Upstream

by Langdon Cook

  “Well, have a good one,” Bradley said finally. “We’re on our way.” He eased his foot on the gas and pulled out ever so slowly, careful not to spit a single bit of gravel. They watched us go. A hundred yards down the road and the pickup still hadn’t moved an inch. We drove until it disappeared from our rearview mirror. Bradley shook his head. Meetings like this with Indians were fraught. The white man had taken most of their land and tried, nearly successfully, to eradicate them from the face of the earth. Everything else stemmed from these inescapable facts.

  “That was weird,” said Bradley finally.

  It was weird. It was disconcerting and dreamlike. I could tell that Bradley was feeling the same thing I was: a sense of being unmoored from reality. I’d never had an experience with another human being quite like it. And what about that whistle? “It was like we didn’t even speak the same body language.” Why wouldn’t they communicate? Or was it communication that we just couldn’t understand? The mistakes of my ancestors, it seemed, had determined the rules of engagement generations later.

  As we drove back down the road through the clear-cut forest, I thought about it some more. Perhaps the worst atrocities were a thing of the past, but less obvious threats persisted every day. Many of the tribes living along the Skeena and its tributaries had become vocal opponents of the gas pipeline, which would be buried under their ancestral lands and would terminate at a complex on the coast adjacent to one of the most critical eelgrass beds for juvenile fish as they transitioned to a life at sea. Many scientists concurred that if built, the pipeline would be a disaster for the river’s salmon and steelhead. Wherever you went in the Skeena watershed, signs with a red slash through the letters LNG—liquefied natural gas—dotted the landscape. All across Indian country, indigenous peoples were rallying to put a stop to the resource plunder that had been going on for centuries as a matter of course. They were using their newly discovered power in the legal system to, as Riley Starks put it, throw themselves in front of the tanks.

  We drove back to camp and the whistle stayed with me, an uncomfortable and mysterious sound in my head. Even if I couldn’t understand them, I knew that I wanted those people to continue on at the mouth of the Babine. Wilderness depends on a few hardy souls living on the edge of it. That village wasn’t a seasonal vacation bivouac with a daily cocktail hour. The people dwelling in those rude cabins lived among the bears and the wildcats. They were the gatekeepers. Without them, the fish of the river, including the great migratory steelhead, would one day be gone.

  CHAPTER 12

  MAKE WAY FOR THE FLOODPLAIN FATTIES

  Returning to the city after a week or two of camping in the bush is neither depressing nor culture shock for me. I like the city. I like the same things about the city that everyone else does: the hurly-burly, the electric current in the air that suggests something big is about to happen, a feeling that can only happen in the presence of many, many human beings of all kinds brought together in a geographically limited space. Even on a Monday night.

  You wouldn’t know it was Monday at Casson Trenor’s newest venture, Tataki Canyon, a sushi restaurant in San Francisco. Five of us squeezed into a table meant for four, as jangly music heightened the din and a clientele of mostly young professionals practiced their chopsticks skills. The waitstaff threaded their way through a tight labyrinth of unadorned wooden tables—all occupied—hurrying out platters of fish while dodging the misplaced elbow or knee-high motorcycle boot. This, the third of Trenor’s sushi restaurants, is located not far from Glen Canyon Park, in a neighborhood that’s changing rapidly as the country’s locus of high tech continues to expand its reach beyond Silicon Valley. Whether they knew it or not, everyone in Tataki Canyon was experiencing an uncommon form of one of the fastest-growing cuisines around the developed world—sustainable sushi.

  The very term strikes many as an oxymoron. It’s a well-known fact that the world’s seas are being strip-mined of their aquatic life, with an ever-bigger portion going to the proliferation of sushi joints. One dire prediction says the oceans will be depleted beyond repair by the middle of this century. A cynic might easily look at a sushi restaurant and see a trough for mindless consumers stuffing their faces with endangered species while congratulating themselves on their good taste. Trenor isn’t a cynic. He understands the appeal of sushi, has spent time in Japan, respects the cuisine. Tall, thin, and dressed in a black chef’s apron (the apron is more for show, since Trenor leaves the actual preparing of food to his knowledgeable staff), he sat down with us for a moment and then jumped back up to talk with his chef.

