Coast Range

by Nick Neely

  To my surprise, we pulled into a skate park: That’s what a nursery stream can look like these days. In flat-brimmed caps and baggy jeans sewn with graffiti letters, boys were swooping in and out of the smooth and sinuous dugout, a small concrete canyon, while across the lot a ditch ran between banks of mown grass: Skunk Creek. The water did look skunky, and most of this stretch was in full sun. But an incoming culvert dumped a froth in a shadowed pool, and maybe the fish would survive there.

  As Chuck tentatively backed his truck toward the curb, Larry furtively slammed the butt of his fist against the door. It sounded as if we’d hit something, and we jumped. “Asshole,” hooted Chuck, with nothing like true irritability. A local, salt-haired volunteer in rubber boots was waiting for us, a member of the Middle Rogue Steelheaders. He would coordinate feeding and monitoring the parr. Chuck dipped his green net into the trash can and turned it inside out, a perforated pocket, to count them as they tumbled like loose, living change into his palm. Ten, eleven . . . twelve. They had faint stripes on their sides like the shadows of new grass. He put them in a small wire-mesh trap, hinged, the shape of a barrel.

  Larry and I looked on as Chuck sat on the tailgate to slide on hipwaders, and then he and the volunteer carefully climbed down the grassy slope to the pool half in shade. They were a little halting in their movements; they stepped circumspectly; and Larry confided in me then, “Another thing to worry about is that these volunteer groups are getting older, and younger people like yourself don’t seem to be joining. I don’t know if it’s that they just don’t care, or what.” Maybe, I suggested, it wasn’t apathy—though it well could be—but that youth are taking longer to home in, these days; that they are still in search of the places and things they loved.

  We rubbernecked as Chuck tossed the barrel trap lightly into the water and tied it by a nylon cord to the bank. If these inconspicuous parr lasted in Skunk Creek, ODFW would open the valve of the tanker truck and pour in those shimmering thousands. Those little transplanted fish would grow into smolt and eventually the massive steelhead we’d left to rot in the sun in Central Point. “If the herons and boys don’t get’m,” said Chuck. If they survived the shallows and the deep.

  We returned from Grants Pass through White City, the old World War II base turned industrial center of the Rogue Valley, which is surrounded by—intertwined with—nature reserves that harbor rare and endangered species like the large-flowered woolly meadowfoam and American pillwort. This savannah had been known as the Agate Desert and, in the patches of open space, you still can find not only semiprecious stones but also an endemic plant, the Agate Desert lomatium, found nowhere else. In 1942, Camp White was built on sixty-seven square miles and soon became known as “the Alcatraz of boot camps,” because it was remote and tough. Replicas of German pillbox bunkers were, are, built into the side of Upper Table Rock, one of the prominent volcanic buttes on the north side of the Rogue Valley, and troops practiced storming them with live fire. After the camp was decommissioned, all but two square miles were sold as private real estate. But those two were handed over to ODFW for the common good.

  Chuck stopped for government gas behind a warehouse in White City, and then, as we climbed back in the cab and drove the final stretch back to the wildlife area, he asked, “Did you hear the one about the biologists who went to hell?”

  Larry and I had not.

  “Well, the Devil said, ‘Come on, boys, you got to choose.’ And there were three doors. He opened the first door and there were people in fiiiire, burning up, and the biologists said, ‘No, we don’t want this.’

  “So they went to the second door, and there were people in there, and they were gett’n tortured, torn apart and everything.

  “Then they went to the third door, and there were all these guys standing up to their waists in old, dead Chinook carcasses, just drinking coffee. And they say, ‘We’ll take this one.’ And the Devil says, ‘Okay, get on in there n’ get your coffee.’

  “So they got in there with their coffee, and the Devil says, ‘Okay, boys—coffee break is over. Down on your hands and knees.’”

  At the wildlife area, we found the remainders of Friday’s lunchtime barbeque. There was pepper-crusted salmon on the table with those no-see-um bones, thick and wet yellow potato salad, slim hot dogs, and Chuck’s offering: a plastic tray of crackers, salami, and other round, sliced meat. “That’s some good meat,” Chuck observed, sampling as we ambled into the kitchen. “Here you go,” he said, handing me a paper towel for a napkin. He pointed to the salmon in its foil nest and said, “I’ll go halves with you.” I forked six or seven lipidous mouthfuls into a New England–style hot dog bun and ate it as is, thinking about the long, fortuitous voyage this flesh had taken to my tongue.

  The day’s main chore accomplished, Chuck insisted I pocket some cookies for the road. “Ah, thanks,” I said. “See you tomorrow morning for the toss.” I drove out the refuge’s gate and down the road through backyard orchards in anticipation of fitting in a hike up Lower Table Rock, where ephemeral pools hold fairy shrimp and, as Larry told me, “you can dangle your feet right off the edge.” But then I remembered: I’d meant to stay with the fish awhile, to honor them with a closer look before they disappeared tomorrow.

  I U-turned, went back, parked, and walked unnoticed across the gravel lot to the red barn where the carcasses were basting in the raw light. The flies were waiting for me. A thousand iridescent, lapis backs lifted off annoyed, in a drone, but they quickly resettled, surmising I was an anemic threat. In the sun, the color of the fishes’ bony gill plates had ripened to a peach-orange. Their skin had dried to a taut leather that showed their muscular weave beneath. Their mouths were uniformly agape and barred with teeth curved like fangs. Piled all together, they seemed a deposition of unending hunger.

  Twenty minutes later, Chuck found me lurking with my black notebook. He sauntered across the gravel in his neon orange cap, a Coke sweating in hand as usual, to clean out his truck and ready it for tomorrow’s enrichment. The fish were hitched and rearing to go nowhere.

  “Couldn’t get away, could you?” he said.

  “Thought I’d muse on the fish awhile,” I said.

  The flies rose in a murmuring wreath as Chuck arrived and, after a pause, began to repopulate at a simmer. “Just think how deep we’d be buried in bodies if we didn’t have flies,” said Chuck. I wrote this down furiously.

  Chuck then gave me an aerial tour of the fish, gross as they were. The bright peach-orange tint on their gill plates, the “operculum,” is their breeding hue, he told me. Their teeth grow long and canine only while spawning: They aren’t used for feeding, only for aggression or defense. The strange extra layers of teeth on their tongues are called “hyoid” teeth, but Chuck wasn’t so sure about those on the roofs of their mouths, which looked like the sharp, conveyor-belt rows on the jaws of sharks. “Hey, I never took salmonid dentition,” he said, drawing out the syllables. Steelhead feed to and from their freshwater rendezvous, but salmon don’t feed at all, Chuck reminded me, not even a little, as they make their one and only pilgrimage inland. “If you take a migrating salmon and cut it open,” he said, “it’s chock-full of eggs or sperm, and its gut is like a thin ribbon.”

  “The thing that gets me most,” Chuck said as he surveyed the awful landscape of the totes one last time and began to stroll toward his Prius, “is how a fish this big”—he spread his fingers a few inches, the size of one of the minnows that we’d dropped off at the skate park—“can go into the ocean, swim down to San Francisco, and return this big.” He spread his hands beyond his shoulders.

  It may be intuitive that a generous forest, a luxurious riparian buffer, benefits fish like salmon and steelhead. Trees are a stabilizing force. Salmonid embryos and fry are sensitive to temperature, and a lush, leaning canopy shades and cools the water, which lower on the Rogue can reach 80 degrees during the summer. Roots prevent erosion that can fill the interstices in redd gravel and choke the flow of oxyge
n and nutrients to buried eggs. Trees are also essential to rivers because they provide, and ultimately are, “large woody debris”: which lodges and creates scouring pour-overs; which then become stable pools that protect spawning gravels during winter floods and allow fish to rest. The larger the debris, the longer it lasts and the less likely it is to be swept off. In rivers thirty feet wide, generally only trunks a foot and a half in diameter withstand the most intimidating flows. Additionally leaf litter is fodder for aquatic insects that juvenile fish devour. Thus, along with overfishing, dams, and now climate change, the legacy of logging is a major reason salmonid populations have plummeted so sharply in the Northwest.

