Salmon by Jude Isabella

Author:Jude Isabella
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-77160-046-0
Publisher: Rocky Mountain Books
Published: 2014-11-13T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

Life, Anthropology and Everything

They seemed to live on remembered things, to be so related to the seashore and the rocky hills and the loneliness that they are these things. To ask about the country is like asking about themselves. “How many toes have you?” “What, toes? Let’s see – of course, ten. I have known them all my life, I never thought to count them. Of course it will rain tonight, I don’t know why. Something in me tells me I will rain tonight. Of course, I am the whole thing, now that I think about it. I ought to know when I will rain.”

—JOHN STEINBECK,

The Log from the Sea of Cortez, 63

“YOU GO WHERE IT hasn’t been tilled, and you just don’t get as many,” Ed the boat driver says as he speeds us to Waiatt Bay, at the northern end of Quadra Island.

Anne Salomon, an experimental ecologist at Simon Fraser University (SFU), nods and glances at a chart on her iPhone.

“If you work the beach all the time,” Ed says, “you get more clams.”

Clams? After spending so much time in salmon central, I’m out with a team of ecologists and archaeologists, the scientific equivalent of the Rebel Alliance attempting to explode the Death Star. The Death Star, in this case, is the Pacific Coast’s salmon-centric universe. The Rebel Alliance aims to reinvent the historical narrative. They dare to assert it took more than seasonal salmon runs to feed villages up and down the coast. The people cultivated the entire seascape and landscape. The world was much richer and more diverse than the salmon-centric worldview allows.

Oddly enough, one of the Rebel Alliance leaders has a name only one letter off from the name of the fish she plans to dethrone. “So, you think tilling the beach mimics clam habitat?” Salomon asks, her smile widening, a smile reflected in her green eyes. Salomon’s skin is a duskier shade than most blondes and though it’s May, she has the same base tan as other field biologists who spend much of their time outdoors. Not quite 40, the scientist could still be mistaken for a grad student.

“I would think so,” Ed says. He has been a resident of Quadra Island since he was ten, but he’s quick to point out he’s still not a “local,” even after 40 years or so. Like Salomon and other field biologists, the outdoors is painted on his face.

“You and I have the same hypothesis,” says Salomon, as we skim through an area called Salmon Narrows. Waiatt Bay is accessible only by boat, or by foot from Kanish Bay, which is accessible from Granite Bay, where the road ends on the north side of the island. There used to be a fish farm in Salmon Narrows, directly in the path of migrating salmon, which is ironic, considering salmon already streamed by en masse.

“They moved the farm,” Ed says, “but still, I don’t think the blueback coho are coming back.”

It’s spring 2011 and the project that Salomon

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