Four Fish (5 page)

But even though this kind of wild competition does not generally occur, the shifting regulations still make things tense. When I finished my tour of Emmonak and returned to the Kwik’pak offices, Jac Gadwill shushed me with a finger while he listened nervously to the announcement over the radio. A woman with a flat midwestern accent droned out the bad news:

“At this time Fish and Game will not be opening the commercial king salmon fishery. There will be a
subsistence opening only
in the Y-1 and Y-2 section of the river from twelve to six P.M.”

Jac slumped in his chair. He pulled a long drag off a cigarette and exhaled with a smoky cough.

“No milk and cookies for Fish and Game.”

He took off his baseball cap and ran his hands though his unwashed, slightly-too-long, sandy-gray hair. He glanced over to the wall where a chart favorably compared the Yukon king salmon’s fat content to that of other Alaskan salmon. Finally he pushed a button on the intercom and called out to his secretary.

“Hi, Jac,” she said.

“Yeah, hi,” Jac replied. “Can you see if Ray and Francine are around? I want to get Paul here out on the river.”

Jac loaned me a set of orange rubber overalls and a thick, very comfortable pair of wool socks and wished me good fishing.

 

 

 

A
n hour so later, a Yupik Eskimo named Ray Waska Jr. threw the hrottle all the way forward on his 150-horsepower engine, and his tiny metal skiff hurtled down the channels of the Yukon Delta. Francine, his wife, sat next to him in a camouflage outfit, and their teenage son, Rudy, perched at the front of the boat. Their three-year-old daughter, Kaylie, in racing-style pink sunglasses and a matching pink jacket, crouched between Francine’s knees at the bottom of the boat. Their five other children were at the grandparents’ fish-smoking camp, hidden away in the channels twenty to thirty miles upriver.

If e. e. cummings had wished to retire to a place where the world was truly “mud-luscious” and “puddle wonderful,” then the Yukon River floodplain would have made a good choice. Minnesota boasts on its state license plate of being the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes. Alaska has 3 million, and it seems that a good number of them are the potholes and broken-off oxbows that surround the Yukon, the greatest of Alaskan rivers—a kind of Mississippi of the Arctic that bisects the state and continues far into Canada. There is so much of everything natural here—sky, wind, water, and, most memorably, clouds of insects that make a stinging helmet around your head the second the boat slows down.

How the Yupik find their way amid this shifting matrix of green sluices and bald shoreline is any white man’s guess. Hardly a tree or rock marks the route, and as with any truly productive salmon delta, land is semipermanent, sinking or rising at the whim of the river. Yet there was never a hesitation in Ray Waska’s steering. Turns were made with unquestionable assurance, until the engine cut out abruptly and Rudy Waska rushed to the front of the boat and started paying out net line, hand over fist. Suddenly we were subsistence fishing.

Once we set up, there was nothing to do. The net hung vertically in the water, a surface-to-bottom curtain a few dozen yards long blocking passage in a small portion of the river. There were so many salmon in the river at that point that even a partial obstruction in the current would result in fish. We were fishing with gill nets that had mesh openings big enough to accommodate the head and shoulders of a chum salmon—a less illustrious fish than a king salmon and sometimes called a “dog salmon.”

The buoys strung along the top of the set net started to twitch. I had seen only one wild salmon in my life—that single fish I sighted in my fish-counting days in Oregon two decades ago—and I rose in my seat with excitement. But on the Yukon, even though this year was turning out to be a poor one, there were still several hundred thousand king, chum, and coho salmon expected to arrive throughout the summer. Ray and Rudy Waska barely noticed the salmon slowly filling their net, twitching the buoys. The rarer kings have heads that are bigger than the day’s allowed mesh size, and they would be able to bounce off unharmed if they hit the net
.
It was all chums today. While chums are perfectly good to eat and also very sleek, beautiful animals, they are smaller, much more common, less fatty, and thus less prized by both Yupiks and nonnatives. Kwik’pak has recently been trying to rebrand chum salmon as “keta”—the native name—but the fish has yet to catch on. Nobody was in a hurry to haul.

But haul we finally did. After just four hand-over-fist pulls on the nets, the first three salmon were in the boat.

