Fly-fishing rods awaken to trembling arcs with taught lines on the run. Exhilaration. A liquid dance between angler and salmon with crescendos of splashing fervor — every time, exhilaration.
The experience of having a salmon on the other end of the line is encoded into the Alaska visitor’s experience. It draws people far and wide to the scenic venues of an Alaskan summer to try their hand at reeling in salmon.
As a summer fly-fishing guide in Juneau, Kevin Maier facilitates hundreds of moments like this between visitor and environment, all of which have the potential to spark profound reverence for place. “There is no telling what an afternoon on the creek might inspire within someone,” Kevin says as he looks out at his clients’ glistening lines snapping back and forth through the sun. “Or,” he laughs, “they’re just here to see how many fish they can catch in a couple hours.”
Kevin knows salmon aren’t to be taken for granted. He shares stories from his youth when it’s fitting. He seizes any opportunity to share how profoundly special fishing for salmon in Alaska is. “I grew up fishing with my grandparents in Washington — I watched the salmon disappear.” He shares with gravity, “To live through the crash of the runs was awful, and it deeply impacted me.”
Kevin reflects, “At the end of the day, I believe that the connections you make to wild things matter.” When the layers of the client’s fishing experience are peeled back like the float plane rides and the photo-ops with each fish, there is a foundation of truth that rises from the shores of the forested wilds surrounding Kevin and his group. It is something concrete yet intangible. An exchange between human and fish brought into crisp focus by the glisten of the current and the shimmer of grass swaying in the breeze.
“At the end of the day, I believe that the connections you make to wild things matter.”
The line that connects Kevin’s days are cyclical and intuitive — following the seasons, like most things in Alaska. At the end of the summer guiding season, he returns to teach at the University of Alaska Southeast for the fall and spring semesters. He is an English professor, leading classes such as “Literature and Environment” and “Salmon, Sport, and Society.” Kevin’s classes are venues for students to think critically about relationships to place and the ethics of those interactions.
“I make sure to take my students out into the field,” Kevin states, whether it is a couple-day retreat to a local Forest Service cabin or a week spent in Yakutat fishing the Situk River. His aim is to bring his classes beyond the walls of the classroom to add experience to theory. He continues, “We go camping and fishing, and we read a lot about the big picture salmon systems, how we fit into that, and where problems in those systems arise.”
Experience as a vehicle for deeper understanding is the key to these classes Kevin facilitates. “A lot of students probably sign up for my class because it looks like they will be fly-fishing in Yakutat for a week, which you are, but along the way, you get all the more complicated questions mapped onto it, and the experience becomes much more about unpacking all of the questions that come with our act of fishing: Is catch and release fly fishing simply playing with what others consider food? Is fly fishing inherently about preserving a resource or is it more a bloodsport? What does fly fishing look like when viewed from Indigenous perspectives?”
Kevin notes that his classes create important realizations in the context of a rapidly changing world, “Students realize we need to find new ways of living with each other and the non-human world around us. This is work students are particularly well positioned to do, but we can’t do it alone. It requires a community.”
Kevin distills the semester-long arc of his classes to inform his conversations beyond the classroom and into Alaska communities. As a member of the Alaska Salmon Fellows program, Kevin has embarked on nearly a year’s worth of work and inquiry among the top minds of Alaska salmon. Kevin frames it in contrast to the romanticized salmon stories we hear so frequently today. He says, “The harder part of the story to acknowledge lies in the challenges that our salmon and ultimately our planet faces.”
Kevin and his cohort have curated a traveling event that catalyzes those harder to acknowledge conversations through art and dialog. The project, titled Salmon Shadows, asks, “How have we developed our collective salmon narratives, what are these narratives obscuring, and how can we bring these shadows into the light?” It aims to promote conversation around struggles for sustainability, equity, and resource management.
The Salmon Shadows project debuted in downtown Petersburg, AK at The Fleet, a burgeoning, collaborative arts space mere blocks away from the harbor holding the community’s literal fishing fleet. An evening of art, poetry, and facilitated conversation transpired between Fellows and community members — an important step in a bigger conversation that all Alaskans might benefit from having.
As the inaugural year of Alaska Salmon Fellowship comes to a close, the Salmon Shadows project can be expected to be found traveling to these upcoming communities Nome, Girdwood, and Kodiak. Kevin and the Fellows have created the framework for future salmon-conversations to be inclusive of learning, hard questions, and most importantly, engaging to the communities that these conversations matter most.
Kevin’s perspectives of Alaska’s salmon systems build upon each other. New paths of inquiry reveal themselves just as the limitations of others are reached. Where a couple hours with fly-fishing clientele only lands on the surface, semester-long courses can dive deeper, and where those reach their ends, there are Salmon Fellow community events to further the dialog, but perhaps the most lasting field of critical thinking that Kevin can cultivate is with his two sons.
“I have this deeply personal, romantic attachment to fishing because that’s what I did when I was a kid, and it’s what my mom did when she was a kid. Now I’ve got two little boys that love fishing too.”
“You have to have those first interactions with things that are beyond self.” Kevin says in regards to growing up with an ethic of stewardship and respect for our world. He shares that sentiment with his kids by regularly getting out with them on fishing and hunting journeys, and skiing and hiking adventures.
Today that looks like several hours out on the water, sport-trolling with snacks and sunshine. The greenery of southeast’s Admiralty Island and the main land vibrantly in chorus.
Today the learning moment will be after the boys face the disappointment and discouragement of having a king on the line, but having to release it due the sport fishery being closed to kings. The compounding lessons between father and sons come back into focus: be patient, respect the animal, and err on the side of humility. The reward? The afternoon ends two cohos later with contented smiles for the boys as they motor back home.
Kevin thinks back to his youth when he bore witness to the crash of the salmon runs in Washington and reflects, “I spent my life seeking the abundance that we have here, and now that I’ve found it, I want to do everything that I can to keep it that way for my boys.”
“I spent my life seeking the abundance that we have here, and now that I’ve found it, I want to do everything that I can to keep it that way for my boys.”
Kevin’s work proves that there isn’t necessarily a single course of action to ensure healthy futures for Alaska salmon, but instead he shows that a life lived iteratively, exploring different depths of thought to further the conversation, can work us towards profound collective understanding as Alaskans.