  We’d met several times in the past and I had already tried Trenor’s first sushi bar, the original Tataki, in Pacific Heights. Tonight he seemed a bit on edge, with the pent-up restlessness of someone struggling to balance work and pleasure. His friend Rolf was waiting at our table when we arrived. With round glasses and short hair parted on the side, Rolf could have been an insurance adjuster or a shoe salesman. He unbuttoned his white Oxford shirt to cool down, thought better of it, and took it off altogether, revealing a Sasquatch in mid-stride on his T-shirt underneath, the words NORTHERN CALIFORNIA framing the image, a battle cry for some who still believed in the Arcadian possibilities. Trenor reappeared and glanced approvingly at his friend’s T-shirt. “Rolf is Greenpeace’s forest-action lead,” he explained. The title wasn’t lost on any of us. Rolf’s mild-mannered appearance was more than just politic—it was a safety issue. Better to look like an accountant than a manufacturer of pipe bombs, especially if you plan to be arrested. The last time I had encountered people like him was at an illegal encampment in the Siskiyou Mountains of southwestern Oregon, where protesters had shut down old-growth logging by literally taking to the trees. Rolf remembered that tree-sit. Greenpeace successfully scuttled the plans of the Bureau of Land Management to clear-cut a grove of cathedral firs, some of them several hundred years old, under the lame pretext of “forest thinning.” “But you’re more likely to find him in the jungles of Indonesia,” Trenor added, “facing down guys with Kalashnikovs.” That was where the real action was these days on the deforestation front. Rolf smiled thinly at this, like a character out of a Graham Greene novel.

  Rene Henery, never one to shy away from dinner-table politics, raised an eyebrow at me. He ran into operators like Rolf all the time. In another life he might have been Rolf, especially if his skin had been lighter. Across from Rene was a colleague of his, Jacob Katz, who worked for California Trout. He too was used to the fray, and on that count tonight was looking up. Katz raised a miniature glass of sake to new friends, and we all drank down our rice wine.

  Already the day had been a winner for Rene and Katz. They had just finished convening a small group of mostly young, like-minded advocates from multiple agencies and organizations across the salmon-restoration universe, and the buzz of an exciting new venture animated their expressions. Calling their loose affiliation the “Fish Tank,” the participants were hoping to find ways to join forces to make a splash larger than the sum of their individual parts. The two had talked excitedly about the possibilities the whole drive over from Oakland, as Rene dodged and maneuvered his little car down side streets and over San Francisco’s hills. After a while, as we passed one SOLD sign after another, the conversation changed from their work to the Bay Area’s red-hot real estate market, a point of contention for many in the region. Rene and his wife lived in a nice little rental on the Oakland–Berkeley border, but they hoped to own a home someday. Likely it would be somewhere far away. “A boarded-up crack house just sold for over a million,” he said with a fatalistic laugh. For his part, Katz was sure he had made a wise move to locate his family well beyond normal commuter range, deep in a rural part of Sonoma County, but this meant nights away from home periodically, like tonight. As Rene turned up Dolores Street in the Mission, we all looked at the cityscape. Rumor had it that the founder and CEO of Facebook was buying an entire block for himself on this palm-lined boulevard. “There goes the
neighborhood,” Rene said, stepping on the gas. By the time we arrived at the restaurant, Katz had to extract his lanky frame from the backseat as if crawling from a wreck, and he walked around the block a few times to shake off a sudden bout of nausea. Driving with Rene could do that to you.

  The sushi dinner was my idea. Rene and Katz relied on making connections—real, in-person human connections—to allow the sometimes lonely work of science to resonate with a broader public. Casson Trenor seemed to me like a natural ally. For one thing, he wasn’t just a purveyor of raw fish. Like Rolf, he worked for Greenpeace—or, at least, he had worked for Greenpeace until a few days ago. The previous Friday, we learned now, had been his last day with the organization’s sustainable-fisheries team. He allowed this piece of information to drop like a lead fishing weight soon after we sat down. Just the week before, when he and I had spoken on the phone, Trenor had hinted that he was scrambling at work. “My latest project is in the weeds,” he had said cryptically. “I’ve gotten into a tight spot and I’m disappointed in myself.” I didn’t ask for particulars. The last project he had told me about involved a blimp he and his colleagues launched over Chicken of the Sea’s San Diego headquarters, with strong words painted on the side calling out the company for bad practices—a stunt that was soon grounded because it ran afoul of regulations at the municipal gliderport used as the launching pad. Risk was part of his job description, just as it was for Rolf. Tonight, the blimp sailed again as Trenor shared with us the story of its brief flight.

