The 100-Mile Diet by Alisa Smith

Author:Alisa Smith [Smith, Alisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307371171
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2007-09-14T17:00:00+00:00

First, the open ocean. Everything here comes from or returns to the sea. Archibald Menzies came aboard the sloop Discovery, an aging naturalist on behalf of His Majesty King George III. On April 7, 1792, he made his first observation regarding this rain-forest coast. The ship had sailed, he wrote, into a mass of Medusa velella, “a very delicate blue” that stretched from horizon to horizon. It took nearly five days to sail through the sea of jellyfish, while around the ship whales surfaced and blew.

There were whales, yes, and not only the scattering of killer whales that, nearly two centuries later, would be so reviled that an anti-aircraft gun was set up near one port town with a thought to killing them faster. Picture the steam vessel Douglas in 1868 at the mouth of Baynes Sound, now famous for oysters, as hundreds of humpback whales pass by, their dead-man’s songs groaning up through the hull. As many as 600 humpbacks might have lived year-round in the straits and sounds where Seattle and Vancouver are now. They would have hunted the herring. The little fish came in numbers that biologists now call a “mega-stock,” but the language of science fails to capture the bounty. Better: fishermen’s memories of spawning runs so thick that the ocean floor can’t be seen and whole bays turn white with milt. Then there was the phenomenon known as the “herring ball,” in which the fish, driven by unseen predators below, exploded at the water’s surface with a sound like some massive exhalation, the water boiling silver, the herring caught between the sea and the sky. The Haisla tell a story of a time when people were afraid to paddle up a certain passage because a monster appeared to have settled at its entrance. It was huge and white, and when it opened its mouth a maddening cry roared down the channel. The monster turned out to be gulls, tens of thousands of them, feeding on herring. The immense flock would rise and fall on the water, a giant mouth opening and closing.

As the herring spawn ended, the oolichan came, each fish a hand-span long and so rich in oil it could be dried and fitted with a wick through the mouth to burn like a candle. They rushed in vast shoals to the Fraser River, spawning in shallows barely deep enough to cover their backs. These were the images of spring, like the arrival of millions—literal millions—of migrating western sandpipers. Sandpipers in spring, in the autumn, the snow geese, and in winter the endless dark flocks of surf scoters with their bold orange, red, and yellow bills. In their season, the largest gatherings of bald eagles in North America, lining the riverbanks by the thousands. In their season, the black brant geese. The coast pilgrim and artist Jim Spilsbury remembered them “by the thousands and millions,” covering acres of the winter sea, or rising as one bird with a sound like thunder to “literally darken the whole western sky.

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