The Fisher Queen Page 17

  “I am so glad we came to your class this morning, I had a feeling it would be really good and you were great. My friend didn’t even want to come, but I dragged her here. I just had a feeling we really needed to be here and I’m so glad we came. It was so interesting. I kept telling her—oh, I’m Joan and this is Anne, by the way; you remember us, right?—I kept telling her something really great might happen and maybe she’d get inspired to write.”

  “I don’t write, at least not up to now,” the quiet one says with a faint smile.

  “I’m so glad you came,” I say, and something about her makes me really mean it.

  “Someone told us you used to be a deckhand on a salmon boat and you are writing about it. That’s amazing. Anne used to work in the salmon-fishing industry too, right, Anne?”

  “That’s amazing, Anne, it’s a pretty small sisterhood,” I say, encouraging her to reveal more. The faint smile reaches her distant grey eyes and she simply agrees.

  It starts out normal enough: we learn I worked on a salmon troller, she worked in a fish camp; I was a full-on deckhand and cabin slave, she was a bookkeeper and first-aid attendant; I fished with my boyfriend, she worked for BC Packers.

  “In Bull Harbour? Oh my God, we fished out of there all the time!” My words rush and tumble. “In the 1980s? That’s when I was there. Did you work with Dave and his wife? The guy that died in the ice auger? And you were the first-aid attendant?”

  When she says yes and that she remembers our boat and fixes me with those searchlight eyes, a high wind rushes through me. It’s hard to hear her, but I see her lips say, “I thought it was you.”

  “My God, you are in my book. Oh my God, I know who you are.” My heart races and it’s hard to breathe, a dark green mountain wave rushes toward me—I just have to hang on to the wheel and keep the bow pointing into it. The world telescopes down to this electric conduit that connects us and sends us spinning 25 years back in time. I watch myself slowly lift my arms and extend my hands to her across the table, palms down. I feel a trickling on my face and don’t know why my eyes are blurry.

  I hear myself say in a bright voice untouched by 25 years of full-calamity living: “It’s me, the little girl with the broken hands.” Some small part of me knows how surreal this seems to those near us, but I can only keep the bow pointing into the wave and pushing forward. She says she knows. I ask her if she remembers what she did for me. She does. I watch a silver track slide down her pale cheeks.

  Her friend is weeping. “When I said I dragged her here because I knew something was going to happen here, I meant it. She has breast cancer, just diagnosed before we came here. I told her that maybe if something inspired her to write, even in a journal, it would help her.”

  I turn to those eyes that had noticed the festering wounds I had tried to hide, those hands that had tended mine, that mouth that had comforted me through the terrible pain. Those arms that had held and rocked me in that tiny plank-board room that smelled of disinfectant and fish guts as I sobbed my fear and loneliness.

  “You saved my life 25 years ago and maybe we’re here for me to return the favour. Maybe something today will help shift what is happening inside your body.” I slowly come back into mine and the room around me. Everything has gone very still and quiet except for the faint gasps and sniffs.

  They say that we barely spoke above a whisper, that a casual observer enjoying the view from across the room would hardly have noticed. But those at our table said they were changed forever, each to their own need, by what they had witnessed. Exchanged serendipity for coincidence, perhaps even considered the possibility of a grander plan.

  Every time Anne and I passed each other in the bustle of the conference activities, I asked, “Did that really happen?”

  And she would say, “Yes, little sister, it did, every bit of it. It’s time to tell the story.”

  I will forever be deeply connected to how the land and sea talk to us. I will always know when something is coming. I’ll look up and scan the skies and sniff the wind, on a wild mountaintop or a frenetic cityscape, and murmur that it’s shifted to slack, get ready for it. Those who know me will pay attention.

  The Wild West has gone to its condos and fish farms, yet still nature insists on being heard. I am older, plumper, shrewder and a little road weary, but my gypsy soul still leaps and flings its irreverent laugh all about the place.

  I went to sea and met my Sisiutl. Faced my horror, faced my fear and answered the call that drew me through my journey home to the Mother Stream that is me.

  Afterword

  Humans have always harvested the land and seas to feed themselves and the world. Now we must feed seven billion of us. In 40 years, there will be many more to feed, and we must increase our food production by twice as much. Fishers are among the last hunter-gatherers in the world and fish are among the last wild food. And the greatest of those fish on Canada’s west coast is the mighty salmon.

  For millennia, five species of wild salmon have been inextricably woven into the tapestry of life in the Pacific Northwest. One of the rare fishes that lives in both fresh and salt water, salmon’s rich, dense and delicious flesh, loaded with life-sustaining nutrients and oils, is prized by both animals and humans. For the fish, the oils allow them to survive migration for thousands of miles and the final powerful push to reach their inland spawning grounds, fighting their way against the current, often through predators, rapids and shallows.

  During their life cycle, wild salmon carry nutrients from river to sea and back again—as living food and then as fertilizer after they spawn, die and decompose. Salmon have provided humans with not only an integral food but also a foundation for Pacific Northwest culture, and for 5,000 years have been a cornerstone of wealth and commerce. Only in the last 200 years has that ancient balance been disturbed and rocked to its core as competition for this dwindling resource becomes more and more fierce.

  The First Nations people of the Pacific Northwest were the first commercial trollers on the BC coast, fishing in small dugouts and using baited hooks with hand-pulled lines. While they braved the wild coastal weather and waters, inland tribes braved the powerful currents of the Fraser, Thompson and Stikine Rivers, trapping and harvesting the returning adult salmon in complex weirs owned by clan families. Fish were dressed and dried to sustain villages throughout the winter. Especially for inland peoples, poor runs meant starvation.

  In May 1670, King Charles II of England signed the charter for his nephew Prince Rupert that created the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) and changed the fate of the BC salmon fisheries and Canadian resource allocation forever. The company was granted unrestricted dominion over “the sole Trade and Commerce of those seas . . . with Fishing of all sorts of Fish, Whales, Sturgeon and all other Royal Fishes in the Seas, Bays, Inlets, and Rivers within the Premises.”

  When Alexander Mackenzie explored the Fraser River in 1793, he was stunned by the enormous numbers of salmon moving upstream and filled his canoes daily to sustain his crew. By 1808, Simon Fraser had begun the first trade in salmon with local First Nations on the lower Fraser River, noting the phenomenal harvest by “means of barriers” and the people’s relative wealth.

  Those ancient traditions would change dramatically in 1827 with the building of Fort Langley, the HBC trading post, 30 miles upstream from the mouth of the Fraser River on BC’s southwest coast. As the first commercial salmon fishery grew exponentially, Native men provided tens of thousands of fish annually while Native women cleaned, salt-cured and packed the catch in barrels for shipping to Hawaii, then on to Asia and South America to an exploding salt-fish market.

  The Fraser Canyon Gold Rush in 1858 saw an estimated 30,000 prospectors pass through Victoria to pan the river, and clashes with Native communities soon followed. Over 2,000 Babine peoples arrived at their ancestral river fishing grounds north of Yale to find an environmental catastrophe: clear-cutting, stream diversion, destroyed gravel spawning beds. The ensuing conflict left fish camps d
estroyed and 31 Native villagers, including chiefs, dead. Eventually an uneasy deal was struck, and by 1906 the Department of Indian Affairs reached an agreement with the Babines that in return for dismantling their weirs and in lieu of land claims, they would be given nets for food fishing and trade.

  As the Industrial Revolution erupted in England, the BC fish-canning industry was launched in 1871 by Alexander Ewen to feed the masses of hungry factory workers. Thirty thousand one-pound tin cans were hand-soldered and hand-filled with 2,000 sockeye in 300 cases. Nine years later, 42,000 cases were shipped; just one year later, over 120,000 cases. Sockeye were prized over other salmon species, even the magnificent spring salmon, because of their superior quality for canning. Pulling in up to a thousand fish at a time, the fishers tossed everything but sockeye, considering the other fish garbage and not worth hauling, and left a trail of dead salmon behind them as they rowed to shore.

