Upstream

by Langdon Cook

  The first time he took the kelper out, he was too embarrassed to try to turn it around in front of the other fishermen hanging around the dock. Instead, he backed the boat a full mile down Ebey Slough to Possession Sound. It was 1973, and his target was Dungeness crab. Before long he knew he wouldn’t be starting law school in the fall. The next year, instead of hitting the books, he went after salmon. This was the same year that an obscure U.S. District Court judge named George Boldt handed down a decision regarding the original Indian treaties of 1854–55 that promised Northwest tribes their fair share of fish “in common with” the settlers. Fishermen like Starks had watched this development with interest, most of them opposed to anything that would favor the Indians. When Boldt declared that signing tribes were entitled to 50 percent of the catch, the white fleet exploded and openly disregarded the law. One man with a family connection to the fishing industry, Slade Gorton, based his entire political career on being the “Indian slayer,” going all the way to the U.S. Senate and fighting Indian rights to no avail each step of the way—or, as one historian put it, becoming a case study in “failing upwards.” Starks, however, was happy for the tribes. “I’ve always been a liberal,” he told me. “I agreed with it then and I still do.”

  By the mid-1970s, Starks was mooring his boat north of Bellingham in Blaine, Washington, just south of the Canadian border. His first day out for salmon was a rough one and he couldn’t pilot the kelper beyond Boundary Bay, where all the other fishermen were waiting for the opening. As luck would have it, wind from the southwest pushed the sockeye in toward shore. For his very first set as a salmon fisherman, Starks hauled in four hundred sockeye, at sixty-five cents a pound. He earned nearly two thousand dollars, half the cost of the boat. In subsequent years he moved around, fishing different species and refurbishing a variety of boats. He kept a modified halibut boat tied up in Sausalito to fish herring in San Francisco Bay. In 1977, after fishing for herring, he was going to carpool home for Christmas with two fishermen from the Swinomish tribe near Anacortes, Washington. They all stood in line at the same bank in San Francisco to cash their checks. “I was out of there in five minutes. It took them forty minutes. All the way home we talked about what it was like to be an Indian in our white culture.”

  Even back then, Starks was into the simple pleasures of good food and drink. Driving down to San Francisco, he would pull over in Ashland, Oregon, the only place south of Seattle where he could get a decent cup of coffee before reaching the Bay Area. Starks fished Puget Sound and San Francisco Bay. He went up to Alaska and fished Bristol Bay. He fished the Naknek and Nushagak, the Egegik and Kvichak, and watched walruses mating on Round Island. When Mount St. Helens blew in 1980, he and his crewman ran all day and night to make it to a phone in Goodnews Bay, to check on their families back home in Washington. In time, he grew restless. The fishing life had changed him. Looking back, he would say it was like taking LSD for the first time. His whole perspective had changed. Work, food, home. They were interconnected in ways he needed to explore. Finding the reef-net anchor was more than a coincidence.

  —

  WHILE THE HISTORY OF reef netting is not well known, it’s believed to be a specialty of tribes in the Puget Sound region. Sometime in the first years of the twentieth century, white men watched Native Americans successfully catch salmon using the reef-net method and replicated the technology.

  “Look at this,” Starks said, guiding me into the main house, the one he now rented out to strangers. In his lightly used living room, he kept a very small library on reef netting, all of two books. The first was a simple sheaf of white paper bound by a rusty clip. It was homemade, all the pages mimeographed. Careful handwriting filled the margins of the first page: “Nestled within the archipelago of the San Juan Islands, there remains a small breed of salmon seekers, ancient in their craft. And though today’s tide often turns against them, these fishers cling to their dreams; anchored and steadfast in their way.” The text and accompanying photos were by someone named Woody Woodcock. This was one of the few known documents on modern reef netting, Starks told me. I leafed through the pages. It had the handmade look of a family album yet the tone of something mystical. Brief koans peppered its pages, such as this bit of reef-net wisdom that might as well describe the fishing life in general:

