by Langdon Cook
“Cod faces are awesome. They have big ol’ heads.”
“Salmon-head soup,” said Morgan.
“Heads are cool,” Sean agreed. “At a party, eat the eyeball and they’ll think you’re funny. I like roasting the whole fish.”
Chef had the faintest hint of a smile on his otherwise serious-looking face. He was feeling like a member of the crew. Josh leaned down from his spotting stand and gave him a high-five. “Dude, we gotta get together. Seriously, I wanna learn some salmon cooking.”
Chef was all for it. “I live alone. It’s driving me crazy. I like to eat.”
“Do you can your fish? I’ve got a canner.”
Sean had had enough. “We need fish!” The laughter was uneasy now. They did need fish. More fish than they were getting so far. The first couple of test fisheries had seemed so promising, but where were the fish now?
“Goat was the worst meat I’d ever had,” Morgan said, apropos of nothing, “until I ate seal. Spanish goats pee on their own faces.” And with that, thoughts of jellyfish returned to haunt us all. I checked my wrist. Though there was no visible sign of sting, it still burned. The hours ticked away. Someone questioned whether we’d see another fish before dark. “It’s time to check out the squid fishery,” Morgan said. “Get out here at night with our floodlight.”
Josh whirled around in his tower. “Let’s go! The only thing is, I’m not allowed to do anything fun. I have to stay home with the wife and baby.”
—
IN THE LATE AFTERNOON, with skies clearing and a corner of sun showing through the clouds and the crew bantering to pass the time, Ian suddenly straightened up in the spotter’s stand and made the call. We all jumped up as if a fire alarm had just gone off. Ian and Josh tripped the winches to hoist the net, and the rest of us grabbed web. The fish leaped and thrashed as they came out of the water, bouncing like a bunch of kids on a trampoline. We guided them into the live tank, a few dozen bright sockeye in all, finally. After that the schools started arriving, one after another. “Take ’em!” Ian shouted again and again. Sockeye spilled into the tank, a dozen here, three dozen there, their blue backs gleaming as they circled and circled, looking for a way out. There was no time between hauls for Chef to get any reading done. He, Morgan, and Cara spent the rest of the afternoon popping gills and moving salmon from the live tank to the bleed tank and then into totes filled with slush ice, each step of the way timed to the minute by the little white egg timer perched on a chopping block aboard the barge. Ian was usually the first to spot incoming fish from his position closer to the reef. Like any activity requiring keen eyesight, it’s a skill that needs mastering. Even with polarized glasses, picking out fish beneath the surface is a nearly paranormal skill, based on the most infinitesimal clues and years of experience. The schools could be cryptic or just obscured by murkiness in the water.
“Sometimes a school looks like an overhead cloud,” Ian explained, never taking his eyes off the water, “like a shadow moving across the ripples.” Other times, he said, it looks like algae blooming beneath the surface or like a giant air bubble rising up. “That’s one of my favorites—fizz coming up and expanding like a diver’s bubble. And sometimes it looks like fish, sure enough—unmistakably like a school of fish. You’ll get them in a perfect line or a V, like a flock of geese.” He relaxed at the thought, leaning into the metal brace of the spotter’s stand, the memory of fish filling his imagination. “Sometimes they’ll be jumping. Every group is a little bit different. Sometimes they’re skittish. They see us or hear us and turn around. The spotter gives the play-by-play, sometimes for ten minutes on end. ‘They’re coming in! They’re going out!’ Finally they disappear or they come in, to a big cheer.”
—
ALL AT ONCE, the tide changed and the current went slack. Fishing was done for the day. The reef netters had other chores to do, so I caught a ride back to the beach with Ian. Riley Starks was there, along with a tall blond woman from Atlanta, Georgia, who was packing a minivan with boxes of fish and hurrying to catch a flight back home. She ran a catering business and had joined the co-op’s buying club. This trip was a little present to herself, to see the place where these incomparable fish originated and to meet the reef netters. She’d brought her daughter and stayed at Nettles Farm. The night before, Starks cooked her one of the fish they’d caught. “It was hands down the best fish I’ve ever had,” she gushed. “I took pictures of it and everything.” Starks gave a slightly embarrassed nod and made quick goodbyes, politely telling the mother and daughter they’d better get moving to catch the ferry. These visits exhausted him. He enjoyed telling the reef-net story, and he was certainly energized by what they were doing, especially the sustainability part, but dealing with the public could be draining. It was very different from taking on the elements out on the water.
