intervals at sea (up to four years, though usually two) and have a diet that consists primarily of crustaceans, which means their abundance is tied directly to the productivity of the ocean. In years with good upwellings of cold, nutrient-rich water in the North Pacific, the population of free-floating phytoplankton rises, which in turn nourishes burgeoning clouds of zooplankton and the salmon that feed on them. Warmer surface waters associated with El Niño put the brakes on this. The feeding habits of sockeye can be discerned in a particular piece of anatomy: They have more gill rakers—toothy, comblike cartilage attached to the gills to filter krill—than other species of salmon.

  In some years the Fraser sees more returning salmon than any other river system in the world, the majority pinks and sockeye. For millennia, indigenous fishermen living along the fingerlike network of waterways that form Puget Sound, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and the Strait of Georgia—a body of water known collectively as the Salish Sea—intercepted these Fraser-bound salmon using any number of clever devices, from fish wheels to weirs to reef nets. Though evidence of such fisheries is mostly gone, occasionally a relic from the past surfaces. On his halftime walk, just as he had hoped, Starks saw something in the tideline that made him stop and look more closely. A stone among the cobbles was not shaped like the others. It was the absence that caught his eye: He could see through it. Immediately he recognized the form of a reef-net anchor. The smooth granite was round and about the same size as a grapefruit. But what made it stick out was a small hole bored through the middle. This was a rock that had been worked by a human being, possibly several hundred years ago, to be used in an ancient form of fishing called reef netting. Starks figured this particular stone had been chosen because it probably already had a slight indentation at its center that could hold a few agates; it was then likely positioned beneath a cascading stream of water in a creek bed. How many years it would take for the agitation of spilling water and agates to bore through remains a mystery. Such a tool required patience in its fashioning. Tap tap tap. Once bored through, the stone could be tied with cordage to hold down a reef, a funnellike contrivance that guided salmon toward Indian canoes, where they could be caught in a cooperative effort that required additional patience and skill. The reef-net anchor was a sign. Starks understood that day where he needed to be and what he needed to do.

  As we stood in the dirt outside his home, most of which was now converted into rooms for his B&B guests, he handed me the donut-shaped stone and then disappeared inside a small cottage detached from the main house—his living quarters these days—to make us some coffee. Holding the anchor was like shaking hands with history. Slate-gray, the stone had heft, a sense of gravitas, yet it was smooth and balanced. Starks considered it more than a chance find or a gift from the sea. Both artifact of the past and monument to the future, it represented everything he had been working toward most of his life, as a fisherman and as a person.

  He reappeared moments later and we sat down on what he jokingly referred to as his patio—just some old lawn furniture at the edge of the driveway. A song sparrow chittered from a fence post nearby. He inhaled the aroma of his coffee and took a long sip. Starks comes from agrarian stock. H
is mother’s people were Mormons who wagon-trained with Brigham Young. His father was Scottish-English. There was some Blackfoot Indian in the family. He was born in Port Townsend, Washington, and then moved across the sound to Everett, where his father was in the Army. They had a two-and-a-half-acre farm. Daily rhythms back then were less complicated and discordant than today, more Verdi than Stravinsky. “People were intentional about what they planted,” Starks said. “There was flow.”

  Starting in his early twenties, his progression became ever more backward, a steady pace into the past. It began with the boat. After four years of college, he was all set to enroll in law school and the comfortable, respectable existence that would follow. He’d just weathered four tumultuous years, 1968 to 1972, during which the country had gone through wrenching change. He wasn’t a radical—more like a hippie….Well, that wasn’t accurate either. He was poor. He finished his undergrad degree in the fall and had to wait a year before starting the University of Oregon’s law program. Up to that point his life had been governed by an overriding desire to get good grades.

  The life of the mind was satisfying, but it lacked an elemental edge. Starks wanted to use his hands. So, with a year to kill, he bought himself a twenty-nine-foot kelper named Kingfisher (which he renamed Asterix, after the swashbuckling French comic-book character) and went fishing. It was just Starks, the weather, and the boat. No excuses. All up to him. He moored the kelper in Everett, north of Seattle, and then, unnerved by this spontaneous decision, disappeared for a week to figure out his next steps. When he returned, he found the boat half-sunk. A leaking shaft log—the housing of the propeller shaft—had nearly finished him before he’d even started. A taciturn old fisherman on the dock handed him a #10 coffee can and told him to start bailing.