  And in my dreams I become eager,

  to wait again…

  Pictures of salmon and lyrical descriptions of their anatomy and life cycles alternated with moody landscape photographs. A hand-drawn diagram depicted the process. At its heart, the reef net is a deception. Imagine a funnel two hundred feet long, with a mouth just as wide, all of it formed by rope lines. Tied to these lines are meter-long blue or green ribbons that wave in the current, simulating shoals. Migrating salmon enter at the mouth and follow the reef as it narrows. At any time they could burst through the waving ribbons and be on their way, but they’re fooled and continue forward as the reef constricts ever tighter until they are in the trap—a fifty-by-fifty-foot net strung between two small barges, each about forty feet long, that hangs out of sight below the reef’s tapered exit. A spotter posted in a crow’s nest above calls out to his crew when the salmon are directly over the net, which is then hoisted with electric winches in a spray of cascading water and leaping fish. All hands on deck rush to the net and bring in the catch. In a matter of seconds the salmon, maybe scores of them, are lifted from the bay’s currents and guided into holding tanks, still alive.

  The spotter’s stand is a special place. Wearing polarized sunglasses, the spotter waits and watches from his perch twenty feet above the deck. As Woodcock writes: “The stand is a world apart.” Nature’s theater reveals a new act every day—every moment—in the tidal showcase, with perpetually shifting winds and skies, the waves “kissed with different glares and colors.” But time and modernity have caught up to the reef netters. The advent of the motor changed everything. “A noisy throbbing drone blasted over waters that were once so silent. And boats moved around in pursuit of salmon rather than waiting quiet in one place.” The author laments new technology, greedy fishermen, depleted fish runs. The book ends with a Hindu poem:

  O mother earth!

  O wind, my father!

  O fire, my friend!

  O water, my kinsman!

  O sky, my noble brother!

  I salute you all

  “Don’t lose this,” Starks said to me, reluctantly handing it over. The second book, Reef Net Technology of the Saltwater People, was professionally printed and published by the Saanich Indian School Board. The Saanich people are part of the Coastal Salish linguistic group and now live primarily on southern Vancouver Island. Text and illustrations depicted the traditional reef-net method of catching salmon. The book begins with a myth explaining the origin of the reef net: A beautiful young Saanich woman was wooed by a handsome young man from another tribe. After rebuffing his advances, she agreed to marry him provided that he’d stay with the Saanich people for a while. In that time, he showed the people how to build a reef net from willow and they prospered with salmon. Then, as agreed, he took his wife back to his home, but instead of heading for a village on the mainland, they paddled out to sea with all their possessions loaded on the canoe. “When they reached a distance away, they simply vanished….” The Saanich people realized the salmon spirit had visited them in human form and carried away one of their daughters as tribute.

  I flipped through the book. The last chapter had a one-word title: “Genocide.” As far as he knew, Starks told me, there were no Indian reef netters left anywhere. “People don’t like to talk about it. It’s a difficult topic,” he said. White fishermen had appropriated the technique, using it in locations formerly occupied by indigenous reef netters, such as the choice currents off Lummi Island’s Village Point. Starks was quick to point out that this transition from an Indian fishery to a white fishery had happened a long time ago, perhaps at the turn of the previous century, before even the oldest of today’s reef nette
rs was born. But it had happened nonetheless. He hoped that one day, in his lifetime, there would be Indian reef netters once again on the water. There was even a reef-net festival in the making, to be held later in the summer, and he hoped to convince tribal members to attend, though this too was controversial.

  With contractions in Puget Sound’s fishing industry, including state-sanctioned buyouts, the white reef-net fleet had been reduced from some fifty-odd permits to just eleven: eight on Lummi Island, and three others in the San Juan Islands. A style of fishing that had been around for perhaps thousands of years was nearly extinct. Yet there were good reasons to keep it alive. As far as Starks was concerned, reef netting was the single best way of bringing fresh salmon to market, if not the most efficient. Salmon caught in a gill net might spend hours, or maybe even an entire night, depending on the scrupulousness of the fisherman, hanging dead in the net before being pulled up. With purse seining, the fish died on deck in a smothering heap. In a reef-net operation, each fish was individually killed, bled, and iced. None of the fish died from asphyxiation, and their meat was untainted by a stressful death. They didn’t get tossed around or kicked by busy fishermen trying to deal with a sudden onslaught of thousands of pounds of fish flopping on deck. A reef-net fish had every scale intact. As Starks explained it, you just pull the fish from a holding tank, cut a gill, and let it bleed out before icing it. “The fish crosses over without even knowing it,” he said.

