Coast Range

by Nick Neely

  You can’t quite see it from the hatchery, but the dam is there, lurking around the bend. Cole Rivers was built by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1973 in the wake, quite literally, of Lost Creek Lake, a reservoir created for flood control. The earthen wall is three hundred feet tall, three thousand long. More than six hundred square miles of mountain drain to the reservoir, and the dam spoiled all those spawning grounds: the upper Rogue and its headwaters. In essence, the fifty-eight-acre hatchery, with the help of sixteen employees and sophisticated fishery science, is to stand for those hundreds of miles of intricate streambed, those sinuous bends and side creeks filled with snags, plunges, and crystalline gravel stretches.

  But what becomes of the thousands of grown salmon that, each year, are savvy or lucky enough to avoid a hook on their way home and yet aren’t selected for breeding? Once broodstock is in hand, the hatchery has no need for them, those colossal extra. In the parlance of ODFW, they must be “disposed” of, and a hierarchy, a ladder, exists for their “disposition.” Though the natural abundance of wild salmon in the Northwest is largely gone—70 percent of Oregon’s salmon are from hatcheries—even in death, these steel-tank-raised brethren continue to migrate toward hopeful ends.

  About four thousand early birds at Cole Rivers are “recycled”: A few hundred salmon at a time are driven downstream in a tanker truck and, in the town of Gold Hill, poured back into the Rogue. Recycling capitalizes on the fishes’ proven fitness to offer anglers a chance at redemption. Slightly fewer than half of recycled fish successfully run the gauntlet again and climb back into the hatchery. But some of them swim the thirty-six miles in less than twelve days. That’s hauling. Pre-release, the hatchery hole-punches their gill plates so that they won’t be counted twice in the run total.

  Another tributary is “stream enrichment.” Since wild populations have dwindled, far fewer salmon now decay in rivers and creeks, and the ecosystem suffers. As they melt into the shallows, salmon leave an important wave of nourishment from the ocean. Now ODFW casts carcasses into waterways, trying to replicate the fertile casualties of former times. They’ve used helicopters—very messy. Pitchforking them from bridges is cheaper, with the added advantage that it’s still good and messy. Personally enriching for volunteers.

  Fish are also sold commercially to American Canadian Fisheries, a company in Washington State that sells fillets to stores like Safeway. You could be eating a marinated Cole Rivers fish tonight for dinner. The Rogue’s salmon are often a sore sight when they arrive at the hatchery. “But if you cut them open,” Dave Pease told me, “they’re an awesome-looking fish. I mean it’s red, bright red.” Hatchery programs are supported by this “carcass fund.”

  Later in the season, American Canadian Fisheries then donates its services, filleting and packaging salmon for the Oregon Food Bank, which sends the fish throughout the state to outlets like the St. Henry’s Food Pantry in Gresham, near Portland. Its manager, Ann Prester, told me that in recent Februaries they’ve given coho, a winter arrival, to everyone who walks through their door: thirty-five families a day, almost four hundred pounds of salmon a year. “These are people who don’t have access to salmon otherwise, not at eight to nine dollars a pound,” said Ann. “Their eyes just light up.” Many have never seen a living salmon, she said, but they’re thankful it doesn’t live in a can.

  Before all these possible ends for excess salmon, however, Oregon tribes are allowed fish for ceremony and subsistence, as outlined in their treaties. I had journeyed to the Rogue to see salmon be given to the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians. This was the tributary of a salmon’s disposition I hoped to follow to its terminus. Members of the Cow Creek Band would arrive in the morning to haul off a fresh load for their annual powwow and salmon rite in a couple of weeks. I asked Dave when the fish I’d just seen collected would go to the chair. To the brail, for a stronger pulse. “If you come back around nine, you should be fine,” he said.

  I camped on the Rogue’s upper reaches that night, above what’s known as Natural Bridge, where the stream is swallowed by a lava tube and disappears briefly from the light, a molten river turned cold. Down unmarked jeep trails, I found a stretch that poured over the wall of a deep basalt channel within the river, creating a long curtain of white facing the bank. In the morning, I rolled up my sleeping bag and drove the twenty minutes through towering pines to Lost Creek Lake, where the river also disappears.

