Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species - Softcover

House, Freeman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807085499 ISBN 13: 9780807085493

Verlag: Beacon Press, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

Part lyrical natural history, part social and philosophical manifesto, Totem Salmon tells the story of a determined band of locals who've worked for over two decades to save one of the last purely native species of salmon in California. The book-call it the zen of salmon restoration-traces the evolution of the Mattole River Valley community in northern California as it learns to undo the results of rapacious logging practices; to invent ways to trap wild salmon for propagation; and to forge alliances between people who sometimes agree on only one thing-that there is nothing on earth like a Mattole king salmon.

House writes from streamside: "I think I can hear through the cascades of sound a systematic plop, plop, plop, as if pieces of fruit are being dropped into the water. Sometimes this is the sound of a fish searching for the opening upstream; sometimes it is not. I breathe quietly and wait." Freeman House's writing about fish and fishing is erotic, deeply observed, and simply some of the best writing on the subject in recent literature.

House tells the story of the annual fishing rituals of the indigenous peoples of the Klamath River in northern California, one that relies on little-known early ethnographic studies and on indigenous voices-a remarkable story of self-regulation that unites people and place. And his riffs on the colorful early history of American hatcheries, on property rights, and on the "happiness of the state" show precisely why he's considered a West Coast visionary.

Petitions to list a dozen West Coast salmon runs under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act make saving salmon an issue poised to consume the Pacific West. "Never before, said Federal officials, has so much land or so many people been given notice that they will have to alter their lives to restore a wild species" (New York Times, 2/27/98). Totem Salmon is set to become the essential read for this newest chapter in our relations with other wild things.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Freeman House, a former commercial salmon fisherman, is cofounder of the Mattole Watershed Salmon Support Group and of the Mattole Restoration Council. He lives in Petrolia in the Mattole River Valley of northwestern California, and this is his first book.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Totem Salmon

Life Lessons from Another SpeciesBy Freeman House

Beacon Press

Copyright © 2000 Freeman House
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780807085493

Chapter One

IN SALMON'S WATER

Sometimes your storyline is
the only line you have to Earth.

SHARON DOUBIAGO

I am alone in a sixteen-foot trailer by the side of a river.It is New Year's Eve, 1982. The door to the banged-up rigstands open, and when the radio is off I can hear water in theriver splashing endlessly over cobbles. The oven is on fullblast. Its door hangs open too. The heat rises to the ceilingin layers, ending at the level of my chest. My face is hot, butmy ankles and knees are cold and damp. On the radio theGrateful Dead and fifteen thousand celebrants woozily greetthe new year at the Oakland Coliseum. Ken Nordine's deepbeatnik baritone drones on. Ken Kesey babbles. Any momentnow, Bill Graham, undressed as Baby Time, will belowered from the rafters. The band lurches through the music,loses the thread entirely, and after a long time finds itagain, the beat loose and insouciant throughout. The bandseems to say, "See? Told you we could find it again." It allmakes sense with enough LSD, I suppose, and I have sometimeslived my life as the Grateful Dead plays its music, driftingin and out of the right way to be, risking everything onan exploratory riff. But tonight I am focused and full of purpose.My only drug is a poorboy of red port, which I sip cautiously.

    I turn the radio off and listen. Then, to hear better, I turnthe lights off too. I am listening to the water. If you listencarelessly, the water in a rushing river sounds like a singlething with a great fullness about it. But when you begin totry to sort out the sound of one thing within the sound of thewater, the moving water breaks into a thousand differentsounds, some of which are in the water and some of whichare in your mind. Individual boulders rolling along the bottom.The Beatles singing ya-na-na-na. The one sound breaksitself into separate strands that intertwine with each otherlike threads in a twisted rope. Some strands are abandonedas new ones are introduced, making a strange and hypnoticmusic. Listening to running water is a quick route to voluntaryhallucination.