He looked at me and exhaled. “How’d it go today? You need a fish too.” I said no, but he insisted. We drove together back to Nettles Farm, where he had a sockeye from yesterday’s catch waiting in the walk-in. We carried it through the pasture to his chicken house and washed it off on an outdoor stainless-steel cleaning table. While Starks tended to his chickens, I took a fillet knife and opened my salmon, slitting it from vent to gill. Starks reappeared and watched me warily, pronouncing my incision ugly. “Look at this,” he said, holding the fish up. My knife had barely pierced the pink membrane that walls off the internal organs. “You’ve fucking ruined it.”
“It’s fine. I’m not running a restaurant.”
“Yeah, but now you’ve opened it. See? This fish won’t last nearly as long refrigerated this way.”
“No problem. I’m eating it tomorrow.”
Starks shook his head. It didn’t matter. My knife work was a travesty. “Jeez,” he muttered. “I’d better fillet it myself.”
BY SUMMER’S END, WHEN I RETURNED to Lummi Island for a third time, giddy expectations for a record harvest at the co-op had been replaced by weariness. Riley Starks informed me that Trident, the seafood processor, had pulled its tender from the bay and sent it north to Alaska instead. Chef was gone, as were several of the greenest reef netters from across the fleet, let go in the absence of fish. The remaining fishermen were clocking long hours, grinding it out. Ginger-haired Morgan, even more laconic than usual, chalked it up to the fickleness of nature. “It’s fish. Can’t count too much on a wild animal’s behavior. I just know they ain’t here.”
Dreams of big profits and the ascension of reef-net fish on the national market turned to a need to break even and a reality-hardened focus on the work that lay ahead. They could still make their minimum goals for the season with some more long days and maybe a stab at the coho fishery that would follow the sockeye. “We just need Morgan to smell them and Josh to feel them,” Cara said. No one wanted to talk much about it. Josh tried to be upbeat, telling me that they’d been getting a couple of hundred fish a day lately, but that wasn’t exactly true. Yes, the day before they’d managed to eke out two hundred sockeye, in a long slog of mostly waiting around for the fish to arrive. Many of their days before that had been goose eggs. Ian said the sockeye didn’t like the warm water.
A layer of water three degrees warmer than average had formed in the Gulf of Alaska and stretched clear across the Pacific to Japan. This warm-water bubble, as some called it, forced salmon north in pursuit of colder, more nutrient-rich water. One exception to this was a band of cold water that ran along the northwest coast of British Columbia. As the Fraser-bound sockeye, driven by their need to reproduce, streamed in from the North Pacific, they ran headlong into the bubble; instead of pushing through it, they banked eastward to find cooler currents along the B.C. coastline, which then channeled them south through Johnstone Strait, between the mainland and the east side of Vancouver Island. Most years the Fraser River sockeye split their migration, with about half taking the northern route through Johnstone Strait and the other half taking the southern route through the Strait of Juan de Fuca. But this year,
as far as scientists could tell, nearly all the fish were choosing the northern route. Some estimates had 99 percent of the run going through Johnstone Strait. The culprit, everyone agreed, was this warm-water bubble. A meteorologist at the University of Washington said he’d never seen anything like it. He nicknamed it “the blob.”
As with any business in trouble, it’s the job of the higher-ups to give the employees positive motivation, and on this particular day the reef netters had something new to be proud of. Ian met me on the beach and told me to come across the road, where the rest of the crew was waiting by an open garage. They were having a powwow. “A team meeting,” one of the reef netters said. “Have we ever done this before?”
“And the good news is,” someone else chimed in, “you’re all fired.”
