Four Fish (3 page)

But now, as wild and domesticated fish reach a point where they are nearly equal parts of the marketplace, this is just the kind of ocean policy we need. And in telling the story of four fish, for which the collision of wildness and domestication is particularly relevant, I shall attempt to separate human wants from global needs and propose the terms for an equitable and long-lasting peace between man and fish.

I
f you were to go looking for a place where the problems between humans and fish first got serious, Turners Falls, Massachusetts, makes a worthy candidate. Located at a narrow pinch point halfway up the four-hundred-mile stem of the Connecticut River, Turners Falls is today the sort of hollowed-out New England former mill town that compels the traveler to move through quickly. Gloomy brick buildings line its main street, and the only encouragement to tarry is the public lot that charges just five cents for a parking spot.

But the most noticeable thing about the village of Turners Falls is that there are no falls.

There is only a dam several hundred feet across that metes out water in greedy spurts to the rocks below. No plaque commemorates the damming or explains why the river’s progress was impeded in the first place. And there is no evidence whatsoever that before the dam the Connecticut River was an important salmon river, one of dozens of salmon rivers throughout New England and Atlantic Canada that made salmon an abundant wild staple for natives and early colonists alike.

Today in my native land of coastal Connecticut, there is no direct experience or memory of local wild salmon as food. The fish live in the minds of my fellow northeasterners as faceless orange slabs of supermarket product flown in from far away, eaten on bagels, and called “lox”—lox from the Indo-European
lakhs
and subsequently the Yiddish and Norwegian
laks,
meaning salmon. But salmon were once present here in significant numbers. The name Connecticut comes from the Algonquin
quonehtacut
, which translates as “long coastal river.” For hundreds of years before my home state was a state, it was known principally as a place where a long coastal river wended its way to the sea and nurtured great annual runs of salmon, shad, and herring, an abundance that drew Native Americans from as far away as Ohio.

Every year perhaps as many as 100 million Connecticut River salmon larvae (no one knows exactly how many there were) would hatch out of large, bright-orange, nutrient-rich eggs. After spending one to three years in the fast currents of the river’s tributaries, salmon juveniles (known as “smolts” at this phase) would pass over Turners Falls, heading down out of the mouth of the Connecticut. They would then shoot over to the fast-moving shunt of water in Long Island Sound called “the Race”—a treacherous spot where I once nearly overturned my small aluminum boat while fishing with a friend during summer vacation. Riding the Race’s six-knot currents on an outgoing tide, the salmon would make a hundred-mile jaunt to Long Island Sound’s terminus at Orient Point before breaking northeast twenty-five hundred miles to the Labrador Sea just west of Greenland. Upon arrival in Greenland waters, they would mix with other salmon from Northern Europe as well as with those from Spain. The Spanish salmon were in fact the first salmon, the strain that birthed the entire Atlantic salmon genome, which millions of years earlier had radiated out across the Atlantic. Though one might think a Spanish provenance would imply a warmth-loving animal, salmon originally hailed from the lush, cool valleys of Asurias and Cantabria in northern Spain and evolved to thrive in cold water. The colder the water, the higher the oxygen content, and salmon, with their hard-swimming, predatory metabolism, need a lot of oxygen. In Greenland they found not only cold, oxygen-rich water but also an abundance of oily krill, capelin, and other forage, which they consumed in large amounts and stored up as rich supplies of fats—fats that humans would come to associate with the heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids, compounds that have the unique capacity to keep muscle and vascular tissue pliant and vibrant even in subzero temperatures.

Selection pressure in the form of seals, whales, disease, and accidents of various kinds culled away salmon throughout their journey, leaving less than 1 percent of the original hatchlings to complete their life cycle. After a sojourn of usually two years in Greenland, the survivors would go their separate ways, the American fish to the Connecticut’s mouth at Old Saybrook and to many other rivers in New England and Canada, the Europeans to the rivers Tyne and Thames in England as well as rivers in Spain, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, and Scanadinavia on east into Russia. By the time they reached their home rivers, the salmon were big fish—broad-shouldered fifteen-to thirty-pounders with olive-silver backs and shimmering white bellies. Their flesh was thick and orange from the reddish pigment in the krill they ate and zebra-striped with enough energy-storing fat to propel them head-on against ten-knot currents. For reasons not completely understood, salmon do not eat upon return to fresh water and so must store great amounts of fat in advance of their spawning runs. These reserves made them great battlers on the line, so much so that when the seventeenth-century cleric-turned-fishing writer Izaak Walton was looking for a metaphor to hide his monarchical sympathies during the repressive Cromwell years, he called salmon “The King of Fish.” This kingly impression extended to the table; special mention of salmon as royal table fare has been made by Roman and Scottish lords alike.

There were no lords waiting for the Connecticut River salmon when they returned to precolonial North America, though. Just native spearfishermen and netters, none of whom had any devastating effect on salmon numbers. The fish were more or less free to complete their genetic missions. Some had evolved to stop early on and spawn in the tributaries near the mouth of the river. Others were designed to sprint up Turners Falls and spawn all the way in the tiny rivulets that feed into the Connecticut from the Green Mountains and the White Mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire. The genome, the sum of the genetic components of the Connecticut salmon, was so broad that sub- and sub-subpopulations were able to make use of radically different tributaries, spawning throughout almost the entirety of the Connecticut’s four-hundred-mile length.

