(Note: this is an unfinished work.  I work on it as I can afford the time.  For those who have visited it quite recently, reload the page. I have today, Feb 10, 2001, added a few paragraphs at the very end.  These related to a conversation I had with others today on a Portland, Oregon radio station, KXL.)

Never forget that a rhino has thicker skin, a tiger sharper claws, a deer faster feet, a bird better wings and a fish better underwater breathing apparatus than you do.  God (or nature, if you prefer), gave you only one aspect superior to all other creatures.  In so doing, God (or nature, if you prefer) left you a message as clear as if it were a billboard ten feet from your front door:  YOU WERE MEANT TO THINK!! - LL

The worst thing about clear-headed analysis is that you may discover that the idiot who created the mess is wearing your pants.  - LL
 

                                          Chapter one

The story begins …

    Last summer, Oregon's second largest river, the Willamette, had a one day long salmon fishing season.  The steelhead (seagoing rainbow trout) runs in the Clackamas River system, which is a tributary of the Willamette, have just gone on the endangered species list.  The coastal coho salmon is facing an endangered species listing.  There will not be a salmon season on the Washington coast this year.
     The question is simple.  Why should you give a damn about fish?  In spite of billions of people, the world is mostly unpopulated land.  Right here in Oregon, you can be in a wilderness an hour's drive from the largest city in the state!  Frankly, you are sick and tired of the ranting and raving of the environmentalist wackos.  Oh, in one sense, you understand.  One of the reasons you live in the Pacific Northwest is the beauty.
   (Hell, the loggers who clearcut the forests like them, and the indians who worship the salmon eat them!  But, then, in the latter case, that’s different from the Christians who only symbolically eat the flesh and drink the blood of the man they worship.)
The mountains, the rivers, the lakes, the streams, the oceans.  Without them, we’d have Detroit.  But hammering nails into an old growth tree so some poor logger will have his head cut off when his chainsaw chain snaps?
     Trees are cut.  Trees are reseeded by themselves or man.  They grow, and if they aren't cut, they fall over and rot.  Clearcuts are ugly, of course.  They shouldn't do them alongside the roads.  But the environmental regulations have stopped all that, right?  Stopped the chemical plants and everybody  from polluting the rivers, haven't they?  There are all sorts of rules these days about that sort of thing.
      Right?
     You've seen the television pictures about those seals up there in Puget Sound.  They won't let a salmon or steelhead by.  The fishermen say that they come right up and steal salmon off their hooks!  The sea lions are the problem, not us!
     You've seen the indians on TV, too.  They claim salmon are part of their religion, and that they have a treaty right to catch as many as they want.  The indians are the problem, not us!
     And, you've seen the pictures of the asian fishing fleets with their big nets cleaning out the whole north Pacific.  What about them?  And, this El Nino thing, down there off the coast of South America.  It affects the ocean somehow and ruins the fishing.  What have we got to do with that?  El Nino isn't our fault.  The asian fishing fleets and El Nino are at fault, not us!
     And, what about the fish ladders?  And all the money we spend on hatcheries?  Hell, they even barge the stupid fish around the Columbia dams!  If they're so stupid that they can't figure out how to swim downstream, no wonder they are dying out.
     Right?
     Wrong.
     Sorry, but almost everything you've been told about all this is unadulterated baloney.  Well, that's probably unkind.  A lot of what you've been told is baloney.  And, even some of the accurate stuff can be misleading simply because it's out of context.  Or badly written.  Or well written for scientists but absolutely useless to human beings.
    Ultimately, for one reason or another you've gotten bits and pieces of the story; isolated reports that have left you staring at pieces of the puzzle scattered on the floor.  The press by nature leaps from headline to headline, rarely doing careful analysis about anything.  Many of the sources for these stories come from people who have an axe to grind (often one that has a purpose dramatically other than saving the fish), a paycheck to save at any cost, or blame to shift somewhere else.
     Hard words, I admit, but I shall prove them to be true with an anecdote.
     What follows is a true story.

        A few years ago while driving along the Oregon coast, I stopped in to have a beer at a tavern in Garibaldi.  In times past, when I frequented Tillamook bay in search of Dungeness crabs and the fall Chinook salmon, I had favored this place for its excellent view of the water.  This day, as I sat sipping my brew, I got to talking to the young fellow on the next stool.
     "You should have seen the fishing in the old days," I said.
     Just then, a seal stuck its head above the surface.
     The man nodded at the animal and said, "Yeah.  Ain't many fish left.  God-damned seals and indians."
     The tavern was, of course, full of local men.  It was a dangerous place to offer alternative explanations for the decline of the salmon.  Nevertheless, I decided to give it a try.
     "I'd guess that you fish in the summer and log off-seasons," I said.
     He looked suspiciously at me.  A number of heads swiveled in our direction.  "That's right," he said.
     "That's the way it was back in the fifties," I added.
     More heads turned our way.
     "Look," I said, "if I asked you a straight no bullshit question, would you give me a straight, no bullshit answer?"
     Almost all the heads were turned our way.  Most of the faces looked as hostile as his now did. But, he nodded again, so I asked the question.
     "If you and I could stand right here in this very spot, only a hundred and fifty years ago when there were nothing but God-damned seals and God-damned indians here, how many fish do you think would be out in that bay?
     His eyes narrowed momentarily, then a rueful grin came to his face.  He shook his head and said, "Well, I guess we could walk across that bay on their backs."
     I laughed and slapped him on the shoulder, tossed down the last of my beer, walked out of that tavern alive and drove away.

     You do not need a degree in rocket science to recognize the obvious.  When presented with just plain everyday common sense, even people shaped by a lifetime of cultural rationalization can see it.
     We has met the enemy and he is us. (Walt Kelly as Pogo Possum)
     El Nino has been at work since before man as a species existed, and it didn't stop the seals and the indians from passing a superb fishery along to us.  When we took over, the bays and rivers were full, repeat full, of fish.
     Asian fishing fleet technology is often blamed for the decline, yet if that's the case, how in the world do the asian fleets manage to catch every salmon except those which return to certain river mouth hatcheries?  The Columbia River buoy 10 return has been consistently good, as an example.  There is no question that the asians are a factor, but not, repeat not, the only factor.   Not, in fact, a primary factor.
     The enemy is not El Nino, asian fishing fleets, seals or indians.
     He is us.
     Even if the idea angers you, read on.  Because, if we choose to recognize this simple fact, and decide to do something about it, then the hero will be us, as well.

     Okay, you now understand that most of what you've been told about the decline of the fish runs is wrong.  I haven't explained which ideas are completely wrong, which partly wrong and which partly right, but you now know there's more to the story than you've been told.
      But, that still leaves the other question we asked at the top.  Why should you except in an abstract way, care?
     Money.
     The salmon fishing industry in the Pacific Northwest is like an ancient Greek temple … just a pile of  rocks where once stood a structure of surpassing simplicity and excellence.  Architecture that was dedicated to the gods.  At one time, this ocean-going species generated a billion dollar industy hereabouts.   A billion dollars a year.
     But, more, far more than that, it was a highly unusual business from a production cost standpoint.  The fish didn't need to be planted or tended.  They didn't need to be fertilized, watered or pruned.  They didn't require shipments of raw materials, or factories to build them.
     All we had to do was harvest them.
     We didn't have to construct a thousand mile pipeline to get them here.  We didn't have to build a million dollar airport to get them to land.  They transported themselves right to our feet, right on to our hooks and into our nets.  We didn't need to tunnel through mountains, lay any track, declare tax-free corporate zones or even feed them!
     All we had to do was harvest them.
     Think of it.  All we had to do was leave them alone and they'd come home, dragging a billion dollars behind them.

