by Nick Neely
“Ooo, doubleheader,” said Steve, lifting two fish on his pugh, each grinning and dripping devilishly.
“Ooo, here’s one with maggots on it,” said John. They squirmed like extra teeth in the steelhead’s mouth.
The scene was the inverse of an old fishing site, I imagined, where Natives and settlers alike would have lanced or netted salmon and steelhead from rocks at falls. It was tradition played in reverse, a renewal, a repentance for past sins: the ruination of spine-tingling fish runs. As the steelhead were ushered along the bridge, the morning light shone amber through the triangles of their flimsy tails. Sometimes the guys just shook them off directly into the creek. Sometimes they flung with all their might. Steve stood on the trailer’s platform and chucked, slow and steady. He stared each steelhead in the eye, holding it aloft; then he watched its body sink or roll away like a man contemplating his golf shot.
John Thiebes explained to me why they tossed them instead of simply dumping the whole lot. “There are so many little different currents in a creek,” he said. “The more varied you put them in, the more highly distributed they’ll be.” In other words, the proverbial butterfly effect comes into play: The slightest difference in where a carcass lands could mean a wild difference in its final resting place; could mean miles of drifting or whether a bruin scatters it through the woods to feed the trees. Tossed carcasses are known to wander several feet, to a few miles, to, in one recorded case, twelve miles downstream.
Chuck then handed me a clean pugh and I speared one through its rancid shine and lifted it from the half-frozen, sticky mass. Walking to the railing, I loaded the ponderous fish, its surprising weight, over my shoulder. Its jaws hung open as if in anticipation. It gave no objection. Awkwardly, it catapulted, remembering nothing of its fluidness, except for the fetid arc of ruby droplets that may or may not have decorated me.
Upon impact—smack—the leakage must have been explosive. Finally the river began to consume this steelhead, to reclaim its contents. A carcass acts as a “slow-release” fertilizer and, after a month submerged, will lose more than 40 percent of its mass, deflating like a bladder. Nymphs would crawl across its skin; a fungus shag would eventually coat it. Within a hundred feet downstream, a bumper crop of “biofilm”—a slick matrix of algae and bacteria—would thrive on underwater rocks and fuel grazing insects. Aquatic invertebrates might increase eightfold, temporarily. Meanwhile, the willows, fir, and hemlock along Little Butte would absorb their share of downwelling nitrogen and invest it preferentially, not in root development or foliar maintenance, but in tender furnaces, new shoots and leaves. Leaves that would eventually twirl and drown.
“All aboard!” Chuck shouted, calling us off the bridge. We slid the pughs into the pickup’s bed and hopped onto the trailer. Ruefully, I gripped the juicy rim of a tote as we rattled downstream to a second, and then a third, tossing spot, both with an easy window through the willow to the creek. Midway through the morning, the bins turned a little soupy. The remaining fish sunk into a slush the not-so-vibrant color of uncooked steak past its prime. John dedicated himself to prying the bottommost dwellers loose from this icy slurry of blood and ooze with his gloved hands. Like a monger, he tossed the fish underhand onto the grassy shoulder between the road and river, where they bounced and skidded, and waited for us to stab and project them into the Little Butte.
Now you had to be careful where you stood: John kept us on our toes. Was he aiming for our feet? He was. One toss grazed my sneaker, and I knew my laces would waft for days. From a long way off, John then managed to torpedo Larry while he wasn’t looking. “Asshole,” said Larry with reluctant admiration. Luckily he was wearing a Gore-Tex jacket. Karma kicked in, eventually, when John’s hat fell into a tote. “Shoot,” he muttered, whisking it up. “Shoot” was an understatement. He studied his cap, and put it back onto his balding head though it was damp with mucous and serum. “That’s okay,” he reassured himself. “It’s my fishing hat.” But flies would orbit him later.
I found myself standing by Steve as the totes were drawn down. Each time his pugh punctured the loose bag of a fish, a pop was heard, a dismal sound. When he cast, he let go of the pugh with his trailing right hand and let the pole drift outward in his left with the fish’s momentum, just as you might cast a fishing rod. After a time, his tosses barely reached the creek. Twice in a row, his steelhead smacked off a dry boulder and deflected into the water.
“Bank shot,” said Steve. “I think I’m getting tired.