During the colonial era, different chunks of the Connecticut salmon run were wiped out as millers dammed tributary after tributary for local power generation. But in 1798 a final death blow was struck. That year at Turners Falls, Massachusetts, entrepreneurs put a much larger dam across the main stem of the Connecticut. The salmon that had left for Greenland before the Turners Falls dam was constructed returned to find that they could not reach their spawning grounds. By the turn of the century, those old breeders had died off without ever getting a chance to reproduce. The broad, complex genetic potential of the Connecticut River salmon had vanished from the face of the earth.

Many salmon extirpations are more recent. It is possible that my generation (I am forty-two as of this writing) may be the last one to have a direct memory of wild Atlantic salmon at all. As recently as my early childhood in the late 1960s, Nova Scotia salmon, often called “Nova lox” by New Yorkers, were wild fish, harvested from several wild runs that spawned in the rivers of Atlantic Canada. But in the 1950s, after a handful of Danish and Faroe Islands fishermen found the patch of water off Greenland where all the world’s wild Atlantic salmon congregated, they began catching tons of them. When Norwegian and Swedish fishermen joined the Danes and the Farose in the 1960s, wild Atlantic salmon went into perilous decline. Today a mere wisp of the wild Nova Scotia salmon population remains, and none of it is commercially fished. In fact, every appearance of the species
Salmo salar,
or “Atlantic salmon,” in supermarkets today, be they labeled Canadian, Irish, Scotch, Chilean, or Norwegian, is farmed. Except for isolated pockets in far northern latitudes, there is no longer a popular memory of “wild Atlantic salmon” as food.

The Pacific species of salmon—the kings, cohos, sockeyes, pinks, and chums of the separate scientific genus
Oncorhynchus
—are another story. Those fish migrate from Russian and Pacific Northwest rivers and use the Bering Sea as their Greenland and still reach the supermarket mostly from wild sources. But those wild salmon have also been winking out steadily in the course of my lifetime. There are diminished runs of them still remaining in California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, but their viability is in question. California closed its salmon fishery completely in 2008 for the first time in history, and the famed Columbia River that divides Washington State from Oregon now hosts less than a tenth of its historical run of 10 million to 16 million fish.

So when it comes to salmon, the modern experience is a paradoxical mix of two phenomena. At one pole is the contemporary seafood counter, blooming like some kind of irrepressible orange rose, overflowing with fresh farmed Atlantic salmon fillets. These salmon are grown in monocultures as uniform and calculated as any animal feedlot and are the product of some of the earliest experiments in modern aquaculture. Because they lay large, oily eggs, visible to the naked eye, salmon are far easier to spawn and raise in captivity than many other common food fish, which lay small, nearly microscopic eggs. The first recorded experience of human-controlled reproduction of Atlantic salmon occurred in France around the year 1400, and since then salmon domestication has carried this single species clear across the equator to Chile, New Zealand, and South Africa—an entire hemisphere where, prior to the introductions of mankind, they had been entirely absent. The aquaculture companies operating in the frigid fjords of southern Chile now produce almost as much salmon per year as all the world’s wild salmon rivers combined.

At the other pole of the salmon experience is the vanishing tail of wildness. In their Atlantic range, salmon have declined drastically throughout most of Europe, New England, and Atlantic Canada. In the Pacific the half dozen species and hundreds of genetically distinct strains of wild salmon are slipping away, river by river. What is left to us now are the two last primeval salmon territories: the wilds of eastern Russia and the forty-ninth American state of Alaska.

I
n the summer of 2007, an Alaskan fish trader named Jac Gadwill invited me to come visit him at the height of the king-salmon run on the Yukon River—the longest salmon river in the world. “Do be prepared for a bit of ‘culture shock’ here,” Jac wrote. “Wonderful, loving people, but this is the USA’s own third world country. The most remote, ignored area of the United States, with the highest unemployment and poverty levels. Fortunately it also has the finest salmon by far in the world. This is why the Yupiks (meaning is ‘Real People’) settled here over 10,000 years ago. We just yesterday shipped kings from here to some of New York’s finer restaurants, direct to them, via FedEx.”

Two weeks later, after swooping over the mountains that separate southern Alaska from its wilder northern part and then cruising in low over the Yukon River basin, I stepped out of a tiny propeller plane and entered the corrugated metal shed that serves as the airport in Emmonak, Alaska. A figure whose look could fairly be summarized as “a great bear of a man” stood squinting at me. There was something familiar about him—a kind of Nick Nolte of the North with a little more warmth and girth.

“You Paul?” Jac Gadwill asked, his voice thick with the grit of ten thousand packs of cigarettes.

“Yeah.”

“Got here okay, did you?”

“Yep.”

He took a pause, stared down at the floor for a moment, and then looked up and appraised me with his head cocked at an angle. “Boy, you look good here, Paul,” he said finally. “You should stay.”

We went out to an industrial-size pickup truck loaded down with fishing gear flown in from Anchorage, four hundred miles away. We headed along the gray ooze of a road that led through the clammy late-spring fog. On the way Jac had this to say about his thirty years in the Alaska salmon business: