Song for the Blue Ocean: Encounters Along the World's Coasts and Beneath the Seas by Safina Carl

Author:Safina, Carl [Safina, Carl]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2010-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Dan Daley introduces me to Jerry Bouck, a large man and a professor emeritus from Oregon State University. Bouck spent an earlier decade in the employ of the Bonneville Power Administration. Like the Columbia itself, Bouck has a lot of energy. Bouck says overfishing in the early years has a lot to do with the present declines. You had twenty-five hundred commercial gillnetters on the river. You had fish wheels going day and night. You had haul seine—net crews. You had dipnetters, and so on. “If you wanted to declare war on the salmon, you’d have had to go about it the way they did. This year I just tore up my salmon fishing stamp. I just felt I didn’t want to hurt one anymore.”

Daley has to leave, and Bouck and I stroll toward the Bonneville Dam visitor center. This is a power plant complex that is expecting company. There are carpets, plaques telling how a generator works, an information desk, and, on the floor to guide your progress among the exhibits, yellow arrows with salmon painted in each one. Any visitor who sets foot here is in a great and continual public-relations hammerlock. Part of the exhibit says, “For centuries, Indians have waited for the fish to return to Celilo Falls. Treaties now guarantee their fishing rights.” This is as close to misleading as it gets. It doesn’t say that the falls are now gone, under the reservoir held behind a dam. There’s a photograph of a salmon leaping up a falls, and it says, “Salmon return to the place of their release.” It doesn’t say they return to the place of their origin; they are subtly inculcating a salmon-are-made-by-humans perspective.

We take the elevator up and out to the fish ladder. The floors, instead of being numbered 1, 2, 3, bear only their elevation above sea level. After I figure out what all the numbers mean, I find it amusing—almost charming—but Jerry huffs, “Only the Army Corps of Engineers would do something that confusing.”

Bonneville was the first and lowest dam on the river, and closing it would have eliminated 90 percent of the Columbia Basin as a habitat for the world’s largest chinook salmon and steelhead populations. Because of the outcry from the fishing industry, something never tried before—a fish ladder—was designed at the midnight hour before construction. Jerry has postulated a reason why the dam was designed without ladders, and it is the first and only one I’ve heard that blames fishermen: “Since only ten percent of the fish were left by then because of overfishing, maybe everyone figured salmon were on the way out even without the dam.” Then, as if to be fair, he adds, “Or, maybe they just didn’t care.”

Some fish are visible in the spilling water in the ladder, which is sort of a flight of concrete stairs for fish. Each step is a foot of elevation, and there are sixty steps in the ladder. The ladder zigzags its way down the dam in a series of switchbacks, and the fish labor up like Sherpas tilting toward Everest.

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