The valleys of his cheeks seemed to deepen, to stretch into a grimace, with each toss. He began to wobble slightly; his follow-through carried him out of kilter so that he’d have to take a step or two. I imagined a heavy door might throw him off balance sometimes, as it does for me. We are both tall and willowy. Even as dead weight, these fish reminded us of their muscle and ours, and it was hard to say who was denser.
“I’m looking tired,” said Steve, as if seeing himself through our eyes. Stooped in the shoulders, drained. Under his gold vest, he was, in fact, a relatively slight man.
“I think you need a break,” Chuck said, stepping forward as foreman.
“I need a break,” Steve agreed.
Chuck took Steve’s pugh and hurled until, before long, the steelhead were gone and all that remained on the bank were dark stains on the soil and the frozen embers of roe scattered in the grass. Turns out, a few of the fish had been female. At the hatchery, they’d drawn a short stick and been offered no second chance. Or maybe this was theirs. I imagined that yellow jackets would find these pellucid orange delicacies and wing them off, glowing, like tiny rogue suns.
As Chuck gunned down the gravel with the lightened trailer swaying and clanging behind us, from the back seat I asked him and Tom what there was to be said, in the end, about the art of tossing carcass. We were headed back to the Cole Rivers Hatchery at Lost Creek Lake to get rid of the slimy totes.
“How about being damn good exercise,” said Tom.
“A strong back and a weak nose,” replied Chuck. “That’s what you need.”
“How about a strong back and a weak mind,” said Tom.
“That too,” said Chuck.
We took a back road along the Little Butte to its intersection with Crater Lake Highway, in the town of Eagle Point. The creek swelled to the size of a river as it slid past neat ranches with hay and RVs under open-air barns. Tom pointed out where he and Chuck had planted seedling pines or pumped farm ponds dry to kill invasive snails. He remembered his first carcass toss with Chuck, up another tributary of the Rogue, Elk Creek. That was seven years ago. The snow had been deep, unlike this spring. They talked of the guys who had helped them heave; they talked of those men’s wives.
“I saw Madonna the other day,” said Tom, who always spoke as if trying to catch his breath. “Went to that memorial for Linda Wood.”
Chuck nodded and said, “I thought that was pretty cool that they dumped her ashes right where they dumped his.”
“Yeah,” said Tom. “Jeff. Miss them both. Their daughters were real nice, very receptive. They called us that morning. She died at something like two thirty in the morning, and I think by seven thirty the phone rang. It was Dina? Dina or Diane. Anyway, one of the daughters called and let us know that Linda had passed. Such a sweet lady . . . God, I enjoyed fishing with Jeff. He was just so nice. Wonderful guy.”
In Eagle Point, we rumbled past the historic Butte Creek Mill, founded in 1872, early for Oregon. It’s the oldest gristmill in existence west of the Mississippi, and the only one still active in the Beaver State. Stones from France were carted by wagon from Crescent City on the California coast, and afterward farmers throughout the region carted their wheat to Eagle Point. The mill took every seventh bag as payment, selling it in their general store and trading it to the Klamath tribe—the local Takelma had been run out of the territory already—for hide and dried berries.
Until the mid-nineties there was no fish screen on the mill’s tailrace, so thos
e migrating salmon and steelhead that chose this dark passage, instead of going over the dam, were minced in the turbine like grain under the stone one floor above. In the basement, a rusted pitchfork now leans against the wall to show visitors how the mill owners once speared their main course from the flume. But today a dedicated fish conduit exists and, for a while, ODFW counted the fish that passed through. In 2002, twenty-five thousand steelhead fry—and over 6.5 million spring Chinook salmon fry—traveled downstream. It was a drought year, like this one, and more fish had been forced to spawn in the Rogue’s larger creeks such as Little Butte.
We passed a chic school that Chuck visited each year, one of twenty-five, to talk salmon and give each classroom five hundred Chinook eggs to raise in an aerated aquarium. “You go in there,” said Chuck, with wonder, “and there’s no blackboard—they’re all sitting in front of computers.” Barring disaster, the kids eventually release their minnow salmon into a local stream. Thus the Rogue Valley’s youth learn and hopefully begin to care about their native fish and watershed. Begin to home in. Each teacher is asked to eventually turn in a report noting how many salmon they pour into the neighborhood. The state wants even that data, though from ten thousand eggs, the whole program, only three adults are likely to return. This year, Chuck’s last, was the first time that every teacher had submitted a report to him. “One of the biologists up in Salem,” Chuck recalled, “she used to send out a Certificate of Death if you didn’t send in your end-of-the-year report. Oh, they didn’t like that.”