  “A zeppelin!” chimed in Rene Henery. An apt metaphor for Trenor’s final days at Greenpeace, everyone agreed.

  A platter of wild king salmon sashimi came out. Plenty of people who came to a sushi restaurant that billed itself as sustainable expected to eat a farmed salmon, assuming it was more green than a wild fish, but Trenor wasn’t having any. He’s a Washington State native with a lifelong dedication to the region’s totem fish. His restaurants use wild salmon. Now in his mid-thirties, Trenor was able to see the decline of wild salmon even within the relatively brief context of his youth in Puget Sound. This also happened to be the era of farmed salmon’s ascendancy in the marketplace, with one trend masking the other. One of Tataki’s first and most defining rallying cries was against industrial salmon farming. Unlike livestock, which eat grass, salmon are carnivores. To produce a pound of farmed salmon requires a minimum—even at the most efficient farms—of a pound and a half of fish down the food chain, fish that otherwise might be eaten by humans or other predators in the wild. Of course, those are smaller, less desirable fish, the sort of fish that might be on the dinner menu in third-world countries. In simple terms, you’re taking a potential food source away from poorer people to produce a luxury food item, or, as Trenor put it, “You’re robbing Pedro to feed Paul.”

  Farming is a tough issue for groups like Greenpeace, and fish farming is tough for the same reasons. There is this notion of the noble landed farmer, even though most of the work in the United States is done by a revolving immigrant workforce overseen by a corporate board. Big Ag likes to suggest that the only thing that stands between a rising population on Planet Earth and massive worldwide starvation is unfettered agriculture. Salmon farmers similarly like to say they’re feeding the world. Rene wasn’t buying it. “We don’t have a food crisis,” he said now, “we have a productivity crisis. We’re so far under the productive capacity of the planet, we can barely wrap our heads around it. We say we’re optimizing agriculture to feed people. That’s bullshit. We’re optimizing agriculture for profit. We don’t have a clue what the productive capacity of the earth is. We have to totally rejigger this thing. It’s like saying, ‘I’ve got the pedal to the metal and I’m in second gear. Am I going to run out of gas before I get to the gas station?’ Yes. Is that the fault of my car being fuel-inefficient? No, it’s because I’m driving like a moron.”

  “We have an inequality crisis,” Rolf shot back. Deforestation around the world, he pointed out, is due mostly to farming rather than timber harvest: slash-and-burn agriculture to grow beef; palm-oil plantations that replace native rainforest; soy production for livestock feed. Forests, especially diverse tropical forests that yield innumerable foods as part of their natural life cycle, are being reduced to ashes in order to produce high-value meat for wealthier nations. Salmon farming is no different. I mentioned an oft-repeated mantra of doomsday adherents: seven billion humans on the planet. That number is rising, with recent estimates of eleven billion by the end of the century. Rene knew the score. At Trout Unlimited they heard such facts and figures all the time. Big Ag loves trotting out the numbers. Eleven billion. On the one hand it’s a figure that we can’t even conceptualize. Try to imagine eleven billion jelly beans in the cosmic jar. On the other hand, whether or not we can imagine so many digits is beside the point; it’s still a number that scares people.

  Trenor brought his open palm down upon the table, startling us all and rattling the sake cups. “We’re living in a world that operates under a fear-based paradigm.” People are afraid, he said. They’re afraid of all sorts of things, especially nature. “You need to start with this fundamental premise: Nature is perfect.” He was right. If there’s a single example of perfection in the universe, it’s nature. The biosphere is a marvel to begin with, and it’s always recalibrating to regulate itself. Human efforts to boost productivity are localized illusions—and they come with a cost on the back end. “Just look at the massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico,” Rene jumped in. It’s caused mostly by Midwestern farms; their fertilizers are carried downstream by the Mississippi, turning seven thousand square miles of the gulf into a hypoxic graveyard. Trenor shuddered at the thought and quickly slid out of his seat to grab a platter from the counter. He brought back a hefty roll of maki cut into a dozen pieces and garnished with swirls of red sauce. He called it a ratatouille roll. It was vegetarian and a hint of things to come. Trenor was about to open his fourth sushi restaurant, one that would be entirely vegan. Vegan sushi. It sounded like the punch line to a late-night-TV joke circa 2010. Maybe change was really happening.