  Canneries admitted to discarding up to 3,000 fish plus guts and offal into the tidal waters at the mouth of the Fraser River every day, which many people saw as the cause of typhus epidemics that raged through the fledgling city of Vancouver and outlying villages.

  By 1900 there were more than 1,000 canneries on the BC coast, employing mostly Native and Chinese workers. By 1913 cannery-employed multi-national fishers (Scandinavians, Greeks, Italians, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Chileans and Hawaiians) used hand-pulled linen nets or handlines from 20-foot rowing skiffs. Each dawn they went out and pulled in the massive catches that sent 2.3 million cases of salmon around the world in 1900. A fisher earned $2.25 for a 12-hour shift and a rower earned $1.00; a crude tent slung across the bow and a cut-down oilcan stove was their only comfort.

  But early one August morning in 1913, a catastrophic event in the Fraser Canyon destroyed 75 percent of the sockeye run and decimated the industry for the next 80 years. Some say forever. As Canadian Northern Railway crews blasted tunnels through the canyon, a rockslide sent 76,000 cubic metres of debris into the Fraser River at Hells Gate and narrowed the river into a destructive torrent. Millions of sockeye were wiped out in one of the biggest environmental disasters in BC history. Only by the heroic efforts of First Nations people with dip nets and baskets carrying live fish upstream over the slippery rocks and of federal fisheries officers frantically dredging and building wooden box flumes were a few thousand sockeye saved. The Fraser did not bear salmon again until the Hells Gate Fishways opened in 1945.

  In 1917 Canada and the United States formed the International Pacific Fisheries Commission to improve salmon runs to spawning beds—in some cases, hundreds of miles inland. Over the years, this joint commission has built fishways—artificial channel systems of low steps (or ladders) that help salmon through the difficult sections of the Fraser River system—at Yale, Hells Gate and Bridge River Rapids. In 1941 only 1,100 fish reached the spawning beds in the BC Interior Quesnel Lake system; by 1973 the number had increased to over 250,000 fish, and in 1981 to over 800,000. But 30 years of significant scientific planning and several years of construction still have not completely repaired the damage done a century ago.

  By the early 1920s, gasoline-powered trollers with multiple lines from V-shaped trolling poles began to appear, and in the 1930s, holds were filled with ice to allow for trips of several days farther offshore. By the 1960s, freezing systems extended trips even further. By the 1980s the BC troll fleet consisted of 1,600 freezer, ice and day boats. However, by the year 2000, the fleet was downsized to 544 boats as part of a government buyback and licensing scheme.

  When the first reports of salmon-stock depletion on the BC coast filtered back to Ottawa in the 1880s, federal fisheries responded to environmental and resource concerns. They made fishing licences mandatory in 1894, and made trap nets and purse seines illegal. That decision was rescinded a few years later under pressure from fishers in competition with lower-cost American producers. Native weirs had already been banned and land claims pushed to the back burner, leaving many First Nations disgruntled. Canneries were lobbying for more power. Fishers and cannery workers were striking and forming unions. Dissension among fishers grew as various factions of net fishers and hook fishers saw each other as market competitors.

  The stage was set for decades of escalating tensions and conflict, as user groups demanded their voices be heard and their share be given. Commercial sport fishing, fish farming, international fishing rights, industrial pollutants, habitat destruction and environmental and climatic change have turned the industry into a many-headed Hydra. Each user group loudly defends itself while blaming others for dwindling stocks, accusing each other of greed and mismanagement. What makes management even more complex is that salmon are migratory, moving through Canadian, American, Russian and Japanese waters. In response, the 1985 Canada–United States Pacific Salmon Treaty and the 1992 North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission treaty signed by Japan, Canada, Russia and the United States were created to manage collective research and eliminate destructive practices like high-seas drift nets and trafficking of illegally caught salmon.

  The Canadian government, through its Department of Fisheries and Oceans, now known as Fisheries and Oceans Canada, has answered these challenges primarily through licensing and regulations, environmental measures and salmon-enhancement programs. Regulations regarding season length, timed openings, gear and area restrictions, quotas, non-retention and allocation limits extend to all gear types (hook, net and drag).