I asked Chuck why he was retiring just now, as if the answer weren’t plain. “Cause I’m eligible,” said Chuck, gazing at me with his glacial eyes through the rearview mirror, “and I’m seeing myself not getting the time to do the things I want to do, like go fishing and hunting, and traveling in my trailer. It’s always work, work, work, and every night, when I go home from work, I’m so damn tired I just fall asleep.” He talked of revisiting the alpine lakes he had fished in Wyoming as a boy.
“Don’t you get over there and retire and then turn around and die on us,” said Tom, “or I’ll come over and piss on your grave.”
“No, no, no,” said Chuck.
“I won’t stand for that shit,” Tom said.
“No, I ain’t going to die, that’s for sure.”
We listened to the purr of the truck, the rattle of the dash.
“It’s about time you’re able to go and do what you want to do,” said Tom.
“Thirty-nine years is enough,” Chuck agreed. “The body is starting to de-te-ri-o-rate.” He isolated each syllable.
At the hatchery, we pulled up to an empty navy-blue dumpster. Tom and Chuck slid on four more disposable gloves and, between them, hoisted the clear bags that lined the totes. Some of the bloody liquid, sloshing within, spritzed from where the pughs had punctured the film. Then we drove the totes a hundred yards to the spawning house, coming full circle. Under an overhead nozzle, we wrestled the hollow bins off the trailer. Chuck yanked on a wall-mounted lever to release a stream from above into each tote, frothing the syrupy remainder to the blush of a rosé. This way it wouldn’t dry before the hatchery employees returned on Monday. They would rinse the totes, sterilize them, and stack them along the chain-link until it was time to “collect” again, to freeze and thaw and haul up another tributary. On the way out, Tom and I each ate a glazed donut in triumph, but Chuck declined, said he wasn’t hungry.
As the sun began to draw the shadows of the elfin black oaks across the wintergreen ranches, I drove back up Little Butte Creek to stay with the fish once more. The carcass toss had been a whirlwind; the fish had burdened the pughs and our nostrils for no more than an hour. Now the real work would begin, the long decomposition. Chuck had told me that, in cold water, a carcass might last four to eight weeks, though in warmer cases a week would suffice for its disappearance. Each fish, he said, would soon have a crawdad looking out from its open maw. “They eat their way out,” Steve had added. I wanted to spend more time with the fish, to see where they had first settled and stand by.
Past the immaculate grange, I stopped at the Lake Creek General Store and found, on the bathroom wall, a kitschy metal sign that read, I say we fish five days a week and work two, beneath the silhouette of a man and his boy, the generations, sitting side-by-side in ten-gallon hats with their rods. I bought a black coffee to go that I planned to save and curved lazily up the South Fork again under the basalt buttes as the valley began to funnel and fill with conifer and shadow. Pairs of Canada geese loitered in the fecund pastures. A Holstein cow rested its head lightly on the rump of another.
When I stepped from the car at the site of the morning’s final toss, the smell, an old friend by now, rose up to greet me. It had soaked into the ground where John Thiebes had tossed the fish at our boots and made us dance. It clung to the thin grass newly between the gravel and was embodied in the orange roe that now caught my eye like polished sea glass. From the road’s shoulder, I could see the steelhead where they’d come to rest below in the stream: ghost white, cuticles in the river. The cold had forced the rouge from their skin and carried it inside or away.
Down the bank, I stepped, to study three steelhead jammed like logs behind a boulder. I was pretty sure one of them was a fish I had tossed, one that had barely reached the Little Butte. Pinned by the current, they seemed frozen in an association they might have known in another life: Some moment of spawning, maybe. Some flurry of defense or fondness. The kype of one male was raised above water, barely, and its golden eye flickered in the clear pulse that rolled up its face. The fin of its neighbor was also lifted into the air and quivering like a tuning fork. Nearby, another fish hung broken in a willow, flies resting on the red jamb of its lip. An accidental sky burial.