“Chums,” Ray said, pronouncing the last consonants hard and sharp, the way that the Yupik tend to do with English words, making it come out as “chumps.” We hauled some more and fish after fish flopped in the boat, their mouths and gills ripped up by the nylon net. The big white plastic well, about the size of a concert grand piano, in the center of the boat quickly filled up with salmon. It was a little like factory work. Haul, haul, salmon, salmon, flop, flop. But just as things started to seem commonplace, Ray tensed up. He pushed his son out of the way and expertly handled the net. He made one last haul, and
thwap!
—a much bigger, more beautiful salmon lay on the deck. It had accidentally snared itself in a net meant for chums, the twine wrapped thrice around its jaw.

“King,” said Ray, the faintest trace of excitement in his voice. The fish was about thirty pounds, twice as big as the chums, and had a steel-colored head that stood out from the rest of its body like a knight’s helmet over chain mail. If the fish had not opened its mouth when it approached the net, it would not have snared its jaw. It would have bounced off and slipped through and advanced perhaps all the way to White Horse, Canada, where it might have laid its eggs and lived a fulfilled life. But instead Ray reached in and ripped out two of its gill arches, and blood poured onto the deck. A bled fish dies faster, and its value is increased because it lasts longer frozen.

Since Fish and Game had declared a subsistence opening only, the king salmon could not be sold to Kwik’pak Fisheries. But nobody had said anything about barter, something I supposed fit loosely into the category of “subsistence.” When the grand-piano fish well was full to the brim with salmon, we pulled up anchor and blasted our way farther upriver. The wind was starting to penetrate my rubber overalls. The only parts of my body that were warm were my feet, stowed snugly in Jac Gadwill’s socks.

Around a bend our boat slowed again. The insect helmet formed over each of us, and suddenly, rising up from the water, was a black oil tanker. It was making the long haul, taking oil out of the area of Alaska that is nowhere and transporting it to somewhere. We pulled up next to the ship and banged on the hull. Some prior communication had evidently taken place, because a few moments later a dude appeared on deck carrying two ten-pound packages of frozen chicken parts. Francine Waska stood and smiled and took the packages and laid them on the deck of the boat. They were an ugly reminder of the way the world is going. Yellow foam backing. Plastic wrap. A bar-code sticker that said “$19.99.” Francine appraised the packages.

“Gee,” she said, “I hope this doesn’t have freezer burn.”

Ray nodded to the galley cook and reached down into a cooler. With one huge haul, he grabbed the king salmon and threw it up onto the ship’s deck, where it landed, shimmering beautifully, steel-colored in the watery sunlight.

A pause.

“Holy shit,” said the cook. He looked down at it and shuffled his feet and glanced at the frozen chicken he’d traded in return.

“Hold on a sec.” He slipped a hand into the gill plate of the salmon, dropped the fish, picked it up again, and disappeared into the galley. He returned in a moment with two more Safeway packages of frozen ground beef.

“Gee, thanks,” said Francine. She looked at them and turned to me. “Do you think these have freezer burn?”

Before I had time to answer, Ray had loosened the rope and pushed his skiff back and once again we screamed down the river.

 

 

 

T
he Yupik don’t seem to hold many grudges
.
Even after many centuries of unfair trading with the rest of the world, these kinds of exchanges are made with a minimum of reflection. Perhaps it’s because the Yupik see the wild raw materials so plentifully within their grasp as essentially mysterious. The processes by which the world synthesizes sun, water, and earth into a slab of endlessly useful pink, healthful salmon flesh are unquantifiable. What is important is that those pink slabs return each year, uninterrupted, in large enough numbers to fill the Yupik smokehouses and drying racks so that folks can make it through the winter or sell enough to educate their children and improve a community that suffers one of the highest suicide rates in the United States.

The Fair Trade Certification of the Kwik’pak Fisheries is an attempt to try to mend the relationship of native fishermen with the rest of the world. A high price is sought for the Kwik’pak catch, and much of the profits from the company go back into the community. But no matter how much I nodded in agreement when told of the good intentions behind this new kind of fair fish trading in the world, I could not get out of my mind the more basic trade that I had witnessed aboard Ray Waska’s skiff—the exchange of thirty-odd pounds of frozen, processed chicken and beef for a thirty-pound fresh king salmon from the wild currents of the Yukon.