(photos: OrHistSoc shots of fishwheels and loaded boats, anglers
with giant fish)

     Which brings us to the last question for this first chapter: if what has been said so far is true, and if what the rest of the book has to say is also true, does this mean that with a clear understanding of the situation we can take action that will bring all those fish back?
     With one caveat, the answer is yes.
     The caveat is that we will never again have the numbers of fish that once favored the Pacific Northwest because the greatest of their habitats, the Columbia River, is for all practical purposes, gone.
     I have discussed this with  people who have for years worked on that particular aspect of the problem.  The biologists, the engineers and the hatchery people, all of them say they'll eventually find a way.  God bless them if they do, but they won't.  Any success with above the dams hatchery efforts will be due to factors beyond the physical fish breeding installations, themselves.
Only Chinook salmon spawn in deep fast water like the mainstem Columbia, and the most productive stretch of that great river is directly adjacent to Hanford!  That’s right: the Federal Nuclear Waste Depository!  Why?
    Because there is no development along the riverbank there.  It is human activity that is the problem.  Logging and other forms of agriculture, towns, businesses, ports … even parks and residences!
    If the birds were disappearing, human technology could not come up with a substitute for the sky.  There is no technological substitute for the developed areas of the Columbia River above the dams.  The limited gains, if you care to call them that, we've made have come at outrageous cost.

        (Insert Bonneville AdMin $1-$3 billion fish expenditures.)

     You cannot afford salmon at a thousand dollars a pound, or even fifty dollars a pound, particulary when, if left alone, they'll produce themselves for free.
     But, if we take an honest look at the situation, and decide to take two simple steps, we can achieve the following:  we can fill the below-Bonneville Columbia tributaries, and all the other undammed streams and rivers of the west with comparatively healthy runs.  Millions upon millions of fish.  A revitalized commercial fishing industry, a healthy charter fishery, fish for half a million anglers and the boots, fishing tackle, boats, fishing books, magazine articles, newspaper columns, TV outdoor commentators, bait, food and lodging they'll need.
     Two simple steps.
     Number one, although I can't see how the average citizen can do much about this, is to redistribute existing Columbia River fish rehabilitation funding to below Bonneville dam and to undammed waterways.  Do what we have to to meet mandated requirements for the indians, but beyond that, forget the upper Columbia and concentrate on below-dam and river mouth hatcheries.
     (And, if we can’t meet the mandated requirements for the above the dams tribes, which is, I suspect, the situation, then they must sacrifice even their religion for the good of the species!)
     Number two, use the information in this book to understand, evaluate and rehabilitate the waterways along which we work, recreate and live.  It will take you about three hours to read about it.
     That works out to an hourly rate of three hundred and thirty three million, three hundred and thirty three thousand, three hundred and thirty three dollars and thirty three cents because even without the Columbia River, the industry we recreate will still be worth a billion.
     Inflation, you know.
 
 

                                            Chapter two
 

     The subject is a fish that's worth a billion dollars.     We shall, therefore, begin our industry-saving education with a description of what a fish is.  (You wouldn't go bow hunting for Cape Buffalo without at least looking at a picture of one,
right?)

The  illustration is of Salmo clarkii clarkii.  You can figure out which family the beast comes from by the first word.  The last two have to do with a fellow who visited the northwest with a friend of his named Meriwether Lewis some years back.  Those who angle for this fine battler call it the Cutthroat trout.

     The front of the fish is on the left.  It starts, like most teenagers, with a mouth, and ends, like most comets, with a tail.  It is a miracle of evolution.  It is shaped like it is for the same reason that submarines are shaped the way they are.  Streamlined like this, it will use the least possible energy while facing a lifetime of flowing water.  The less energy it uses, the less luck it needs to find enough food to survive.

     The fin in the middle of the top of its back is called a "dorsal." (door-sill)
     The little fin behind it is called an "adipose," a word which comes to us from Greek and Latin.  It means, "fatty."  Someone, somewhere, probably knows what this fin does, but I do not.
     The tail is also known as the "caudal."  (cod-jule)
     The fin on the bottom near the tail is called an "anal."
     The fin on the bottom on the belly is called a "pelvic."
     The little fin up front near the gills is called a "pectoral," a word from Latin which means "of the chest."

     The tail fin, when waved side to side provides forward motion.  The others mainly have to do with the direction of motion and the fish's "attitude."  (How upright, for turning and for heading upwards or downwards.)
     You might be surprised to learn that fish have nostrils.  One thing salmonids use them for is to smell their way back to the spawning grounds.
     That curved slit up front is the gill cover.  Inside are blood-filled gills that remove oxygen from water and release waste gasses like carbon dioxide. Gills are a fish's lungs.  Since fish breathe water, they sing hymns when it rains.  I have actually heard them doing this.

                "Aqua est bona rex,
                 Rex est pices ami.
                 Gloria, gloria, gloria
                 Ad taberna
                 Nunc ursis!"

     (The words come up one at a time with the bubbles.)

     Observe, now, the patterns on the trout.  The top is speckled so that the fish looks like the bottom from above.  The bottom is white, so the fish looks like the top from below.  Camouflage.
     The eyes are situated so as to give a wide view forward and upwards, which is where some of their enemies and most of their victims come from.  Because fish live in water, they do not need tears.  Salmonids do not have eyelids.
     Cutthroat trout come in two varieties.  One lives all year round in the stream.  The other, like steelhead trout and salmon, is "anadromous."  It migrates to the sea and later returns to its birthplace to reproduce itself.  Below: a variety of anadromous and resident salmonids, plus an ancient but still living ancestor called a char.  The methods in this book will help all of them to thrive.

(illustrations of Chinook, coho, chum, sockeye, steelhead,
rainbow, browns, brookies and dolly varden in both adult and
juvenile colors.)

     Just like you, the fish look different at different times in their lives.  The steelhead, for example.  It is a seagoing rainbow trout.  As a child, it looks like a rainbow.  (And, is much smaller, just like you were, which explains minimum catch-size regulations, since these fish head toward the sea before they are six inches long.)  In the sea, it loses these stream-habitat survival colors and takes on camouflage that is good for that environment: namely, dark (look down into the ocean) on top and light (look up from the sea floor) on the bottom.
     All these fellows are cold blooded.
     For those of you who don't recall your highschool biology (I am referring to the classroom variety, here, although even that may be a non-sequitur, these days), you are warm blooded.  Your body adjusts to changing temperatures by burning some calories (fuel) or turning on the air conditioning (sweating).  Fish, on the other hand, cannot do this.  If where they are is not comfortable, they have to go somewhere else where it is.
     Remember this: body temperature is critical to these fish.  Say it: "Body temperature is critical to these fish."  Thank you.
     Think of it this way: if you couldn't burn calories to keep from freezing, and couldn't put on a fur parka or start a fire, you would last, naked, about thirty minutes in Nome , Alaska in the winter.  Conversely, if you couldn't perspire in the Saharan Summer you'd die in an hour or less.
     Our fish cannot live in water much above sixty degrees fahrenheit.  They are healthiest in water ten to fifteen degrees cooler than that.

