Salmon Life

My family used to set nets off this shore for dog food and people food. Kapakavik in Inupiaq, we were told, meant “place where they spear salmon,” but I have no idea how the people of the past did that, and my family never tried spearing anything.

The surface of the big river reflects the gray of the sky in approaching twilight, and a faint breeze carries along the stink of dead salmon. Down farther along the bar, young brown bear tracks meander the dark wet sand. Scattered here and there are dead salmon and other fish, washed ashore. Out in the main channel, the curved flank of a floating salmon spins slowly in the current.

This fall something is killing fish in the Kobuk River. None of the experts are quite sure yet why this is happening. The theory put forward is that our huge chum salmon run combined with unseasonably hot weather in August and no rain might have caused oxygen depletion in the water. An algae bloom, too, might have further reduced the level of oxygen in the river. So far no one knows for certain what has caused this strange loss of life.

On the rocks, I poke a stick into a gigantic sun-bleached fish, bloated like a hip boot full of oatmeal, nasty and reeking. I kneel down and peer into the hole I’ve twisted in the soft flesh. The rotten sperm sacks appear intact. I stroll to a smaller female, do the same, and discover orange eggs.

These salmon didn’t spawn, and I don’t believe the others along the shore did either. None of them have that spawned-out look I’d recognize. Glancing down the shore, from one to the next, I think about all this wasted food, and life, and I can’t help fearing for our future. A feeling of loss comes over me, for these intense lives, lived with such force, and abandoned here, so close to completion.

Back then, every weekend at the fish camp the fishermen listened to KOTZ AM radio for the openers. Fritz Coleman was the ADF&G biologist who announced his decisions. He cut us back in the mid-1970s from forty-eight-hour periods twice a week, to thirty-six hours, and finally to twenty-four-hour openers. Universally, folks hated him—which is why I remember his name today.

Most of us were from camps and villages, and we had long hours and days to sit in our wind-lashed tents, waiting, while fish passed, some jumping and the rest unseen under the waves. We had no iPhones, no four-wheelers, no video players, very little fresh water. We ate salmon every night unless a loon got in the net, or a porcupine wandered out the grassy spit. We fed flounders to our sled dogs, and we waited. We just wanted to FISH! And when the season ended, most of us packed our boats and went directly home up the Noatak and Kobuk Rivers, and to Kivalina, Deering, Buckland, Selawik, and camps in between—to fish more, for food. Because of the great numbers of fish we killed, we were sure we knew more about salmon than any Outsider biologist on the radio.

Slowly, over the years, from various biologists’ excuses, reports, and reasoning, people learned a side of things we might not have known—bits and pieces, such as how the value of the Japanese yen affected our fish prices, how three-year-old salmon numbers predicted the following year’s return, and five-year-olds could be counted on the year after a large run. We learned about roe maturity and quality, and fall rains washing out eggs, and spring floods flushing out fry. And words like “smolt,” “escapement,” “test-net,” “sonar,” and “aerial surveys.”

Local fishermen were outraged to learn that False Pass boats in the Aleutians were intercepting our chums, as were Korean ships on the high seas with many-mile-long nets. Dips in fish prices didn’t help the mood around Kotzebue Sound. The ‘80s had some good years, but on average our price kept falling, and in the ‘90s it rose briefly—then fell to pennies.

These days melting permafrost due to climate change is draining thermokarst lakes on the nearby tundra. Warming is seeding the sandbars and hills and tundra with brush, tall alders, and trillions of new baby spruce. The rocks of the creeks feel different under my feet—slimy with algae—and from the sky I’ve photographed whole lakes now that are neon green.

Change is in the air, too, a climate of uncertainty—tangible in this unseasonably warm evening, the smell of greenery, the stink of rotting bodies—and somehow in our cells now, too, I’m beginning to believe. It’s hard to know what to expect next.

Now, on the big river rain begins to patter down, splashing on the rocks around me. In the falling dusk I turn to walk across the bar and wade the shallows back to my home on the hill. Tonight I don’t feel any of us have done anything spectacular here—only been lucky, inhabiting a spectacular place, at a spectacular time. One we’ve shared with salmon.

And when these silver companions of ours turn belly-up in mid-journey and start floating dead down this pristine river, what else can we think but that somehow we are doing wrong, terribly wrong. We—none of us—have even begun the real work of doing right for these beautiful creatures, and for ourselves.