  Because this is a fixed-gear form of fishing, good reef-net sites are used year after year and represent a rare instance of private property on the water, one that can be informally handed down or inherited through the years. The head-can anchors remain fixed underwater year-round; at the start of each fishing season, the cables leading from the anchors must be dredged up so that the reef can be suspended once again. Starks called it an exciting and effective way to catch salmon when the conditions are right, those necessary conditions being a flowing tide, though one not so strong that it can swamp or even flip the barges. And, as Starks pointed out, reef netting also comes with built-in advantages over other methods. The superb quality of the individually handled fish is one advantage. The other is that it’s the only truly selective fishery. Rather than wasting unwanted bycatch by tossing it overboard, dead or nearly so, as is done with other fisheries, it is simply removed from the live tank and freed back into the sound. This is especially relevant for endangered or threatened stocks of salmon, which can be readily identified and released.

  I leafed through the mimeographed sheaf of pages one more time and came upon sentences that might as well have been written by Starks himself:

  As a group, reef netters are moody characters….The passage of time warps into a long drifting. There’s an occasional bright joy and happiness which quickly absorbs back into the daily abandonment. And always there is waiting. The uncertain and unstable dream of waiting for the salmon to flicker far down within the heart…And even if civilization itself were to float by and peddle its silly wares, the fishers could not comprehend; for their minds become filled with salmon and their eyes search only the wild and watery world of so many solitudes.

  I closed the book and looked up at Starks. He gave a half nod of acknowledgment, as if there were passages yet to be written.

  —

  WIND GUSTS AND CHOPPY seas, typical for spring, scuttled our plan to take sea kayaks out past Village Point to see the fishing grounds. Instead, Starks drove me over to where the reef nets were dry-docked, just south of the point. Two mule deer does, docile as blushing tourists, sauntered right in front of us across the road to the beach. Starks parked in a driveway filled with old rusted fishing gear. Someone—a reef netter waiting for the fish, perhaps?—had made elaborate sculptures from the cast-off equipment. Several forty-by-twelve-foot barges, flat-bottomed and made of wood or fiberglass, formed a row on wooden cradles next to a small green house, partially obscuring its view of the bay. The arrangement suggested a seaside graveyard. Starks explained that the homeowner had been reef netting since 1942. “He wants to die reef netting. He wouldn’t want his land used any other way.” Head cans painted brown and bigger than medicine balls sat on the lawn like strange art installations.

  After buying his first reef net in 1992, Starks spent five years learning how to fish it.

  It was a do-it-yourself fishery without much of a blueprint. You couldn’t just go shopping for a proper reef-net barge. “You have to one-off them,” he explained, pointing to one of the older barges made of wood. “That was built by a guy in Bellingham. This one over here is fiberglass and was built by us. It’s been a learning process of working together. Fishermen working together.” Winch motors to hoist the net had been cannibalized from World War II bomb-bay door openers and landing gear. He pointed to a bank of solar panels mounted on one of the barges, the latest innovation in the fleet; the co-op was going green. Except to power the skiffs that run back and forth from the beach to the reef nets, no fossil fuels are burned. Solar panels mounted on the barges charge deep-cycle batteries, which in turn power the winches. “This is the most sustainable fishery in the world,” said Starks. No more diesel fumes floating across the bay, no more ka-thunk ka-thunk ka-thunk of internal-combustion engines turning over. Now the only sound was the brief rattle of the winch’s pulley grinding in the teeth of the sprocket. “That’s the only noise you hear out here, and just for a few seconds. Otherwise it’s silence. And the birds, of course.”

