Anadromous
Our kayaks hover along Chilkoot Lake’s western shore in the lee of katabatic winds that race the sockeye up the river. Cushioned between glacial moraine and young peaks curtained with Sitka spruce, the lake curls placid in its bed, three hundred feet deep. An early June warm spell loosens more snow, swelling the lake and shifting the shoreline daily.
The opaque coverlet of sedimentary turquoise thickening with glacial silt stretches from sawtooth 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 sitka spruces which stand like gates above the place 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 and the Lynn Canal just beyond.
These waterways carved from coastal mountains trace the lifecycle of the sockeye salmon. Once they leave the cradled waters of their birth, they are swallowed into the North Pacific. Their adult years are spent swimming through the same ports where cruise ships call at Sitka, Glacier Bay, Ketchikan, and Wrangell—creatures of the open ocean.
The same ocean delivers another lifecycle. Our weekly ration of cruise ships tender ashore passengers crowned with Glacier Bay baseball caps and garlanded with binoculars. These floating cities charge around the Inside Passage like modern-day gold rushers. Except, unlike their ancestors, the gold that floats these ships has already been laid up. Fortunes already made are now being expended in the hopes of spawning a less dense currency than bullion: wildlife, selfies, and adventure.
We pick them up at the dock. We stand there, beneath the Alaska State flag, our little sign advertising sea kayak alongside all the other excursion contractors’ little signs: cycling, rafting, bald eagle preserve.
The van bounces off the state park. Meanwhile, I act as an ambassador to elsewhere. My cargo are my audience, the ultimate apex consumer nature has set upon to devour this final frontier. But I masquerade as more, peddling the mystique of guide. I plod along in lightly scuffed 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 like a comb jammed into an unruly snarl of long dark hair, 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. Who are they, anyway? “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, swathed in rubber to gaze through the fish-sized opening, counting the Sisyphean salmon. The sign where the run’s tally will eventually be inscribed twice a day in red dry erase marker stands at zero. It’s been that way since I arrived.
For now, the salmon and 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 gape at the empty spawning beds. The still waters hide in their pocket of gravel and moss, tucked behind pale green curtains of old man’s beard.
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 by the fish selected by nature from life’s audition to give us the performance of their deaths.
Sometimes, a mature bald eagle darts overhead with a cotton-colored dolly varden in its talons, a rag doll torn from the river. The fish will flicker in the grey sky like a diamond until the trees swallow the spectacle from sight. Other times, mottled juveniles flash cinnamon and orange on the trees above the beaver dams.
I spiel like a priest preaching an ecological gospel of what’s to come. Like the guests, I too have never seen the salmon run, but I proselytize it with the zeal of one who knows.
“In a few weeks, the females will rake their redds with their tails and slip their eggs inside.”
My audience nods with feigned interest before gazing toward the cascades thundering down the far shore. Their feet go to sleep inside the cockpits, and they wonder what they might find in the town’s gift shops, and whether bubble-netting humpbacks will churn the waters to foam for them when they sail tomorrow.
Waiting. Always waiting.
Day by day, the weather brightens. Sunshine comes to Southeast Alaska like an old friend who never married or had children and so sweeps through the neighborhood with no regard for routine and no idea how long they’ll stay.
Evermore expectancy gathers along the lake's edge along with small cloud-like clusters of black cottonwood fluff. Buffleheads and common mergansers hatch their ducklings and hide them from the eagles in the brush. If our group swings too close to one of their nests, the terrorized downy family will rush from their cover out into the water, immediately summoning the eagles from their lofty perches. The birds will swoop down and the ducks will dive. Some will come up to the safety of their mothers. Others into the mouths of their enemies. Others still will not come up at all, drowned in an attempt to get away.
Last year's sockeye 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 before heading out to sea.
The generation before them, meanwhile, circles somewhere beyond the mouth of the Lynn Canal. Out of sight, and 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. The immensity of this land, its verticality and proto-historic reach, cannot be comprehended. But it takes time being here to know that. I’m not sure that I’ve been here long enough to know it, let alone see it.
Anadromy itself is not too different from our idea of retirement. The moment the sockeye reenter freshwater, they stop feeding and subsist entirely on their zooplankton 401Ks, energy stored from years in the ocean. As they struggle upstream for their beds, their bodies begin to dissolve. Time catches what the fisherman’s net does not. 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 ruffle 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 bears have swallowed all the dandelions, and the salmon nowhere to be found, so the juveniles are magnetized to town. They lope hungry through the parking lot and stare at the cruise ships, salivating at the tonnage of trash. They leave little cairns of tar-black scat splattered along the Lutak Road. 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 …
Weir count, July 18: 18,972.
The first of the large pulses has arrived—6,173 came up just this morning alone. They amass in the inlet then wait for the exact right temperature and tidal conditions to make their rush up the river.
Sunset pink streaks like broad, gestural brush strokes twist in the shallows and leap at the river mouth. They make an impressionist painting in the mouths of drainages.
“A hospice and a nursery,” one guest muses. “And these are the lucky ones.”
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, harbor seals appear, 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.
And these are the lucky ones.
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 arrive like the wildflowers, in heats. They appear suddenly on their own schedules, 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, the eagles digest, and the town sighs quiet. 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.
“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 the rest of us have gone home.