I was in my mother’s womb, waiting to be delivered, when the president’s salmon was hooked and netted in the Penobscot River just outside the hospital. It was April 1, 1951, opening day of Maine’s fishing season, and by custom, the first salmon of springtime caught in the Penobscot goes to the president of the United States. There was some excitement in my family, and even among our neighbors, over who would make his appearance first: me or Dwight Eisenhower’s fish. Eastern Maine General Hospital sits right on the river, and my expectant mother had a good view of the anglers working the Bangor Salmon Pool. I’m sorry to report that Ike’s fish won the race. A Down Easter named Horace Bond hooked the presidential salmon, and Harry Colburn scooped it into his net. My head emerged later that evening, sometime after the salmon was “delivered” to the White House for the photo op.
Now here’s something funny. I never knew about this. Never mind that I had written three fishing books. My mother only recently told me the story. I had to look it up in an old newspaper file to fact-check her. If it’s too good to be true, it isn’t, right? But there’s the photo in the Bangor Daily News showing the presidential salmon being hoisted out of the water on the day of my birth. It doesn’t matter that I was kept in the dark about this for most of my life. I don’t believe that my birth on the opening day of Maine’s salmon season augured much of anything. Our lives do not have a particular design. But here I am, sixty-five years later, on another coast, on another salmon trip that requires me to spank my Visa card.
Here’s something I’ve learned in the intervening years. The beauty and gravity of fishing, like life, confers on us both ravishments and moral obligations. I think it’s fair to say we haven’t lived up to our obligations. We have cheated our children out of their rightful inheritance in the natural world. Perhaps they won’t notice, mesmerized as they are by their smartphones.
But here’s the evidence. The world’s stocks of ocean billfish are only 10 percent of what they were when I came into the world. Half the coral reefs on the planet are dead or dying. When Thor Heyerdahl made his famous voyage in the raft he called Kon-Tiki, he didn’t see any plastic trash in the Pacific Ocean. And the annual Maine tradition of the presidential salmon? It was discontinued after the salmon decided they’d had enough and were no longer going to show up in any meaningful numbers anymore in the polluted Penobscot. That river was the last holdout for Atlantic salmon fishing left in the United States. And we ruined it with our greed, our lack of foresight, and the cruelty of our market economics. The last president to be presented with a salmon from those waters was George Herbert Walker Bush, who said he wanted to be the “environmental president.” And now he lives in Maine!
The years unspool. All things must pass. We want to believe that we have something changeless and secure. But everything is transitory. “This world of dew is but a dewdrop world,” sighed haiku master Issa, after the death of his baby daughter. The Dalai Lama said that children who die young are our masters who teach us impermanence. “All things hang like a drop of dew / upon a blade of grass,” said William Butler Yeats in “Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors.”
But why stand for the rape of the ecosphere? The paramount river system of the Pacific Northwest is the Columbia River and its tributaries. We could do a lot to revive it by removing four dams blocking salmon migration on the Snake River. This one sacramental act would allow Pacific salmon to ascend five thousand or so river miles of
Western streams and tributaries that are still relatively pristine, ancestral headwaters that reach into the Rocky Mountains. There are many other dams that could come down and many other runs of salmon that might be restored. Tilting at windmills? Why not live the impossible dream? Blame it on the song from that stupid musical. I am by temperament a rhapsodist. There’s still a lot out there to love and protect.
A fishing trip tends to bear that out. And that’s why I’ve come to this particular river in the Pacific Northwest. It is autumn, and the salmon are arriving right on time. The sunshine in the forest is a rich brew. The conifers are ever-green and the deciduous trees are changing color in earnest. Yellow is the dominant October color in the riparian zones. There is orange and scarlet in the forest, too. The red in the plants is like the redness in the skin of salmon as they change in the streams.
