by Langdon Cook
The spawning drama, as he called it, is something I try to see each year as well. It’s one of the great natural wonders of the world, certainly one of the few spectacles in North America that compares to the wildlife on display in a place like Africa. Each fall and into winter, I can drive a couple of hours from Seattle and see thousands of big fish rolling about with amorous resolve in a single drift—the huge chum run on the Skagit River, for instance, which attracts hundreds of bald eagles from as far away as Alaska, or even the coho that pair up all over a small stream like Pilchuck Creek, not far from the suburbs, all those colored-up fish scraping the gravel beds clean with their nest-building so that the river bottom looks as if someone has just pushed a giant vacuum cleaner across it. The pictures and documentary films that the average American is likely to encounter on the Discovery Channel or in the pages of National Geographic—of scarlet sockeye lolling about in a Bristol Bay drainage, or of bronzed chinook on the Kenai—are dramas that still play out in a handful of rivers throughout the populated regions of the Pacific Northwest as well, despite the odds. After nearly two centuries of intensive development and exploitation, we continue to have a few remnants of wild nature that can rival the best of what Alaska has to offer.
When my son was still a toddler, I took him to the Stillaguamish River—the Stilly, as everyone calls it—near Granite Falls, little more than an hour north of Seattle, where we watched wild pink salmon, thousands of them, use up the last of their life force in the cobbled reaches of that modest river, their humped backs sticking out of the thin water. Contorted, half-eaten bodies of salmon littered the banks. The place reeked of death and also of life. My little boy ran up and down the banks on wobbly legs, finding one twisted and desiccated carcass more grotesque than the last, until the stench was too much for both of us. I looked at him and realized the life cycle of the salmon had become part of my own annual trip around the sun. I could mark the seasons and important dates by my travels through salmon country, and one day, I hoped, when my boy was older, he would join me for the sort of backcountry fishing adventures that had become an annual highlight. In a week I would leave for British Columbia. I was heading north to go camping and fishing, as I had every fall for the last several years. People from all over the world journeyed to this region to explore the ancestral parts of their humanity. I had met Germans, Italians, Japanese, even Chinese on the banks of salmon streams, all of them drawn to wild rivers and their fish.
Starks ordered what the menu called cedar-plank salmon. This dinner was a mission of sorts, a little private-eye work. “Is it farmed or wild?” he asked the waitress, already knowing the answer. She wasn’t sure and offered to check. “Don’t worry about it,” he said quickly. The fish was a farmed Atlantic salmon, but recently California Pizza Kitchen had been negotiating with Lummi Island Wild to buy wild pink salmon, in an effort to reinvigorate their menu. “They’re trying to reinvent themselves,” Starks said. “They want to be more sustainable. It’s a publicly traded company. I think they’re bored. They’re looking at how they can change with the times. If they can’t be organic, they can still offer a wild salmon.” Next summer, he added, when the pinks were running, California Pizza Kitchen would buy enough to freeze and last them through the year. “It’s going to have a halo effect if they embrace it.”
“Halo effect?”
“Oh, that’s marketing talk. My job these days,” he reminded me.
I wondered whether pink salmon served at a place like California Pizza Kitchen was enough to turn the tide, to open the eyes of a public that was too busy, too harried, too uninterested in nature to care about something they saw at the supermarket’s fish counter every day of the year. Sockeye, with its richer flavor and striking color, seemed like a better choice. Starks disagreed. “Take a look at how far those Fraser River pinks have to go. They average four and a half or five pounds. The fat content is huge. They’re not even like a pink salmon. They’re beautiful.” Anyway, he said, pinks have the same flavor profile as sockeye. Both species eat the same sort of food at sea: zooplankton. The only difference is that pinks spend half the time in the ocean that sockeye do, so they never develop the deep-red color, the rich flavor. But they’re still damn good. “I’ve shed my mantle of ‘It has to be perfect,’ ” he went on. “I’ve got an open mind. I believe in pink salmon. I believe it’s an amazing resource that’s underutilized, and it’s wrong to be underutilized. We need to get it on menus and dinner plates. It’s going to be a really great thing, if people can accept it.” The co-op was moving on from the disappointing sockeye season. Their new goal was to move one million pounds of pinks the next year.
