Coast Range. Nick Neely

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СКАЧАТЬ fish and called out its sex and length in millimeters. Dave would glance at his data sheet, holler over the sound of water, and scratch tallies:

      “Buck 670,” yelled Ada.

      “Yeah,” shouted Dave.

      “Buck 800.”

      “Yeah.”

      “Buck 870.”

      That’s thirty-four inches.

      “No.”

      “Oh, whoops, got him anyway . . . How about hen 810?”

      “Yeah.”

      “Hen 830.”

      “Yeah,” said Dave, as a three-inch insect called a salmon fly, hatched out of the river with orange legs and abdomen, alighted on the small desk where he sat perched on a stool.

      “Buck 800.”

      “Yeah.”

      “Buck 830.”

      “No.”

      “This one’s comical,” said Ada’s cowboy partner, as he passed her the next.

      “How about a buck sub-350?” she said.

      “Sure,” Dave replied. The smallest are known as “jacks,” males that try to spawn after a single year in the ocean. Fewer than ten pounds, and sneaky.

      The sorting occurs in episodes of only a few minutes, fifteen or twenty fish at a time so they aren’t out of water too long. Then the crowder lifts again and more cascade onto the brail—zap. Over the course of the morning, Dave shouted “No” more often as broodstock requirements were filled. He referred to his paper, and each decision was impersonal. Nonetheless, it reminded me of an emperor lifting his thumb up, or down. “Yeah” sends the salmon into Chute 4 (after it receives an injection, to prevent disease) for breeding in the fall. Those genes, randomly selected, will carry on—have a chance to—and four years later (jacks aside), a fraction of the resulting smolt will return transformed. But a “No” from Dave sends the salmon hurtling through the black hole of Chute 6, for a moment, and into the pond reserved for “excess.” The afterlife begins.

      You can’t quite see it from the hatchery, but the dam is there, lurking around the bend. Cole Rivers was built by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1973 in the wake, quite literally, of Lost Creek Lake, a reservoir created for flood control. The earthen wall is three hundred feet tall, three thousand long. More than six hundred square miles of mountain drain to the reservoir, and the dam spoiled all those spawning grounds: the upper Rogue and its headwaters. In essence, the fifty-eight-acre hatchery, with the help of sixteen employees and sophisticated fishery science, is to stand for those hundreds of miles of intricate streambed, those sinuous bends and side creeks filled with snags, plunges, and crystalline gravel stretches.

      But what becomes of the thousands of grown salmon that, each year, are savvy or lucky enough to avoid a hook on their way home and yet aren’t selected for breeding? Once broodstock is in hand, the hatchery has no need for them, those colossal extra. In the parlance of ODFW, they must be “disposed” of, and a hierarchy, a ladder, exists for their “disposition.” Though the natural abundance of wild salmon in the Northwest is largely gone—70 percent of Oregon’s salmon are from hatcheries—even in death, these steel-tank-raised brethren continue to migrate toward hopeful ends.

      About four thousand early birds at Cole Rivers are “recycled”: A few hundred salmon at a time are driven downstream in a tanker truck and, in the town of Gold Hill, poured back into the Rogue. Recycling capitalizes on the fishes’ proven fitness to offer anglers a chance at redemption. Slightly fewer than half of recycled fish successfully run the gauntlet again and climb back into the hatchery. But some of them swim the thirty-six miles in less than twelve days. That’s hauling. Pre-release, the hatchery hole-punches their gill plates so that they won’t be counted twice in the run total.

      Another tributary is “stream enrichment.” Since wild populations have dwindled, far fewer salmon now decay in rivers and creeks, and the ecosystem suffers. As they melt into the shallows, salmon leave an important wave of nourishment from the ocean. Now ODFW casts carcasses into waterways, trying to replicate the fertile casualties of former times. They’ve used helicopters—very messy. Pitchforking them from bridges is cheaper, with the added advantage that it’s still good and messy. Personally enriching for volunteers.

      Fish are also sold commercially to American Canadian Fisheries, a company in Washington State that sells fillets to stores like Safeway. You could be eating a marinated Cole Rivers fish tonight for dinner. The Rogue’s salmon are often a sore sight when they arrive at the hatchery. “But if you cut them open,” Dave Pease told me, “they’re an awesome-looking fish. I mean it’s red, bright red.” Hatchery programs are supported by this “carcass fund.”

      Later in the season, American Canadian Fisheries then donates its services, filleting and packaging salmon for the Oregon Food Bank, which sends the fish throughout the state to outlets like the St. Henry’s Food Pantry in Gresham, near Portland. Its manager, Ann Prester, told me that in recent Februaries they’ve given coho, a winter arrival, to everyone who walks through their door: thirty-five families a day, almost four hundred pounds of salmon a year. “These are people who don’t have access to salmon otherwise, not at eight to nine dollars a pound,” said Ann. “Their eyes just light up.” Many have never seen a living salmon, she said, but they’re thankful it doesn’t live in a can.

      Before all these possible ends for excess salmon, however, Oregon tribes are allowed fish for ceremony and subsistence, as outlined in their treaties. I had journeyed to the Rogue to see salmon be given to the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians. This was the tributary of a salmon’s disposition I hoped to follow to its terminus. Members of the Cow Creek Band would arrive in the morning to haul off a fresh load for their annual powwow and salmon rite in a couple of weeks. I asked Dave when the fish I’d just seen collected would go to the chair. To the brail, for a stronger pulse. “If you come back around nine, you should be fine,” he said.

      I camped on the Rogue’s upper reaches that night, above what’s known as Natural Bridge, where the stream is swallowed by a lava tube and disappears briefly from the light, a molten river turned cold. Down unmarked jeep trails, I found a stretch that poured over the wall of a deep basalt channel within the river, creating a long curtain of white facing the bank. In the morning, I rolled up my sleeping bag and drove the twenty minutes through towering pines to Lost Creek Lake, where the river also disappears.

      To my chagrin, the fish had been zapped ahead of schedule. The Cow Creek Band’s volunteers were backing up a trailer on which rested two identical, empty turquoise containers, perhaps five hundred gallons each. I met Teri Hansen, her son Jake Ansures, and his five-year-old boy as they stepped from their white pickup. She had satiny black hair to her waist, bangs cascading down her brow, and a powwow T-shirt with short red sleeves that exposed her pale arms. Her voice was smoky, graveled. She was a clerk for the tribal court. Jake was athletic, in a scarlet DC skater’s shirt and a black cap with a stiff brim. His eyes were wide, his grin elastic. He worked as a sales and marketing manager for the tribe-owned Umpqua Indian Foods, known for its steak jerky.

      Dave soon drove out of the spawning house on a forklift with a white plastic container that looked like a giant mail bin, a USPS flat tub. Inside was a thousand pounds of salmon. Fifty-nine fish, as it turned out. Their skins were mottled, СКАЧАТЬ