I notice steelhead are holding higher in the river at this time of year. Water temperatures are in the comfort zone, due to colder nights. The yellow in the hazels and big-leaf maples is most conspicuous along the river banks. And oranges and reds are supplied by dogwoods, vine maples, and poison oak. Within the deepest part of the looming forest, the light is dim, with a greenish glow. The conifer trees are mainly Douglas firs and sugar pines. The evergreens are so deeply branched that little sunlight filters down to the forest floor. And the light that reaches the ground is chapel-like. Green too, are the Western hemlocks, the Pacific yews, the madrones, the silk tassel trees, the chinquapins, the salal and ferns on the forest floor, and the streamside alders.
If the Pacific Northwest begins anywhere, it is very near the Oregon border. This is where California’s languid Mediterranean climate starts giving way to the climate of the Cascades. You can sense the changes in the sky overhead, in the light, and in the ever-thickening forests. Sometimes I think about moving here from my home in San Francisco so I can be closer to the fishing. But if I wanted to live far from civilization, I’d live in Hollywood.
I call this region Cascadia. Cascadia is a place, a political movement, and a beer. I’ll take all three. The name derives from the Cascadian subduction zone, a fault made up of two convergent tectonic plates that run from Northern California to Vancouver Island in British Columbia. No one can quite agree on Cascadia’s borders. Some say it’s anywhere the salmon can swim to. Some say it’s a state of mind. My personal Cascadia extends from California’s Eel River redwood canyons well into B.C. I like best the green, rainy part lying to the west of the Cascades. But the high-desert steppes and arroyos have their grandeur, too. I pledge allegiance to the ecosystem, and to the bioregionalism for which it stands, with liberty and justice for all.
From my vantage point, I can see chinook salmon on their spawning beds. The salmon have dug redds on the edges of a wide and shallow gravel flat that is just around the corner from a highway bridge. The salmon are discolored and already dying. I don’t know if they are spring chinooks that have been waiting in the river all summer for this moment. Or a pod of autumn kings that came in from the sea only recently. I suspect the latter. The spring salmon in this river usually spawn in September. And I have heard that autumn fish came in on the freshets that raised the river a few nights ago. I see flashes in the shallow pool that remind me of the red color in some of the ground-hugging plants, like the maroon fruit that hangs from the bankside viburnum. The eggs of the salmon also are red, the color of setting suns, but are invisible to me under the cold gravel and implacable flow of the water.
Downstream from the redds are a handful of small pools and choppy runs where steelhead are holding in glittery riffles and broken water. Steelhead have been coming into the river steadily throughout the summer and autumn months. Those steelhead below the redds might be eating loose salmon eggs, for all I know. Or they might be snapping at the October Caddis that I can see fluttering on the air. Or they might not be eating anything at all. Do steelhead feed when they return to the river, or are they just idiosyncratic? I only know they rise to our flies. I can’t explain it. I just name the glory in the land.
I suit up and follow a path through the forest down to the steelhead pools. As I draw closer, the sound of moving water grows louder in my ears. We have a tuning fork inside us that vibrates sympathetically to a river. The same is true when we hear the ocean’s heaving sigh and contrapuntal thump. Scientists say everything — animal, vegetable, mineral — has a natural frequency, a point at which their atoms start to vibrate uncontrollably. So soldiers, when crossing a bridge, are ordered to break stride, lest the cadence of marching feet set the bridge’s atoms into motion, making it collapse. The human body also has a natural frequency. That’s why harmonic music pleases and discordant noise jars. We like sounds that vibrate at a frequency sympathetic to our internal structure. And we are mostly made of water.
I tie a Riffle Hitch onto a Muddler, a fly made out of spun deer hair. While not a steelhead fly per se, this streamer is a great all-around salesman. The Muddler Minnow was originally tied to imitate a sculpin. Don Gapen, the son of a Minnesota lodge owner, came up with its simple design back in the Great Depression. The renowned Montana fly tyer Dan Bailey made it famous. Muddlers can be fished wet or dry. There’s probably one in every fly fisherman’s box. As I said, not strictly a steelhead fly. So it’s probably a coincidence that the two best steelhead fishermen on this river fish Muddlers exclusively.
