by Brian Doyle
The Creature Beyond the Mountains
There are fish in the rivers of Cascadia that are bigger and heavier than the biggest bears. To haul these fish out of the Columbia River, men once used horses and oxen. These creatures are so enormous and so protected by bony armor that no one picks on them, so they grow to be more than a hundred years old, maybe two hundred years old; no one knows. Sometimes in winter they gather in immense roiling balls in the river, maybe for heat, maybe for town meetings, maybe for wild sex; no one knows. A ball of more than sixty thousand of them recently rolled up against the bottom of a dam in the Columbia, causing a nervous United States Army Corps of Engineers to send a small submarine down to check on the dam. They eat fish, clams, rocks, fishing reels, shoes, snails, beer bottles, lamprey, eggs, insects, fishing lures, cannonballs, cats, ducks, crabs, basketballs, squirrels, and many younger members of their species; essentially, they eat whatever they want. People have fished for them using whole chickens as bait, with hooks the size of your hand. They like to follow motorboats, for reasons no one knows. As with human beings, the males wish to spawn in their early teens, but the females wait until their twenties. The females then produce epic rafts of eggs, 3 or 4 million at a time, from ovaries that can weigh more than two hundred pounds. On average three of those eggs will grow to be mature fish. Some of the fish that have been caught have been fifteen feet long and weighed fifteen hundred pounds. There are stories of fish more than twenty feet long and two thousand pounds. A fish that long would be taller than three Shaquille O’Neals and heavier than six. There is a persistent legend in southwest Washington State that somewhere in the water near Mount Saint Helens is the biggest fish of this kind that anyone has ever seen or heard about or imagined, a fish so big that when it surfaces it is occasionally mistaken for a whale, but this is the same region of the wild and wondrous world where Sasquatch is thought to most likely live, so you wonder.
The being of which we speak is Acipenser transmontanus, the sturgeon beyond the mountains, popularly called the white sturgeon, although it is not white, but as gray as the moist lands in which it lives, the temperate rainforest west of the Pacific mountains and east of the not-very-Pacific Ocean. From northern Mexico to southern Alaska it cruises the nether reaches of rivers, battling only the sea lions that in recent years have taken up residence in the coastal rivers of the West to dine on salmon and young sturgeon, but I am sure there will come a day when I will pick up my newspaper and read about a precipitous decline in sea-lion pups, and I will remember that a new lion pup is not much bigger than a chicken or a cat or a basketball. Taking the long view, you have to admire the individual sturgeon, very probably adolescent males, who over the years were the first to eat such things as cats and cannonballs. Perhaps it was accidental, but perhaps not, perhaps it was a brave leap, and among the sturgeon of today there are legends of the first heroes who inhaled volleyballs and badgers. This could be.
At the Sturgeon Viewing and Interpretive Center at the Bonneville Fish Hatchery in Cascade Locks, Oregon, where Tanner Creek empties into the Columbia River, near the immense Bonneville Dam, there are three enormous sturgeon in a large open pond. Two of them, each about eight feet long and weighing about an eighth of a ton, have not as yet been given names by human beings. The third is Herman, the most famous sturgeon in Oregon. Herman is more than ten feet long and weighs almost five hundred pounds. No one knows how old he is. He might be ninety years old. There are references to Herman the Sturgeon in hatchery records beginning in 1925. It is thought that there have been several Hermans, some exhibited annually at the Oregon State Fair. This Herman, who is probably not the 1925 Herman, arrived at Bonneville ten years ago, a mere nine feet and four hundred pounds, then. Many thousands of people come to see Herman every year, as they visit the hatchery’s spawning rooms, holding ponds, rearing ponds, and egg-incubation building, all of which are for salmon and steelhead; the three sturgeon here, and the pool of massive rainbow trout, are show ponies only, sturgeon and trout not being as close to extinction as salmon and steelhead. This hatchery alone raises a million coho salmon, 8 million chinook, and 300,000 steelhead every year, for release into various Oregon rivers. There are fish everywhere at the hatchery, leaping and milling and swirling and startling visitors, and it is remarkable and piercing to see so many miracles at once, so many mysterious beings, so many individual adventures, so much excellent flaky accompaniment to fine wine, and to think where they will go and what they will see, some of them headed into the deepest thickets of the ocean, others into the bellies of animals of every size and shape, but pretty much every human visitor is here also to see Herman, and I station myself in a dark corner of the center one afternoon and view the human beings who come to view Herman.
