As any fisherman will tell you, no coho goes down without a spastically muscular fight. And no other salmon fights like a coho.
Braced against rollers in the slick pit of our salmon troller, we breathe in North America’s great temperate rainforest, misty and edging the grey seas of Chatham Strait where we fish. With rain beating rubber clothes, scales in hair, and blood in teeth we run the hydraulic spools that pull up writhing salmon on fathoms of steel line.
To win I must lift the hooked coho from the froth of the sea, a motion that sends the fish into a powerful and frantic flexing that threatens to jump the hook from her mouth. With the wire wrapped around a glove, and the bucking fish cutting off circulation to my hand, I must gaff the direct center of her skull. If I am successful she will stun and die immediately. But sometimes I only shock her. After bringing her over my shoulder and onto the metal tray at my waist, I find that being out of the water has only granted her more strength to fight, and fight she will. To make a living, we repeat this battle hundreds of times a day and tens of thousands of times a season. Our own muscles are shaped by the strength and passion of silvers.
My partner Eric has been a commercial salmon troller in Southeast Alaska for over a decade, and we’ve been selling our own catch for three years. These coho—spawned on the wild streams of the Tongass National Forest and in the headwaters of the great transboundary rivers we share with British Columbia—are the heart of our business.
I grew up near the southern terminus of coho’s continental range, splashing in Ashland Creek, a cold tributary of Oregon’s Rogue River. By the time I was in my twenties, the coho from my natal stream were on the Endangered Species List. And so I am familiar with the duality of coho: fierce and also vulnerable. I get it because I am the same. Like a coho, I am formidable as an individual, but as part of a population I am susceptible to the ills of our culture. Coho and I are both fighters, but that hasn’t kept coho off the Endangered Species List in much of their range, nor me from getting breast cancer.
A childhood photo of the author in Ashland Creek
***
Last summer we cut our salmon season short so I could be wheeled, tears streaming down my cheeks, into the center of a coldly lit and vacuous surgical room, surrounded by strangers with masked faces and trays of steel tools. Eric and I had wept together in pre-op, the weight of sorrow and uncertainty heavy on our shoulders, but ultimately I faced the surgery alone. I woke up hours later with bandages wrapped around my chest that I was afraid to remove.
I worked through the personal devastation of mastectomy as the 2016 presidential election blared on the radio and television. By the following autumn, I had completed six months of chemotherapy and six weeks of radiation.
In a year in which country and community grew more polarized, I learned to hold a strange paradox in my body. I was humbled and proven vulnerable. I was also fierce and circled back to my strength and my desire to live. I thought of coho often. The way their aggressive impulse to survive can occasionally save their lives with a jump off a hook. An individual can’t know if their resistance will be what saves them when so many are caught, but it is hard to win if you don’t fight.
It has meant articulating the choice all Alaskans now face: learn to develop with salmon in mind, or prepare for a future without them.
***
As coho in the Lower 48 were falling onto the Endangered Species List, I was conducting fish surveys for the Oregon Department of Fish and Game. Even when their tiny bodies measured in millimeters, a coho’s orange, black, and white trimmed fins stood out from the fry crowd. It was during these halcyon days in waders, catching fish for the state by fish wheel, beach seine, electroshocker, and fly rod, that I first made an observation that has stuck with me for life: any day you touch a live, wild fish is a good day. It was also a time that I learned how special it was to touch coho. Not only did I hold in my hand a wild thing sprung from another watery world, I grasped the slippery tail of a species headed toward local extinction.
Under the tutelage of Dr. Parker, a graduate fisheries professor whose dynamic love for fish lives with me still, I learned how the five species of Pacific salmon had evolved different niches in time and topography. Dr. Parker got us thinking about how when nature uses sheer numbers as a life strategy (a single coho may lay 4500 eggs in her lifetime) it also self-organizes rhythms that keep the abundance flowing. Unlike kings, sockeye, pink or chums—whose young bolt for the ocean shortly after hatching from river, lake, and estuary nests—coho spend up to three winters rearing in freshwater. To survive winter floods when other salmon have escaped to sea, baby coho migrate to smaller streams, wetlands, ephemeral headwaters, and meandering side channels. They depend on the habitat most vulnerable to the developmental whims of human beings.
I saw this my first winter in Southeast Alaska, on assignment for the Yakutat Salmon Board. One blue morning I crunched down a frozen dirt road among the labyrinthine muskegs around the Situk River. On glacial forelands ringed by cut-sugar peaks—a narrow strip of spongey land between ice field and ocean—I caught the quicksilver flash of tiny bodies from the corner of my eye as they passed through slanted sunlight and held in shadows under ice.
