Waiting for that Feeling ~ Salmon Life

Camaraderie Freedom

You stand shoulder to shoulder at the mouth of the Kenai River, where the fresh water joins the salt of the Pacific, and jump three-foot waves holding a five-foot net attached to a ten-foot pole. You love this subsistence sport known as dipnetting. And you feel crazy doing it—crazy alive.

You wait alongside thousands of other Alaska residents for a Sockeye salmon to swim into your net. Not the net inches from yours. Not the net at the front of the line. But yours. You want to be the chosen one who interrupts the Red’s journey to its childhood home.

You silently talk to the fish. Please, you say, please find my net amidst the rest.

You wait. And you wait.

You talk to the people around you, as diverse as they come, an eclectic group of ethnicities, ages, and backgrounds all wearing the same uniform—waders or hip boots, Gortex and fleece—all of you hoping the next fish lands in your net.

“It’s slow.”

“Yeah, have you caught any yet?”

“No, but at least it’s a nice day.”

“Yeah, I’m hopeful they’ll come with this tide.”

“Hope is all we got.”

When you dipnet, or participate in the Kenai River personal use fishery, you camp on the beach of Cook Inlet where the glacier-fed river meets the Pacific with up to 15,000 other hopeful fisher-folks. Your tents are packed together like sardines, a carnival scene on two strips of sand and mud less than a mile long, the most crowded of camping experiences; everyone united by fish. And, like at a Dead Show or a Super Bowl, you are driven together to step outside of your regular lives and respond as one. You may not cheer and clap, but you all stand together as a crowd and wait for a salmon to hit. As diverse as you are, different languages and colors of skin, you are all the same: waders and nets.

And when one of you loses a fish at the shore, you may question that person’s technique or their equipment or their reaction speed, but you all feel that person’s pain. You’ve been there before.

We’ve all lost something we wanted, arrived empty-handed with our heart shattered when we expected to be full. When tragedy strikes, our tendency is to deny or blame or to try to rewind time, like Superman reversing the rotation of the earth to save Lois Lane. But it could happen to anyone. Chance. Luck. That fish swims past a thousand nets and gets caught in yours.

It could happen to anyone. Chance. Luck. That fish swims past a thousand nets and gets caught in yours.

And you better be ready to respond, to accept what the earth gives you. That is really your only choice: to accept or not accept.

You lick the salt from your lips, remnants of waves far bigger than you, too large to jump, too fast to move away from, and too strong to turn your back on, waves that catch you off guard and leave you feeling wild and raw. You stare at the light on the water, the volcanoes in the distance, Redoubt, Spurr, Illiamna, and St Augustine, as the sun rises higher above this crowded beach scene. You observe all the various people down the line, Alaska Native, Samoan, Hmong, old, and young, all waiting with a net similar to yours, but with the same intentions. You turn and watch the action on the beach where thousands of families camp, process fish, play in the sand, eat, drink…and wait.

Your children are back there somewhere, Elias and Olive, watched over by the tribe that joins families every second or third week of July for fish camp, eating meals communally and taking care of each other—the way it should be. You know Olive is playing with the other kids, building sandcastles or racing up and down the beach; her older brother, Elias, well, you just hope he’s not in meltdown mode. You choose to place your trust in your community of mostly transplanted Alaskans, and you let go as you strain to hold your net upright against the outgoing tide. He’s OK. He’s fine.

You can’t feel your fingers, your arms ache, your bladder is as full as your stomach is empty, but you stand chest high in the water for hours, waiting for the rush of a salmon to swim full tilt into the net you hold, waiting for the adrenaline surge as you yank, flip, and drag that net to shore, hoping it emerges on the beach with a ten pound sockeye thrashing within. You promise to say thank you before you kill with reverence, showing your gratitude for the bounty of food these speckled salmon deliver. Mmm, salmon.

Salmon fillets, salmon cakes, salmon burgers, salmon tacos, salmon quesadillas, smoked salmon, salmon pesto pasta, salmon scrambled eggs, salmon salad, salmon lasagna, jarred salmon, salmon sandwiches, salmon jerky, salmon quiche—you name it, you’ll eat it all winter long. It’s one of the many reasons you love Alaska.

As an Alaska resident and a family of four, you are allowed up to fifty-five red salmon as part of the Kenai River personal use fishery, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of skill or fancy equipment. All you need is a giant net and a willingness to stand in the fifty-degree water holding the long pole against the tides.

So you wait for that feeling. You’ll wait in the water for hours.

And in this day of microwave dinners and takeout meals, there is something almost sacred about fishing for food, about catching your own lunch and honoring its life before slitting its gills. It is the feeling of honest to goodness work that doesn’t involve computer screens or meetings or systems or processes you can’t feel and taste. It is the feeling of sore calves from standing on tip toes in your attempt to stand out as far as the taller men, of jumping the waves to try to keep the water out of your waders, of sore shoulders and back from holding the large net against the current, and of lugging the salmon ashore. And this sacred feeling is heightened when it is a communal act, a unique Alaskan ritual each July, during which you have the opportunity to fill your freezers with salmon fillets, ground salmon, and smoked salmon for the long winter months ahead.

So you wait for that feeling. You’ll wait in the water for hours. You wait.

You remember the first fish you killed all by yourself. You caught it during low tide, out past the mudflats, without Nick or any of your friends by your side to help. And it was a big fish, no King, but at least ten pounds. It was beautiful.

The fish flopped out of the net when you dragged it to shore, so you dove on him, coating your fleece jacket with mud. Nick had given you a big rock to knock him on the head and a knife to cut his gills, but they laid in the wagon twenty yards away. So you crouched there in the mud on your fish, feeling its warmth, unsure how to tame the slippery fellow. You decided to tangle him in the net and drag him to the wagon. He continued to flop around, fighting to return to the Kenai, to his traditional migration back to the waters of his birth.