  To my chagrin, the fish had been zapped ahead of schedule. The Cow Creek Band’s volunteers were backing up a trailer on which rested two identical, empty turquoise containers, perhaps five hundred gallons each. I met Teri Hansen, her son Jake Ansures, and his five-year-old boy as they stepped from their white pickup. She had satiny black hair to her waist, bangs cascading down her brow, and a powwow T-shirt with short red sleeves that exposed her pale arms. Her voice was smoky, graveled. She was a clerk for the tribal court. Jake was athletic, in a scarlet DC skater’s shirt and a black cap with a stiff brim. His eyes were wide, his grin elastic. He worked as a sales and marketing manager for the tribe-owned Umpqua Indian Foods, known for its steak jerky.

  Dave soon drove out of the spawning house on a forklift with a white plastic container that looked like a giant mail bin, a USPS flat tub. Inside was a thousand pounds of salmon. Fifty-nine fish, as it turned out. Their skins were mottled, jaundiced in patches. Some were without their snouts, which had been removed—severed—to extract those coded-wire tags. Other tribes want all of their fish entire, but the Cow Creek Band needed only two. “You could gut and fillet them also, if you’d like,” said Teri. Dave laughed, said his crew probably wouldn’t go for that.

  The lift whined as Dave tilted the bin, and another technician swept and dragged the fish so that they spilled, slowly, into the tribe’s turquoise counterpart, leaving it speckled and streaked with drip marks. In black gloves and a white apron, he had the appearance of a butcher, and he took his time, to minimize splatters. He’d done this before. Blood as thick as syrup ran over the sides and, when I edged a little too close, my shirt paid a small price. My forearm, too. Jake shoveled ice into the fish as they fell like a lumbering waterfall, and before long it seemed they would all fit in just one of the turquoise containers. “One less tote to clean,” said Dave.

  When the fish were tied down, we took a quick stroll around the grounds. The ponds looked like lap pools, but were tented with netting to prevent gulls and eagles, and maybe anglers, from diving in. They rippled with the backs of trout and salmon, and juveniles at all stages: fry, parr, smolt. We walked toward the fish ladder and collection pond. Sun poured through the ladder’s entrance, a roofless hallway into the river, where big fish were holding in the shadow of the wall. You could see them if you trained your eyes, if you squinted, and if the school nosed momentarily into the slant of light. They were poised as if waiting for some signal. Some decision.

  I asked Jake when he had caught his first salmon. Nine or ten, he said. I asked after its size. “It was all right,” he said. “It tasted good, I can tell you that much.”

  He put his kid on his shoulders, and they stood on the bridge above the ladder’s last step, the one that ultimately lofted those scarred-backs from the Rogue to their origin. Through the grate that separated the pen from the ladder, water roiled in an incandescent foam. As we stared down, mesmerized, instantly and inexplicably a slick teardrop form broke the surface and glided through the air into the hatchery’s motionless pool. “Ooooh,” we all said, as the salmon hurdled.

  “Good job,” said Teri. “He wasn’t wasting any time.”

  “He looked like he knew what he was doing,” said Jake.

  Then another he, or she, leaped up and deflected off the concrete sidewall into the holding pond. It was a triumph and a bittersweet moment of finality. For this was the gate to heaven. And these fish were a day late for the ceremony.

  The totes pulled out of the hatchery lot, and I followed. Salmon flies fluttered before the windshield and lay dead
on the pavement. We turned toward Medford, but before we’d gone far, the fish swung right and headed skyward. Caution, a road sign announced, Limited Maintenance After Dark. This was OR-227, Tiller Trail Highway, the short-but-steep cut to Canyonville over a mountain pass. We were lifting the fish from their native drainage to the neighboring one, the South Umpqua, which seemed to embody the peculiar migrations of the modern age: Even in death, these fish were being transplanted to another river, the way planes let trout free-fall into alpine lakes; the way seedling invasive mussels hitch rides on trailered hulls.

