THERE’S A MAJOR miracle happening now, and you won’t read about it anywhere but here.
This incredible event happens yearly hereabouts, but it is not given its due regard. In fact, most people ignore it.
Like the tourist I tried to educate last week while peering into the shallow water, pointing out the new life that had just emerged from the gravel.
“Look there,” I told the tourist. “There is a 40-pound king salmon. And there is a 20-pound coho.”
“Those are just tiny fish,” the tourist protested.
And they were correct.
The baby salmon had yet to grow up. Barely an inch long, these little fish had been spawned last fall beneath a layer of gravel, slowly maturing as the floods of winter roared above them.
With the coming of spring, the water dropped and the tiny fish rose through the gravel to emerge in the shallows in schools, darting through the rocks unheralded, unappreciated and almost unknown, as they have each year since the continental ice sheet melted.
Then, I explained to the tourist how the baby salmon migrate down the river and make the miracle transformation from fresh to salt water, spending years swimming from the Olympic Peninsula to the Aleutian Islands and back to their home river to fight their way upriver for a chance to migrate into my smokehouse.
It’s something we take for granted every year, but the hatching of the baby salmon is arguably the most important environmental event on the Olympic Peninsula.
Salmon are the basis of our ecosystem. They represent an energy exchange from the ocean to the mountains and back through the transport of nutrients by the migrating salmon that spawn and die, depositing their bodies throughout the forest — nurturing everything from the largest tree to the tiniest insect and nearly every creature in between.
And yet, this relationship between the salmon and the land has become twisted backward to the point where we plant trees to grow the salmon instead of planting salmon to grow the trees. We protect predators that are endangering the salmon, then wonder why the salmon are endangered. We spend millions replacing culverts on creeks with no salmon, instead of investing in proven methods of restoring fish in streams that have no salmon.
It all boils down to a lack of respect. Maybe the Native Americans had it right.
Salmon were considered people. They lived as people in the House of the Salmon at the bottom of the ocean. When it was time to run up the rivers, they put on salmon robes and migrated up our rivers.
The salmon were willing to sacrifice their bodies to the people and animals that fed upon them.
As long as they were accorded the respect that they were due, the salmon would run forever. That was the basis for the First Salmon Ceremony practiced by every tribe throughout the range of the salmon. Where the first salmon of the season was honored, shared and its remains washed and returned to the river in hopes that more would come.
Instead, today we find a perfect storm of deranged governmental policies that allow a strip-mining of the ocean, ineffective salmon restoration efforts and exploding pinniped and predatory bird populations that has resulted in salmon going extinct in 40 percent of their historic range in the Pacific Northwest. Where 19 populations of salmon and steelhead are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, with more candidates proposed as you read this.
All of this proving the belief that, if we disrespect the salmon, they will not run forever.
_________
Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist” whose column appears here every Wednesday.
He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.