The root of what seemed to me to be a quintessentially unfair trade stems from a more profound imbalance in the world. Whereas Alaskan salmon outnumber Alaskan humans by a ratio of fifteen hundred to one, the global human population outnumbers the global wild salmon population probably somewhere on the order of seven to one. If wild salmon were really the only option for the rest of the world to eat, then by all rights Ray Waska’s king should have cost a fortune, exponentially more than that ground chuck and those chicken parts. But unlike the Yupik Eskimo mentality, the Judeo-Christian mind is governed by a faith in improvement and transformation of the natural world. The Yupiks wait for game to arrive. Judeo-Christians see the arrival of food on their plates as something that can be scheduled and augmented by focusing effort.

As early as the time of Moses, God commanded humans to seek out, select, and breed animals and plants in a way that would differentiate them from the wild melee around them. “Thou shalt not let thy cattle breed with unlike animals,” God commanded Moses in one of the first published recommendations for controlled food culture. “Thou shalt not sow thy field with two kinds of seed.” It is a commandment to isolate and focus our attention on a discrete set of plants and animals. To dewild them from their context, so to speak, and to grow them in an efficient monoculture.

Over the last four thousand years, this dewilding of animals has been accomplished primarily through a practice that has come to be called “selective breeding.” From the time of Moses until the Industrial Revolution, we have progressively selected individuals within animal populations possessing sets of traits that suit our purposes. This “improvement” of our livestock occurred slowly at first, with animals becoming gradually more useful decade by decade. The slowness of the progress was due mostly to the fact that when humans first began selecting traits, they selected them according to what they could see. It was understood since the Roman era that a white-faced cow would have a good chance of producing another white-faced cow. A speedy sire and a quick dam were seen as good bets to create another fast horse. An ignorance of the unseen genetic truths that lay behind these traits kept humankind from delving any deeper.

This breeding by outward observation was encapsulated by the first truly systematic animal breeder, the British animal-husbandry pioneer Robert Bakewell. In the mid-eighteenth century, Bakewell coined the phrase “like begets like” and set about isolating sheep and cattle that had traits he felt were universally appealing to breeders. So confident and relentless was Bakewell in his breeding practices that he created entire family lines of sheep and cattle that still form the basis of the world’s major animal breeds. The “like begets like” school of thought continued into the early twentieth century with an ever-increasing degree of complexity, but it took a gut-sucking world depression for the next step in animal breeding to emerge.

At the height of the Great Depression, a professor at Iowa State College named Jay Laurence Lush began codifying the
internal
traits of animals into a system of breeding that selected not what individual animals looked like but rather how efficient an entire population of animals could be at turning feed into flesh. The child of farmers, Lush was forever preoccupied with the practical. No doubt he had observed through breeding on his family’s own farm that a “like begets like” approach had certain limitations. As he grew to adulthood and was increasingly surrounded by hungry countrymen who could not afford the price of meat, he began looking into how traits could be systematically and more accurately passed on to subsequent generations.

Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, Lush developed a collection of theories that distilled down to their basic elements could be summarized as this: Improving just one animal is not enough to bring about rapid change in the productivity of farm animals. The true expression of progress that we seek is the improvement of a whole population, a new race, if you will. Instead of trying to breed one ideal animal, breeders need to focus on moving the average qualities of an entire population closer to an average that is more in line with what humans can use.

And more than anything else, what humans could use out of a population of animals was more meat for less cost. In animal husbandry, feed is traditionally the biggest cost for any farmer. Before Lush and his theories were applied, many animals required as much as ten pounds of feed for every pound of meat they produced. But over time, by coming to an understanding of the genetics that regulate growth within a population at large, breeders were able to apply Lush’s principles and accelerate growth rates so that the “feed conversion ratio”—that is, the number of pounds of feed required to produce one pound of meat—could be lowered substantially. It is this accomplishment that enabled the galley cook of that Alaskan oil tanker to buy ten pounds of chicken parts from Safeway for the astronomically low price of $19.99. The animal that produced that meat came to market twice as fast after consuming only half as much feed as an animal that Robert Bakewell would have raised.