And Starks had another idea: Watching his dog roll around in dead salmon carcasses on the banks of the Adams River reminded him of a new gadget he’d heard about. It was a machine that could scrape fish carcasses. The industry term is food recovery. After filleting, the pink salmon carcasses can be scraped, ground, and cooked into dog treats. “We’re trying chum salmon too,” he added, sitting up in his chair and jotting some notes in a little book. In another departure, the co-op planned to buy chums from Puget Sound seiners. “If this company is going to succeed, it needs to do more than just reef-net fish. We’ll have full say over quality.”
Our cedar-plank salmon arrived. Starks pronounced it dry but not bad. “It has decent texture,” he said, piercing it with his fork. He took another bite and I could see him pondering the opportunity to supplant this farm-raised fish with the real thing, a wild salmon bound for an icy glacier-fed stream in British Columbia. The problem, he said, was in finding consistency. “Nature’s vagaries,” he added wistfully. “We were all excited about this season. It would have been wonderful if it had come off. We thought we were going to get a hell of a bump. We thought this was going to really push us.” Starks took another bite. This fillet of farmed salmon that “wasn’t bad” was already beginning to vex him. He pushed it around a little on the plate, studied its contours and fork-tenderness. In a way, he was besieged—with an army of farm-raised simulacra on one side and unsympathetic nature on the other—and yet, always the fisherman, he found a reason for hope. “The fact is, because we had a good line of credit we were able to buy fish, and so it played out a lot differently and it wasn’t all bad. It opened doors that wouldn’t have been opened otherwise. We had markets we had to fill.” Hadn’t Ian, the crew chief, told me that half of the seiner fish were fit only to be crab bait? “We left a few people in the lurch,” Starks had to admit. “Like Metropolitan Market, for instance.” He felt bad about that. He’d sent an email to the seafood buyer at Met Market recently and hadn’t heard back. What was that about? Were they upset? The chain of upscale grocery stores had invested a fair piece of time and money in advertising this year’s reef-net sockeye: posters, stickers, even online video. And then: no fish.
“The thing is,” Starks said, “the fish came. The Canadians got them, and we got them from Canada. It’s not like people didn’t get fish.” It was true. The blob interrupted the run, and it probably caused a level of mortality that scientists hadn’t yet calculated, but it didn’t crash the whole shebang. Sockeye still returned to their breeding grounds in good numbers, and many fishermen caught them along the way. The reef netters didn’t get enough, and maybe this would deter markets like Metropolitan from investing similarly in next year’s wild pink run—which would be a shame, Starks said, because the goal had always been to capitalize on pink salmon above all. This was the fish no one wanted at one time, at least not fresh. It was a cannery fish, pennies on the dollar. The hope was that a good sockeye run would soften up potential buyers for the next year’s pink run. “This isn’t the first time this kind of thing has happened, when you set your sights on something and it doesn’t happen and you look like an idiot. It shows that the co-op is maturing and we were able to withstand it. We didn’t sit around with our hands in our pockets. We went out and got fish.” The buying clubs were still on board. There was excitement about salmon c
aviar—ikura and sujiko. The new tender being built by Mavrik Marine in La Conner, to the tune of $1.4 million, would be finished in December. “It looks like a big bowpicker,” Starks said. At fifty-by-twenty-five feet, the tender would be able to pack fifty thousand pounds of fish at a time. There were plenty of indicators of progress.
Starks was figuring out his vision for the home front as well. “I’m recreating Nettles Farm in the form of a small Burgundy chicken farm,” he said. I wasn’t sure what to say to that. Was he kidding me? “No, not at all. Nettles is a good platform for marketing.” Recently he had invited a few executives from California Pizza Kitchen to stay there while they negotiated the new salmon contract. “We didn’t have fish for them to catch, but they got to butcher chickens,” he said. “We had an intimate experience. You can’t buy that kind of bond. That’s how I’ve always marketed. It’s who I am. I marketed the Willows that way, reef netting that way. ‘Let’s cook together. We don’t even know where this is gonna go.’ Get outside of your head. Get in your body, in your habitat. It’s primal. And remarkably fun.” He pushed his empty plate away. “One guy was a chef, he’s done a lot of cooking. Never killed a chicken. He had the hardest time putting the knife in and doing a clean job of it. I forced them to go through the steps and do it. The fact is, if you go all the way through, there’s a change that happens. He had to do it three times to get a good cut. Then they got to gut it and butcher it. One of them made a chicken joke and I got really serious with them. I said, ‘You know what, this is food. It’s an animal. I always treat these animals with reverence. This is a gift.’ Everyone straightened up. It could have gone the rubber-chicken way. All three shook my hand at the end and said it was a good experience.”