Past the Caution sign and the rockslide, I arrived at the bridge to Camp Latgawa. Some of the steelhead here, the first we’d thrown, had washed a few hundred feet downstream. Descending the bank through blackberry and willow, I waded into the stream in my rubber boots and was absorbed by the noisy silence of the creek. The fish were wrapped around stones like wrecks around telephone poles. I nudged a few over with my toe and looked into their sodden mouths for crawdads, but none had arrived. Not yet. Their eyes bulged opal white. Two pale fish were snagged in the woody debris on either side of a riffle, just where the creek fell into waves; these reminded me of marble statues guarding an edifice, a library, all of it submerged and overturned.
Carcasses can be held by large and small boulders, slow margin-water, and pocket-pools; they can be buried by gravel quickly or over time, abandoned above the waterline by receding flows, or held in the tentative grips of roots, the washboards of riffles, and living branches. Scavengers wrestle them onto the banks and scatter them for others. But it’s a complex logjam, intricately woven with sticks and branches, that is the best retainer of the dead. Trees are the original, unwitting fishers, stringing seines across creeks to drag for salmon and steelhead and, in the long run, nurture more of them. Or maybe it’s the fish that are unknowingly raising and culling the trees.
Then, in a half-dry channel below the bridge, lay a fish at rest in a shallow puddle. Half-exposed to the air, lending its oil to the pool’s surface—evidence that it already had begun to leach, to pass on. And there on its side were three gray moths, adhered, each pasted upside down to the fish’s scales. To a moth, it was clear, a steelhead carcass can be a fatal moon. They had visited in the dusk and become stuck to its mucal surface.
But bending lower, I saw: They were still alive. The legs of one moth tickled the air, and when a second managed to raise a wing in instinct or memory of flight, its upper surface showed violet-blue. These weren’t moths, I realized: They were those small blue butterflies so fond of roads and trails, the genus Celastrina; those spring azures, as they’re known, that “mud-puddle” in clusters, especially the males, to drink the sodium they require to breed; fragile two-fold creatures that advertise the sky, but, when they close their wings, are per
fectly camouflaged on gravel or in the salty ash of a campfire.
I slept diagonally in back of the Jeep, in the sleeping bag I had stolen from my father long ago, ancient and baby blue, with the down half-gone out of its cells. My breath gradually fogged the windows as the night cooled and locked me in. We were in the mountains, I realized, we were near headwaters. Sometime in the early morning dark, I pushed open a rear door to piss and shiver. The quarter-moon poured down and the fish shone chalk white in the Little Butte like stones for someone to cross. But not me.
Direct sun on Little Butte around nine. The fish hadn’t budged, not that I could see. No bear in the night, no raccoon. I drove a quarter mile upstream past the rockslide to Camp Latgawa and walked the concrete bridge again, eating a banana and drinking my frigid day-old coffee in the building sun. The willows were lit with the nibs of their new buds. The stream continuously divided around the elliptical island of cobbles where John Thiebes’s errant steelhead still lay stranded. Other carcasses were also mostly as they had been the day before: bandaged around stones, their opercula pried open like doors by the current, their pale bellies an invitation.
Even from high on the bridge, the flies were now visible. There were at least fifty on the burnished flank of the steelhead that, last night, had trapped the spring azures. I scrambled down the purple slate riprap and, as I came upon that particular fish, my shadow seemed to become the flies it raised to nearby rocks. The three butterflies were still there, held in the wetness, clinging to the body. As I knelt in the mud to photograph them in the morning light, one lifted a wing and revealed its lavender-blue. They had survived the chilly night with their backs, their microscopic scales, glued to the fish’s.
The flies’ confidence returned and so did they, at a trickle. One twitched to an overturned butterfly and with rubbing forelegs prodded its fellow insect. Their legs engaged, bicycled in concert. Some transpiration: our beauty and our hideousness communing, though, this close, they were difficult to tell or tease apart. They were one animal. The lustrous flies gathered faster and nosed into the openings—the gill slit, the quarter-inch wound at the base of the pectoral fin—where they turned to oviposit. This is how the fish would begin to disseminate, one larva-cum-fly at a time. Fifty thousand maggots, I’ve read, will grow in a salmon carcass and devour it completely within five days.