  But what if salmon and steelhead are also critical to forest health? They are, we’ve found, and the reason is simple: Their bodies are tidy packages of nitrogen from the ocean, packages that dissolve. Typically nitrogen—a component of both the chlorophyll used in photosynthesis and the nucleic acids found at the heart of every cell—is the limiting factor for vegetative growth in Northwest forests. Not much is available to organisms on land, but plenty dissolves from the air into the ocean, where it is transformed or “fixed” by certain microbes, turning into ammonium that other microorganisms can readily access and incorporate into their bodies. As a result, the ocean is fertile while the freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems are, in many places, “nutrient-poor.” Fortunately more than 95 percent of a salmon’s palatial bulk accrues in the ocean, where they feast on krill swarms that lend their supple flesh its orange-pink. Each returning fish embodies about sixty-five grams of nitrogen.

  Scientists have shown that steelhead and salmon swim up into the trees, so to speak—especially salmon, because they are so well studied. The key to this discovery is isotopes: two or more forms of an element that have the same number of protons (which is essential to the atom’s chemical identity), but differing numbers of neutrons. A nitrogen atom usually has fourteen neutrons, but less commonly it can grab one more. About 12 percent of the nitrogen in the sea happens to be of this rarer fifteen-neutron variety, while on the continent there is pretty much none.

  Along streams, even far inland, researchers have collected foliage samples and ground them to a fine powder for spectrometer analysis, which allows us to pinpoint the isotopic ratio. An elevated N-15 to N-14 ratio signals a contribution from the ocean. In reaches where salmon spawn and die, up to a third of the nitrogen found in leaves is marine-born, the gift of carcasses. Core samples from these trees, which allow us to compare annual growth rings, show that the growth rate along these enriched streams is as much as triple and an increase is significant as far as three hundred feet from the bank. Which means, at healthy spawning sites—at funerary sites—it might take less than a hundred years for a tree to reach that flood-resistant girth of a foot and half, when it would take three hundred years otherwise. In this way, anadromous (“up-running”) fish are crucial for the vigor and recovery of forests and streams. They generate shade and debris that, in turn, support their own reproduction. And of course, the taller the trees, the farther away from the bank they can topple and still make a splash.

  It’s a classic, exemplary ecological cycle, but this positive-feedback loop is terribly frayed throughout the Northwest. Only a fraction of the “nutrient subsidy” that anadromous fish once offered river ecosystems is still delivered. In extreme cases, up to 95 percent of the nitrogen and phosphorous in watersheds once came from salmon, and their infusion of carbon also invigorated the food web. But Pacific salmon are now found in only 40 percent of their natural range and, within those waterways, they deliver just 7 percent of the nutrients of old. In the Snake River Plain of Idaho, notoriously beleaguered by dams, a paltry 2 percent of historic salmon numbers have arrived in the past forty years.

  In more ways than one, then, the strength of the run dictates the number of smolts that later will travel out to sea. Fewer parents mean fewer eggs, obviously; but fewer carcasses also mean the “carrying capacity” of the river gradually falls and, for lack of food and shelter, fewer juveniles will be able to survive down the line. In essence, the riverbank is overdrawn. You have a “net nutrient export”: Smolts go to sea, but adults don’t return. As a result, many conservation efforts are at risk of sabotage. A stretch of pristine or restored river might look like paradisiacal salmon and steelhead country, but if adult fish aren’t already running strong, it’s probably malnourished. Wild rivers can’t rely on the massive bags of fish feed that arrive on pallets at hatcheries like Cole Rivers, however. Or they could, but there’s a more holistic, if not transcendent, way to fertilize, to jump-start the “riverweb”: one carcass at a time. In the words of Chuck, “Gives the whole system a shot in the arm.”