Starks pulled out his wallet. It was time to go. “Reverence,” he said one more time, pushing out his chair and standing up. “It’s the same with salmon.”
CHAPTER 11
COCKTAIL HOUR ON THE KISPIOX
A man lost his face the day I arrived in steelhead camp. Everyone agreed it was a case of very bad luck—a bear with cubs. “Never knew what hit him,” said an angler leaning on his fourteen-foot spey rod on the banks of the Kispiox River in central British Columbia. He said this with the resignation of someone who would walk on narrow trails through head-high willows every day for the next week to reach his favorite steelhead run—just the sort of hidden paths the bears prefer too. The sow took off the man’s jaw with one swipe and left him to die beside the Morice River. Even so, he managed to crawl out to the road for help. Later, the provincial government closed the river, but after interviewing the victim at a Vancouver hospital—during which he nodded yes or no, since he couldn’t speak—it was determined that the bear wouldn’t be hunted down. Its behavior was entirely natural. The man just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Our camp was several miles up the Kispiox, in a meadow next to the river, bordered by groves of firs and poplars. Even though the Morice River, where the bear attack took place, is across the Hazelton Mountains to the south, plenty of grizzlies still haunt the entire region’s secluded folds and ridges. My first evening, after putting rods and reels together for the week’s fishing, I took a walk before dinner. A trail led me through woods a few hundred yards downstream of camp, where it jogged down a bluff to the water’s edge. Large rocks interrupted the river’s flow here, creating riffles and eddies and a deep trough in the middle—just the sort of safe holding water a big steelhead prefers as it migrates upstream to its spawning grounds. An angler was working his way along the bank in last light, making long, graceful casts with his spey rod, putting his fly behind the rocks and probing the pocket water. This is a well-known stretch on the Kispiox. It’s called the Bear Hole.
—
WHEN THE RITUALS AND TRAPPINGS of civilization become too much for me, I head for the hinterlands, the sort of places where bears and wild steelhead still lurk. My first steelhead camp was on the Hoh River in Washington State, just outside the border of Olympic National Park, in dark, mossy rainforest, about four hours by car from my home in Seattle. That was many years ago. The wild steelhead of the Hoh and just about every other river in Washington, Oregon, and California are in trouble now. When the time comes to introduce my own children to the pleasures of making camp with friends along an untamed river filled with wild steelhead, I will probably choose the eighteen-hour drive from Seattle to the Kispiox instead. For all the problems that plague even this remote watershed—logging, oil and gas development, mining—it’s still a place to discover the beguiling ways of the Pacific Northwest’s most legendary game fish.
The Kispiox is a tributary of the Skeena River, the lifeline of a territory that’s semi-domesticated at the edges but still largely left to its own devices. In a land of big rivers, the Skeena is a giant, second in the province only to the Fraser River. It drains lonely glacier-clad peaks that give way to deeply sculpted valleys—a complicated and interconnected latticework of rivers and mountain ranges that is hardly more comprehensible on a map. The Skeena’s source is the Spatsizi Plateau, sometimes called the Serengeti of British Columbia, a place of wolves, grizzlies, caribou, moose, and mountain goats. Cougars stalk the woods, and countless bald eagles stand on the sandbars, alone or in groups, like pensioners at a city park staring at a chess match. The eagles watch for a reason. All five species of Pacific salmon run up the Skeena, as do steelhead, cutthroat, bull trout, and a colorful type of char called Dolly Varden, named for a gaily-dressed character out of Dickens. The surrounding forests are also home to the spirit bear, a rare all-white black bear that owes its ghostly form to a recessive gene. Terrace, Smithers, and Houston are the largest communities along its course; combined they have fewer than thirty thousand people. Prince Rupert, just north of the river mouth on the coast, has another twelve thousand people. There are pockets of country in this watershed that still resemble North America before the first Europeans arrived, with the same merciless dynamics of predator and prey that characterize life in unbroken wilderness.