You stood over this prehistoric-looking creature and apologized for the rock and for your own inadequacies when it comes to performing a quick kill. You wanted to harvest this fish, to fill your freezer with patties and filets, but you didn’t feel comfortable killing it alone. You worried you were doing it wrong, making it suffer more than needed. Did you hit it hard enough or too hard? Did you cut the gills enough to let him bleed out or just enough to torment the poor fellow? What the hell are you doing anyway? When it comes down to it, we are always alone with our questions, always wondering if we are doing it right. Are we capable? Are we good enough? Are we OK?

Christy Everett Jordan

You look up to see a robust Polynesian woman you met earlier walking toward you with her wagon. “You got a fish?”

“Yeah, but I don’t know if he’s dead yet,” you said, anxious to pull someone else into this circle.

“Oh, here.” She picked up a rock twice the size of yours, leaned over your fish, and whacked him good and hard. “There, he’s dead now,” she said with a smile.

You thanked her, picked up your net, and returned to the water.

“Was that your first fish?” the smiling man next to you asked.

“No, but it might as well have been.”

Listen to Christy Everett Jordan- The Fish that Found My Net

"She's got that big-eyed primal look. I don't think she wants to stop."

Fast forward a few summers to the time they lifted the eleven p.m. curfew due to an exceptionally strong run, and you stood in the water long past midnight catching and killing fish.

“She’s got that big-eyed primal look,” your friend Pili told Nick. “I don’t think she wants to stop.”

Red salmon shimmered silver in the dusk. Big ones hit your net hard and fought to escape as you muscled the net over and dragged them to shore. You confidently bonked them on the head with two hard strikes.

“One to stun and one to kill,” your friend TJ said.

Reni, who, like you, fully caught the fishing bug on this trip, walked back into the water with her ten-foot pole. “Nick and Gavin don’t want us to catch any more fish,” she said, referring to her father by his first name, seeming more and more like a peer than an eleven-year-old girl. “Every fish we catch is one more they have to clean.”

“Right,” you said and smiled. “One more and I’m done.” One more. You’ll just catch one more.

“Me too,” she said as she maneuvered her net into the water like a pro.

Earlier in the evening, you and Reni caught a fish together as your nets tangled underwater when the salmon swam your net into hers. She took the lead in untangling the smaller female, and as you stood by watching her unwind the net from the fish’s fins, you had to restrain yourself from helping. You realized she will only grow more competent, more independent, more able. We all will.

It was almost two a.m., and you felt more awake than you had in years. You felt alive and full of your own blood, blood from your ancestors, blood passed down to your children, blood that allows you to do crazy and beautiful things, like hold a net in the edge of the Pacific and wait for a salmon to find it. The blood that allowed you to create children who tested you and broke you and remade you a thousand times a day, but try as you might, you can never catch them in your net, never keep them still. They swim on to underwater worlds you will never see, following their own blood down uncharted streams, bound and free.

When your own son arrived four months too soon, you knew you couldn’t return him to your womb, and in that moment, your sense of being in control shattered. You could not save your son, so you handed his care over to a medical community that resuscitated his stopped heart and somehow, with the help of science and machines, hope and prayers, and your little boy’s will, got his one pound body to breathe. And, despite dire predictions, he survived.

"When I'm bigger, I can go out there. I can fish too."

Years later, he held himself upright with the help of forearm crutches, which he used to poke a recently cleaned salmon carcass on the beach. “Mom, how do I un-dead the fish?”

How do I go back in time? How do I start over? How do I get a second try?

“Oh, bud, you can’t. But if you figure out a way, you’d be one wealthy man.”

“When I’m bigger, I can go out there. I can fish too.”

And you know you will find a way for him to participate because his determination overrides his disabilities every time. And you know you will be here again next summer and the summer after that and as long as the salmon are plentiful and subsistence is possible because it’s about more than camping and fishing. It’s about reconnecting with the natural cycles of life; it’s about love and death, fear and hope, solitude and community on the shores of the Kenai and Cook Inlet Sound.

The author's son, Elias.

So you hold tight to your net and wait.

The author, Christy Everett Jordan, with her fresh catch.

So you hold tight to your net and wait.

The quiet camaraderie of standing in the water with others makes the frigid temperatures more bearable. That and the persistent hope that any second a fish will hit. Oh, and once it does, no matter how cold you are, or if you had just been ready to take a break, you find yourself wading out again. One more, you think, one more.

“I think its chaos theory,” you say to Nick and Gavin as you ponder how to predict the patterns of the approaching salmon and the science behind catching them in your dipnets. It’s random and luck and just being in the right place at the right time. We can point to our height or our stance or our tools or our place in time as factors in our bounty, but perhaps we can’t pinpoint the cause.

You feel a salmon hit and turn your net over as he jumps out of the water in an attempt to flee. You drag the net along the rocks underneath your feet and walk back toward the beach. You cheer when you finally land the large Sockeye and dance around the net. “Thank you,” you tell the salmon, “thank you.” You lay your hands on silver scales and study your first fish of the season longer than normal after waiting so long. “Thank you, thank you,” you repeat before raising your handmade wooden “bonker” and hitting it twice on the head.

You smile from every fiber that makes you alive. Then you turn and walk back into the water, wielding your giant net like a direct line between family and sea, and you silently thank your own version of God for this rich salty life of yours.

And again, you wait for that feeling.

Salmon Life

Waiting for that Feeling

Dipnetting on the Kenai River

Fish and Family

Connections to Life

Waiting for that Feeling

Dipnetting on the Kenai River

Fish and Family

Connections to Life

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