  There were glazed donuts in the morning, and a waiver. Larry was there, along with two other volunteers, Steve Brummett and Tom Treese, both retirees. Steve was a lanky California figure with white hair to his shoulders, glasses, and severe cheek lines. He wore a baby blue UCLA cap, the gold of its Bruins B exactly matching his down Patagonia vest. Tom’s suspenders held up black rain pants. He had a full face, a trim gray mustache, and an ODFW volunteer cap—one of the perks of this filthy job. He’d moved to Medford from San Diego where he’d run a construction scaffold business, and he liked to remind us that he was born in Oregon, though he left as a baby. These guys squeezed into the cab of Chuck’s four-by-four with me, while Larry wheeled off separately to pick up the last member of the crew and endeavor to beat us to the toss site.

  We took the Lake of the Woods Highway east toward the Cascades, past muddy ATV tracks and broken cars abandoned in fields. The white cone of Mount McLoughlin grew until it finally sunk behind the green foothills we drove into. Earlier known as Snowy Butte, this stratovolcano had lent its name to Little Butte Creek, which soon we sailed across at fifty miles per hour. The size of a one-lane road, Little Butte ran swift and opaque with silt; seventeen miles east to west, it empties into the Rogue across from Upper Table Rock. “Don’t let me miss the turn,” said Chuck. “It’s Lake Creek Road.”

  No flies trailed us into Lake Creek, so named for a branch of the Little Butte: There are tributaries upon tributaries for fish to swim up and call home. The town was only a grange as white as a chapel, a log-cabin pioneer hall, a general store, and a handful of houses. Just beyond, we turned left up the South Fork of the Little Butte and followed it through ranchland studded with petite black oak, wiry and handsome. Past a turn for Dead Indian Road, the pass over the hills to Ashland, the valley began to narrow and evergreen. Then up ahead was a temporary Caution sign, an orange diamond. Chuck slowed and steered us around a rockslide in the middle of the gravel road. Amid the rubble was the tawny medusa of an uprooted madrone tree.

  “Quite the fall down here,” said Tom. “Goodness gracious.”

  “That’s a good one,” said Chuck.

  “Damn,” said Steve.

  “Don’t let Marian see all those rocks,” said Tom. “She’d have me over here trying to get some for the garden.”

  We came to the end of the line, a concrete bridge with its piers buttressed by heavy riprap. Chuck drove the rig on and over and performed a careful three-point turn. “Come on back, come on back,” said Tom, waving into the side mirror. “There you go, looking good.” Obscure in the hemlock was Camp Latgawa, a Methodist retreat you can rent for your next gathering outside of Medford. “The end of the canyon,” reads its brochure. “The beginning of a journey.” In the language of the Rogue Valley’s Natives, Latgawa means “those living in the uplands.” The Takelma people wintered along these tributaries, relying on steelhead and salmon, and in the summer they climbed the ridges to hunt deer, gather huckleberries, and escape the infernal heat.

  Mid-bridge, Chuck cut the engine. “All right,” he said, “we’re ready.” Larry and John Thiebes, a retired ODFW biologist and our final tosser, had caught up and eaten our plume of dust, and now, without ceremony, everyone snapped on latex gloves the hue of clear skies. They hoisted the fish pugh
s—short poles with sharp, gently hooked tips—from Chuck’s pickup bed and began to spear the long-marinated carcasses, one at a jab. They carried them dripping along the bridge, planted their feet, and flung the poles forward like lacrosse sticks. The fish twirled heavily outward, flashing and spraying, and crashing through the willow to another existence.

  Chuck played foreman and supervised as the steelhead were skewered and sent packing. “John has got four on the bank so far,” he said, with a guffaw. The idea was to throw them into the water, where, in theory, they would have once died naturally.

  “What!” said John. In his jostling green waders, he scampered to the bridge’s edge and peered down through dark sporty sunglasses, a tarnished fish swaying from his pugh. As a former regional coordinator for ODFW biologists, until recently John had been Chuck’s boss; Chuck told me that the acronym for John’s official title had turned out to be PRIM DIC, in all seriousness. But he was a really nice guy.

  “Oh, shoot,” John said, dumping his steelhead over the side. “I didn’t even notice that, Chuck. I didn’t see that the creek went around an island.” The water’s flow was subdued this year as the drought in the West deepened.

  “That’s all right,” Chuck said. “There’s crrittters that’ll eat’m.”