  Unfortunately, each group often feels it is being unfairly burdened with regulations and therefore lobbies for leniency, as trollers did after being restricted to a four- to six-week annual season and increasingly reduced fishing areas.

  Beginning as a school project in North Vancouver, the extensive federally funded Salmon Enhancement Program was launched in the late 1970s to support recreational and commercial fisheries and to rebuild depressed stocks. Despite 19 BC hatcheries producing and releasing an average of 485 million salmon fry and smolts, only a small fraction of them, about one percent, returned to spawn. Whether the high mortality rates are from industrial pollutants, disturbed spawning grounds, rising ocean temperatures, unreported over-fishing, diseases and parasites from farmed fish or a combination of all of these is still unclear.

  The rise of the commercial sport fishery, which is seen by other user groups as the sexy fishery and the darling of the regulators, is a relatively modern phenomenon. Not to be confused with the personal recreational sport, where folks catch a fish or two for their own table, these major commercial ventures range from exclusive lodges to small charter boat operators who cater to a largely well-heeled crowd seeking adventure holidays.

  It was completely unregulated until 1951, when a daily limit came into effect, and personal sport fishing licences came 30 years later. In an industry still largely unregulated and run by volunteers, sport fishermen are now required to purchase an annual licence and adhere to catch limits. Boat totals are reported by the honour system, though many people believe that commercial sports operations should be as closely regulated as commercial fisheries.

  Some sources say sport fishers take only three percent of the annual take, but others, especially commercial fishers, say that number is grossly inaccurate, and stories of illegally caught, canned, frozen and sold fish run rampant. Sport fishers are also not required to adhere to any closures or other restrictions, giving them priority access to springs and coho and protecting the fishery from changes in abundance.

  Seen as a key element in BC’s recreational and commercial well-being, commercial sports operations are significantly tied to the tourist industry. In the 1960s sport fishers began to organize to protect their interests and created the Fishing Advisory Board, which now represents the interests of several hundred thousand anglers and business owners.

  By far the most controversial and volatile issue on the BC coast is fish farming. The answer to world hunger to some people, environmental holocaust to others, fish farming has generated immense reactions from all sides.
>
  Fish farms began appearing in the late 1970s; in 2012 there are 130 operations in BC. Located in protected inlets and bays, the farms provide millions of pounds of salmon to a growing middle class around the world that appreciates salmon’s health benefits and delicious taste. Unaffected by weather and seas, migration cycles and predators, grown-to-order fish are available throughout the year.

  After a moratorium on new fish farms from 1985 to 2002 in order to study their environmental impacts, fish farming has become the province’s largest agricultural export, outstripping any other industry and projected to contribute a billion dollars to the province’s GDP by 2020. Fish farmers insist this is the only way to take the pressure off the wild stocks and create a viable mass-produced food product.

  With commercial fishing, sport fishing and salmon farming each bringing in approximately $300 to $350 million per year in the early 2000s, anti–fish farm protesters argue that employment figures are significantly higher for sport and commercial fishing, at nearly 4,000 jobs compared to approximately 1,500 jobs for fish farming, and without the attendant environmental risk. And that does not include nature-based tourism, of which salmon is a part, coming in at nearly $7 billion and over 120,000 jobs.

  At the same time, other marine-related sectors and environmental agencies have voiced significant concern over such issues as contamination of wild stock as they swim by the farm cages, contamination of waters by concentrated fecal matter and uneaten food, use of other fish in the feed pellets, and escape of farmed Atlantic salmon into wild Pacific stock. The greatest concern is the impact on young smolts and fry that are too fragile to survive sea lice and disease.

  And so the argument rages on.

  Annual catches and fishers’ incomes have roller coastered for the last 100 years. Following the devastating aftermath of the Hells Gate rockslide, annual catches slowly increased to a high point of 93,210 tons in 1936. A gradual decline followed, then numbers began to reverse again in the late 1970s, with annual salmon catches reaching historic high levels of 107,500 tons in 1985. From that peak, catches fell rapidly to a historic low of 17,000 tons in 1999, totals that bumped up only marginally in the early 2000s.