(illus: two thermometers, with one live, one deceased fish next
to them)

     Water temperature is determined by a number of interrelated factors.  Shade, for example.  If you cut down all the trees along your creek, then the summer sun is going to pound down on the lower summer flows.
     And, if, after you've cut down the trees, you use the stream bottom rocks to build a nice wading pool for the kids, you have given the sun the opportunity to warm the water even more, since the flow rate has been slowed.  Each such artificial wading pool warms the water by one degree fahrenheit.  Two pools back to back equals two degrees.  Ten such pools along an unshaded mile of streambank gives you fish jerky.
     (It is, by the way, against the law to build such a dam without providing two apertures the fish can use to go up and down stream.  For survival reasons, fish use up to a half a mile of stream over a few days span.  Block that access and when the kids want to go fishing they'll be drowning worms in dead water.
     Another thing that affects the temperature of the stream is irrigation.  The less water there is to heat, the faster it heats and the higher the temperature goes.  If you can remove all the water (which has been done in Oregon), of course, you will be required by law to provide the fish with a lotion with a high sunscreen number.  If it comes to that, you might ask yourself which is better, a green lawn or an Astoria commercial fisherman with a job.

                  A breath of fresh air.

     The main reason for this fuss about higher water temperatures is not that the fish's system slows down and they become vulnerable to predators, and eventually disease.  That is true.  But, often, it's what these temperatures do to the water's oxygen level that matters..
     Without oxygen, animals die.
     As the water temperatures rise, the oxygen level goes down.  The fish began to gasp.  They soon cease trying to eat.  Finally, they turn over on their side and die.
     Think about it.  All you have to do to help these valuable fish survive the heat is nothing!  Don't block the stream with a wading pool, don't draw the water down to a trickle and don't cut down the trees along the bank!
     Imagine it!  A billion dollars for correctly doing nothing!

          The view from Old George's wife's kitchen window.

     Most anglers avoid stretches of a creek that have bare banks.  They look for stretches that have trees and grass and bushes.  Trout, anglers know, don't particularly like to sit out in the open where an osprey might get them.   Or, in the case of  a young fish, a kingfisher or heron.  Not only that, the brushy, shaded, green banks harbor the plants that insects like to nibble.  Trout love insects like you love eclairs.  So do juvenile salmon and steelhead.
     Bare banks mean a faster stream flow in the winter, like water through a big pipe.  Limbs, berry vines and roots drag against the water, slowing it down.  The fish has to use less stored energy to survive.
     Brushy is better.
     I'll tell you a story about that.

     One day, I was fishing a favorite stretch of my creek, when I came upon a fellow we'll call Old George.  He was cutting the streambank bushes.  When he spotted me, he said, "This is private property."
     I nodded, and said, "It has been for the nearly fifty years I've been fishing it.  You're new here, aren't you?"
     He grunted and said, "We don't want people fishing on our place."
     "You'll get no argument from me," I said.  "I have a place upstream myself.  If I'd have known you bought the place, I'd have asked for permission to cross it  But, if that isn't it; if you're just worried about the trout, look in my bag."
     I opened my fishing creel and showed him the plastic bait cups, beer cans, torn paper spinner packages and other garbage I'd collected along the way.
     "All I keep is the garbage."
     "No fish?" he asked.
     "Five nice ones, so far.  I release them."
     "Well," he said hesitantly, " I guess you're okay."
     "Thanks," I said.  'What're you doing there?"
     He looked down at the bushes.  "Oh, my wife wants to see the creek when she's washing the dishes."
     "That's a mistake," I said.
     He looked up quickly.  "What?"
     "The bushes are what hold the streambank in place.  Kill them and you'll lose part of your yard this winter."
     "Sure," he said.
     "Well, good luck," I told him, and headed off upstream.
     Quck scene change ... it is now a year later.  As I fish by, Old George is standing and staring at the place where a nice chunk of his property used to be.
     "Hi, George," I called.  "How's it goin'?"
     Old George shook his head and walked away.

     For the fish, bushy is better.  For the yards of those who live on a stream, bushy is also better.  Remember that.  Bushy is better.
     And, so is clutter.
     Some years ago, some government agency or other issued the rule that loggers must, before they leave a cut, remove all the slash their activity had dropped in nearby streams.  ("Slash" is a trade term for limbs, rootballs and other chunks of trees.)  Why were the loggers told to do this?  Well, some people "felt" that like kitchen floors and English manor yards, streams should be free of clutter.   Subsequent studies generated the "surprising" fact that these "clean" streams were almost devoid of fish!
     Why, one asks?

(photo of an old growth area stream)

     Simple.  Hie thee to an old growth forest and look at the stream there.  You will note that everything all over the place is a mess.  Trees have been blown over the creek, stumps have washed down from above, the whole place is a tangle of ferns and vines and mossy rocks.
     Now, why are there fish in this messy place and not in that properly ordered and civilized one?
     Visualize you are a three inch salmon.  Imagine that you are not the powerful, seagoing sixty pounder of the future, but a fragile, frightened fingerling.  That logging slash has given you shade, and protection.  You can hide in the nooks and crannies.  Hide from the bad kingfishers and hawks and eagles and bears and  those other, bigger fish.  It is cool here.  Bugs like the rotting wood.  You have many delicious bugs to eat.  Besides, sometimes the stream goes faster, and this nice hiding place is out of the current.
     And, then the men come along and remove all the slash, and you have no cover, and the food is harder to find, and it gets too hot at times and you can't breathe very well then, and bigger fish and birds are always trying to eat you and then the water begins to go very fast and you grow tired and are swept away.
     Yes, the silly tricks of the fairy tale author, which I am, have put you in the story for a moment.  My purpose was not to turn you into a tree-hugger in Birkenstocks but to give you a sense of the vulnerability of small salmonids.
     Understand.  Understand.  Understand.
     When they are small, they are delicate, easily destroyed creatures.
     If we coddle them then, they will come back weighing a hundred kilos a few years later.  That's when we attack!!   That's when we catch them and kill them and eat or sell them!!!!!  HAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!  Catch!  Kill!  Eat!  Sell!  Billions!  I tell you, Billions!
     But not now.
     Sshh!
     Later.
 
 

                                               Chapter three
 
 
 

     To sum up the preceeding two chapters: salmonids represent the least costly, most profitable industry you could ask for.  The fish runs aren't declining because of the God-damned indians or the God-damned seals.  The main problem isn't during their ocean careers, it's (except in the Columbia) in their nursery headwaters, the streams they use to get to the ocean, and the estuaries where they adjust to salt water conditions before heading out to sea.
The paper mills and chemical factories aren't all run by Nazis who wish to exterminate fish runs.  Sometimes the enemies of the fish are the very people who say they wish to save them.  (Like those who demanded slash removal.)  Sometimes, the friends of the fish are the very people who everybody says don't give a damn about them.
     As you read through this book, you'll discover two things.  The "good guys" can either wear Birkenstocks or caulk boots.  So can the "bad guys."
     To tell which is which at any given time, you must filter claims and news reports through the greatest filter of all, your brain.  Never forget that a rhino has thicker skin, a tiger sharper claws, a deer faster feet, a bird better wings and a fish better underwater breathing apparatus than you do.  God (or nature, if you prefer), gave you only one aspect superior to all other creatures.  In so doing, God (or nature, if you prefer) left you a message as clear as if it were a billboard ten feet from your front door:  YOU WERE MEANT TO THINK!!
     That's the tool we'll use to fix this mess.
     To think, the human brain, just like a computer, needs a framework with which to evaluate things.  You must first know up and down, in and out, here and there, hot and cold, dark and light.  Then, you must see how things bounce around inside them all.  Then, you must ask why they bounce the way they do.
     There are two kinds of frameworks available to the human brain.  The first is how a thing is.  The second is how one wishes a thing to be.
     The Garibaldi fisherman had spent his entire life inside a community that praised him for believing a self-serving framework.  In one question, I cut through his rationalization, his communal fairy tale, and brought to the front that other frame: the part that says, although this runs counter to all my prejudices, it is obviously so.
     Your new framework of fact begins here.