There are nuns. There are schoolchildren. There is a man wearing a cat on his shoulder. There is a woman wearing not much more than a smile. There is a woman wearing white plastic thigh boots and a baseball jacket. There is a deputy mayor. There is a long-haul truck driver smoking a cigar that smells like something died in his truck. There are teenagers holding hands. There is a man dressed head to toe in Seattle Seahawks fan gear, including sneakers. There is a man with a cane and a woman with a walker. There is a girl in a wheelchair. There are tour groups, family outings, and a man wearing tuxedo trousers and gleaming black shoes and a motorcycle gang jacket. People eat and drink and joke and curse and smoke and spit and gape and dawdle and laugh and several ask me, Where’s Herman? I say my experience is that he will loom into view after a while. Some people don’t wait. Some people express annoyance with the hatchery management and the lack of organization as regards Herman’s appearance. Others mistake Herman’s eight-foot-long companions for Herman. Others wait silently for Herman to loom into view.
The most memorable viewing for me that day was a young man with a small boy who appeared to be his son. The father looked like he was about nineteen, with the wispy first mustache and chin-bedraggle of a teenager. The boy, wearing a red cowboy hat, seemed to be about three years old. The father tried to line the boy up for a photograph, tried to get the kid to stand still until Herman loomed into view, but the boy skittered here and there like a rabbit, the father alternately wheedling and barking at him, and finally the boy stood still, but facing the wrong direction, with his nose pressed against the glass, and the father sighed and brought his camera down to his waist at exactly the moment that Herman slowly filled the window like a zeppelin. The boy leaped away from the window and his hat fell off. No one said a word. Herman kept sliding past for a long time. Finally, his tail exited stage left and the boy said, awed, clear as a bell, Holy shit, Dad. The father didn’t say anything and they stood there another couple of minutes, both of them speechless, staring at where Herman used to be, and then they walked up the stairs holding hands.
On the way home to Portland, as I kept an eye out for osprey along the banks of the Columbia, I thought of that boy’s face as Herman slid endlessly past the window. It’s hilarious what he said, it’s a great story, I’ll tell it happily for years, but what lingers now for me is his utter naked amazement. He saw ancientness up close and personal. He saw a being he never dreamed was alive on this planet, a being he never imagined, a being beyond vast, a being that rendered him speechless with awe until he could articulate a raw blunt astonishment that you have to admire for its salty honesty. He saw wonder, face-to-face. Maybe wonder is the way for us with animals in the years to come. Maybe wonder is the way past the last million years of combat and into the next million years of something other than combat. Maybe the look on that kid’s face is the face of the future.
The woman who married me, a slight mysterious riveting being not half as tall as Herman, grabs me by the beard in the kitchen one day and says, What is up with you and sturgeon? And I spend days afterward trying to answer this question for myself.
Part of it is bigness. The fact that there are wild creatures bigger and heavier than cars right there in the river in a city of two milli
on, is astounding, and it is also astounding that everyone totally takes this for granted, whereas I would very much like to stop people in the street about this matter, and blast-text OMG!!!, and set up a continual river-bottom video feed in all grade schools so kids everywhere in my state will quietly mutter, Holy shit, Dad, and establish the website MassiveSturgeonVisitation.com, so when a creature the size of a kindergarten bus slides to the surface suddenly in front of a Cub Scout hunting up crawdads in the Columbia, he, the Cub Scout, can post an alert as soon as he changes his underwear. And the bigness of sturgeon here is mysteriously stitched, for me, into the character and zest and possibility of Cascadia; there are huge things here, trees and fish and mountains and rivers and personalities and energies and ideas, and somehow the pairing of power and peace in the piscatorial is a hint of the possible in people.
Part of it is harmlessness; they don’t eat us, no matter how often we eat them. Adult sturgeon do not even have teeth, having dropped their weapons after gnashing through adolescence. We have a fairly straightforward relationship with most animals: we kill the ones who eat us, and we eat the rest. Most of the ones who eat us are bigger than we are—crocodiles, tigers, sharks, bears—but there are some animals that are bigger than we are that don’t eat us, and at those we gape, and grope for some other emotion beyond paranoia and palate and pet. Whales, for example. We yearn for something with enormous gentle animals, something more than mammalian fellowship. We want some new friendship, some sort of intimate feeling for which we don’t have good words yet.
Part of it is sheer goofy wonder; I suppose to me sturgeon are a lovely example of all the zillions of things we do not know, for all our brilliance and inventiveness and cockiness, all our seeming confidence that we run the world. Most of what we do know is that we don’t know hardly anything, which cheers me up wonderfully. The world is still stuffed with astonishments beyond our wildest imagining, which is humbling, and lovely, and maybe the only way we are going to survive ourselves and let everything else alive survive us too.
Part of it is freshwaterness. The ocean is the densest wilderness on the planet, the jungle, the unexplored deep, filled with mysteries and monsters, mostly unmapped, the endless blue world where human beings are unmoored; whereas the rivers are land veins, serpentine lakes, people paths, arteries through the muscled earth; and we are more comfortable in general with fresh water, which we drink and in which we bathe, than with salt, which we cannot drink and in which we are not only uncomfortable but essentially unwelcome. Even the biggest rivers and lakes are stories with endings, they can be plumbed, they are the land’s liquid cousins, the land embraces them; whereas the ocean is landless, endless wilderness, its denizens often savage and terrifying. So to ponder an enormous creature that is not terrifying, that lives in the river I can see from my office window, that remains pretty much a total mystery to biologists and ichthyologists and the United States Army Corps of Engineers—this gives me hope.
I ask fisherfolk what it’s like to haul up a big sturgeon from the bottom of a river. Like dragging a refrigerator, says one man. Like fishing for bear, says another. Like having an air conditioner on the end of your line and if you give it slack it will sink and if you pull too hard you will snap your line, so basically you are doomed to an hour’s weight lifting, at the end of which you haul up a nightmare from the Paleozoic, says another.
They have the most subtle bite, says a man who guides men and women to sturgeon in the mouth of the Mighty Columbia. We call it a soft bite. You’re hardly aware your hook’s been taken until you set and pull and realize there’s a dinosaur on your line. And they’re very fast. People don’t think they are quick because they get so big. People think they are like manatees or whatever, but I’ve seen them rip off fifty yards of line in ten seconds. They dart, man. Something to see, a ten-foot animal whipping through the water, and they jump like tarpon, and they tail-walk especially in shallow water, and the first time you hook a serious dinosaur and he or she decides to light out for the territory you’re…flabbergasted. Awed. Fascinating animal. Very, very adaptable. They live deep, they live shallow, they eat everything, their only enemies are sea lions and us. What else can I tell you? They have the worst eyesight imaginable, but they have a very sharp sense of smell. One sturgeon tagged in the Columbia showed up in San Francisco Bay. Others go out in the ocean and disappear for years. No one knows what they’re doing or how far they travel. Isn’t that wild? We think we know everything science-wise but the fact is we know about half of nothing.
People tell me sturgeon stories. A man frying oysters in a restaurant in Portland tells me that his grandpa told him there used to be so many sturgeon in the Columbia that you couldn’t use a net because it would for sure get broke. A biologist from Texas tells me that sturgeon evolved into their current form long before there was a hint of person in the world. The journalist Richard Carey notes that there are stories of sturgeon in the Volga River in Russia weighing nine thousand pounds, which would be twenty-eight Shaquille O’Neals, and that some sturgeon species can whistle, and that the Kootenai Indians of Idaho used to harpoon sturgeon from canoes they designed to be dragged by the fish until it was exhausted and could be hauled aboard or towed to shore: sturgeon surfing. An anatomist friend of mine explains that sturgeon have cousins among the bony fishes who emerge from the water and wander around on land for brief periods looking for good things to eat, and that they have other cousins who build up speed to about forty miles an hour underwater and then leap out of the water and glide through the air for more than five hundred feet, which is seventy-one Shaquille O’Neals, and that sturgeon themselves, along with their closest cousins the paddlefish, have such extraordinarily sensitive sensory barbels—the four long whiskerlike tissues between mouth and nose that look not unlike a teenage boy’s first uncertain mustache—that they may be able to discern what kind of cat they are about to eat. This could be.
I kept coming back to Herman. Every once in a while, I would find myself thinking about him and soon I would be in the car sailing through the stunning Columbia Gorge to stand quietly in the shadowy corner of his viewing room for a while. Without fail, every time I was there someone would be startled and say something startling. It wasn’t always a kid. One time a small man with a mohawk haircut said something in a language I don’t know, but his tone was unmistakable and I would bet the house he said holy shit in Mayan or Tagalog or whatever. Another time a man knelt and prayed when Herman hove into view. Another time a young woman came in and watched Herman for a while and then whirled on me and delivered a sudden tart lecture on how it was a sin and a crime to jail this fellow living being in this ridiculous circus, to which I didn’t reply, there being nothing to say, and she stomped off.
I went and sat by the river for a long time after that, though. She was right; Herman is in prison for the crime of being amazing, which doesn’t seem altogether fair. And for all you can say that he’s safe, and well fed, and has lots of visitors to his jail cell, and cool roommates, and a certain renown, especially among children, still, he is confined without cause, and chances are excellent that he would rather be in the river, gorging on salmon and whistling at girls and eating cats and basketballs like the other guys.
I end up at the edge of the Mighty Columbia, which is thought to be maybe 10 million years old and which was brawling past this spot, crammed with Acipenser transmontanus, long before my forebears wandered out of Africa, gaping at the wider world. A heron lumbers over, looking like a blue tent. In front of me the Bonneville Dam stretches forever. Sturgeon live so long that there are certainly elders above the dam, upriver, who were there before the first lock was built in 1938. Perhaps they are wondering when the sudden wall in the water will dissolve. Perhaps the vast ball of sturgeon that boiled at the base of the dam in early 2008 was motivated not by lust or politics or sea-lion revenge plots but by the itch to communicate with loved ones behind the Wall.
I go back and watch Herman for a while and consider th
at maybe his job is to be an agent of wonder. Maybe everyone who gapes at Herman gets a sturgeon seed planted in their dreams. Maybe Herman is the one among his clan chosen to awaken the walk-uprights. Maybe he watches the people who watch him and every time a child leaps back amazed Herman silently scores another one for the good guys. Maybe he is here to grant us humility, because humility and wonder of sturgeonly shape and proportion naturally swim to wisdom.
Hoop
Photographs are time machines, and other people’s children are time machines (how did that kid get a foot taller and an octave deeper in a month?), and boxes of old letters and cards are time machines, and old people’s memories are the best time machines (my mom just told me about going to minor-league baseball games in New York City 80 years ago), but often smells and sounds and glances are terrific time machines, as I can presently attest, having just seen a boy of 12 or so bicycle past with a basketball under his arm, and suddenly it is 1968 and I am that boy and I am pedaling home from the gym after my First Official Practice with a Real Team, this after a thousand hours of playing in parks and playgrounds with my brothers, and I made the team, and got a jersey (number 42, for my hero Connie Hawkins), which is so precious to me that I have it huddled under my jacket so that not a drop of rain or speck of mud shall touch and stain it, and I am the happiest boy who ever lived on this wild bright planet, and now I know that the game I love above all other games is going to be my dear and close companion this year while I wear the green and gold for Saint John Vianney, and perhaps I have the secret sense that the game and I will be the dearest of friends for the next 20 years, until my back gives up and I have to quit suddenly and never play again and never even pick up a ball again, and dream almost nightly about playing ball quick and confident and intent until I am deep into my 40s, and write about the game and its denizens every year the rest of my life, as, for example, here.