Salmon - Life of the River

I was on a freighter in Bristol Bay, on the eastern edge of the Bering Sea, home to the largest wild salmon run in the world. We were anchored up, waiting for the big runs to begin. Behind us were fifteen other freighters in a great line, opposite the shoreline, forming the northern edge of a miles-long gauntlet. Millions of salmon would swim through this gauntlet on their way to the spawning rivers. Scattered along this line were approximately twelve hundred, thirty two-foot-long, high-powered gillnet boats, many more fishing tenders, tugs, enforcement vessels, and processing ships. There were as many of us as safety would allow, hugging the north shore of that northern stretch of the Alaskan Peninsula.

The fish would come up through False Pass from the North Pacific, into the Bering Sea, and cut hard east along the shore, heading to spawn on the Naknek, King Salmon, Kvichak, Nushagak and Egegik rivers.

I had spent the previous ten years further west, midway out on the Aleutian Chain, where pollock, cod, halibut, mackerel, yellowfin sole and crab are taken. All species are caught in deep water, out of sight and out of mind, unless you were actually on the vessel fishing. On the other hand, the Bristol Bay salmon fishery, I heard, was a spectacle. The salmon literally swim along the surface of the water. When they begin to head back to their home rivers, it starts like a horse race on an exact latitude line at an exact time. There is no gun or cannon to signal the beginning, though it would have been a nice touch. Fishermen jostle each other for good position, cross each other's nets with their engines screaming, and get into great arguments. This is not an occupation for the timid.

I was on the largest freighter there, anchored at the top end of the line. It was a Soviet-made vessel and at 600 feet long, stood out in the Bay. It was almost too large for the small crew we had. It was a five-story climb to the bridge. Twenty men now did the work in this post-Soviet era, of the 85 that were required under the old Soviet manning procedures.

The salmon had been wandering around the North Pacific for the last three to five years in small schools. Suddenly, in one of those natural mysterious moments, all the fish from that year class, and others, headed for the river and the exact spot where a few years ago they emerged as alevin, which is half fish, half egg. At this moment they are at their peak of physical perfection. Dressed in their bright mating colors, they parade down the shoreline of the Bristol Bay.

So there we were, engaged in the serious and manly business of waiting for the fish. Most of the day was spent on the bridge looking through binoculars, listening to the VHF, and telling stories of where we were from. One crewman had brought his bicycle and was riding it clockwise along the rail. Every few minutes he swept up the port side of the ship, stitched through the rigging, then around the bow, and then down the starboard side like a free-floating second hand. Watching him seemed to make time crawl.

From the chatter I learned many things about Latvia, where most of the crew was from. They were personal motifs. It was difficult to picture the place as anywhere remarkable, only that it was home to them. It was all about the family, the house, the job, the school, the oppression, the economy and the miserable Russians.

As much as I could, I slept, which was effortless. The vibrations from the engine room worked their way up the superstructure of the ship. As the Supercargo, in charge of loading the ship, I had a stateroom across the hall from the captain. In the room was a settee table, a desk built into the wall, a small bedroom and a private bath. We were one story below the bridge, but still a good climb from the deck. The weather in the bay was breezy so there was always a small chop making the ship rock nicely from port to starboard. The vibrations in that cozy bunk were narcotic. This was my preferred way to wait for salmon, holed up in my cabin sleeping and reading.

The day the salmon came I was on the bridge, my hand full of acupuncture needles, twenty to thirty of them. The Korean port captain from my company had come to spend a few days on the ship and get the feel of the crew and our general circumstances. I had made the mistake of complaining about an ache in my knee to him. Hearing my complaint, he disappeared and came back minutes later with a small case of these needles. He explained the process and what the parts of my hand symbolized. The next thing I knew he was using a tiny sliding ram to put the needles in my hand. The surface of my hand was transformed into a pin cushion. He instructed me to leave them in for twenty or thirty minutes.

As Murphy's law would predict, the salmon chose this time to come running up the bay. The VHF started crackling and everyone came alive. There was nothing for me to do really but look like I knew what to do. However, it was difficult to engage in the official 'wait is over' posture with my hand full of needles.

In short order, though, I had my hand back. My knee still ached but I told the captain to take the needles out; I was feeling much better. I looked through the binoculars on the bridge and saw the small single-engine spotter-plane doing loops about three miles due west of us. Our dedicated vigilance was over. The salmon were headed in. Two weeks of boredom were over and now there was the sharp crack of excitement that a million fish were pouring through. I looked down the Bay and saw a small disturbance in the water, but it was too far away to distinguish, other than it looked like a thin black line moving through the water.

Suddenly the fishing fleet was upon us. There were gillnet boats all around the ship trying to gain a better position. I soon began to see what I was waiting for. Out of the water popped a salmon, about a foot into the air. It didn't breach and it didn't arc gracefully. Rather it seemed as though a hand underneath the water squeezed the fish and pop, out of the water it came! In genetics it is called, appropriately, vigor. It was an overabundance of pure natural energy. As the line of fish approached our ship, salmon were out of the water more than they seemed to be in. They were pure muscle.