  The road was hemmed in with fir, oak, and lustrous madrone. Then it ran through clear-cuts with heaping slash piles hard on the shoulder. I felt as if I were in the wake of something remarkable, clandestine even. The turquoise of the container took on a kind of glow, freighted not just with the weight of the fish, but with their import to the tribe and the Northwest more broadly. The drive was a procession, a caravan into the clouds.

  We crested the ridge and slalomed to Elk Creek, which joined the South Umpqua River at the townlet of Tiller, where many of the Cow Creek’s forbears are buried. They had built the first roads and bridges in the drainage for the government, some over the mountains on old Indian trails. Teri and her boys stopped at the general store. Inside was a framed black-and-white photo of a man with a pistol in one hand and a skunk dangling by its tail in the other: He was an official Douglas County champion skunk hunter, a dubious accolade. Teri and her grandson bought morning ice cream bars. Then we flowed on, past sturdy and decrepit barns, stacked wagon wheels, and shrink-wrapped hay bales that looked like fresh mozzarella in the fields; past signs for Eggs $2 (then, closer to Canyonville, Eggs $3) and Creation Camp.

  Finally we reached the river’s confluence with I-5 and the Seven Feathers Casino, the Cow Creek’s cash cow. What had started, in 1992, as a bingo parlor had become a three-hundred-room resort with a thousand slot machines on its main floor. Not too big, as casinos go. Seven feathers, of course, is symbolic: The tribe, as reconstituted, began with just seven families, the survivors of the Rogue Indian Wars of 1855–1856. They had hidden from vigilante settlers in the mountains east of Tiller. Thus the tribe’s emblem is of seven feathers tied to a single staff, a common destiny. But there is other iconography. In front of the hotel’s porte cochere stands a heroic statue with its wings swept upward, its talons outstretched: It’s the largest bronze eagle in the world, at thirty-three feet tall and ten thousand pounds, and it’s striking a salmon.

  The turquoise totes snaked to the rear of the casino and backed into an open bay lined with shelves of humongous cans and twenty-five-pound bags of flour and sugar that were heavier, just barely, than the salmon. I parked and was escorted down a corridor to obtain a behind-the-scenes badge that read Visitor. When I returned, the dead had been unloaded in clear plastic tubs and carted into the commercial kitchen, where a dozen chefs awaited, all in white. They had donned a hierarchy of toques and berets, and on the stainless steel preparation tables before them, each had a V-shaped wooden carving board to cradle a fish. The casino had made these some years earlier for precisely this purpose, the annual pre-powwow cleaning. It was clear much bleach would be needed.

  Several other tribal members arrived to help prepare the salmon, including Kelly Rondeau. He wore a faded T-shirt printed with a wraparound American flag and sunglasses atop his ashen hair tied in a ponytail. His face was tall, his nose broad and prominent, his rugged smile lines framed by a moustache. “So which one do I get to take home?” he said jokingly. Half-jokingly. The Rondeau family is one of the seven original. His grandfather had been instrumental in starting the casino, and now Kelly was on the tribal board. He told me of the 180,000 steelhead smolt the tribe had helped release into the South Umpqua over the last decade. “We’re going to have to start claiming some of them,” he said, wryly.

  I spent time with Dennis, Buffet Captain, and Victoria, Sports Bar Cook. Dennis did the cutting. With a forceful cleave behind the gills, their heads, those sunken and rosy eyes, were the first to go. For those that had already lost their snouts, it seemed an act of mercy, aesthetic at least. In many of the salmon, this first cut revealed shining clusters of roe behind the shoulders: translucent orange orbs that, in another life, would have overwintered in the small crater of a redd to first become big-eyed alevin, which stay hidden under gravel with a yolk sack slung to their bellies. The chefs scooped these refulgent masses into gallon bags for those on hand and lucky elders. Kelly held up two bags as if raising the spoils of a contest. He would thread them like beads onto a hook and bait steelhead, but one could also flash-fry them with flour.

  The fish were butterflied, from the anal duct upward. The glossy innards were slung into trash cans. With the knife’s tip—or better, a fingernail—the chefs scraped out the coagulated red that ran against those spines newly exposed to the fluorescent light. I asked Vicky what this spinal gunk was called. “Spinal gunk,” she answered with her signature staccato laugh. “I have no idea.” I’ve since learned that it’s called the bloodline: the river within the fish, those arteries and veins that allow these dense muscles to thrust and quiver, and fight their way home.