(illus: the hydrological cycle)
 

     The sun heats the sea.  Water evaporates into the atmosphere and becomes clouds.  An average cloud, according to KATU's Jim Bosley, contains twenty tons of water.  This cloud is blown by the winds.  When the cloud cools, it releases its water.  A basic way a cloud cools is when the wind blows it against a mountain, forcing it upwards.  "Up," in the troposphere, or lowest atmospheric layer, usually means cooler.  The moisture falls.  In the winter, in the mountains, it falls as little doilies of frozen lace we call snow.  Snow is a bank account for the streams and rivers of summer; for a time when the paycheck of rain does not come every day.  (A forest, particularly an old one, is another kind of savings account for streams that do not have snowbanks--streams that originate at lower elevations.)
     Gravity, which was defeated over the ocean by the sun, now takes charge.  The winter rain or the summer melting snow begins to trickle downward.  It forms dribbles, rivulets, streamlets, creeks and finally rivers as it goes.  The journey ends where it began, in the sea, and when the sun shines there, begins where it ended.
     It is a wheel, spun by the sun and gravity, in that order.
     The great Columbia River dams do not produce waterpower, they tap transformed energy from the sun and the Einsteinian space-time deformations in the vicinity of a classical mass.  (The Earth, for example, which "weighs" 10 X 6 to the twenty-seventh grams.)

(illus: watershed)

     Water, we have securely established, runs downhill.  The kind of hill it runs down determines what kind of drainage it is.  Your gutters produce one kind of drainage during a downpour.  This type is called a gusher.  Your kitchen sponge produces another kind of drainage when you lean on it.  This is called a dribble.
     For salmonids, the best system, particularly in the upper reaches, is the sponge.
     The landforms that combine to create any drainage system of streams and rivers is known as a watershed.  If you could straighten the trunks of any of the big watersheds out and then look at them from earth orbit, they would look exactly like a leafless winter tree.  A maple or an oak tree, for example.
     Using the largest watershed in the Pacific Northwest as an example: the Columbia is the trunk, the large secondary rivers like the Deschutes and the Willamette are the main trunk forks, the smaller rivers like the Tualitan are the larger branches, the streams like Gales Creek or Dairy Creek are the small branches and the little feeder creeks are the twigs.

                 Snow-based watersheds.

     Drier, desert country streams use a sponge called snow.     When you hear a tv weatherman talk about snowpack levels, he's talking about bars of liquid gold in a mountain vault.  Depending on the moisture content of the snow, which can vary, six inches of the white stuff equals somewhere around one inch of water.  So, if a thousand square miles of mountainsides are covered with six inches of snow, you have the equivalent of a rectangular lake a hundred miles long, ten miles wide and one inch deep.
     Winter rains, which do occur in our dry eastern lands, keep the streams going until spring.  The warmer weather then takes over.  Remember higher is cooler.  As the year wears on, the snow melts back, higher and higher, slowly releasing its store into the gulleys, draws and finally canyons.
     A good snowpack means constantly refreshed summer desert streams.  There is water for all who need it.  A light snowpack means late-summer limits on stream levels.  If human needs, for agriculture as an example, remain the same or increase, the streams suffer extreme drawdown.  Rivers like the Umatilla have, in recent times, been drained completely dry during such years.
     Low water means extreme heating, and thus lower oxygen content, for such rivers.  While certain species of fish can take this heating, salmonids cannot.  Few salmonids survive the extreme heating of  agriculturally exhausted summer desert streams.  No fish, of course, can survive a river that has been drained completely dry.
     Whether we like it or not, the Umatilla indians had a good case for objecting to the well-watered farm fields that resulted in riverbeds made of dust.
     But, there's an equally important group of people who ought to have stood by the indians in this argument: those who make their living from salmon.  The charterboat skippers of Westport, Washington (Grays Harbor) should have driven down and over to eastern Oregon to raise all kinds of Hell.  Their fishery, once a thriving one, was always based on salmon going by on their way to the Columbia.  Because they maintained their cultural prejudices, blaming the indians for their problems, they didn’t drive down to demonstrate and litigate with the indians, and so will probably have no ocean salmon season in 1998.
     Understand, understand, understand!
    When the Umatilla river dried up, the agricultural interests of the Umatilla basin helped to turn the charter industry of the southern Washington coast into another kind of desert.  There isn't, to my knowledge, a single owner-operated charter boat in Westport today.  All the boats are owned by business people from inland--merchants, dentists, doctors, attorneys and the like.  They are tax write-offs, and playthings.  And, in 1998, because of their own lack of action, not one of them will be able to catch a salmon!
     A snow-based watershed, like your car, has a limited carrying capacity.  If it isn't utilized by the numbers, if non-aquatic needs are not limited to the lowest snowpack capacity, or prioritized and adjusted to the changing supply levels year to year, then we have made a simple decision.
     We have decided that a Umatilla basin farmer has more right to make a living than an Astoria or Westport, Washington fisherman.
     This is a theme that will pop up again in this book.
     Recently, the specifically mentioned situation above seems to have been solved, by the way.  Agreements between the parties involved have finally been made.  For the moment, at least, the Umatilla will be allowed enough water to survive.  But, because of the dams, in my opinion, restoration of snow-based watersheds on the eastern slopes of the Cascades should be emphasized only in the lower reaches of the Columbia drainage.  The reasons for that will be explained later.  (My friend, Frank Amato, one of the primary publishers of fishing books in the West, disagrees with the above.  He claims hatcheries alone produced a recent steelhead run increase in the Columbia – a fallacious conclusion, in my opinion, based on the simple fact that he blames the run deficiencies on ocean conditions that favor smolt-eating mackeral.  My argument is that his analysis demands that the mackeral somehow managed to miss the upstream-bound steelhead he was talking about, while eating all of the steelhead heading for the Clackamas River system, which feeds into the lower Columbia.)

