Four Fish Read online

  In 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:

  “In the lower forty-eight, people are sort of arranged. They know when they get out of school what they’re gonna do, what they’re gonna achieve. In Alaska it’s all mixed up. It’s like everybody’s running even along a mud track. But then all of a sudden, someone throws sand under one guy’s feet and zoom! Off he goes. And you’re like, ‘How’d he do that?’ Well, I’m kind of that person. A few years back, someone threw some sand under my feet, and off I went.”

  Soon we arrived at a bunkhouse and an adjoining office building. Both structures were tidy and snug-looking and semi-sunk in that same gray mud. A sign hung in front of the office:KWIK’PAK FISHING COMPANY

  NEQSUKEGCIKINA

  “I asked an elder in a village upriver a ways what the Yupik word for ‘good fishing’ was, and that’s what he came up with,” Jac said. “Well, when I had that sign done, I showed it to the Yupik here in Emmo to see what they thought of it. They just kind of stared and said, ‘Something to do with fishing, right?’ Turns out the dialect’s different in every village.” Following this (and many other things he would say over the course of the next few days), Jac let out a smoky “Wha-ha-ha-ha-ha”—a raucous guffaw that brought to mind a cartoon character on the verge of launching a grandiose, doomed plan. “I tell you,” he said, recovering from his laughing/coughing episode, “this thing is gonna kill me.”

  “This thing,” as Jac likes to call the recently founded Kwik’pak Fisheries, is something both very new and extremely old in the ten-thousand-year interaction of man and salmon. What makes it old is its basic principle-native people in small boats fishing for wild salmon. What makes it new is the same principle—native people in small boats fishing for wild salmon. But unlike those who run the large canneries and fishing operations to the south in Alaska with a transient army of seasonal laborers, Kwik’pak’s founders are working toward something different. Instead of white men coming along catching all the fish or ruining the fishery with a dam as they did at Turners Falls, this time the Native Americans will reap the profits. This time they will sustainably harvest the fish, brand it with a hyperlocal name, and sell it back to the white man at a premium. Kwik’pak is the only seafood company in the world that has earned recognition from the Fair Trade Federation for its labor and compensation practices. It is native-owned and largely native-operated, with the exception of a few outside managers and salespeople like Jac Gadwill. If all goes well, the Yupik board of directors of Kwik’pak hope that these particular native people catching these particular Yukon king salmon will bring a product to market that will be one of the most valuable fish on earth. How and why this is a possibility is the modern history of salmon itself, a history that is unfolding even as I write these words.

  “Why don’t you go take a look around town,” Jac told me as he headed up the ad hoc staircase to his office. “I’m gonna go call Fish and Game and see if we can’t get us an opening. I’II try the sugar-and-honey approach. If that doesn’t work, I’ll get my Lithuanian blood up.”

  Aside from the Kwik’pak Fisheries, an Ace Hardware store, and the local division of the state Department of Fish and Game, there is pretty much nowhere for the residents of Emmonak, Alaska, to go. Nor is there anywhere outside of town to go. Alaska is split at a diagonal roughly seventy-thirty between the northwest and the southeast. The southeasterly 30 percent has roads, outlet stores, Mc-Donald’s franchises, nail salons, psychiatrists, Californians’ summer-houses, and a phone number you can call if you’d like to claim a moose that you saw killed on the highway. The northwesterly 70 percent of Alaska has very little of all that. Seen from above, Emmonak is very clearly in the middle of that emptiness—a gray divot dug up from a massive golf course of hundred-mile-long neon-green moss fairways and water hazards bigger than cities. No roads connect it to anything. And yet walking down the village’s abbreviated thoroughfare, you can’t get away from the traffic. Grandmothers in babushka scarves, fathers with sons riding piggyback, even children clearly under the legal driving age all cruise their all-terrain vehicles up and down the hillocks in the road, shouting in the cold, foggy air.