  “I like fish,” said Vicky, “but not in the raw. Don’t think I’d want to do this for a living.” She did the washing in a stainless basin, her chubby hands swirling inside the open book of each salmon. “This is not how they get’m at Safeway,” she added. The steady sound of the faucets was like a recollection of a river and, rinsed, the salmon recovered some of their silver brilliance. They’d given up their heads, but not their tails; not their elegance. Teri, Kelly, and the other members of the tribe helped package them: shrouded in plastic garbage bags, wrapped in white butcher paper, stacked once more on a stainless cart. Some were marked with a Sharpie for the mid-July powwow, others were reserved for a second event. Teri selected a small fish, one to fit her oven. “Everything you do, you do with a prayer and good thoughts,” she said. (“What is that,” asked Kelly, “a trout?”) The rest were wheeled into the freezer.

  Two weeks later, I found myself on the Rogue-Umpqua Divide, staring out from under a fleece cap at a vast series of drainages. The Cascades’ ridges seemed to live up to the range’s name: a long line of waves being pulled down, slowly, by gravity. The snow had just melted, the earth was soupy, and the mosquitoes whined. I immediately had to stoke a fire to ward off these evil spirits. But there were tiny yellow violets strewn across the wet jeep tracks, and I was otherwise alone. At dusk, I became apprehensive for a moment, thinking a truck was coming around the bend. But it was the moon.

  In summer, the Cow Creek Band also climbed to these heights, which were known, almost mythically, as the Huckleberry Patch, as if it were the first and only berry-picking spot on earth. They felt closer to the Great Spirit at these heights, slept in the open air, and dried venison and berries for winter. Sometimes they descended to the Rogue to hunt and trade, and went across Natural Bridge as far as the Klamath Marsh. They roamed west into the Coast Range or through the Rogue watershed to the Siskiyous. They told origin stories about the cradle of Crater Lake, Mount Mazama, whose shield feeds the Rogue and so, with a little help from the government, gave life to the salmon frozen in Canyonville. Here on the divide, the idea of carrying fish between drainages suddenly didn’t seem so unnatural: From this edge, water ran two ways, arbitrarily, and as a result entered the sea one hundred miles apart. But this view described the Cow Creek’s territory long before it was renamed a “wilderness” even as surrounding hillsides began to lose their trees.

  In 1853, the Cow Creeks became the second tribe in Oregon to forge a treaty with the United States, ceding more than eight hundred square miles of land in the South Umpqua watershed, though they had no idea something so essential could be signed away. They were compensated 2.3 cents per acre, and the United States turned around and sold those acres to settlers for a dollar and a quarter. Afterward, the Cow Creeks were literally and figuratively driven into the hills,
toward the Rogue-Umpqua Divide. Though they were promised a reservation and more, the tribe was only truly recognized when, without notice, its sovereignty was dismissed by the Western Oregon Indian Termination Act of 1954. But in 1982, Congress reacknowledged the tribe and, two years later, the courts awarded it 1.5 million dollars for lands lost. The tribe’s leaders prudently rolled the sum into a trust that helped spawn the casino and, now, a growing empire in Douglas County.

  Come morning, I drove in low gear down the swelling Umpqua, to the falls where the Cow Creek Band had long congregated for salmon and still gathered for its summer powwow. The campground was a clearing nestled against a ridge on the north side of the river, an old Forest Service camp ideal for large groups. Tribal members had arrived the night before and parked among the trees at the meadow’s edge, in the sanity of the shade, in their annual spots. Families stretched tarps between RVs and firs to bridge their camps and shelter their stoves. The two teepees present were vastly outnumbered and looked out of place (historic Cow Creek houses were dugouts with pine-board ceilings). Space was already tight, so I pitched my tent in the meadow, in the morning shadow of a lone oak tree, poison oak ascending its trunk. I should have thought about how that might make me stand out a little, but no one cared. The tribe welcomed me. When my unstaked tent blew off that afternoon, someone corralled it and tied it to my roof rack like a balloon.