                Non-snow-based watersheds

     All hell will break loose on this one.
     Watersheds need either constant replenishing or storage capacity.  West of the Cascades and north of, say, Eugene, the annual rainfall is a multiple of that in eastern Oregon.  This means that more snow falls up high on the western slopes, and more rain falls lower down, in the latter case well into the summer.
     Streams that begin below the snowline on the east side are often temporary things.  Streams that begin below the snowline on west side of the Cascades can run all year long if they have the second kind of sponge: a forest.
     A forest, as defined by Webster's Seventh Collegiate Dictionary is: "a dense growth of trees and underbrush covering a large tract (of land)."
     Trees and underbrush.
     Trees and underbrush.
     Trees and underbrush.
     An old-growth forest, because of the shading provided by giant trees, may not actually have what you would call a "dense underbrush."  What it has is just as good.  It has fallen, rotting trees, layer upon layer, and moss and ferns.
     In either case, the result is a storage, a holding back and gradual release of water, just like the snowpack on the east side.
     Young or old growth, though one uses brush and fallen leaves and the other decaying trees, ferns and moss, the basic idea, if not the result, is the same.  Remember that when you hear or see a radio or television commercial or read an advertisement in a newspaper or magazine.
     Anyone who claims that commercially planted sites are "forests," is either a complete idiot or is lying.  This sort of thing is a redefining of the language for public relations purposes, nothing more.  Half of my family members were timber cruisers, loggers and mill owners.  They knew the difference, and as a result I know the difference.  These sites are "tree farms," not forests.  They are in no way even like a forest.  And, there's a good reason they aren't.  If you were a wheat farmer would you plant weeds in your field?  Of course not!  What you want is a field full of one plant, and one plant only.  Wheat!
     The same is true of tree farmers.  They don't want thirty kinds of trees and a hundred kinds of "underbrush" on their farms.  That is exactly what you would find in a naturally evolving young forest; one that would turn into a very different but just as natural old growth forest.
     Tree farms, even when planted immediately after clearcut harvest, cannot compete in any way with an actual forest when it comes to water storage and slow release.  If you find a forester who says that's not a true statement, take a look at his paycheck stubs.  (Find out who's paying his salary.)
     That said, you can now, probably for the first time, understand some things that never before made sense to you.
 Buffer zones, for example.  The law that forces logger to stay a hundred feet away from a stream.
 More importantly, you now can figure out why, as important as they are, these buffer zones are far from the final answer.   (Saw away all but the bottom inch of a twenty gallon bucket and see how much water you can carry.)
 But, while a buffer zone won't  do anything about the great loss of natural storage capacity, it does, in many instances, cut down on direct runoff siltation.  But, even in this instance it's an imperfect rule, because the stream so protected must be a year-round one.  If you stand back and look at any range of hills you will see wrinkles.  Some of these wrinkles run as part of the watershed only during the wettest part of the year.  Once clearcut, they erode and become a source of wetseason siltation, commonly known as mud, that runs into salmonid streams, choking the fish, suffocating the roe (fish eggs) and killing much of the other wildlife in the water.
     How did you answer the question asked earlier in this chapter?  Do Umatilla basin farmers have a greater right to make a living than Astoria fishermen?  Well, do tree farmers have a greater right, as well?
     The actual forests of the western Cascade slopes do a fine job as water release control mechanisms.  They provide the streams with the right amount of clean water, exactly when they need it.  The  best one can say about the more advanced  (in age) tree farms is that while far less useful in this respect than old growth or even younger natural forestlands, they still, once some natural ground cover is in place, are far better than bare ground.
     When you understand that these latter are crops, not forests, you can then grasp another concept.  Like any crop, they are harvested as often as possible.  Since most commercial tree farms in Oregon grow conifers whose greatest growth period ends in, at the most, thirty years, then you can count on an invasion of equipment and men, the cutting of the trees and a period of peak erosion at least three times per century.
     Streams dependent on tree farm watershed will never do as well as those with natural, actual forest, watersheds.  Improving tree farm practices employed by companies that actually do give a damn (there may be one, somewhere) are helping.  Improving tree farm practices employed by companies that just had the crap scared out of them by a looming endangered species listing for coastal coho salmon will also help.
 That's what some people say, anyway.
 Frankly, I doubt it.
 

                   The coast range.

     The Cascades east side is dry, and needs snowpack.
     The west side of the Cascades gets more rainfall, and needs some snowpack.
     The  coast range is not high enough to get any lasting snowpack, and so depends almost entirely on the forest "sponge" form of storage and slow release we have already discussed.  The Oregon coast from top to bottom has far, far, far more acreage in tree farms t> 

Transfer interrupted!

                                             Chapter four
 

     My nearest neighbor lives just across the creek.
     If you made out a list of the qualities you'd like in a model neighbor, he'd have every one of them.
     For years, besides working at an electronic factory, he ran a dairy on his place; which seems fitting for a farmer who lives on Dairy Creek.
     He is, I repeat, a good man.
     But, a cow pasture isn't much use if it's covered with trees, so the idea of planting them along the creek never even occurred to him.  You've already learned what the lack of shade trees can do to salmonids.
     The cows can't get to the stream for water if there's a fence in the way, of course, so the pasture is unfenced down by the far end where the creek turns.  For years, I watched his cows turning the fringe of the stream into mud wallows.  I watched them urinate and defecate in the water while they were doing it.
     I never stopped to fish that stretch because it was so muddy, slimy and scummy during the summer.  Once, though, when walking by, I saw a small trout slowly finning through the urine-colored water.  There were blisters here and there on its body, and the body itself was hump-backed, deformed.
     When regulations came along that forced my neighbor to build a holding tank for the winter pasture cow droppings, the ones most likely to be washed into the creek, he began the project, then decided the hell with it.  He got rid of most of his milk cows, maybe all of them by now.  I see he has a few young cattle over there, so maybe he's raising some locker beef.
     To him, I suppose, the day has come when a good man can't have a dairy on Dairy Creek.  The world has become an overregulated place.  The hippies and the bureaucrats have won, and something fine has been lost.

     I've always thought that the fact that the fish in this creek are old pals of mine means absolutely nothing.  There is no cash value in the fact that this creek has helped me through a nasty childhood, two divorces, two open-heart surgeries, the implantation of a pacemaker and the onset of epilepsy (from childhood brain damage).
     But, for another personal reason, I have long harbored a mild resentment towards the best neighbor you ever could want.  The reason is simple.  I make all of my living by writing.  I make part of it by writing about the outdoors.
     Of my five published books, three of them are about fishing.     When this fine man's dairy operation caused a deterioration in the quality of the stream, and thus damage to the trout and migratory smolts (young fish) in Dairy Creek, he was negatively affecting my ability to make a living.
     More than that, he was negatively affecting people's incomes up to a thousand miles away.
     Understand, this isn't a battle between farmers sucking the last of the water out of the Umatilla and indians who think that's about as crazy a thing as a man could do.  (Which is undeniably true.)  This miscreant is a decent man who isn't draining the last drop out of anything, and who thinks that his little herd never hurt a living soul.
     The one time I pointed out the slimy, summer low water slough out there at the far end of his pasture, he said, "That water runs clear in a hundred feet."
     This is the heart of the matter; the reason for this book.
     Oregon's streams take enough grief from bad people, people who don't give a damn if they are affecting other people's lives.  I know people like them who live right here in the valley.  They are, thank God, in the minority.
     But, if you add to their numbers all the people like my next-door neighbor ... all the people who are unknowingly, unintentionally destroying a billion dollar industry, and have been doing so for decades ... then the armies of stream habitat destruction stretch from horizon to horizon!
     The enemy, you may now be beginning to understand, actually is us.  All of us.

     So, off we go in our airplane, soaring up from the Dairy Creek valley and towards the setting sun.  There's the pass to Tillamook.  Gales Creek runs east from over there.  And, the Wilson River runs west from down there.  You can see the ocean ahead.  Over on the left is the Trask River.
     It all looks fine from up here.
     The gentle mountains from the northern horizon to the southern are, except for the strange checkerboard squares of the clearcuts, a carpet of trees.  And, ahead, just west of the Coast Range, are the lush green dairy farms of Tillamook.
     Before reading this book, you would have marveled at the great stretches of "forest" left in Oregon, and at the lovely, neat, well-tended farms.  But, now, you know what you are looking at.  It's a battlefield.  The site of an economic war, in this case, between those who make a living from timber and dairy cattle, and those who make a living from fish.
     And, you know that it's a war that's just about over.
     The federal government, a great political machine powered by campaign donations and voting blocks, knows it, too.  Even though the few fish left can't vote or send a check, even though there aren't enough full time fishermen left on the Oregon coast to populate a small town, the government knows.
     The coho are threatened.  If Oregon doesn't do something about it, the federal government will.  It will list the coastal coho under the endangered species act and bring down the wrath of God and the bureaucrats on this land.
     All that stands between that disaster and the people is an emergency consortium of those in the legislature, agricultural interests, tree farm companies and the govenor's office, to name the principal players.
     The question is, can they do the job?  Can these major power groups come up with a plan and activate it, and bring the salmon back?  And, if they can, will they?
     If past experience is any guide, the answer is no.

