News from Big Bend Pool pt. 3

“Some Are Steelhead?”

With the help of per diem and a winter stipend from The North Umpqua Foundation, the writer and Maggie, a three-and-a-half year old Australian cattle dog from northern New Mexico—this is her first season with me—sit at this pool, a pool that by autumn will have gathered hundreds of wild summer steelhead and, because the banks here are largely bedrock, has been doing so for thousands of years.  The life habits of the various wild summer steelhead populations that spawn in the North Umpqua Basin have them entering the mouth of the Umpqua River in May while the river is on its spring rise from the melting of the previous winter’s snow.  Summer steelhead that have entered the river during the late spring of one year will be spawning during the late winter and early spring of the following year before this same snow melt is having its way with the river.

Because they spend up to nine months or more in freshwater waiting for their spawning time, summer steelhead need a refuge that will protect them from the warm waters of summer and the low waters of autumn.  This pool is such a natural refuge and, based on the numbers of steelhead that gather here, the best one on the creek.  The coolest tributary creek in the Steamboat Creek Basin, one that flows 13° to 15° cooler during the hottest part of the summer, joins the main creek about a hundred yards above the pool.  This is what makes the pool the natural summer haven it is for the several populations of wild summer steelhead that spawn in the middle and upper portions of this creek.

When I respond to this question—Why do they hold here?—from one of the more than a thousand people who visit the pool each season, my response—Because it’s the coolest pool in the Steamboat Creek Basin—has become virtually invisibly tentative, almost as though I were pulling the trigger in some game of Russian Roulette.  This is because, for almost universally harmless reasons, a person who has just been told that a cold tributary connects with Steamboat Creek a hundred yards upstream often wants to test the temperature of this water with their fingers.

Three to five minutes after this happens, the water has carried the human scent to the pod and all the steelhead in the pool contract into a tight oval of fish, drift down to the lower end of the pool, and begin a constant counter-clockwise cycling that may last for forty-five minutes or longer with the steelhead not returning to their original position for sometimes several hours.  This daisy chain is an unacceptable use of energy by fish that are not eating other than incidentally during their time in freshwater.

So . . . if not asked a direct question, do I mention the cold tributary or not?  If I do so, do I make a further point of telling the questioner:  “Please, do not test the water yourself because it scares the steelhead.”  For less innocent reasons, there are commonly also people who need to test this explanatory statement for themselves.  This is, really, understandable.

Each spring, summer, and fall, I play this minor mental game hundreds of times and, now and then, my intuition is wrong or someone who has no predisposition to question my statements has a dog and wants to get this creature to water or they want to dandle their babies legs in the cool water, quite simply not connecting up what they heard me say with their baby or their dog.
I don’t lie to visitors.  In response to a direct question about why this is the coldest pool, I will always explain.  But it is tough playing this intuition game, balancing the well being of the wild steelhead in the pool with being fully responsive to questions from the public who are, in the end, the best friends these steelhead can have.

As a final digression here, it fascinates me that there is a common type of human . . . human what? . . . psychological attitude? that has a hard time believing that they are not . . . beyond the ken . . . ? . . . invisible to the steelhead in the pool.  At its most mundane, this plays out in touching the water of the cold tributary and returning to watch to see if the fish react.  At a perhaps more elevated level, people are often astonished when I tell them the steelhead that just jumped probably did it to get a better look at them.  Seeing a pod’s active response to a bird shadow or an otter is one thing, comprehending that the steelhead are aware that they are being visited and that the fish want a better look at the visitors is another.  Some people are happy in this knowledge, happy to know that the fish are smarter and more complexly aware of their world than they had thought.  Other people are simply flummoxed.

We, the writer and Maggie, the dog, take notes here on wild steelhead behavior, on natural history and seasonal changes, and we write down an occasional interesting story that we hear from a visitor to the pool.  Unquestionably, though, the most important aspect of these notes, which have by now swollen to a total of more than nine-thousand pages, is that we are sitting here while we are writing them out.  My formal task here at the pool is to be a warm body and simply by my presence to deter poachers and other harassers and no more.  My notes and the questions I answer from the perspective of the wild summer steelhead, no matter how important, are ancillary to this main deterrent purpose.
For thousands of years, Indigenous People have known about the steelhead in the pool without, probably, ever having to answer:  “These are wild summer steelhead.”  Since this pool became known to the members of my own interloper industrial society, wild summer steelhead and other Pacific salmon have come under increasing pressure on fronts that have continued to broaden.  During the first part of the 20th Century, here at Big Bend Pool, steelhead were now and then taken by persons traveling the main trail that led from the area of Steamboat Creek Falls—about four miles downstream—to the Bohemia Mining District, another dozen miles further up and over into a neighboring watershed to the north.  A short remnant of this trail, with an old wooden sign documenting where it crosses a USGS section line, is visible nailed to a tree about thirty feet up the far bank of the pool.  This defunct human trail is used by wildlife now, though the recent collapse of quite a few local trees has made even this use less frequent in the area of the pool.