The yard out front was filled with a haphazard array of old fishing equipment, some of it in current use, though much of it looked more like artifacts from a long-gone seaside culture: a boat trailer, assorted crab traps, buoys in red and yellow, coiled piles of thick rope, and an ax. An angry salmon sculpture the size of a marlin, welded together from rusted scrap metal, arched beside the driveway. Everyone shuffled over to the front lawn and sat on patchy clumps of sunburned grass. Even here, at their first-ever team meeting, the fishermen could gaze upon the sparkling bay where their gears waited, empty. With his back to the water, Ian stood before the group, which included a couple dozen reef netters from the four gears that made up the Lummi Island Wild co-op.
“I just wanted to take a second to get everybody together so we’re all on the same page,” he began. A salty breeze blew in off the water, and I could see some of the reef netters trying to concentrate on Ian’s words even as their faces revealed the pull of distant currents. “It came off as a little bit of a surprise to have the opportunity to bleed the entire catch yesterday.” With the Trident tender out of the picture, the four gears not associated with Lummi Island Wild suddenly had no one to buy their fish. The co-op stepped in and offered their own services. But this offer came with the stipulation that the other gears handle their fish in such a way that they could be sold under the Lummi Island Wild label. This meant bleeding, icing, and delivering quickly. “It was so cool to see the entire bay for the first time ever cooperating to deliver a product to a unified tender,” Ian continued. He was on a roll now. “All of us got an extra thirty cents a pound. Double thumbs-up. I’m still floored. We earned ourselves a co-op raise.” The reef netters erupted in a brief ovation. This wasn’t the speech they were expecting.
Out on the water an hour later, after lowering the net, Ian breathed a little sigh of relief. Speaking to the whole co-op—giving them reason to be proud—was a big deal. He was wearing his usual tie-dyed thermal sweatshirt. “My lucky sweatshirt is lucky again,” he mused.
“You know it only stays lucky if you don’t wash it, right?” Josh, the Texan, yelled down from his tower.
“Is that the trick?”
“Dude, tell me you didn’t wash that thing after we caught all those fish yesterday.”
“Not this year,” Sierra piped in.
“Oh, okay, good. I haven’t washed this underwear either since we’ve been catching fish.” Groans all around. “Come on up, Morgan. Anyone else wanna see my tie-dyed underwear?”
Laughter was the best response to poor fishing. On cue, a little towheaded boy came rowing out past us in a miniature bright-red dinghy. It was barely sunrise and he was the first to arrive at his gear, pulling at the oars with obvious intent, biting his lower lip. Seeing the next generation of reef netters inspired awe among the fishermen. “No one knows who he is…” intoned Morgan theatrically.
“But he pulls web like an animal,” added Ian.
I joined Ian in the tower, hoping to improve my spotting skills. From up here, looking across the bay, with eagles soaring in a blue sky and great blue herons perched like gargoyles on the head cans, it was hard to believe that the unseen depths weren’t teeming with fish. Puget Sound has the same effect on all who stare out across its rippling waters. What a beautiful place—just as nature intended. But that same water masks an unpleasant stew of chemical runoff, PCBs, sewage, and all sorts of other man-made contaminants. One study has revealed traces of antidepressants and cocaine in Puget Sound salmon. And then there are the larger forces at work in the North Pacific. The blob…Nothing surprises the reef netters anymore. Still, Ian was feeling good about the day before.
“We tendered the whole catch. These are fish that will be marketed as reef-net caught.” Ian took his eyes off the water for a rare moment and surveyed the activity below. Cara and Morgan were busy moving sockeye into the bleed tank. Josh, already in a tank top, was repairing one of the solar-powered winches. “We’ve spent a decade developing systems like this,” he went on. “It’s hard on the people to be bent over, popping gills and moving fish from well to well. We have a recipe for slushing our totes with just the right mix of ice and salt water. We have a bleed time that we use for the minimum amount of time they swim before they bleed out. When you watch those fish get cut, there’s no question. You can tell instantly. Our fish, you can fillet ten, twenty, thirty, on a single piece of newspaper before changing it. If you fillet an unbled fish: one piece, covered in blood.” Off in the distance an osprey circled the bay, looking for its own morning catch. “Even our processing plant tells us they love our fish. They’re clean; they’re easy, beautiful. You can taste the quality difference, in my view, especially out of the freezer. No fishy off-taste.”