(BPA expenditures/research/hatcheries/results)

     Sometimes the reason why a thing fails is that it can't be done.  Sometimes the reason why a thing fails is that it's being done incorrectly.  And, sometimes the reason why a thing fails is that it won't be done.
     This will shock and anger some very important people hereabouts, which neither surprises nor bothers me, but I doubt that some of the consortium members even care about the fish.  They'll run a million dollars worth of commercials pointing out their nobility, but that's just political shmoozing and corporate public relations baloney.
     If these people had had a deep love and respect for the fish runs, plus a regret for the hundreds of thousands of jobs that have been lost, it wouldn't have required a threat to move them to action.
     I'll repeat that for emphasis.  If these people had had a deep love and respect for the fish runs, plus a regret for the hundreds of thousands of jobs that have been lost, it wouldn't have required a threat to move them to action.
     (It wasn't the out of work Astoria commercial fisherman that generated this revitalization commitment.  It was the fear that they, the consortium members, might be out of a job.  This doesn't make them evil, it makes them human.  They're looking out for number one, and for years they've had the power, read money, to do it, regardless of what and who else had to suffer.)
     Consequently, the members of the consortium will not run the full course.  They will do that which they actually intend, which is to slip out from under the economic threat of the listing.  They will not finish what they start.  The only way the fish will be brought back in commercial numbers is if, in addition to the efforts of the official rehabilitation consortium, you and I take action.
     (Which is fair, since we haven't been all that noble, either.  What we've done or not done may have been mostly out of ignorance, but that's not much of an excuse.)
     The action required comes in two distinct categories, though
those in category A are also in category B.
 
 
 

                          Chapter five
 

                           Category A

                 Those who live along a stream.

     If you own or rent land adjacent to a stream or river, and wish to act in a responsible way toward it, you must learn how it works.  (You can't repair a car unless you understand how it works, so how can you help a stream without the same sort of knowledge?)

(illus: stream channel, banks and foliage)

     Our stream is like a clock.
     Remove any part of the mechanism and it stops.
     The people who study the whole mechanism of any natural system are studying its "ecology."  The people who study one of the parts of the mechanism, trying to figure out how it fits in, how it behaves, is an "ethologist."
     For the moment, you're going to be an ethologist.
     Having already noted the hydrological cycle, the way water moves from the sea to the land and back again, you're familiar with circular systems.  The anadromous fish of the pacific northwest, if left alone, live in a circular, or cyclic, biological system.
     They hatch from eggs in the gravely headwaters of streams, live there for a while, then head for the ocean.  There, great schools of them follow a route in the north Pacific for a number of years, feeding and growing, until their biological clock tells them to go home.
     They swim along the coast until they smell the river system they were born in, then work their way up it, identifying by smell each branch, each turnoff, they need to take to get to the far upper reaches where they were born.  Once there, the female waves her tail above the gravel, making a shallow depression, a hole, called a "redd."
     She releases her eggs into it while a male releases his sperm to drift over them.  Then, she uses her tail once more to cover the fertilized eggs with clean gravel.
     Following that, both parents die.
     Their bodies decay in the nursery, and so participate in the enhancement of the food chain.  (This is why, in recent years, boy and girl scouts have been given hatchery carcasses to place in spawning grounds.  Though dead, the parents feed their children.)
     The cycle is complete.
     If you reside near a spawning area, you are in control of one of the most critical stages of the anadromous story.  The importance of what you do or don't do in and around that fish habitat cannot be overstated.
 

THE STREAMBED
                         Spawning areas.

     The single most important quality of an anadromous spawning bed is the gravel.  Unless it is small enough to react to a waving tail, it is useless.  When left alone, streams will make their own gravel.  But, when a town changes a stream's cyclic flow rate variations by pumping half the spring runoff into a reservoir, or by building a small dam for storage, the result can be a reduction in spawning areas.
     Here are the mechanics.
     Little rocks are made from big rocks.
     This happens when big rocks, pushed by a strong temporary flow, like a spring freshet, bang into other big rocks.
     No temporary freshets, no little rocks.  This is why some people who live below small river upstream dams and who understand these simple facts actually go out into their dying streams and rake the big rocks out of the way, creating spawning beds.
     Which brings us to the second most important quality of an anadromous spawning bed.
     Cleanliness.
     Streams, left alone, sweep their own nursery floors.  Those affected by human activity often end up dirty. If the dirt settles before the eggs are spawned, the eggs cannot descend safely down between the pebbles and will be eaten by predators before they can hatch.  If the dirt settles after the eggs are laid, they will die for lack of oxygen.
     One result of raking is the release of sediment between the pebbles.  In many cases, particularly if this is done during the lowest summer flows, all this does is transfer the silt to someplace else not far downstream.  But, you get a net gain of one spawning bed, at least.
     (If a stream is silted, all the spawning beds are silted.  One is better than none.)
     Spawning beds are made of silt-free gravel.
     Nothing, repeat nothing, else will do.

                        Living quarters.