  Speaking in almost a stream of consciousness, Trenor continued his thought as if he hadn’t just left the table for a moment. Harmful fish farming comes in a variety of forms, he said. “What does it mean that we’ve created what is arguably the largest aquaculture facility in the world off the coast of Maine in what we call the lobster industry? Because it’s basically a farm. We’ve killed all the cod and turned it into a farm. There’s nothing else that lives there. It’s a farm the size of three New England states. We’ve knocked off the apex predators and created all these weird animals.”

  With that he disappeared again, to a back room out of sight, and returned a few minutes later bearing another platter, this one with a half dozen pieces of nigiri. The slices of fish had a bluish hue that stood out against the pillows of white rice, each one topped with a little green square of seaweed. “This is my favorite dish that we serve. Saba is one of the most maligned, poorly done, absolutely dishonored fish in the fishing industry.” He was talking about what the English-speaking world calls mackerel, a fish perceived by many as too oily, too fishy. “People treat it badly. If you treat it right, it’s beautiful. We give it a light pickling, just a dash of rice vinegar and some other things, and add a piece of kelp candy on top, so you’ve got the sugar and umami of the kelp to balance the vinegar and fat of the saba. Don’t use a lot of soy sauce. Take it and eat it like this, upside down.” He plucked a piece from the platter with his fingers, inverted it, and dabbed a corner of the fish in a little dish of soy sauce. The rest of us followed suit. The combination of just a small sliver of pickled fish along with candied seaweed was deeply satisfying. Mackerel, he said, was a fish in good supply that people didn’t want to eat, usually for the wrong reasons.

  After another bite of saba, I looked around. Everyone was having a good time. Diners laughed and told stories at their crowded tables. They gestured with their hands and made ey
e contact and twisted their faces into complicated expressions that were at once recognizable. Some were couples, maybe on a first date. Others were groups of friends or colleagues meeting after work. Beer bottles sweated on the tables; the music blared. All these people! All of them enjoying the food and company and vitality that a night on the town could provide. It was contagious. “Anyway, we get the planet we deserve,” Trenor went on—and then he too glanced around his restaurant, this meeting-and-eating spot he had dreamed up, and he must have had the same sense of sudden wonderment as me, because he laughed out loud and threw his hands in the air. “Aren’t we at the heart of it?” he shouted. “If we continue to focus on saving this or protecting that, we’re missing the point. It’s not about protecting the oceans—it’s about living in a way that promotes a healthy ocean. We can only do it as individuals. We can’t do it for anyone else. And this is one of the reasons I was getting burned out at Greenpeace.”

  I could see Jacob Katz getting increasingly agitated. He had energy that needed an outlet. He fidgeted with his chopsticks, shifted back and forth in his seat as if he might just lift off at any moment. “I have three kids,” he said finally, the pragmatist. “We’re not here just for ourselves.”

  “All I have control over is what I put into this world, how I behave,” Trenor countered. He waved his open palm, gesturing toward the four corners of his tightly packed restaurant like a magician. Not all of his customers saw any virtue in their decision to patronize Tataki. Maybe it was a neighborhood place for some; maybe they didn’t even know about the restaurant’s commitment to sustainability. “Or maybe they don’t give a damn. It doesn’t matter. I’m not focused on the problem. I’m focused on creating a solution. Regardless of the perspectives or backgrounds of the people who come into this restaurant, they are confronted with only one path forward. We control the playing field in here. I don’t care why you want unagi”—he was talking about the barbecued eel that has captured the hearts of sushi lovers everywhere, the unagi that is now severely threatened throughout its range, largely because of the sushi trade—“if you order it in this restaurant, you’re going to receive something we can stand by.” As if to underscore his point, at that moment a server appeared with a platter of what looked like unagi, or “fauxnagi,” as some call it. Instead of serving eel, Tataki substitutes a fish with a similar taste and velvety feel to it, dressed with the standard barbecue sauce that people have come to expect. The fish was black cod, also known as sablefish. It’s a species with a stable population at the moment, though one increasingly in demand in Asia, causing its price to rise steadily in recent years. “You come in with your unagi issues,” Trenor said. “I don’t really care why. In my world, when people want that sweet, dark, sultry experience they get from unagi, this is what they’re getting. In my restaurant, goddammit, that’s what they’re going to have.” He pounded his fist on the table theatrically, the environmental impresario as mock hero.