  Starks invited me to climb one of the spotter towers. A bell clanged somewhere down the beach, and nearby the forlorn whistle of a white-crowned sparrow reminded me that it was still spring. “Look at this piece of wood I’m standing on,” he said, bending down to run his hand across its gray, weathered surface. “Look at the grain on this wood. This is holding my body up, this piece of wood. It’s thin but it’s strong, because it’s old-growth fir. Every time I stand up here, I think, This is so wonderful.” From the spotter’s stand, I could look out across the entire fleet of reef-net gears. (Like everyone else in this little-known vocation, Starks calls the reef nets “gears.”) There were four dry-docked here in this old-timer’s yard and another four next door. A rail ran beneath the barges to the road. When it was time to fish, the barges were jacked off their cradles and lowered onto a rail car that could be towed by a steam donkey to the beach. Each reef-net owner had a designated fishing spot off Village Point.

  “The quality of the fish is the main advantage,” Starks said. “And it’s really exciting, like a combination of sport fishing and commercial fishing. It’s also sort of Zen-like. You have to pay attention. It’s quiet. You’re not screaming around with an engine. It takes skill.” The reef net brings in fish in a matter of seconds and dumps them into live wells, where they swim around, giving the lactic-acid buildup time to dissipate, after which they’re gilled and bled out in a separate tank before being transferred to totes filled with slush ice. The reef netters use a simple egg timer for each stage. Starks figured he’d honed his operation to take up to fifteen hundred fish a day, and each one of those fish was being handled individually in order to “eat well,” as he put it, and also to command the highest price. These weren’t salmon bound for a cannery—they were meant to be eaten within a few days of being caught, at a discriminating backyard barbecue or fine restaurant.

  “When I moved here I wanted to be part of the island, and at that time there were fifty gears out there. This was what was happening on this island. This was a reef-net island. Everybody reef netted. You’d go to the store, everyone was in boots, and the opener would be posted. And after the opener, everybody would get a beer and tell war stories.” In the old days, before the arrival of the white fishermen, the Lummi tribe would come here and they’d set up a camp at Village Point and they’d reef net in the summertime. They’d weave a reef from dune grass and string a net made from nettle cordage between two long canoes. The village was temporary. They’d break it down and head back to the mainland at the end of the seaso
n. Now the reef netters are all white. Starks reiterated that he’d like to see Native Americans rejoin their ranks, but his isn’t a view shared by everyone. “There’s a schism,” he admitted. “It’s political. In every schism there are two kinds of people. In this situation there’s one side that’s afraid of the tribe and one that isn’t.” The Boldt decision had put the tribes on equal footing with the nontribal fishermen, and so non-Indians had assumed a mostly defensive posture. In the first years following Boldt, there had been bad blood and lawlessness, and state officials didn’t even bother trying to enforce the law. But over time a grudging acceptance had taken hold. Starks was ready for the next phase: working together to husband this extraordinary resource.

  Because of the forecast size of the Fraser sockeye run, which anticipated a large return that summer, the co-op was planning to use a tender, a forty-by-fifteen-foot boat that could just as easily work up in Alaska’s salmon fisheries. “We’re growing up. This has to survive into the future. This is too good of a resource. It’s too precious.” Even so, there were pressures on the fishery, pressures that could cause it to just blink out of existence if they weren’t careful. “Everyone is old, there’s no new blood. No one’s really making any money.” Starks was trying to address this last point. He had a market for twenty thousand pounds of frozen fillets, plus his connections to fine-dining restaurants and chefs. His partner was working with Microsoft; this year their salmon would be sold in the corporate cafeteria, which made him laugh. He was reminded that his portrait was hanging at Google headquarters: “Riley the Reefnetter.” It was part of a series of portraits done by a well-known photographer, Douglas Gayeton, for a project called “The Lexicon of Sustainability.” Starks shrugged it off. The time to crow would be later, if and when the fishery got the recognition he thought it deserved. The big run of sockeye due in the summer would be a test. Were they ready?