Salmon, People, and Place: A Biologist's Search for Salmon Recovery

Introduction

1 Introduction This is the essence of tragedy, to have meant well and made woe. —Robinson Jeffers1 Experience has a bitter taste in fisheries management. —Callum Roberts2 Rain—steady, heavy rain—so much rain that air and water merge into a single, wet grayness. I’m listening to the steady drumming of raindrops on the hood of my jacket while I look over the clear-cut. The ground is covered with a tangle of limbs and the trunks of non-merchantable trees. Near the center of this field of logging debris is a small stream and it’s that stream that brought me here today, to see if the loggers left the required number of trees along the stream bank. One glance at the clear-cut tells me what I need to know. All the riparian trees are gone.3 About a dozen small trees scattered across the clear-cut did manage to escape the chain saw. The largest are no more than three to five inches in diameter. I head toward the stream even though it’s clear that the rules intended to protect it were ignored. Crossing the clear-cut is like running an obstacle course. My feet rarely touch the ground as I slip and stumble on the rain-slicked branches and logs. It is a small miracle that I fall only once before reaching the stream. It’s a small stream. There are places where I can stand with a foot on each bank, but it is home to several cutthroat trout, and now, with the riparian trees gone, their home is in jeopardy. This is a clear violation of the rules. I’ll complain—and 2 Salmon, People, and Place so will others—even though I already know the response: “The lumber milled from those trees has more economic value than the few little trout that might be affected.” That the loggers broke the rules doesn’t carry much weight out here on the west end of the Olympic Peninsula. Even if the forest managers could be convinced that what happened here is a mistake, even if they could be persuaded to use a different yardstick to measure the value of the forest, the stream, and the trout, nothing can remedy the problem that this violation creates for the fish. It will take at least fifty to eighty years to replace the trees that once protected this stream. I linger on the stream bank for several minutes thinking about the cutthroat’s fate, until a trickle of cold water finds its way past my rain jacket and runs down my back. The cold water abruptly brings me back to the present and it reminds me of the hard slog back to the truck. When I turn to leave, I see something that freezes me in place. Across the creek, about forty or fifty yards away, is one of the few surviving trees—a western redcedar about two or three inches in diameter and probably fifteen or sixteen feet high. The spindly cedar is bent over so that its top nearly touches the ground. What grabs my attention is a golden eagle perched on the highest point of the arch formed by the bowed cedar. We stare at each other through the rain and across the debris that was once a forest. I’ve seen many eagles, but never on such an unlikely perch. Maybe the limbs and trunks strewn across this clear-cut are the remains of the eagle’s home. wu It has been a couple of decades since the eagle and I stared at each other through the rain. The image is still fresh and returns to my mind’s eye from time to time. It’s one of those events that become a haunting memory, like a burning question whose answer always lies just beyond the next experience. While driving home that day, I continued to think about the eagle. I recalled a passage from Barry Lopez’s book Of Wolves and Men, in which he describes an intense stare between predator and prey; a silent exchange of information that either triggers an attack or breaks it off. Lopez called it “the conversation of death” and pointed out that this silent communication can only occur between wild animals. Domesticated animals have had it bred out of them.4 Was the strange encounter with the eagle a different kind of conversation, a conversation of blame, reproach, or rebuke? For several days, I couldn...