    Among the many voices of the water, I am trying to distinguishthe sound of a king salmon struggling upstream. It is afoolish undertaking and it never works. I hear a hundred fishfor every one that is actually there, and then miss the one thatis. The only sure way to locate a fish in this realm of sensationis to walk to the river's edge and play your light along the surfaceof the water where it passes through the weir. The kingsalmon may be large or small, it may weigh three pounds orthirty. If it has swum into the pen above the weir, I will pullthe long latchstring that releases the gate that closes themouth of the weir, so the fish can go neither upstream nordown. This doesn't happen very often in 1982.

    A little more than three years ago, a state fisheries biologisttold us that this race of native king salmon is done for. Iam still not totally sure he wasn't right. The state Departmentof Fish and Game is spread thin. They can't afford toexpend their scarce resources on a river that has next to nohope of continuing to produce marketable salmon for a diminishingfishing fleet. But a small number of residents of theremote little valley have not been able to bring themselves tostand by and watch while one more race of salmon disappears,especially the one in the river that runs through theirlives. They have begun with little idea of what can be done.They've talked to other people like themselves, and also toranchers, loggers, academic biologists, and commercial fishers.They have read books and sent away for obscure technicalpapers. They've developed a scheme that they hope willenhance the success of the spawning of the wild fish.Through stubborn persistence they've convinced the state tolet them have a go at it.

    By the last night of 1982, this little group has grown intoa cohort of several dozen residents who are spending a greatdeal of time trying to forge a new sort of relationship to theliving processes of their home place. We also have learnedto deal with bureaucracies outside that place, and we haveincorporated as the Mattole Watershed Salmon SupportGroup. We have raised money. We have entered into contracts.We are inventing our strategies as we go along.

    I am part of that cohort. I am tending a weir with an enclosedpen behind it that is meant to capture wild salmon inorder to fertilize and incubate their eggs. I am working bymyself, which is unusual. Normally a crew of two or threewould share these long nights. Most often, David and/orGary, two of the people who initiated the effort, would behere. But it's a holiday. Everyone else has pressing engagements.The fish, however, know nothing of holidays. Thespawning season is almost over, and we few who care for thesalmon haven't come anywhere close to reaching the goalswe have set for ourselves this year.

    (Now, nearly twenty years later, we find ourselveswith lots of company—hundreds in our own watershed andthousands in other places all over North America—and Iwrite out of curiosity as to what motivated people, myselfincluded, to act in such a way. It is my hope that by the timeyou close this book we will both have some of the answers.)

    The weir looks like fish weirs have always looked onthis coast, a fence angled upstream across the river fromeither bank at enough of a bias against the current so that itwill not offer more resistance than it can endure. It closes offpassage upstream except through a one-foot opening at itsapex. In earlier times, a fisher with a net or spear might havestood behind or above the opening. For our purposes, theopening serves as the doorway to a trap, or to a pen. Althoughbuilt from materials manufactured elsewhere, it hasa funky look; it blends in. Panels of redwood one-by-one,grape stakes in another life, are spaced at one-inch intervalshorizontally and lashed to metal fence posts pounded intothe river bottom. Each panel has a chickenwire apronattached at its bottom. The aprons are held to the bottom bysandbags, gravelbags really, each one weighing about fortypounds. Filling and hauling the bags two at a time takes upmost of the two-hour drill required for three or four peopleto install the temporary structure.

    The salmon's progress upstream is one of many marvelsof the salmonid life cycle. The grace and strength requiredto overcome waterfalls and other blockages, the stamina toendure floodwaters, the systematic persistence necessary tothread the maze that a big logjam presents—these are attributesso wondrous that we must consider them in the samerealm as the mysterious intelligence that allows the creatureto distinguish between the smell of her particular natalstream and the smell of the rest of the world of water. Butwhen the fish swims into an enclosure that requires her toseek an exit downstream, she becomes slow and seeminglyconfused. It will usually take her some hours to discover thedownstream exit that she found so quickly before, when itwas the passage upstream. Her slow meanders seem now tolack purpose; escape from the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Beacon Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0807085499
• ISBN 13: 9780807085493
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 244
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland