Mist on the River by Michael Checchio

Author:Michael Checchio
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-04-19T16:00:00+00:00

One of the country’s loneliest stretches of coastline begins somewhere north of San Francisco and extends all the way up through Oregon almost to Portland. Blue sea and white surf contrast with deep green forests and weathered gray barns. Here folks live in small coastal towns and rural hamlets, and their livelihoods depend on logging, fishing, farming, dairy ranching, sheep herding, and occasionally pot smuggling. America’s best vintage wines are grown in vineyards inland. Along the fogbound coast, Victorian gingerbread homes and white New England fishing settlements sit atop ocean palisades. The forested coastal mountains are drained by a labyrinth of purling salmon and steelhead rivers. That part of the region lying in California has come to be known as the Redwood Empire.

Close by the Oregon border, California’s Smith River meets the ocean amid the majesty of coastal redwoods. This is a steep and lonely region of cold summer fogs and winter rains. The Smith drains the Siskiyou Mountains, one of the few ranges in the western United States that runs from east to west. Like California’s Coastal Range, the Siskiyous are entirely free of glacial ice. Somehow the advancing glaciers of the last ice age missed them. Rivers born in the Siskiyous, rivers like the Smith, and the Chetco, which is just over the border in Oregon, run with exceptional clarity where they have not been logged. The Smith River flows either emerald or jade depending on whether it has rained, and it is always the first river in northern California to drop and clear after a heavy storm.

I have driven six hours from my home in San Francisco to be on the Smith River. It has been five months since I caught my first steelhead in the North Umpqua. The Smith has become my winter steelhead river of choice. I discovered it shortly after moving to northern California. I was a trout fisherman gone wrong. I had given up my first love in order to pursue steelhead. I still loved trout; but steelhead filled me with wonder.

At Jedediah Smith State Park, I found myself looking at frothing creeks feeding into the Smith River from an unspoiled forest of Douglas fir, western hemlock, cedar, and old-growth redwood. Redwood National Park in California was created out of three existing state parks, Jedediah Smith being one. The Smith’s magnificent redwood forest has never been logged. The Smith River itself has never been dammed. It is the only river of any consequence left in California not to have a dam on it. In autumn, the sylvan stream hosts vast runs of king salmon, and these are the largest king salmon seen in any river in California. In winter, California’s biggest steelhead arrive, brutes weighing up to twenty-five pounds.

Everyone living up here seems to be either a fisherman, a logger, or a pot farmer. Or a prison guard. California’s maximum-security penitentiary at Pelican Bay is close by. I stop at a wide spot in the road that comprises the entire hamlet of Hiouchi, which is just downstream of the forks of the Smith.

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