Upstream

by Langdon Cook

  These days, in Puget Sound, an angler who wants to know what it was like “back in the day,” who wants to know what is meant by the public library’s collection of musty archival papers that speak of rivers “teeming” with fish, of riverbanks “lined” with people armed with nothing more than pitchforks, of burlap bags “weighted down” by fish—this angler must make peace with the pink, the only species of salmon left that can even hint at what yesteryear’s harvests must have been like. Today, in the late summer of odd-numbered years, these anglers come out in force to fish the now-famous humpy run.

  Beginning in the 1990s, pink salmon in Puget Sound started trending upward. This was in contrast to other salmon populations in the region, which have been crashing, especially chinook and steelhead. Even the bread-and-butter coho have struggled to hold on. The usual factors are in play: habitat destruction, hydroelectric dams, overharvest, and so on. Though token efforts are now under way to reverse the damage, with high-minded yet toothless initiatives like the Puget Sound Salmon Recovery Plan, the region has been transformed, and it will be a long time before its rivers and estuaries can support large numbers of wild salmon again. Lowly humpies are the single bright spot. In an age of decline, one might well ask: How did this happen? So I went down to the state capital to find out.

  The Natural Resources Building in Olympia is a squat, bunkerlike affair in the shadow of the city’s attractive capitol building, which, with its dome and steeple, resembles the U.S. Capitol in miniature. I took an elevator to the sixth floor, where I was greeted by a chatty receptionist and a glassed-in replica of a steelhead trout that might have weighed fifteen pounds. Fish in one form or another adorned every wall. This was the home of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW), and I was here to talk to Aaron Dufault, one of the biologists in charge of studying the region’s salmon so that future generations will still have them around. Dufault gets the usual razzing about his name, with its New Economy suggestion of business as usual, but it’s actually pronounced in the French way, and his email carries the unlikely signature of “pink salmon specialist,” a job description that would have been inconceivable just a few years ago. “Yeah, chinook and coho are big potatoes in comparison,” he admitted. He was a young guy with close-cropped auburn hair, wearing a plaid shirt and jeans. Right away I got the impression that he was a perfect match for the humpies in his purview: humble, careful to qualify the knowns and unknowns of pink salmon biology.

  Despite being the smallest species of Pacific salmon in North America (the cherry salmon of Asia is even smaller), the humpy is also the most abundant, Dufault explained. They spawn from June to October, usually in shallow, gravel-bottomed stretches in the main stem of a river, sometimes all the way down to tidewater. Unlike other salmon, pink fry lack the camouflaging spots that are necessary for in-river survival. After hatching in the spring, they migrate quickly to salt, spending several months in estuarine habitat before heading for the open ocean. Because they have only a two-year life span, pinks return to spawn every other year. There are odd-numbered runs and even-numbered runs, from the Arctic coast of Alaska south to Washington in North America. The rivers of southern Puget Sound, notably the Nisqually, represent the practical southern boundary of the species, although strays show up as far south as California. Odd-year fish dominate the southern part of the range, including Washington and lower British Columbia, while even-year fish dominate in the north. Interestingly, Washington State has one river system, the Snohomish, with a small even-year run that has been steadily increasing in population since 1980, and scientists aren’t sure how it got started.

  Pinks are known to stray widely and have been observed recolonizing former spawning grounds as soon as impediments such as dams are removed. The species’ historical range is somewhat unclear. Early in the previous century, a few pinks were observed spawning in rivers as far south as central California but never in large numbers, and more recently there have been only a handful of recorded sightings in rivers such as the Klamath and Sacramento. Lower Columbia tributaries like the Cowlitz see small returns as well. Population strongholds in North America include large runs in the Skeena, Fraser, and Skagit Rivers.

  Because their two-year life cycle is so regular—unlike other species’, which vary to some degree—the year-to-year abundance of pink salmon can fluctuate wildly. With chinook salmon, for instance, you might see adults from four different age classes spawning in a single stretch of river; their progeny will return in different years as well. With pink salmon, they’re all the same age: two years old. This means a single catastrophic event can have an outsize effect on their numbers. A flood might wipe out an entire age class in one fell swoop. On the flip side, pinks are especially fecund and can rebuild their populations quickly. As a result, they’re the healthiest of all salmon species and represent an important commercial and subsistence fishery. In 2010, Alaska commercially harvested 372.5 million pounds of pink salmon. Most pinks are canned, with labels that don’t highlight the species. “Generally they’re not a sought-after fish,” Dufault said, “especially if you’re a recreational fisherman.” But—and here’s the rub—in recent odd-numbered years Puget Sound has seen a return of several million pink salmon. Not long before that, WDFW didn’t even include pinks in the forecast. “Ten years back we estimated them at 10,300 fish in the Green River.” A decade later, the projection was for 1.4 million pinks in the Green, the sort of number that doesn’t get tossed around much anymore with regard to Puget Sound salmon.

