Coast Range by Nick Neely

Author:Nick Neely
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619028593
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2016-10-07T04:00:00+00:00

We pulled into the Denman Wildlife Area, Chuck’s headquarters, which rests in Central Point, adjacent to Medford, in the middle of the broad, fertile Rogue Valley. The unassuming office sat beside a tranquil pond with a view of snow-capped Mount McLoughlin, 9,495 feet in elevation, to the hazy east in the Cascades. It was a World War II army building turned faux chalet: forestry brown, with evergreen shutters sporting the cutout silhouettes of rising trout and antlered bucks. We rumbled past to a rear gravel lot and unhitched the trailer beside an aged red barn with dust holding the light in its cavernous mouth. The fish would benefit from an afternoon’s sunbath.

Then we hit the highway, I-5, heading west a half hour to Grants Pass to drop off some little steelhead hitching a sloshy ride with us in a plastic trash can. Steelhead and salmon morph from newly hatched alevin to fry, to parr, to smolt, the stage when the fish silvers—ocean camouflage—and heads for salt. These were parr. At the hatchery, they had been netted from one of its concrete ponds for “an experiment.” They were guinea pigs, canaries. They were going to be placed into a tiny creek, and if they survived, then ODFW would build a temporary barrier and pour in thousands more to “imprint” on the flow for several weeks. When the grown fish returned from the ocean, those survivors would rediscover their first stream—steelhead might be able to smell it from thirteen miles away—and linger, trying to find a way up despite an impassable dam. It was yet another ploy to bring luck to anglers.

To my surprise, we pulled into a skate park: That’s what a nursery stream can look like these days. In flat-brimmed caps and baggy jeans sewn with graffiti letters, boys were swooping in and out of the smooth and sinuous dugout, a small concrete canyon, while across the lot a ditch ran between banks of mown grass: Skunk Creek. The water did look skunky, and most of this stretch was in full sun. But an incoming culvert dumped a froth in a shadowed pool, and maybe the fish would survive there.

As Chuck tentatively backed his truck toward the curb, Larry furtively slammed the butt of his fist against the door. It sounded as if we’d hit something, and we jumped. “Asshole,” hooted Chuck, with nothing like true irritability. A local, salt-haired volunteer in rubber boots was waiting for us, a member of the Middle Rogue Steelheaders. He would coordinate feeding and monitoring the parr. Chuck dipped his green net into the trash can and turned it inside out, a perforated pocket, to count them as they tumbled like loose, living change into his palm. Ten, eleven . . . twelve. They had faint stripes on their sides like the shadows of new grass. He put them in a small wire-mesh trap, hinged, the shape of a barrel.

Larry and I looked on as Chuck sat on the tailgate to slide on hipwaders, and then he and the volunteer carefully climbed down the grassy slope to the pool half in shade.

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