     Salmonids, once their egg sacs are gone, must survive for a time near their birthplace.  In a wilderness stream, where spawning gravel areas are interspersed with other aquatic topographies, the smolts swim through a land of liquid winds, some fast, some slow, some even travelling, compared to the main currents, upstream.
     The larger rocks that divide and obstruct the streamflows are partly responsible for these variations. (The basic shape of the streambed, say the transition from shallow fast water to a deeper, slower pool will do it, too.)   By their size and placement, the rocks invent many micro-holding areas, providing a range of places for a range of fish.
     Although not part of the geology of the streambed, various kinds of obstructions like the trunks of fallen trees, roots and limbs obtain in wild waters.  They have a critically important function to perform in a healthy stream.
     As mentioned in the early part of this book, these obstructions provide a hiding place for smolts.  They offer protection from predators from above, birds for example, and their aquatic enemies, other fish.  The secret here is easily discovered just by looking at a rock, then looking at a fallen limb.  The limb offers more nooks and crannies for the smolts.
     Decaying chunks of flora attract insects.  Food, in other words. And, during high water periods, these things break the flow, creating important resting places for fish who are years from their adult strength.
     I know of a man who told his wife that small fish do not need any of the flow obstructions just described.  He told her that the little fish go down to the bottoms of the big holes to wait out the periods of high water.  This man apparently never attended school, and therefore never met a bully who liked to shove others out of the way to get the best seat in the lunchroom.  Additionally, he probably doesn't know that big fish like to eat little fish.  My guess is that this man thought the problem through just far enough to justify removing a fallen tree from a stream.
     This kind of thinking is known as "rationalization," and is one of the strongest forces on the planet.  It is as responsible for the wars of despots as it is for the streamside holocaust that has nearly ended the fish runs in our waters.  You can easily spot this sort of thing when it comes to streams, because it is normally preceeded by, "This is my property, and besides ... "
     These are the reasons why the idiotic "slash removal for clean streams" regulation imposed on loggers has been rescinded.  A rule that was, at one time, heavily favored by environmental groups.
     The enemy, I repeat, is at one time or another, all of us.  Tree farm companies, cities, agriculture, environmental organizations, universities, the average citizen, real estate developers, power generating corporations, hamburger stands, churches, gas stations, sportfishing organizations, outdoor publishing presses, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, foreigners, airport washroom attendants, the highway department, people named Ralph, the U.S. Marine Corps, UFOs, the New York Times, foresters, dumpster-divers, Wall Street, Rush Limbaugh, Mr. Rogers, Ken and Barbi ... everyone is the enemy!
     Unless the fallen tree is costing you property, deflecting the water so the stream is eating away your yard, leave it there.  Forget your English Manor esthetics and learn to love dead limbs.  If you are losing part of your yard, there are proper and improper ways to deal with the situation.  You'll read about that, later.
     Learning the correct way to handle such situations can prevent two things from happening.  (1) The unnecessary demise of anadromous smolts.  (2) An unnecessary depleting of your bank account.
     Loggers aren't the only people who must deal with environmental regulations.  You'd be surprised at how many there are that apply to streamside residential sites.  If you resent this sort of thing, if you think that a man should be able to do what he wants on his own property, it may surprise you to find out that I agree.
     With one caveat.
     What color your house is is no business of mine.  But, when you buy a place on a beautiful stream, strip the banks of natural foliage, cut all the trees and then dynamite the creek to make God Knows What--a horse watering pond or a goldfish pond maybe--it should become somebody else's business!
     (The above is not a fictional example.  It actually happened and is a matter of record.  When the county was informed about it, a hearing was held.  The county chairman is a woman who began her political career based on an environmental premise – the prospective construction of a garbage dump on the hills above her property.  This property, by the way, flanks a stream that once had superb searun cutthroat populations, which are now completely extinct.  The most significant outcome of the dynamiting incident was that the highway department put up a sign on a nearby feeder creek, naming it after the property owner.  It's like naming the child after the rapist, isn't it?)
     A property owner's rights should be sacrosanct until the moment that the effect of what he does goes beyond his property line.  At that time, the property owner should be suspended in a cage and left there until his body drops for parts.
     Do what you want to your own place and your own life and your own business, but leave mine alone.  Ignore that warning at your own risk, my friend, because the instant what you've done affects me, I'm returning fire.  Don't tell me that only about fifty or sixty little fish could have been harmed, Mr. Logger or Mr. Dairyman.  They represented a ton of returning fish and a million eggs!
     If what I did on my place drifted over and killed your cows or your trees, you'd be singing a different tune.
 This, of course, means you are a damned hypocrite.
 

THE BANKS

     We're having fun, aren't we?
     Now to the subject of the sides of a creek.  As a rule, they are partly in and partly out of the water.
     You already know quite a bit about the half above the water.  It washes away unless it has bushes growing in it.  It is a good place for trees since they'll never get thirsty there, will provide summer shade for the fish and maybe even some broken branches for the smolts to hide behind.  Best of all, the bank may have long grass stems which fold over into the water and make for a fun place for fish to hide and wait for a victim to float by.
     I call this latter situation a "floral transitional linkage" between the above-water and below-water bank zones because it fools some people into thinking that I know what I'm talking about.
     Yes, there are examples of streambanks that are solid rock.  No bushes, no trees, no floral transitional linkages.  Maine, or is it New Hampshire, has a lot of that sort.  So does Portland, Oregon, except that the ones in Portland are made by humans so that when Johnson Creek rises it doesn't destroy their azaleas.  (Just those that were planted by whoever lives down stream.)
     Stone banks look pretty much the same above and below the water.  Turf banks do not.  When turf banks haven't been stomped into swamps by stupid cows, shredded by stupid off-road vehicles and stupid motorcycles, turned into a lifeless putting green by stupid landowners or dynamited by stupid idiots, they're quite interesting, really.
     These top half zones are excellent places for things that breathe air.  Many plants do this.  The ones that naturally grow along our Oregon streams, besides fighting erosion and shading the water, are supermarkets for all sorts of hideous, many-legged creatures of the insect persuasion.

     Imagine you are a trout, slowly finning in the tunnel formed by a floral transitional linkage when, all of a sudden, a gigantic, rotund, two-inch long caterpillar drops from a leaf into the water.  It is green with red spots, has a black shiny head with two great black bulbous eyeballs and a bunch of feelers and little black legs.
     It is struggling as it sinks, poor thing, desperately trying to get back up to continue destroying your floral transitional linkage.  You take pity on its suffering and end it by swishing your tail, shooting out like Jaws and eating the bugger.  Since you are a salmonid, and don't chew your food, you can feel it wiggling as it goes down, but soon its troubles are over.
     You feel really good about yourself.
     You have both ended the caterpillar's misery and aided evolution by focusing breeding opportunities on less clumsy bugs.
     Life is good.

     The kind of flora that is on the bank of a trout stream is important.  Should, however, you move from the city to the country and decide that your property has unimpressive plant life along the creek, you will not be a rarity.
     Not everybody razes the land, poisons the stubs to make sure the roots of natural plants die, then sets down Lincolnshire bluegrass, Turkish triphennias and Bulgarian blood roses, finishing with some nice Abysinnian slate slabs down to the water's summer edge, but a great number of folks do.
     Most of the rest just dynamite the place.
     My question is, if you don't like the country, why do you move to the country?  Or, to put it another, kindlier way, if you're going to bring the suburbs along with you, I hope you die.
     What follows is a list of the trees, bushes, broadleafed plants and grasses that naturally occur along pacific northwest streams.  Plant anything you want around the house, but only these varieties along the stream.

(photo/illus/text floral guide, or html link)

THE WATER

     On a lovely summer day, a number of years back, my nieces' children came out to my Dairy Creek cabin to enjoy a splash in the stream.  After a few minutes, I noticed them all returning.  Leaning out the kitchen window, I asked what was up.
     "There's something wrong with the water," one of them said.  "It burns."
     He pointed at his leg, which had strange spots on it.
     Dead insects began to float by.  Within a few hours, the fish were gone.  By the next morning, there wasn't a single crayfish left.
     I never found out who did it.  I never even found out what the chemical was that he poured in the creek.  I don't know if he wanted to get rid of some cleaning fluids that had been sitting in his garage, some pesticides in the corner of his barn or what.
     All I know about the bastard was that he did it upstream.

     Do not pour used motor oil in a stream.
     Do not spray pesticide on streamside bushes.
     Do not spray herbicides on streamside bushes.
     Do not wash out nerve gas containers in a stream.
     Do not store atomic waste capsules in a stream.
     Do not dump your garbage in a stream.
     Do not throw old tires in a stream.
     Do not discard styrofoam packing in a stream.

     If what you have in your hand doesn't occur naturally in the stream, either recycle it or take it to a landfill.  Even if you don't give a damn about the life in the stream, even if you could care less about the household pets and farm animals that drink from it, you couldn't want to give chemical burns, possibly cancer, to a twelve year old kid, for God's sake!  What if he had dived in and burned his eyes out?  What if he had swallowed some and ended up screaming in an emergency ward while his guts dissolved?
     Even if you're the dumbest, most mentally deranged asshole on the planet, you couldn't want to do that!