Skeena fish are all wild, and they return in enough numbers to give a fisherman hope. Of the many storied rivers in the system, including the Sustut, Babine, Bulkley, Suskwa, Morice, Zymoetz, and the main-stem Skeena itself, the Kispiox is probably the most storied, though anglers will argue the merits of their pet favorites into the wee hours. The Sustut and Babine are more remote, and the Bulkley is known for fish that are famously tempted by a dry fly, but the Kispiox is where most of the record-book fish have been caught over the years. In 1962, an angler landed a thirty-three-pound buck hooked on a fly called the Kispiox Special, a record that still stands. The fish was forty-two and a half inches long, with a girth of twenty-four inches. My friend Rocky, a champion fly-tyer (and, reportedly, a fine dentist, which requires a similar ocular skill), has twice landed steelhead nearing the thirty-pound class in this somewhat smallish river that more closely resembles a Michigan trout stream, with its colorful fall foliage and tannin-colored water. The river is too small for a typical three-person drift boat. Rocky’s favorite way to fish it is to putter up and down the country by-lane that follows the river on a little red Honda minibike, ducking in and out of favored honey-holes, his rod secured in a section of PVC pipe lashed to the handlebars. The most popular way to fish it, though, is to float single-occupancy pontoon boats or one-man rafts like the Water Master. These are highly portable though somewhat flimsy vessels, and you wouldn’t want to meet a bear midstream in one.
Here on the Kispiox, word travels fast about the grizzlies. Besides the news of the Morice mauling, everyone knew that a sow and her cubs had taken up residence near an oat field adjacent to the Cottonwood Hole, one of the river’s most productive steelhead runs, where they’d been gorging for weeks on post-harvest leftovers and leaving their calling cards on the banks in large piles. It’s common courtesy among farmers and ranchers who live along the river to let their neighbors know when a griz shows up. “I heard rustling back in the cottonwoods the ot
her day and got out of there quick,” a sturdy-looking angler from Fairbanks told me with a tight, knowing grin. When the Alaskans are being cautious, you know it’s real.
Bradley Boyden, my friend and steelhead mentor, is no stranger to bears. One time, in Oregon’s Rogue River Canyon, he watched a large black bear and a cougar square off over the carcass of a freshly killed mule deer. Bradley and his brother, Frank, are the owners of the wilderness homestead above the Rogue where I lived as a caretaker more than two decades earlier—where I caught my first steelhead. The brothers learned to fish there and to respect the wildlife. As children, they traveled with their parents to the remote stretch of canyon by boat, running miles of rapids to get there. A wildcat gold miner named Red Keller sometimes helped the family with chores around the cabin and took the boys hunting and fishing. Red showed them how to pan for gold in the river’s crevices and how to snare a lizard with a long blade of grass tied into a slipknot. Bradley remembers watching his father fly-fish during their summers there. He had a favorite spot—Dad’s Rock, as it was known—and he would stand on that rock and unfurl tremendous casts out over the river that would invariably hook a bright steelhead as long as your arm. This was before the Lost Creek Dam was built in the 1970s along with a fish hatchery. The steelhead back then were all wild. They looked and behaved differently.
These days the Rogue’s fish are smaller, for some reason, and they tend to charge upriver toward the hatchery rather than hang around the lower canyon, as they used to. Still, if you time it right, you can get into some good fishing. Nearly twenty-five years ago, Bradley stood on Dad’s Rock and showed me how to make a long cast out into the heavy downstream current and work a fly called a Red Ant back in among the cobbles and ledges where a steelhead was likely to hold during its upstream migration. On a river like the Rogue—gin-clear in the low flows of summer—you can sometimes see the fish materialize off the bottom to sip in your fly. The effect is like those toy viewfinders that create an image out of kaleidoscopic colors, making form out of chaos. It’s startling and unforgettable. Most of my steelhead on the Rogue have been in the five-pound category, a far cry from a twenty-pound Skeena steelhead, but on a couple of occasions I’ve landed fish pushing ten pounds. According to Bradley, such fish were, if not the norm, much more common before the onslaught of dams and hatcheries. This is why he happily gets in his truck each September and drives for two days to the Kispiox. To be a steelhead fisherman is to mourn for all the abused rivers and their beleaguered fish. Like the fish itself, this special breed of angler is a wanderer, forever searching for a lost Valhalla.