Upstream by Langdon Cook

Author:Langdon Cook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

Pictures of salmon and lyrical descriptions of their anatomy and life cycles alternated with moody landscape photographs. A hand-drawn diagram depicted the process. At its heart, the reef net is a deception. Imagine a funnel two hundred feet long, with a mouth just as wide, all of it formed by rope lines. Tied to these lines are meter-long blue or green ribbons that wave in the current, simulating shoals. Migrating salmon enter at the mouth and follow the reef as it narrows. At any time they could burst through the waving ribbons and be on their way, but they’re fooled and continue forward as the reef constricts ever tighter until they are in the trap—a fifty-by-fifty-foot net strung between two small barges, each about forty feet long, that hangs out of sight below the reef’s tapered exit. A spotter posted in a crow’s nest above calls out to his crew when the salmon are directly over the net, which is then hoisted with electric winches in a spray of cascading water and leaping fish. All hands on deck rush to the net and bring in the catch. In a matter of seconds the salmon, maybe scores of them, are lifted from the bay’s currents and guided into holding tanks, still alive.

The spotter’s stand is a special place. Wearing polarized sunglasses, the spotter waits and watches from his perch twenty feet above the deck. As Woodcock writes: “The stand is a world apart.” Nature’s theater reveals a new act every day—every moment—in the tidal showcase, with perpetually shifting winds and skies, the waves “kissed with different glares and colors.” But time and modernity have caught up to the reef netters. The advent of the motor changed everything. “A noisy throbbing drone blasted over waters that were once so silent. And boats moved around in pursuit of salmon rather than waiting quiet in one place.” The author laments new technology, greedy fishermen, depleted fish runs. The book ends with a Hindu poem:

O mother earth!

O wind, my father!

O fire, my friend!

O water, my kinsman!

O sky, my noble brother!

I salute you all

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