The Furious Spinner

Parts of this essay might seem familiar to Furious Spinner readers. I filched some of it from previous essays I have written about salmon. Mario is home sick for the second day in the row, so my energy is with him. I wrote this essay last weekend, and I thought you might enjoy it.

A recent study of farm-raised salmon revealed they contained alarmingly high levels of cancer-causing contaminants. Television news reports showed video of the farmed salmon in their pens, thousands of them pushing up against one another, unable to swim freely.

Seeing the fish in these crowded pens, I thought of the animal markets in Asia, where once wild animals are packed into tiny cages, unable to move, hardly able to breathe. It was from these animals, many scientists believe, that the SARS outbreak originated. This year, because of the bird flu, we got to see home movies of poultry farms where chickens were jammed into pens cheek by jowl.

In news reports about the bird flu, contaminated salmon, and SARS, no reporter once mentioned what was obvious to me: these living creatures were being treated with intolerable cruelty.

Why isn’t anyone talking about this? It could be in our own best interest to see that these creatures are treated better. You can’t put people in such crowded conditions without engendering an epidemic. Couldn’t it be the same with animals? Isn’t it probable that if these animals were treated humanely we wouldn’t have to worry about SARS and some of the other infectious diseases?

Farmed salmon are not spreading infectious disease, but they are consuming contaminated feed which stays in their tissues and is passed on to the consumer. Salmon are farmed because much of the wild salmon’s habitat has been destroyed, and they have been overfished. Many species are already extinct.

Salmon have been valued around the world for thousands of years. The Irish believed the salmon was the oldest and wisest of creatures. Irish poets crouched at the water's edge to be as close to the salmon as possible, hoping the mystical fish would imbue them with inspiration, creativity, the right words to make their poetry sing.

In the Pacific Northwest, $3.3 billion has been spent in the last two decades to save the Pacific salmon from extinction. For many people, the salmon represents the soul of the Pacific Northwest. Salmon are extraordinary creatures, shapeshifters, survivors supreme. Salmon change physically so that they can survive in salt water, even though they were born in fresh water. Later, they change again. They are first the color of gold, then red as dried blood.

What kind of disconnect happens to human beings so that it becomes acceptable to stuff animals into cages like feet are stuffed into too-tight shoes? What happens to us so that we think it is tolerable for magnificent creatures like the salmon to be put into pens for their entire life span, never free to follow their natural impulses to leave their spawning beds for the ocean, only to return years later, in defiance of Thomas Wolfe who said you can’t go home again.

I have watched salmon struggling upstream to spawn. I have participated in human celebrations where we welcomed the first salmon. Near to where I live was once Celilo Falls, the Great Falls, where Native people fished for 12,000 years before the Corps of Engineers built a dam in 1957 and drowned the falls. The grief over this act is still raw, and many people will not speak of it. The wild salmon runs have gotten smaller each year since the dam was put into service.

Many people say there is no value in saving salmon. How does one put a value on such a thing? Aren’t salmon valuable because they exist? Shouldn’t living creatures be treated well because it is the right thing to do?

This fall, I went nearly every day to a place called Eagle Creek to watch the salmon returning to spawn. I was recovering from an illness, and something about their tenacity inspired me. They flipped, flopped, wiggled, and leapt up this shallow stream determined to get to the spawning ground.

As days went by, the red salmon became white or black-red as they neared death. A huge salmon, golden blond in death, lay across the bottom of the stream, looking like one of those great fallen Roman statues. Sometimes salmon leapt into the air, and they were all motion and stillness at the same time. My knees buckled to witness the beauty of it all.

One day, I put on my rubber boots and walked down to the creek. I noticed rose-colored beads at the river's edge. I assumed someone's necklace had broken, and the beads had fallen into the clear cold water. They were different colors. Rose. Pink. Light orange. Perfectly round. Exquisite. Some were salmon-colored. Maybe even most of them.

Salmon-colored? I stood and looked into the middle of the creek. These salmon- and rose-colored pearls were scattered all over the creek bed. They were salmon eggs! How wonderful.

Watching my step, I waded into the shallow water. One salmon swam up next to me. Part of her flesh was falling off of her tail, and I could see her tail bones. Another fish, about a foot from me, kept turning on her side and wiggling. Then another salmon came and undulated over where she had been. I assumed I was witnessing the laying and fertilizing of the salmon eggs.

As I stood amongst these sacred creatures, I wondered if I was like one of the returning salmon, on my last fin, so to speak, or like one of those pearls of wisdom on the sandy bottom of the creek waiting for a new beginning. Were we all ending and beginning constantly?

The Columbia River once ran red with salmon. 16 million returned to spawn in the mid-1800s. Over the past quarter-century approximately 660,000 have returned.

According to the Sierra Club, the best thing we can do to save the salmon is to eat wild salmon if we eat salmon. Farmed salmon pollute; farmed salmon can escape and contaminate native stocks; wild salmon is better for us since it’s not as high in contaminants and it’s not injected with dye to make it pink.

I think the best thing we can do for the wild salmon and all the wild creatures is to treat them better. I, for one, will continue to crouch along riverbanks, listening for the wisdom of the Salmon and waiting for them to imbue me with inspiration and creativity.
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