     Clean water.
     Fish need clean water.
     Besides chemical pollution, what else louses up the water?
     Dirt.
     Heavy silt content lowers the gill's efficiency to extract oxygen from the water just the way the smoke in a room on fire chokes people.  Streams in natural settings, in forests, do have to deal with occasional landslides, and do so quite efficiently because of all the mossy, ferny, branchy jumble they’re made of.  Streams adjacent to human activity usually have been modified to meet human requirements.  They no longer have the tools to deal with their problems.  One thing they often suffer from as a result is siltation.  Salmonid smolts are fragile critters, and die in such environments.
     So,  siltation endangers the eggs and the breathing apparatus of the few eggs that hatch into smolts.  But, there’s more.
     As important as both is the effect that siltation has on the food supply.  Salmonids eat insects.  One of their favorite insects is the caddis.  The caddis, like a butterfly, spends part of it's life in a cocoon.  The difference is that the cocoon part of a caddis' life is spent under water.  Instead of the cocoon being attached to a leaf, it is attached to anything handy down there.  A dead branch, a root, anything.  But, best of all they love to connect to rocks.
     If you go to your stream when it's clear and look at the rocks, you will see little cylinders on the rocks.  If you pull off the cylinder, you will be holding a cocoon made out of tiny chuncks of stone.  If you catch a trout and open its stomach, you will see those same rock cocoons in there.
     Seventy-five percent or more of a trout's diet is comprised of this insect.  They swallow the cocoons, they swallow the bug when it leaves the cocoon and drifts to the surface to dry its wings, they snap it up as it dances its mating rituals in the air above the stream.
     Caddis reproduction takes place in streamside trees.  The eggs are deposited in the stream and sink to the bottom  When they hatch, the bugettes, which look like tiny maggots, drop into the stream and make rock cocoons.  They can crawl around, dragging these stone sleeping bags with them.  Most of the time the ones's you'll see are attached to or crawling around on big rocks.
    When they're ready to leave their strange cocoon, they form a kind of plastic bag around themselves, fill it with gas bubbled taken from the water and, after their wings dry in there, float like a baloon up to the surface.  The baloon splits and they're instantly airborne and heading for the branches of an alder love nest.
     Unless the stream is silted.
     The few insects that survive with dirty gills long enough to grab a rock and begin inflating their air bag cannot get a grip on dirty rocks. The current washes them away.  Because when they are in the bag, they are now air-breathing creatures, and because they have no control over their drift, and because they drift by fish, they rarely make it to the surface.
     So, if there has been silt, and no flushing of water to carry it down to the lowlands, it settles on the big rocks.  The salmonid's food supply has been almost totally eliminated.
     Most of the smolts starve to death.

     One day a few years back, Dairy Creek turned to mud.  This wasn't a winter landslide.  It was in the summer.  I drove upstream to find out what was going on, and found a Northwest Natural Gas pipeline crew at work.
     "You're killing the fish," I told the foreman.
     "What're you talkin' about?" said the foreman.  "I'm from Oklahoma and we got fish that can walk on top of mud.  This ain't nothin'."
     "I understand," I said, "but these are not like your fish.  They are salmonids.  With the water so low and slow, the silt is clogging their gills and settling on the rocks.  You are killing their food."
     "Well," said the foreman, "what should I do?"
     "Go to any nearby farm," I told him.  "Get some haybales.  They're only a couple of bucks each.  Make a temporary dam with them across the creek.  When you're finished, throw them back in the trees."
     An hour later, the stream was running clear.

     On another occasion, a gyppo outfit was cutting a stand of timber upstream.  They turned a feeder creek into a mudbath.  They weren't interested in listening to any of my baloney, so I called the cops.
     An hour later, the stream was running clear.
     I prefer the first anecdote to the second, but sometimes the power of the law is all you have.  There are people who don't give a damn about anybody but themselves.  They don't leave you any choice.
     In any event, do take note of a continuing theme item, here.  Brush and trees are something we cut.  Poisons and fertilizers are something we put in the streams.  Siltation is something we cause.
     Once more, we have discovered that all we have to do to bring back the fish is nothing.
     Leave the streams alone.

(Here ends the current text available for the internet.  For financial reasons, though I have continued my research, I have not continued to write this book.  No organization of any kind from the Left or the Right will support it.  No fishing publisher, even my own, agrees with what you've read.  The Governor's Watershed Enhancement Board.  Oregon Trout.  None of them will take a tiny piece of the billions they have spent to support this particular view of the situation.  If I win the lottery, I will bring it out, myself.  But, since I don't buy lottery tickets, it is unlikely to happen.  I will now, however, add some brief text for those who have visited the page because of a radio program, today, Feb 12, 2001.)

For the KXL listeners.

If marine mammals and birds are the problem, why does Alaska, which has a thousand times the number of such creatures, have good salmon returns?  If Asian fishing fleets are the problem, why does Alaska, whose salmon face the same fleets our fish do, have good returns?   If ocean predation by toothy fish, or El Nino conditions that reduce food levels, are the problem, why does Aaska have good returns?

THINK !!!

Further, if dams aren’t one of the problems why is it that the Buoy 10 fishery at the mouth of the Columbia is the only place on the river with consistently good fishing?  There are hatcheries above the dams, but their results are nothing compared to the facility below them.  Why do the seals, ocean conditions and Asian fishing fleets get all those other salmon going up the Columbia, but miss the Buoy 10 hatchery smolts and returning salmon?

THINK !!!!

The Columbia is a series of giant lakes.  Salmon smolts evolved to migrate in flowing water.  What used to be a hundred and fifty mile downhill run for the little guys is now a giant lake with little current to help, giant concrete food processors (dams with turban blades) every so often, and dramatically more aquatic predators.  The fish who eat smolts in the Columbia used to be restricted to small bays because they aren’t built for fast water.  Now, with the dams, there isn’t any fast water.

Twenty to fifty percent of the smolts that arrive at each dam die going through the blades, from banging into the walls of water tunnels or from the bends (nitrogen supersaturation)  when they pop out the other side.  (That’s why the Fish Dept. is now barging them around the dams.)  Start with a hundred fish and ten dams later, you have 3/32 of a fish left.

So, their spawning streams are adjacent to logging that alters the storage and delivery characteristics of the watershed, these little creeks flow into streams along which farmers have changed the land, past towns that change the rate, periodicity and chemical composition of the water that they release (off roofs, streets and lawns), swim past fifty times the in-water predators that would normally exist to get to the dams, one by one, until they reach the lower river which is lined with dredged dock sites and channels, towns, factories and farms (all affecting the quality and flow rate of the water), and finally reach the tidal areas.

In the case of the Columbia, this used to be a big sand bar and all sorts of swampy areas.  Today it is a dredged channel that recently hosted the U.S.S. Missouri (which is larger than the Titanic) and miles of docks, towns, highways and shoerline businesses.

Where shall they dally while they get used to, prepared for,  the transition to saltwater?

At a local Motel 6?

Habitat is where a fish lives, folks.  It doesn't matter where you drink poison, are eaten by a bear or starve to death -- in your home, at the movie or at work.

Dammed rivers with agriculture and civic activity along them are about as useful to salmon smolts as you would find a cardboard house in the middle of a freeway.  The solution to the Pac NW salmon problem is simple.  Free three or four rivers along the coast from all but highly restricted human activity from the headwaters to the mouth.  Encourage better behaviour along those rivers and streams where we must remain.  Try to match the Buoy 10 experience with river mouth hatcheries on these latter streams.

A few small coastal watersheds returned to nature.  The rest of them, the vast majority, subjected to better human treatment and with downriver hatcheries.  Give up on the Columbia above the dams (we need the power, irrigation and shipping lanes) and redirect Bonneville Power Administration money to creating the few pristine watersheds, helping the non-pristine watersheds and leaving it at that.

That, in a nutshell, is it.
 

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