It was when the logging roads went into the upper basin above Steamboat Creek Falls during the middle of the last century that the thoughtless and truly harmful mayhem began . . . not, though, as damaging as have been and are hatcheries and their kissing cousins, the fish farms.  Powder sheds to store the explosives used in the construction of ever more logging roads were part and parcel of the industrialized consumption of mass quantities of timber in the Steamboat Creek Basin.  Regular dynamitings earned this refuge pool the local name of The Dynamite Hole.  Judging by the fact that they continue to return in their hundreds to the pool, the wild populations of summer steelhead that use the pool seem to have weathered these dynamitings over the thirty years or so of intense logging in this basin.  I am reasonably sure that the summer steelhead would not have done so well if also confronted with the pressure of legal fishing.  This, however, is moot because the creek was closed to all angling in the early thirties and, clearly, most of the visitors to the creek respect this conservation regulation.

The volunteer effort to protect the wild steelhead in the pool began in 1993, if my sources are correct—a hit or miss thing—in response to the final dynamiting of the pool.  Since that event, and initially haphazardly, there has been a focused human presence here to deter poachers.  Things I see and hear of every season make it clear that deterrence is still necessary to fend off the ill-thought-out actions of the poachers and the rock throwers and the swimmers and the occasional photographer who wants to get that sexy underwater close-up of lots of big wild fish in it.  Each of these activities and others have in common the inability to just leave the wild fish alone.

Since the invention of gravity and our adoption of a bipedal stance that has placed our feet directly below our shoulders and hanging arms, human beings have been dropping things on their feet accidentally while attempting to do other things.  Psychologically, we may be more the tool dropper than the tool user.  Technological advances allow us to shoot ourselves in the feet now too.  Poaching Big Bend Pool represents such an ignorant attempt.  An ex-poacher confessed that he used to think:

“What harm could taking a fish or two from the pool do?  There were obviously hundreds of them.  Now I see that if everybody thought like that there wouldn’t be any fish left.”

We do do it . . . shoot ourselves in the feet . . . commonly . . . at least for the last three to four million years since they have been on the ground and not clasping a tree branch in the open forests of central and southern Africa.  The various species of Pacific salmon and us humans are children of the highly fluctuating climates of the Pliocene and the Pleistocene Epochs—the last six million years—both of us reaching our modern form with the monumental advances and recessions of continental and alpine ice sheets.  We humans have originated as species with our big heads and flat faces from more prognathus—or steelhead-like—ancestral forms at the beginning of the most recent 40,000 year glacial episode .

As a species, we humans began in a relatively warm zone well to the south of any ice.  While we were gradually learning to modify our environments in evolutionarily unexpected ways and gradually elaborating our cultures—or doing what can be easily construed as constructing our own hatcheries—the Pacific salmon began in the heart of a storm.  Starting well before the Pleistocene, for the last forty million years, the Pacific Northwest has been the most tectonically active region of the North American continent.  There have been mountain building episodes that have produced the Coastal Ranges, the Western Cascades, and the Sierra Nevada Range, all of which are largely the result of the western edge of the continental plate overriding more than 2,000 miles of the Pacific Plate with the subsequent melting and venting to the surface of much of this material.  In the early Cenozoic, the mountains ranges presently known as the Cascades, the Coast Range, and the Klamath Mountains were oriented essentially east to west.  Since then, the subplate containing these mountains has rotated 73° to the right, or clockwise (as a response to Coriolis force?).

During this time of crustal upheaval, ancestral members of the salmon family may well have adopted the anadromous way of life that characterizes so many of them now.  They may, as well, have experienced the tetraploid event that doubled the amount of DNA they carry.  Pacific salmon have four copies of each chromosome, whereas we humans have only two.

The more recent glacial cycles of the Pleistocene have repeatedly lowered and raised the level of the sea by more than three hundred feet, and continental ice sheets and alpine glaciers have expanded, burying the whole of some drainages and just the headwater reaches of many others.  During glacial retreats, slopes have readjusted and regular mass-wastage events over periods spanning hundreds of years have created dams and choked whole river systems with rocks and finer sediments. The volcanic peaks of the High Cascades have also been formed during the last two million years.

The populations of summer steelhead and other salmon species native to the Umpqua River Basin have been through all of this, including the explosion of primal Mount Mazama 7,000 years ago which created Crater Lake.  This destructive episode was massively catastrophic to the basin of the Umpqua.  Presently, in the upper part of the fly water stretch on the North Umpqua River, the main highway has been cut through more than seventy feet of Mazama tephra.