Dr. Parker explained how land use could “channelize” rivers, eliminating the curves, wetlands, and hydrological complexity—what scientists term “off channel habitat”—coho needed for their years of rearing. On the Yakutat forelands, I had experienced it. I felt what it was like to be part of a wild, complex, and intact river system, glimmering with over–wintering coho. With a main stem just 26 miles long, the Situk watershed as a whole has powered close to a 100,000 coho average harvest over the last 15 years. A fecund, lowland river, the Situk is not so different than the tributaries of the Rogue I grew up on, except it hasn’t been repeatedly clearcut, urbanized, dammed, mined, and channelized.
Before my jet back to Oregon that first year, a friend and I trolled up a coho in Yakutat Bay so I could smoke it and bring some back to share. I ended up extracting it from the overhead bin and eating most of the ruby red treasure during the flight, friends be damned. Ripping it into chunks with my bare hands and letting my face go greasy with fish flesh I made an addendum to my observation: any day you kill and eat a live, wild fish is a very good day.
To harvest and eat wild salmon—to join the Alaskan food web—was a gift and, I knew, a responsibility. Over the last ten years I have tried to honor that responsibility. For me this has meant not just research and education, but also organizing to restore and protect Alaskan salmon. It has meant honoring indigenous cultures who have co-evolved with salmon for millennia. For me, it has meant articulating the choice all Alaskans now face: learn to develop with salmon in mind, or prepare for a future without them.
***
I remember no real panic as coho in Oregon were listed as federally threatened. There were no emergency alerts during the evening news, no alarm bells rang. We just chose winding rivers of cars over winding rivers of salmon and kept driving.
Of course, in conference room “stakeholder” meetings, agency staff told cold stories of salmon death in the veiled language of bureaucracy. Extirpated runs were reborn as powerpoints outlining the tragedy without saying anything tragic. Experts described the loss but society as a whole was eerily quiet. In this silence, coho in the Lower 48 declined. It is the same silence I now break with my words and actions in Alaska.
It is easy for us as Southeast Alaskan trollers to take coho for granted. Though numbers may dip and rise year to year, we trust the fleet is managed for longevity. From the decks of our boats we can see with our own eyes that the streams of the Tongass National Forest, where 80% of commercially caught Alaska coho spawn, are still mostly wild, wooded, and pure.
Meanwhile the Tongass is the only National Forest that still logs old-growth trees on an industrial scale, eroding coho habitat with clearcuts and roads. While buffer strips around streams can protect coho, their extensive use of off-channel wetlands makes buffers challenging to define and defend. Southeast Alaska’s pure waters are also threatened by heavy metal mines past, present, and future. Coho habitat in the headwaters of the Unuk, Stikine, and Taku—our transboundary rivers—is the site of a Canadian mining boom with a frightening track record of catastrophic pollution. In Alaska, we’re proud that management of our fishing fleet has learned from mistakes in the lower 48. I worry that our management of activities that jeopardize our fisheries has not.
***
I started chemotherapy in January, opting for a regimen that proffered a lower dose for a longer period of time. For 24 Tuesdays, I forced myself to enter a hospital and submit my body to drugs designed to kill all of my fast–growing cells. My nurses became friends who did terrible things to me, including forcing a stout stainless steel needle through my skin into a port surgically implanted in my chest. Because chemotherapy is so toxic it will destroy the thin vein in an arm; it must be received into the large veins around the heart, where it is quickly circulated throughout the body. After the needle was used to draw blood, and flushed with saline, it was fastened to an IV line where I watched the cold drip of the yellowish fluid into my heart. The body is wise and understands when it is being poisoned. The waves of nausea and horror were elemental and inevitable and lasted for days after the needle was pulled from my chest.
At my most broken I survived because I loved and was loved. This love came from people who may or may not have voted with me politically. Both showed up at our front door in Petersburg with meals. I received a sweet card from a fellow on the other side of lawsuits I had brought in my work for salmon. Reading his words, emotions hung in a knot in my throat. We can disagree over candidates or policies, but as humans we are all one diagnosis away from ruin, and so we still need one another in order to heal. Studies are clear that cancer patients who have increased community support have better long–term outcomes. I imagine it is the same for salmon whose survival rests on our ability to make good decisions together. Disagreement is human and also a prerequisite for robust democracy. But we must find a way to hold fiercely to our convictions while also holding fiercely to our love for one another.
As I finished cancer treatment, thousands of coho passed through our hands on their journey from ocean to plate, so according to my own wisdom it was also a very good year. In making our living off these fish, we deepened our deal with Alaska and so I will continue to speak for salmon. I have learned, from coho and from cancer, to do so with strength and vulnerability.