  Dufault called such projections “remotely educated throws at a dartboard.” Just the same, they’re close enough to be winners in most barroom leagues. Pink salmon are among the easiest salmon to forecast, because they don’t have multiple age classes on the spawning grounds at once. Since they’re always two-year fish, a returning run size can be calculated simply by figuring out how many of the juveniles migrate out to sea.

  After taking a seat in a conference room, I told Dufault I wanted to know how these big runs of Puget Sound pinks got started. He’s a scientist, and it’s a scientist’s job to figure out this kind of stuff. He just shook his head. “I wish I had a good answer.” The fact is, there is only speculation. Ocean conditions are one hypothesis. The Pacific’s long-term cycles of heating and cooling benefit some species while hurting others. Pinks are reliant largely on zooplankton for food, in contrast to larger, baitfish-eating species like chinook and coho. High winter temperatures in the North Pacific are correlated with higher zooplankton and pink salmon survival. Temps that are too high, though, can cause a crash in the food chain.

  Which leads to the elephant in the room: climate change. So far, the effects of a warming planet are more measurable on land. “More variability is what we’re expecting,” Dufault said. He told me that in recent years some rivers have experienced historic lows and highs within a two-month span, a volatile mix of conditions that leads to dewatering one moment (effectively shutting salmon out) and flooding the next (destroying spawning nests). The future, he said, is hard to predict.

  Another young biologist, wearing a bowling shirt and goatee, sat down with us. Ryan Lathrop’s title is Puget Sound Recreational Salmon Manager. He’s the Saturday beach caster’s go-to guy.

  “Maybe pinks will benefit from climate change,” Dufault continued. “There’s usually a species poised to take advantage of the situation.”

  Lathrop frowned. No offense to his colleague, the so-called pink specialist, but given his druthers, Lathrop would take just about anything over humpies. He was nervous about the declines in coho. And chinook? Well, they’re just in the tank—never mind steelhead, which are at perhaps one or two percent of their historic abundance in Puget Sound. But his lot is pink salmon these days, and fishing-license sales depend on them. Lathrop said WDFW sees a huge uptick in licenses in pink years, money that in turn goes to promoting recreational fisheries. The pink run has turned into a great tool for introducing new anglers to salmon fishing, he told me, and
so, like most everyone else, he’s now a grudging fan of the humpy. The central paradox of his job can be summed up in one image: a big fish toted home triumphantly by a little kid. Future stewards of our environment are created this way.

  I know just how that little kid feels—as do my children. You can call it a stinky pinkie or a humpback or a humpy—it doesn’t matter. Those of us who fish for them, particularly with a fly rod, know that a humpy fresh from the sea is a good biter and smokes up nicely. You don’t need a boat and downriggers to fish for pinks. You don’t even need to huck a heavy lure fifty yards offshore. My son caught his first pink at the age of seven on a Seattle beach. He used a Snoopy rod and tossed his two-inch Buzz-Bomb maybe thirty feet.

  “It gets people outdoors fishing,” Lathrop said, “and that’s a good thing.”

  —

  THE DUWAMISH RIVER CLEANUP Coalition envisions a future in which “residents will be able to crab in the river” and its banks will be a “welcoming and risk-free place for our children and their children to wade, fish, and play.” This is a sentiment expressed by citizens’ groups across the country, as they band together to restore ecological processes in urban areas and bring nature back to cities—by planting trees, daylighting creeks, cleaning up ports and bays. The narrative of the American city itself is no longer one of decay. People are returning to cities. All over the world, the trend is toward urbanization, and when people are asked why, their answers are not just about jobs. It turns out human beings actually enjoy one another’s company. This would seem to contradict nearly everything I learned in American history class. Rugged individualism. The lure of wide-open spaces. Control of nature. These are just a few of the accepted tropes that try to explain the birth of America and the settling of the West. The reality is more complicated.

  As a kid, I always assumed the city was a place of poverty and pestilence. It never occurred to me back then that I would choose to live in such a place one day, much less go fishing there. Still, cities and salmon have not been compatible for the most part. Some of the more pessimistic urban anglers I know think the pink salmon’s recent upturn in Puget Sound is a cosmic joke, the beginning of the end. With other species of salmon on the ropes, here comes Mr. Humpy, an empty river all to himself. In a world ruined by the hand of man, it only makes sense that the least desirable fish is the one to inherit the earth. They call pinks the fish of the coming apocalypse. Cleaning up a river as polluted as the Duwamish is a fool’s errand, they say, window dressing on Armageddon. I don’t expect to drop a crab pot in sight of Boeing Field in my lifetime—but in my children’s lifetimes? This is the possibility that motivates many of us. Boeing itself recently committed voluntarily to a costly restoration on its property, transforming an ugly stretch of channelized river into a tidal mudflat alive with flowering vegetation and statuesque great blue herons.