There was no question about the quality of reef-net fish. The problem was quantity. This was supposed to be the year Lummi Island Wild put reef-net salmon squarely on the culinary map from coast to coast. Instead, they were forced to look abroad for non-reef-net fish just to keep afloat. “We went up to B.C. and bought some seined fish because we thought we might not have any,” Ian admitted, “and we ended up throwing out almost half. They’ll be crab bait. We’ll never ever put our name on something like that. Nothing we want to be a part of. That’s what the seiners are bringing to the dock, what ends up at most grocery stores. They were disgusting. I was picking fish myself. They were soft, gills washed out, not iced properly, brailed up in big bags. I try not to talk bad about other fisheries because it’s easy to start a holy war, but it was very apparent.”
Later in the day, a pair of old-timers took over on the gear next to us. They had a couch on board. It was a sunny day at the end of summer. Shirts off. From their position on the cushions, they could reach all the winches and operate the net without even getting up from their seat. The oldest of old-timers, Jerry Anderson, visited our gear and took up his former position in the tower. Almost immediately he spied a school of fish. He studied them for a while and then fell back into casual conversation with the crew.
“What happened to the fish?” someone wanted to know.
“Oh, they went out.”
“How many?”
“Ah Christ, I dunno—fifty or sixty.”
Fifty or sixty fish would be a nice haul, especially in a year like this, but there was nothing to do about it. The fish entered the reef and sometimes they turned around and left the reef. Like a flock of birds wheeling through the sky, they moved in unison, in unpredictable ways. It was the spotter’s job to make sure they didn’t get past the net unseen. Everyone watched the octogenarian—with his specially modified sunglasses that included a homemade tweak of cardboard side panels to cut the glare—as he chatted and joked and seemingly paid no attention to his spotting duties. They all knew that if a single fish had the audacity to show itself anywhere near the surface of the reef, Anderson would spot it.
“He can see fish clear down to Lummi Rocks,” said Morgan. We all looked south. In the afternoon haze, the rocks—tiny islands—appeared like little bumps on the horizon. Maybe a gigantic school of sockeye was gathering there, off in the distance, at that moment. The possibility of fish never diminished.
At the ferry that evening, I overheard a
weekend couple ahead of me in line lamenting their return to the city. They hated to leave the place. The island offered so much you couldn’t get on the mainland these days. Orchard trees hung low with fruit. Crab-pot buoys painted dabs of color in the bay. How many of the humble ranch houses looking out on the water would become second homes, I wondered. How many would be torn down and replaced by something bigger, more at odds with the landscape? What would happen to Jerry Anderson’s house? To backyards filled with old rusty fishing gear? You couldn’t really blame them, this couple. The island had changed hands in the past and it would change hands again. First it belonged to nesting seabirds, then the Lummi Indians, followed by the white fishermen. Next it would be the dominion of tech moguls or their like.
Civilization’s progression has a churning finality to it that defies reproach. The city couple’s Lexus SUV sported a single carefully placed bumper sticker that read LIVIN’ LIFE. My own cooler in the back of my car concealed a sockeye, a beautiful bright silver one of about six pounds taken earlier that day, still uncut. I had the hale feeling of a man who has caught fish. It’s an infectious feeling, one that’s made Lummi Island a destination for centuries, perhaps as long as there have been people on Puget Sound.
WHEN THE SEASON WAS OVER and the fall rains had started again in earnest, I met up with Riley Starks one more time, in an unlikely location. He had business to do in Seattle and suggested we have dinner together at a chain restaurant in Northgate Mall. I got lost in the acres of parking lot and was late. After walking the mall from end to end, I finally found our destination, a California Pizza Kitchen across from Barnes & Noble. Cloying pop music filled the room, and a few disinterested couples poked at their dishes of pub food. Starks had recently returned from the Adams River, a Fraser River tributary, where he went hiking with his new dog, Stella, and filmed the spawning of the stream’s famous run of large, late-returning sockeye salmon. “We went on these trails way off the beaten path and there were no people,” he told me. “We got to witness the spawning drama, with big kings in there too and trout trying to steal the eggs.”