Anadromous
Our kayaks drift along the lake’s western shore while the cold sneaks into our hips through the hulls. Glacial melt envelopes slowly, piercing polyethylene and waterproof clothing one layer at a time.
Cushioned between glacial moraine and peaks curtained with Sitka spruce, Chilkoot Lake curls placid in its bed, three hundred feet deep. An early June warm spell loosens more snow from the peaks, swelling the lake and shifting the shoreline daily. The coverlet of sedimentary turquoise thickening with glacial silt stretches from mountain to mountain, except for where its southernmost end frays into the Chilkoot River. A mated pair of bald eagles, whom some guides call Uncle Sam and Martha, perch in the spruces where the current grabs the lake water and begins to run. The river barely makes it half a mile before surrendering to the saltwater of the Lutak Inlet.
These waterways trace the life cycle of the sockeye. Once they leave the sheltered waters of their birth, they vanish into the North Pacific, passing the same coastlines where cruise ships call at Sitka, Glacier Bay, Ketchikan, and Wrangell. For years, they are creatures of the open ocean.
The same ocean delivers our weekly ration of cruise ships, tendering ashore passengers crowned with Glacier Bay baseball caps and garlanded with binoculars. These floating cities charge around the Inside Passage, cocktails in hand, like modern-day gold rushers. Except, unlike their ancestors, their gold has already been laid up and is now being expended in the hopes of a different currency: wildlife, adventure, selfies.
On the bouncing drive into the state park, I act as an ambassador to elsewhere. In truth, I am more of an imposter than they are. They are the audience, the ultimate apex consumer nature has set upon to devour this final frontier. But I masquerade as more. I plod along in unscuffed Xtratufs and tell the the tourists how the bears will soon gather at the fish weir. I gesture to the narrow opening in the fence, which stretches from bank to bank, and joke about a vending machine for salmon, like I’ve seen it all a hundred times before.
“They cut back the brush at the forest’s edge so you can better see the bears coming,” I say, trying out another guide’s facts in my mouth like a salmonberry that’s not quite ripe. “We saw one from the van yesterday. Watching us watch it from the side of the road…”
For now, no representative from Fish & Game posts up in the middle of the weir, gazing through the fish-sized opening, counting. The sign where the run’s tally will eventually be inscribed in red dry erase marker stands at zero. The bears are ghosts of the lake’s future. I worry that that the cruise ship people are the ghosts of mine.
Every day, we paddle along the western shore to go see the empty spawning beds. Sometimes, an eagle darts overhead with a cotton-colored dolly varden in its talons limp like a rag doll torn from the river. Other times, enormous mottled juveniles with flashes of cinnamon and orange settle on the trees above the beaver dams.
Drooping old man’s beard frames the beds like curtains at Shakespeare’s Globe. Even where there aren’t performances scheduled, this theater in the round opens to the public for tours about its storied history—hundreds of years of drama comprising the cultural largesse of an ecosystem, an economy, a people. Protected between the streams that deliver the cold, oxygen-rich water the salmon seek, the gravel waits like boards to be trodden upon. In Alaska, (except for the Alaskans), all the world’s a stage.
Meanwhile, my audience drifts around awhile I spiel like a priest preaching an ecological gospel of what’s to come. They slump in their tandems as their PFDs ride up their chests toward their chins. For now, the bed is empty, but not vacant. It holds the weight of what is coming. In a few weeks, the females will rake their redds with their tails and slip their eggs inside.
Waiting. Always waiting.
Like the guests, I too have never seen the salmon run, but I proselytize it with the zeal of one who knows.
Day by day, the weather brightens and evermore expectancy gathers along the lake's edge. Last year's fry, who crept from their dead mothers’ redds beneath the ice back in February, flicker silver beneath the surface. They will spend a year growing and dodging the shadows of eagles and kayak hulls in their littoral cradle.
The generation before them, meanwhile, circles somewhere beyond the mouth of the Lynn Canal, silver-backed in their Pacific prime.
The sockeye’s journey home is one-way. The reverse way of the cruise ships whose passengers travel here once in their lifetime. Our guests go home and tell everyone they saw Alaska like Alaska is a play the magnitude of Hamlet; the same five universal acts, a classic produced in a myriad of creative ways.
But in truth, they see this place more the way the salmon, pelagic fish who dwell in the sea’s uppermost waters, see the Pacific Ocean. They swim through the layer of the enormity that is most conducive to their getting back to where they need to be when the grand adventure is over. Nor is anadromy itself too different from retirement. The moment the sockeye reenter freshwater, they stop feeding and subsist entirely on their 401Ks, energy stored from years in the ocean. As they struggle upstream for their beds, their bodies begin to consume themselves. Fins fray. Flesh wastes away. Eyes cloud. They quite literally fall apart while still moving. ("Zombie fish," the locals call them).
They spawn once.
Then they die.
By the Fourth of July, the body count creeps toward one hundred. Sometimes, I think I see a few bubbles break the surface of the spawning beds. My new fisherman friends tell me they’re catching nothing but dolly.
“Soon,” I promise the guests, “the salmon will be so abundant, the bears can be picky about the parts they consume: eggs, brains, the fatty hump behind the head—the most calorie-dense. Heads will be torn off, and the carcass tossed into the woods becomes food for ravens, eagles, weasels, insects, and microbes. The forest itself will close the chain, metabolizing the salmon’s nutrient delivery system: marine enrichment will end up in the ferns, berry bushes, and sitkas.”