  Meanwhile, some of us city folk have learned how to stock up our freezers every other year with a two-year supply of smoked salmon by fishing in our own slightly ratty yard. A humpy is an ideal candidate for the smoker. True, its thin fillet hardly leaps out at you from the cooler of a fish market the way a bright hunk of chinook does. Its flesh is less fatty than that of other species, the color a pallid pink. This is in part due to the fact that humpies spend less time in the salt than other species. Their flesh lacks bright red and orange tones, muscled firmness, and longevity on ice. As the reef netters of Lummi Island know, pinks must be bled quickly and then handled with care lest they bruise or turn rancid. For these reasons, salmon eaters have long turned their noses up at them. The problem is, most salmon eaters are now financially hard-pressed to indulge in their favorite types of wild salmon, not with fresh king fillets fetching upward of $30 per pound, never mind the price of Copper River salmon. “Once considered ugly-bumpkin cousins to glamorous sockeye and kings,” reported The Seattle Times in 2010, “pinks are transcending their traditional $2-a-can destiny to debut as the new, eco-friendly, sustainable darlings.” Many local fishermen already knew this. Perhaps the biggest believer today is Riley Starks. With a projection of more than fourteen million humpies returning to the Fraser River, he was thinking pink.

  ACROSS SALMON COUNTRY, ANGLERS, commercial fishermen, and the tribes had prepared for a mixed year. From California to Alaska, the forecasts varied widely and proved difficult to parse. “Ocean conditions” was the common (and not so satisfactory) explanation for run sizes, whether for good or ill. In April I attended another First Salmon ceremony at the Celilo Falls longhouse, where spring chinook, most of them hatchery fish, overflowed from plastic totes. Despite ongoing drought, California managers predicted decent fall chinook returns for the Sacramento and Klamath Rivers, giving hope to coastal communities dependent on sport fishing. Washington State forecast a return of several million pinks to Puget Sound rivers even as the outlook for other species appeared bleak. By early July, tackle shops across Seattle were sold out of the most popular lures.

  While our kids were off at sleepaway camp, Martha and I decided to visit San Juan Island for a few days. This was something we had agreed to do more of, at least in theory, now that our children were a little older and we could get away. We wanted to explore this beautiful place where we lived, to see its many sights, and get a little muddy in the process. The weekend before, we had gone backpacking in the Olympic Mountains. Now we embarked on a beach vacation of the sort that we had both known from our childhoods on the East Coast. Of course, a July beach trip in the Pacific Northwest might involve layering on the fleece and maybe even a down jacket, but that was okay. One morning, we got up early and drove over to the rocky shoreline along the west side of the island. Martha sat herself down on some bluffs to watch for killer whales, while I scrambled down to the wave-washed rocks below with my casting rod. It took just six casts to catch a limit of four humpies, all bright and firm, if a bit small.

  Later in the month, Riley Starks called me to say that the reef-net test fishery was hauling them in as well. On a sunny afternoon in early August, I caught up with Starks at the Willows Inn on Lummi Island, his former business, lately transformed into a must-visit restaurant with a slew of laudatory reviews. Starks, wearing a sky-blue Lummi Island Wild ball cap, was in his fourth and final day of entertaining new clients. A celebratory luncheon would be the last event. His beard was a little whiter, a spray of hair on top a little more scruffy than usual when he removed the hat, but he looked contented. The Willows gathering was a victory lap. He’d landed a big fish: Patagonia.

  A few years earlier, the enviro-minded clothier had launched a new food division, with smartly packaged snacks for the active person on the go, including trail bars, buffalo jerky, and smoked sockeye salmon. Now they wanted to add pink salmon to the lineup and tell the story of the reef netters on the packaging. “They’re committed to a hundred thousand pounds already,” Starks whispered to me before we all sat down on the restaurant’s front deck, overlooking Sunset Beach and Rosario Strait. A gaggle of Patagonia reps took their seats at the table, along with a film crew they’d hired to interview chef Blaine Wetzel on the little-known charms of pink salmon. Starks leaned over again, a tumbler of sparkling water in his hand while the rest of us drank glasses of rosé. “Really, it’s twice that. They’ll do two hundred thousand without blinking.”

  Clearly, the Patagonia deal was a coup for Starks and his co-op. Lummi Island Wild is a company with a bunch of fishermen in charge—hardly a recipe for corporate success. But as the guy responsible for marketing, Starks had found a willing partner with all the right credentials. Reef-net pink salmon were about to make a coast-to-coast debut. They would be sold fresh in select fish markets too, he added. The co-op was getting fifty cents a pound. Starks hoped to sell a million pounds this year. If all went according to plan, they could wrap up by the end of September and skip the fall coho fishery. Even though the blob was still in the North Pacific, scientists didn’t expect it to divert the Fraser’s pink salmon run the way it had the sockeye run the year
before. Still, Mother Nature has a way of throwing curveballs. So far the fish seemed smaller than average. I had noticed the same thing on San Juan Island. All four of my pinks were on the light side, two to three pounds. The reef netters were releasing fish under three pounds, because they were too small for the automated fish-cleaning machines. This was translating into a third of the catch going overboard. At least they were still alive, Starks said, unlike the bycatch in other fisheries.