Then the boats around our ship began to let out their filament gill nets. Everyone was roaring orders. Motors revved. Deckhands furiously tried to stay ahead of the commands. Then they started hauling them in. From the rail of the ship I could see the deckhands picking the salmon from the nets as the drum slowly reeled them in. The salmon were pure perfection. They were bright red across the top of their spines and blue with silver bellies.

You could see fish escaping from their first encounter with the gillnetters, but they still needed to avoid the setnet sights, gillnets run out from beachheads. The setnets were positioned to deal with those fish that moved along the edges of the beach. The amazing things was that the fish that weren't caught didn't turn back, frightened by the noise and the carnage; rather they just kept moving straight ahead. Nothing scared those fish. I thought that they would have been frightened off like a herd of deer or caribou that saw the danger and veer quickly off in the opposite direction. But no, something powerful was happening to keep those fish on course through this mayhem. They had journeyed from a small patch of gravel in the upper waters of these rivers, and something powerful was drawing them back to that same secret place that only they knew of, up in the clutches of the mountains to the east of us.

Next I looked behind me and there was another phalanx of fishing boats. The salmon just kept moving through and around those nets too. They were so predictable, those forward moving fish. They kept swimming, and moving as one. Being caught seemed as natural as moving ahead. There was nothing in their actions that I could interpret as fear or an attempt to save themselves. The secret seemed to be in their numbers, in their collective purpose. The mystery of their great collective moment and their compact with the river showed itself in their determination. They were going to make it and together they were going to spawn another generation in each river and each in a secret spot.

It was in their numbers that they were able to survive, because they seemed completely vulnerable to the activity here. I could see boats behind, before, and next to me. Nets were everywhere. Ribbons of nets dragged across their path for miles. Regulations ensure a certain escapement into the rivers, nevertheless, it was formidable what these fish still had to go through.

It was the fish themselves that were the most remarkable. Caught or not caught, they were all noble on that particular afternoon. Those that were against the fish seemed to be greater than the fish themselves. Even after eluding the boats, the fish would face a whole new series of challenges, in bears, eagles, anglers, and raccoons as they went farther up the river. Even the river itself would have obstacles for them in the form of rapids and waterfalls. And when the river slowed, they would be easy prey for bears and birds. They were completely vulnerable the whole time, with no defense except in their numbers. In the end, even the water would seem to be against them. It would become shallow, and they would be so exposed, dying, yet still moving forward up the river.

I remembered a little river I lived on near the harbor out on the Chain. It was a short river, maybe two miles long called the Illiuliuk River. Each August the pink salmon would run up the creek bed on the back side of the village. I would watch those big pinks from the edge of my lawn along the river. They would be discolored, with this big hump on their back, mostly gray and black, having lost most of their pink and silver color. The bald eagles, wings tucked in, waddled like old women across the creek bed. At will they would come up to a spawning pink salmon that would be resting in the riffles and take a big chunk out of the side of the fish. The fish didn't seem to mind because that part of it was already dead and beginning to rot. Life was slowly leaving it. They were food for the fishermen and food for the bears, food for the anglers, and food for the birds. Never had I seen such an open, beautiful, vulnerability in my life. Those fish would continue to go upstream without fear. They would not stop. They would not run. They would not turn back and go downstream. They would only go up. Ultimately, when they reached their journey's end, they would spawn and die and become food for the river and the land itself.

As I stood at the rail of the deck, mesmerized by this wonder, it was not hard to fathom that these wonderful creatures were something God created. And here I was, one of God's highborn creations, possessed with intellect, soul and spirit, yet I had none of that quest-like purpose in my life; if I did, it was undetectable. It was a sad moment. On the one hand it was glorious to see those fish fulfilling their destiny but on the other hand, I wondered about the purpose of my life. I glimpsed the leviathan of meaning breaking through the surface of my rationality for a moment.

My efforts at finding God had come to naught, so I was surprised to see God show up in those fish. I saw God dancing up the bay with those fish. There was no connecting my spiritual existence with what I saw. I really didn't even know what I had just witnessed. It was difficult to connect my existence with what had been revealed by the fish down below in those killing waters. I wanted that out-of-the-water-popping-with-purpose, that resolve in the face of all the nets and the motors and more nets. Even their dying in the nets was glorious. You could see shark bites, fins missing, and you knew that those fish had ranged the ocean for years and survived. They had hunted their own food. They were strong and fast enough to escape being food for other predators. They went wherever they had to go to survive. And in a moment they responded to the deep call to head back to where they had hatched, two thousand miles away. Nothing short of death would stop them, and they did it all together, as if one being. Yet each one was responding to the river in an intimate way going to that special place, a tiny piece of the river geography that was their own. In spite of the numbers there was great singular purpose in each fish. The fish I saw that day were ocean fish. Everything about them, their entire physiology, was gained from the ocean. Now they were headed up river.

