Mountain in the Clouds: A Search for the Wild Salmon by Bruce Brown (review)

Reviews 165 Most of the time the boy wanders alone from encounter to encounter, seeking some friends and avoiding others, luring the reader into a nostalgic yet nightmarish past. “I can hear the sound of redwing blackbirds and the wind blowing hard against the cattails,” the narrator recalls. “They rustle in the wind like ghost swords in battle and there is the steady lapping of the pond at the shore’s edge, which I belong to with my imagination.” My imagination meets the narrator, his boyhood self, and the 1940s’grotesques like the middleaged fishermen at the shore’sedge too. There I try to reconstruct Brautigan’s world without making the implicit so explicit that the tragi-comic evocation isdestroyed. So I choose not to explain the February day in 1948 when a childhood distintegrated. To learn about that event, “so the wind won’t blow it all away,” the reader must approach the rainswept apple orchard on his own. Suffice it to say that all our laughter turns to tears when baseball, Mom, apple pie, and Miss American Pie disappear into the American Gothic of Richard Brautigan’s mind. ANN RONALD, University of Nevada/Reno Mountain in the Clouds: A Search for the Wild Salmon. By Bruce Brown. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982. 239 pages, $12.95.) Tributes to vanishing species of wildlife are common these days, but few are as dramatic and effective as Bruce Brown’s treatment of the wild salmon of the Pacific Northwest. He describes the ancient and frantic game of oneupmanship among greedy fishermen and packers. The cannery owners built traps in front of the Indians’ weirs, the gill-netters went out in front of the traps, the purse seiners moved beyond the gill-netters, and finally the trailers got to the head of the line by pursuing the fish into the ocean itself. . . . [Official studies] have shown that 95 percent of some coastal Chinook runs are taken by trailers before the fish can return to their native rivers. But overfishing is only one of many threats; even more devastating to the salmon is the rapid elimination of river breeding habitat by on-shore enemies: irrigators who tap precious water and turn spawning grounds into dry-washes; loggers, mill operators, manufacturers, and oil distributors who pollute streams with silt, sludge, and other waste; and dam operators who block salmon from their spawning grounds in upper reaches of streams. Life even downstream from a dam is perilous for young salmon, who often bury themselves alive: The normal response of young salmon to a falling water level is to dive into the gravel substrata. . . . Juvenile salmon will continue to dig to a depth of several feet as the water recedes. .. . On the Skagit 166 Western American Literature River, the Seattle City Light dams have killed as many as 239,000 young salmon in a single night when they ran a high flow until the end of the peak consumption period around 11 p.m., and then reduced the flow sharply until the next morning. Brown documents the longhistoryof abuse which has reduced the great Pacific salmon and steelhead runs to near-trickles, illustrating the practices of greedy and ignorant men who have perpetrated these abuses and, in many cases, con­ tinue to do so. We cringe for both the salmon and the citizens of Washington as arrogant WPPSS officials bulldoze through local opposition to continue a faltering nuclear power project financed by “the equivalent of a $31,000 mort­ gage on every household in the state.” Even fisheries biologists and other would-be friends of the salmon often contribute to the destructive practices: we recognize the tragic potential of good intentions asBrown explains the hazards of misguided attempts to replace the wild salmon with hatchery-reared fish. All of this sounds depressing, and it is, but the story is not without its brighter moments and admirable men. And it’s at least slightly comforting to know that we still have writers as sane, articulate, dedicated, and talented as Brown to speak for the salmon and other imperilled wildlife. His documenta­ tion of evils is objective and concise, his description vital and colorful. He recalls a...