  The Yupik nation barely noticed me as they zoomed around town. A woman in the distance called out enigmatically, “Sweetie, Sweetie!” A ways down, in the yard of a kind of jigsaw-puzzle house made of salvaged sky blue plywood, a man grasped the eye socket of a bloody walrus head with his left hand and sawed away at a tusk with his right. “Sweetie, Sweetie!” the voice called. A purebred pug appeared out of the fog and sprinted toward the voice. From the second story of another jigsaw-puzzle house, a man scolded, “You sleep all day! Good-for-nothing—you can’t even catch fish! Damn Eskimo!” And for those who can catch fish, a yellow sign posted throughout the town by the local Fish and Game Department declared:From June 1—July 15 a person may not possess king salmon taken for subsistence use unless both tips (lobes) of the tail fin have been removed. Clipping must be done before the person conceals the salmon from plain view.

  On this day the salmon situation was making the Yupik nation particularly idle. Everyone was waiting for the handful of white men and women at the Department of Fish and Game at the far end of town to determine if enough salmon had escaped into the upper river to allow for a commercial “opening” of the fishery. Every year in every major river system in Alaska, Fish and Game sets what they call “escapement goals,”—that is, a total quantity of salmon that must escape capture so that a sufficiently large number of adults make it to their spawning beds to lay enough eggs to ensure a viable next generation. When I arrived in Emmonak, the Department of Fish and Game was in a “conservative regime.” They had been rattled since 2000-2001, when the Yukon king-salmon returns dropped far below their 53,000-fish average for still-unknown reasons. The fish’s numbers had been slowly inching their way back up again, but the year of my visit, escapement goals were not being met, and Fish and Game was proceeding with a degree of caution that was making people like Jac Gadwill exasperated. Jac mentioned that he had heard rumors of death threats.

  But seen in the greater context of what has happened with salmon around the world, it’s easy to understand Fish and Game’s caution. When it comes to salmon, Alaska is a little like a wise old man
sitting on a far northern perch overlooking the destruction that humanity has wrought farther south. Almost visibly, the shock wave from the global near eradication of wild salmon seems written into the landscape of this richest of seafood states.

  Before the Industrial Revolution, the world’s population of wild salmon was likely to have been four or five times greater than it is today. Even in areas where there was no direct outlet to the sea, “landlocked” varieties of salmon evolved and used large lakes, like Lake Ontario, as their own private oceans. It is not for metaphorical reasons that the principal river draining into Lake Ontario from New York State is called the Salmon River. Nearly every river in Northern Europe, including the Thames and the Rhine, also teemed with them. The oft-told story of prisoners rioting on account of being served too many lobster suppers in colonial New England applies to salmon dinners and Scottish prisoners as well.

  But salmon abundance requires a set of river characteristics that have stood in direct opposition to human industrial development, and salmon were among the first fish to suffer extreme extirpation at the hands of humans. Salmon need rivers that are free-flowing, clean and oxygen-rich, and protected by significant timber cover. One by one, each of these characteristics has been removed from the world’s major salmon rivers. Free-flowing water has been eliminated first by small milldams and later by large hydropower complexes. Clean, oxygenated water has been voided by agricultural runoff and industrial effluent. Timber cover has been robbed outright by logging. And though these factors were well established and well known to be key to salmon survival since the 1800s, wild salmon as a commodity have never been economically valuable enough to deter the more immediately profitable human activities that destroy salmon. A remarkable memo from Julius Krug, the secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior under HarryTruman, basically admits this.

  “The overall benefits to the Pacific Northwest from a thoroughgoing [hydroelectric] development of the Snake and Columbia Rivers,” Krug wrote in the 1940s on the eve of the construction of the dams that decimated salmon runs 16 million strong, “are such that the present salmon runs must be sacrificed.” Only in retrospect and in the face of steep declines do humans smack their foreheads in dumbfounded realization and reach out, Lorax-like, for the last vestiges of wild salmon slipping from their outstretched hands.