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On the Columbia River System you don't see the salmon per se. What everyone is looking and hoping for is the majesty of their passage. It is the passage that makes the fish, not just the fish itself. It is the idea of whole fish on a whole river whose natural beginnings were in the reeds of the upper river, and who return years later to the exact spot they were born, to lay and fertilize their eggs. It is a fish that is part of the river and responsive to its great cycles. Wholeness, without understanding everything contained in the relational matrix of the river and the salmon, is a work of intuition and the much-maligned idea of common sense. We know life when we see it. It comes at us as wonder, a sense outside our rationality. It is a concept that we wrestle with in our almost totally fractured world. Together, the fish and the river represent life. Separated, they represent temporal power and a diminishing food source. What we see when we see fish making their way through the maze of concrete passageways around river machinery is more like traveling, not necessarily making passage. In natural passage the fish and the river engage in an activity that bumps up against true meaning. With the river altered, fish travel through a mechanical maze with little real hope of regeneration. Those salmon that are caught for breeding, their young will grow in concrete tanks and their first passage will be in a blackened tank on the back of a truck. It is truly traveling, but not passage.

The salmon in Alaska were a congregation moving with great purpose. They were not a contrived group hemmed in by artificial boundaries, for as many salmon as there were, each one of them had singularly achieved a great passage when they came together. They moved to the river where they were born in a wonderful collective fidelity. In them they carried the genetic potential of thousands of generations of noble, fearless, and faithful passagemakers.

Left to themselves they would repeat the process, as long as there was a free-flowing river that emptied into the ocean. That is all the effort could equal to me, beyond the nets, beyond the eagles and the bears, beyond the waterfalls and the rapids; it was just unbelievable joy in motion, true meaning in life. They would go up river and they would die and become nutrients for the very river their offspring would emerge from the next spring. They were so much a part of nature that their deaths were as natural and essential as the water flowing down to the ocean. It was not an end; it was part of a divine continuum.

I learned that my spiritual migrations were, at best, short, uneventful and weekly. My struggles were reduced to finding parking and determining color-coordinated outfits. My religious life seemed bound in a small circle, governed by a clock, set on acquiring information, religious assembly, and secondhand good works, a life that fit perfectly with the culture that surrounded me--a seamless order. Our managed 'Sunday for show' joy was either whooped up or solemn, depending on one's taste, and managed well or poorly, depending on the abilities of the priest, pastor or rabbi. What I saw in the great salmon migration was an order tuned to much grander cycles, whose passage was key to not just the propagation of the species, but part of a vast relational web of life . Passage of the fish was all about experience and meaning.

Meaning is found in experience--authentic, individual experience. It is impossible to orchestrate this type of experience, so religious systems have specialized and focused on information. Information can be managed, taught, memorized and more importantly, measured. It is not that information in itself is bad, but it must be married to authentic experience to be meaningful . And finding meaning takes its own time outside the orchestration of time in the religious order of things.

I believe that the search for God and meaning involves true passage. Passage creates honest and true experience for the individual. The true congregation of believers is steeped in relationship and the true function of maturity. They are not blinded by the mechanical veils of religion and the entropy-laden effort of membership.

Looking at the overarching qualities of the wild salmon you see this. In their quest for maturity, they rely on instinct to know when to leave the comfort of the upper stream where they are born. On signal they head downstream. Everything is new. The river they travel in is not known to them, but they have a knowing that this is what they must do. It is in their genetic makeup to face the challenge of the downstream experience. The river accommodates them and is at the peak of flow when the smolt make their break for the ocean. They leave behind the familiar and jump into the turbulence.

The estuary is where the predators congregate, waiting for the smolt to pass through. It is the salmons' welcome to the real world where they will learn to survive or take an early departure to the food chain. The true spiritual quality of the life of the salmon is that they are food. At every point in their wild state, because of their prolific reproduction, they present themselves in vast quantities to a hungry world. Those that do survive the rigors of the estuary and the ocean are faced with the upstream challenges. It is a fearless life. It is the base requirement for relationship.

At the end of the ocean life of the salmon, it returns to more conflict. All the predators are awaiting the return of the fish; the river itself seems to be resisting them. It seems so irrational that these fish, having reached the peak of physical perfection and beauty, their bodies full of new life, a perfected maturity, would willingly be on their way towards the end of their life. But looking at the whole picture, it is not just about the fish. It is about the whole world they live in and are connected to. Their greatest gift to the whole river is themselves. In their death , they bring the ocean and life itself to everything around them.

I ponder these great fish and their marvelous wanderings as I get a glimpse of the whole cycle. I wonder about the true glories of what I am responsible for. I know that my life is tangled up in something much grander than I realize and yet there is really nothing I can do but follow my own intuition when I encounter the Divine. God seems to be lurking just downstream and later just upstream.

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