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

Side Channel 3 - Visit to the River Machine

91 Side Channel 3 Visit to the River Machine We would come to agree that henceforth no river should be appropriated in its entirety, nor be constrained to flow against its nature in some rigid, utilitarian straitjacket nor be abstracted ruthlessly from its dense ecological pattern to become a single abstract commodity having nothing but a cash value. —Donald Worster1 Several years ago, I took I-84 out of Portland and headed up the Columbia River. I wanted to see firsthand what was being done to track the migration of juvenile salmon past John Day Dam. I drove under a thick layer of fog. It had crept inland, following the river all the way to the western edge of the gorge. The heavy fog cooled the lower half of the canyon. At the same time, I knew that, above the fog, the upper wall of the canyon was baking under a bright sun. Near the river, the branches of Douglas-fir, hemlock, and western redcedar combed water out of the moist air, creating a steady rain-like drip. I knew I would spend most of the day examining various kinds of machines and other forms of technology, so I pulled off the freeway and took a little walk in the woods and listened to the condensed fog drip onto the duff of the forest floor. After I had passed the City of Hood River, green patches of irrigated crops dotted the dry brown meadows and hillsides, a sign that I had passed into the Cascade rain shadow. Further east, the rain shadow 92 Salmon, People, and Place deepened so by the time I reached Rufus, Oregon, the Douglas-fir and cedar were gone. Sagebrush, a few scattered patches of the native bunch grasses, and the ubiquitous foreigner, cheat grass, covered the hills. At the little town of Rufus I pulled off the interstate and drove to a mostly empty strip mall and parked in front of the field office for National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). NMFS biologists were going to conduct the tour of the facilities and equipment used to monitor juvenile salmon migrating past John Day Dam. After clearing security, we drove along the top of the dam to a place where several biologists wearing hard hats were working. While the tour was getting organized, I walked over to the upstream edge of the dam and looked over the guardrail. The dark water appeared to be dead still. Juvenile Chinook salmon swam along the face of the dam a foot or so below the surface. They swam back and forth like animals in a zoo pacing in their cage. Their large size said hatchery fish and their silver color said smolts on their way to the sea. I knew that somewhere below these visible fish were many others following the suck of water into the turbines buried in the dam’s concrete bowels. Many of them are screened out of the water and shunted into gate wells before they reach the rotating blades of the turbines. The gate wells are large shafts cut into the dam’s concrete extending from the turbine screens to the surface of the dam. I looked down a gate well at the black water about thirty feet below and saw a solitary smolt swimming near the surface. I watched the little salmon for several minutes and thought about the journey that had brought it here and the dangers that still lay before it. The smolt was obviously stressed, swimming with its head partially out of the water. It appeared to be looking up at me while it swam in circles, lost and hopeless. I took out my notebook and wrote these lines: At the bottom of a deep shaft Staring up from the gloom A solitary smolt Unaware it is doomed Juvenile salmon diverted into a gate well enter a trap that is periodically hoisted to the surface of the dam. Once the trap is free of Side Channel 3 93 the gate well, the juvenile salmon are flushed into a large plastic pipe that carries them into a building about forty feet away. Inside the building, NMFS biologists calm the salmon with an anesthetic and then they weigh and measure them. Many of the salmon both hatchery and wild carry a small piece of metal called a pit tag. The tag, which contains basic information about the young salmon, is retrieved...