For now, the dandelions are all gone and the salmon nowhere to be found, so the bears are magnetized to town. They lope hungry through the parking lot and stare at the cruise ships. They leave piles of tar-black scat along the Lutak Road like mile markers. When the town puts down yellow paint lines to refresh the road, the workers paint right over the scat.
On July 16, a lone figure emerges from the Fish and Game truck and crouches on the weir, dressed in fishing rubbers as fine rain mists around them.
Their head bows towards the current.They are counting.
2,609 …
We float in the lake’s eastern elbow, just beyond the main spawning bed, and I hear a crack in the forest. I wonder if it is the yearling we saw in the parking lot that morning, come back for another photo op.
The guests turn back toward the view, then—crack!
Eagle in the water. It is being pulled down into a vortex of its own dinner, beating the surface with its broad wings to keep its white throat above the waterline. A sliver of silver flashes in the bird’s left talon. With a great effort, the eagle threshes the large salmon from its desired grave onto the moss-blanketed banks. He pauses on the shore, his feathers moving up and down as he catches his breath. One eye tracks over his shoulder toward us. My group takes a few gentle backstrokes away from the spectacle so the eagle knows we are only coming to film him eating his dinner, not snatch it from him to eat it ourselves.
Just in case, he heaves his prize further up the bank. Then, he holds the fish down with the same talon that first skewered it and begins to tear into the silver flesh. We watch in silence. Every now and again, the fish’s tail curls upward. I want to anthropomorphize this pitiful gesture, turn the tail into a hand reaching for its maker, but to what end? It is just a salmon doing what it came home to do.
Weir count, July 18: 18,972.
The first of the large pulses has arrived—6,173 came up just this morning alone. Sunset pink streaks like gestural brush strokes twist in the shallows and leap at the river mouth.
For the first time, I realize the oddysean nature of the salmon’s homecoming. These heroic returners are superfish, for the entire universe seems to conspire to keep them from coming home. There are gillnets spread for them in the Lutak, at the mouth of the river. After all those years dodging commercial trawlers at sea, they must escape the subsistence fishermen’s long, lethal lines into which a salmon swims in but not out. Their bodies held in suspended animation, trapped with the realization, perhaps, of one of the violent deaths that will soon find them. If they try to reverse and get away, the nets pull at their gills, ripping them of their watery breath. If they are pulled up, the gutting knife waits on deck. If the fisherman dozes on his phone, and they’re left to long, the seals come, and devour them like cookies pulled from the oven, still cooling on the sheet.
Everything is against them. Everything wants them dead. Eagles, bears, loons, humans, ducks, gods—but, most of all, themselves.
The Southeast Alaska State Fair begins. Fireweed’s exhilarated pink darkens to ruby purple along the beaches, and Fish & Game’s tally climbs to just under 30,000. The fish come with the wildflowers, in heats. They arrive like cruise ships of various sizes, docking and flooding the place all at once; 2,000 appear, then 200, then 500, then 1,500. Then nothing. A day off. The restaurants close and the eagles digest. Then another 1,800. They splash their way upstream and vanish into the lake. They are absorbed. Depending on the year, this is the beginning of the end of the run.
The jubilant eagles’ high-pitched popping and piping wraps through the woods. Where they concentrate, six or more, the scent of fish thickens. Since the run began in earnest, we haven’t seen a single bear on any of our tours. The fishing guides say they haven’t really been seeing them either. It’s the eagles who cluster on the banks, hungrily eyeing their catch.
So, then, it is the eagles who remain standing at the end of the play. Uncle Sam and Martha no longer guard the gates at the river’s entrance. They have joined Prince Fortinbras of Norway’s retinue, alive and arrived at the castle to claim the sockeye’s crown.
“We’ve seen more glaciers than bears,” moaned one couple.
“How disappointing,” I agreed.
The Fish & Game people count on, unmolested by bears. They are the attractions photographed by the cruise people out the windows of our white vans. They keep their hoods up, even when it’s not raining.
It’s not that I’ve been lying about the bears, but only that this year’s production is being staged with a different casting. I am glad for the bears to remain ghosts. I do not need pictures of them. I’d rather they stay alive catching their salmon and napping in sedge grasses someplace where no one counts their salmon.
The cruise ship people pull anchor and sail on to Glacier Bay or Icy Straight or Hoonah—the next performance of Alaska that is and isn’t Alaska, but like the salmon runs, keep this place humming from generation to generation. Ecosystems here braid like the Chilkat River’s channels across the broad valley or the lives of strangers who come from near and far to witness some idea of wilderness.
Maybe they’ll get their pictures of bears elsewhere, but for most of the guests, the bears will remain ghosts. Soon, the season will stop, and daylight will disappear and the cruise ships, for a time, will become ghosts too. My past, rather than my future. Among the many lesson of the salmon is that there are innumerable ways to produce Hamlet, infinite ways to go home, spawn, and die.
More salmon will come. Some will be caught at the last minute. Snatched, a few thrashes of a tail from home. But a few will make it. They’ll tuck into the beds nature has so graciously made for them, point into the drainage currents, and ensure another generation will wake this winter, under the ice, long after all of us have gone.