The upheavals and changes that have churned the Pacific Northwest have left it a region with high-gradient cold streams that are not only poor in nutrients compared to the rest of North America, but also poor in the number of fish genera and species.  As an example of the acute difference between Pacific Northwest streams and those elsewhere in North America, consider the freshwater turtles, or terrapins.  There are at least thirty-seven separate terrapin species to the east of the Rocky Mountains and only two to the west of this mountain range.  One of these terrapin species is a relic population of painted turtles in the upper Colombia Basin and the other is the western pond turtle.  The western pond turtle ranges from British Columbia, in Canada, to Baja California, in Mexico.

In the Pacific Northwest, where whole genera of fish and other aquatic creatures have disappeared, the Pacific salmon thrived and blossomed into numerous species and varieties with very diverse and adaptive life histories.  Kendall and Behnke have characterized the members of the salmon family as having precise homing abilities, a tendency to form genetically isolated populations, and an ability to occupy new niches and habitats in the cold temperate parts of the world.  Pacific salmon are thus the personification the fundamental ability of life to adapt to changed conditions by keeping things unstable and as diverse as possible—or with as many adaptive choices as possible—at our genetic core.

On the eastern shore of the North Pacific Ocean, Pacific salmon and human beings came into contact only at end of the most recent glacial episode of the Pleistocene between fifteen and twenty thousand years ago .  It is hard to say what the consequences of this earliest contact here in the Pacific Northwest were for both parties, the fish and the human, but what we know is that a dynamic balance was ultimately achieved.  We know this because the rivers of the greater Pacific Northwest were rich with thousands of local breeding populations of the various species of salmon when the developing industrial societies from elsewhere in the world encountered the region around two hundred years ago.

The ultimate effect on the indigenous Pacific Northwest coastal peoples of the incomprehensibly rich interplay of the myriad populations of Pacific salmon that were bringing marine nutrients upstream through the multitude of streams emptying into the North Pacific Ocean was profound.  The salmon returning and being harvested and eaten or dried and smoked for future use and as a trade commodity, allowed the development of the most elaborate gathering and hunting societies in the world.  Elsewhere in the world, societies showing the complexity of those in the core area of the Pacific Northwest Coast only developed with the domestication of plants and animals.

Now, here, it is a different story.  Pacific salmon are gone from about 40% of their original range and most of the fish in the remaining runs are of hatchery origin.  We are hatcheriized ourselves and have grown in number and advanced technically to the point where often now the least thing that we do has worldwide economic, demographic, and environmental ramifications.  To Maggie and I it often seems a toss up as to which of us—the wild salmon or the domesticated humans—will collapse first.

If it is the wild Pacific salmon that go first, we will shift to another resource and lament the loss.  Cassandras will be saying I told you so, “It was the hatchery fish that needed the wild ones, not the other way around.”  Studies have shown that hatchery fish cannot be used to produce new anadromous generations of hatchery fish.  Within a few generations—two or three only—the resulting anadromous hatchery fish are unable to even propagate themselves naturally.  In the one hundred thirty-five years of salmon hatcheries on the west coast of North America what has happened to the wild populations of Pacific salmon here?  The only reason the whole hatchery system for anadromous fish didn’t crash and burn long ago is that their remained wild anadromous salmon to use as brood stock.

If it is us who fail and we close our goddamn hatcheries and fish farms because we can’t afford them any longer, the resilience of  the wild salmon will kick in, no longer damped by our hatchery, STEP-program, and fish-farm shenanigans.  In all likelihood within a human generation or two, wild Pacific salmon will again be returning—and for free—from their long journeyings through the North Pacific Ocean.  As it is told in the accounts of travelers and explorers from two centuries ago, the entry of the Pacific salmon to some of their natal streams will be so dramatic that the sound of their fins breaking the surface as they leave the ocean will sound as a soft thunder in the ears of those humans waking from around the coals of their fires as the stars glimmer in a dawn sky.  This elemental sound will bring smiles to the faces of those awaiting their arrival.

After many long summers in fish camps on the North Umpqua, awakening in the darkness to the sound of a winter wren or raven, reaching below the cot to play grab paw with other dogs, Muchacho or Sis, and feeling a smile on my face, I have stumbled onto the opportunity to do something—with the help of The North Umpqua Foundation—something simple and positive for these wild summer steelhead.  In this, and in the simple life it makes possible, I am lucky.  My task?  Only to see that the wild steelhead in the pool are left alone.  The next twenty years may well show how lucky the remaining wild breeding populations of Pacific salmon are at surviving the new and really elemental storm that is us and our desires . . . as Pogo might say.

 

Lee Spencer
September 25, 2010