The hitch I tie allows me to skate the fly across the surface to form a juicy wake. Because the autumn river is still fairly low, I tie on a very long leader, well over fifteen feet. I work my way slowly down the pool, taking my eyes off of the V wake from time to time to admire the tint and shading of the river and the deep saturation of forest colors. A blue heron feeds in the shallows on the opposite bank. I spy an osprey perched on a Douglas fir. Wake up, Nature Boy! A steelhead strikes while I’m stargazing, and I lose the fish.
What made it strike? Was it curiosity or aggression? Better to ask: Why does nature contend with itself? Why is life both struggle and rapture? The salmon are spawning and dying in this river. All living things are founded on the necessity of absorbing the energy of other living things, whether plant or animal. So we inhabitants of the creature world are always killing each other and eating one another, literally or symbolically. I guess that’s why fishing works. The poet Wallace Stevens said that we live in an old chaos of the sun. And death is the mother of beauty. Life is worth living because everything dies. The salmon prove it.
I decide to drive downriver to see if fresh salmon are nearby. I want to catch one even more than I want to catch a steelhead. The other night, someone came back to the campground with a pair of freshly caught coho. They were mint-bright fish, as cold and lovely as the crescent moon hanging above the black Douglas firs. The angler said he took them in a pool below a large, but passable waterfall. So I figure that if coho are staging around the falls, I might have a chance of taking a few. Although by now, they could be well upriver.
I throw my rod in the back of my car and slam the trunk. Like Captain Nemo’s Nautilus, my car has a bumper sticker that reads Mobilis in Mobili. It’s Latin for “moving freely in a moveable element.” Or “free in a free world.” Jules Verne’s antihero roamed the seas, waging a holy war against injustice. Today, we would call Captain Nemo a terrorist. But I like to think of him as “an extremist of hope.” Sadly, my car lacks a torpedo launcher.
The long fishless intervals in salmon and steelhead fishing have me worrying about their fate. Must we all join the Sierra Club? Been there, bought the T-shirt. We are in the hands of retrograde people who have enlarged the gap between the man-made and the natural world. Too many of us live according to ideas that are thought up for us by uncaring minds and business enterprises least impeded by innocent ends. There seems to be little room in that world for the logic of nature. I don’t have any answers for this.
The idea of a breakaway “Republic of Cascadia” has been kicking around for awhile. It has some of its roots in a cult novel called Ecotopia. A utopian bong dream, this novel was written by Ernest Callenbach, a respectable editor of science books for the University of California Press in Berkeley, who occasionally taught film studies at Cal and at San Francisco State University. Twenty-five publishers turned the book down before Callenbach published it himself. That was in 1975. Ecotopia took off, found a mainstream publisher, and has since sold over a million copies.
The story goes like this. The Pacific Northwest has broken away from the United States and has formed its own independent republic out of the bioregion that was once Northern California, Oregon, and Washington. Fearing revanchism, the secessionists have sealed off their borders. The first U.S. journalist ever admitted into the raw nation serves as the book’s naïve narrator. He discovers a land of solar panels, mock warfare, and near druidic worship, where people practice free love and smoke a lot of pot. They have also shifted over to completely renewable energy and organized their lives around the concept of ecologically sustainable living. This includes slow growth, energy reduction, and locally grown organic food. (There’s even a stream running down San Francisco’s Market Street.) At first skeptical, the journalist is gradually won over by the place and its people. Did I mention that he falls in love with a beautiful woman? The story is faintly ridiculous. The characters are flat and the prose utilitarian. People talk like they’re in group therapy. And the place is as white as a Klan rally. (Black citizens have voluntarily separated to form their own mini nation, Soul City, over in the East Bay.) But as a novel of ideas, Ecotopia is prescient. It has been called “the novel that predicted Portland.” Back when it was first published, environmentalism meant saving scenic places and glamorous species. Callenbach changed the game plan by grafting green tech onto the old hippie ethos. He advanced what were then groundbreaking concepts such as green urban planning, sustainability, and bioregionalism, which considers that each part of the country has a distinct ecological character to be cultivated. The author showed that by focusing on sustainability, biosystems such as forests and wetlands can stay diverse and remain productive indefinitely. A hit with the counterculture back when it first came out, Ecotopia is now enjoying a second life as a work frequently assigned in environmental, sociology, and urban planning courses. It has also found an unlikely audience among evangelicals and other churchgoers who are alarmed over what we are doing to God’s creation.