  In the late 1980s when I left college for a while, thinking I might disappear into the West and work as a fisheries biologist, I participated in one of these attempts at salmon salvage in rural Oregon. There, in the Willamette River Basin, I took habitat inventory of tree cover, built current diverters to create slack water for salmon juveniles, and trudged up and down streams all day long with a lazy career fisheries bureaucrat who listed on his employee self-evaluation that his greatest fear in life was falling into a river and drowning. We were looking for signs of spawning spring king salmon, a relative of the Yukon king and a fish that had lived in the Willamette River Valley for millennia. It was said to be one of the more delicious strains of the species. In my three months of stream surveying, I sighted one fish. To date there are very few examples of successful salmon restoration, for a variety of reasons. Often failures stem from the resistance of regulators to remove dams or restore streamside forests, but the vanishing or depletion of the original genetic material of the specific salmon run in question makes all restorations something of an uphill battle.

  On an evolutionary scale, though, salmon have withstood epic cataclysms before—indeed, salmon species’ exceptionally broad stock of genes buffers them against periodic and dramatic contractions of population and range. In the 50 million years of salmons’ existence on earth, lava flows, ice ages, and the rearranging of mountains have wiped out thousands of miles of salmon territory on a regular basis. But after each contraction, the richness of salmons’ genetic material has allowed populations to opportunistically seize on new habitat when it emerges. What makes the contemporary man-made salmon crisis unique and alarming is the effect humanity is having on the genome of all salmon species, simultaneously, throughout their global ranges. Pacific salmon are now extinct in 40 percent of the rivers where they were known to exist in California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho and highly diminished in the runs that remain. In the whole of the Atlantic Ocean, wild salmon populations hover somewhere around five hundred thousand individuals compared with what may once have been a population of tens if not hundreds of millions of fish. It is in the wake of the salmon destruction carried out in the past centuries that fisheries’ managers in Alaska have zeroed in on the maintenance of genetic diversity as one of the most important factors in preserving wild salmon. But they have had to do this in the face of ever-increasing demand. In the last three decades, the harvest of Alaska salmon more than doubled, to over 200 million animals annually.

  But even with demand growing yearly, managers reserve the right to act conservatively when they think things are going in the wrong direction. This was why the people on Emmonak’s main street, the people who fish the Yukon, had nothing to do. Salmon enter the Yukon Delta in bursts, and each burst represents a slightly different genetic subpopulation. After years of watching salmon runs implode, fisheries managers have learned that maintaining diversity within a given population is critical. Each burst may be headed for a slightly different bit of the Yukon’s nearly two-thousand-mile-long water-shed, and Fish and Game makes the argument that the more these sub-subpopulations survive and thrive, the richer the overall salmon genome is and the more adaptable and elastic the population will remain in the event of a crisis.

  At the same time, Fish and Game has to make allowances for another population living on the river: Yupik Eskimos. Fisheries managers will permit “subsistence openings” for a limited number of hours, during which time the Yupik can catch salmon for their personal consumption. These fish have to be readily identifiable as subsistence catch and not for sale (hence all those yellow signs talking about the clipping of tail lobes). Only once the number of salmon in the river exceeds both the escapement and subsistence goals does Fish and Game allow a “commercial opening.” And when a commercial opening takes place, the Yupik can sell what they’ve caught to Kwik’pak Fisheries.

  On the Yukon a commercial salmon opening occurs in a relatively civilized fashion. There are only two fishing companies working the area, and the tribal unity of the people makes it basically a collaborative effort. In the more populous salmon regions to the south, where lower-forty-eighters often run the show, the moment Fish and Game declares an opening a dangerous game of waterborne, motorized rugby begins. Fish and Game draws a line of passage for salmon with floating buoys in the river, beyond which boats are not allowed to fish. Dozens of boats crowd the lines, bumping up against one another. Some boats are jet-powered, with no descending propeller, and can skip over other fishers’ nets. As the day progresses, Fish and Game gradually reduces the fishing area. There is a crush as the managers draw in the line. If you cross that line, you can receive an initial fifteen-hundred-dollar fine. If you do it multiple times, you get points on your fishing license, a bit like drunk driving. If it goes on too many times, they take your license and your boat.

  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 fa
vorably 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.

  An 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.