Today, the idea of an independent “Cascadia” is more of an attitude and a mindset than anything else. The concept of a “Cascadian secessionist movement” is more playful than real and embraces such values as environmentalism, bioregionalism, privacy, civil liberties, and freedom. It is symbolized by the “Doug flag” that stands for the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest. The flag displays three horizontal stripes of blue, white, and green, with a single Douglas fir tree standing in the center. The blue stands for the sky, the Pacific Ocean, the Salish Sea, and all inland waters. The white stands for clouds and snow, and the green for the evergreen forests.
The spirit of Cascadia is also evoked on countless beer bottles. It’s the Pacific Northwest as refreshment. The Fish Brewing Company of Olympia, Washington, puts “Brewed in the Republic of Cascadia” on the label of its organic ales. Secession Cascadian Dark Ale, sold by Hopworks Urban Brewery in Portland, features a label inspired by the Doug flag. And the Cascadian spirit doesn’t thrive just in microbreweries. A newspaper based in Bellingham, Washington, calls itself Cascadia Weekly and reports “From the Heart of Cascadia.”
But for me, the crowning symbol of Cascadia is the salmon. More than anything, salmon and steelhead represent the Pacific Northwest. They are totemic creatures. They are born in and return to imperishable rivers that are replenished by winter rains and mountain snowmelt. There is something heraldic about these sea-run fish. They bring the ocean deep into the land. The idea that this wildness might be passing from the earth is unbearable.
I drive downriver to the waterfall to get another good look at what autumn is doing to the world. The vine maples along the ridges are a stupefying feast of reds and golds. But there are no fishermen above or below the falls. And although I watch for a long time, no salmon are jumping there.
So I drive farther downriver and spot a pair of bait fishermen working a fishy pool from the rocks. There seems to be some action, so I park and chat them up.
It turns out fresh coho have come into the pool, and they invite me to join them.
I retrieve my fly rod and change from a floating line to a sinking tip. When I get to the river, I tie on a Comet, perhaps the most popular fly for Pacific salmon in this neck of the woods. I wade into the easy flow, strip out some line, cast, and let the Comet sink. And then, instead of a traditional steelhead swing, I retrieve the fly with rapid jerks. Coho attack flies eagerly. They move farther for a fly, and rise more readily, than any other Pacific salmon. But they have come a long way upriver. So I don’t know how these coho will be acting or what shape they’ll be in. The bait fishermen assure me they are fresh.
On my tenth cast, I spot something silver in hot pursuit of my fly. There is a momentary connection that becomes a tug. The salmon leaps once and comes off in an instant. I am shaking with excitement. A few more casts and then another coho seizes the fly and runs off with it. The fish is jumping, twisting, and rolling all over. It, too, unhooks. I am beside myself. Many more casts later, I get another hit. No leap this time, just a hard yank and a good, steady pull well below the surface for seven or eight minutes. The tugging at the end of the rod is both electrifying and sensual. I wonder briefly if it might be a small chinook. But no, it’s a bright coho. I play the fish. carefully, frantic I might lose it. Soon I am holding a seven-pound silver hen in my hands. Her sides are gleaming, and there is a faint haze of pink on her belly.
The next coho I hook puts on an aerial display that has it thrashing about in the river, twisting and rolling and throwing spray. And then it throws the hook. And that’s it from the pool for the rest of the morning.
Is this to be the last fishing of its kind? That’s the question. Everything seems to be pushing salmon to the brink. Can we fix our broken world? That part of it that we busted? We like to believe we can. Even our illusions give meaning to our lives and sustain what is most valuable to us. Yes, it’s a dewdrop world and nothing lasts. But that world can’t be held at arm’s length. We can’t pass through life detached from it. We seek solidarity with one another in love and in meaningful work. We know there is a better and wiser way. Shall we form committees, sign petitions? March to save the salmon? Fly the Doug flag?
I vote to secede and form a new nation.
