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The Afterlife

A salmon’s second journey begins with its “collection.” At the Cole M. Rivers Hatchery north of Medford, Oregon, the crowder is drawn through the holding pond once a week, May through August, pushing the fish toward the rear, toward the spawning house. When I visited one June, three hundred spring Chinook were loitering, miraculously returned from the ocean to the place where, for them, it had all begun. They were conceived artificially and released as fingerling smolt into the Rogue River, which ushered them through Shady Cove and Grants Pass—all the way to Gold Beach and the Pacific. A fraction of them reach the ocean. A fraction of those return. These were the prodigal .003 percent, each fifteen or twenty pounds of sauntering muscle wrapped in silver.

Cole Rivers is an industrial-strength facility, a real doozy. “No one wants to work here,” David Pease, the assistant manager, said with a measure of pride. Tall and laid-back, with curly brown hair, Dave was in a short-sleeved beige Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife uniform and khaki shorts, a classic game-warden look. There are eighty-seven ponds on the Cole Rivers campus, while the typical Oregon hatchery has about fifteen. On the other hand, elsewhere employees must wade through ponds with screens during the dead, or drizzle, of winter to corral their fish. Here you have the crowder, which is much like the automatic sweeper on a bowling lane.

But it can’t handle three hundred Chinook. Not close. Most, in fact, weigh more than your average bowling ball, and the contraption began to moan and screech as it approached the spawning house. The operator, Ada Carnes, a hatchery technician with long blond hair, freckles, and deep-set eyes, backed off and lifted the gate of the crowder a touch, letting some fish escape underneath. A reprieve. Instantly they darted the length of the pen, sleek torpedoes with jaws, speckled and scarred. Many had visible hook wounds on their flanks, pink gashes. Some were “whiteheads,” covered with a fungus where they had scraped the protective mucus from their scales while forging upriver, over rock. “They’re dying,” Dave said. All of them.

Salmon stop eating when they enter freshwater. Their whole purpose, then, is to flash upstream, and their intestines shrivel inside their massive bodies to make room for swelling gonads. The feast is over; the ocean becomes a memory. As they push on, they lean on their reserves. Become lean. By the time they reach their natal waters, salmon give “running on empty” new meaning. The jaws of the male elongate and hook, becoming a “kype” that broadcasts his prowess. A female excavates a redd in gravel with her tail and deposits her eggs, which, at that same moment, are met by a cloud of milt, his offering, a cloud settling and dissipating in a blink of current. She guards her brood until she has no strength. Then her body releases to the current and drifts, already disintegrating, to an eddy or shoulder of mud where its essentials are reabsorbed: by crawdads; by raccoons, bears, and bald eagles; by trees even several hundred feet from the bank; and by salmon fry, those thousands of unknowing mouths that need every advantage if they’re to swim the Rogue and home again, to die.

The water began to boil. As the crowder neared the back wall, the hulking fish panicked and frenzied in the diminished space, throwing their fins into the air. A salmon’s world, of course, is immeasurable: the ocean, the wild length of the Rogue, 157 miles of rapids and anglers to the hatchery. Raked together in this concrete pool, perhaps these salmon sensed time was finally closing in. That something was lifting them. The crowder has a bottom shelf, and once the school was pinned, their floor rose—Ada elevated it—until they piled at the surface and about fifteen spilled through a gap and down a wide ramp into the facility. To the “brail” that would subdue them with an electric pulse.

Momentarily. “If you don’t quiet them,” said Dave, “they beat you up. They’ll put a hurting on you.” Ada raised the brail ten feet and tilted it so the fish would pour onto the sorting table. The salmon flopped despite the current that had just coursed through their blood-orange interiors. But, not as much. Their heavy domes and tails thumped on the stainless steel, but they weren’t “hot,” as Dave called it. Another technician wearing a Stetson and camouflage hip-waders grasped each Chinook and stilled it, best he could, with one hand over its golden eye and the other on its tail. He slid each to Ada. Both of them wore nonabrasive cotton gloves that quickly became covered in slime.

It was an inspection line of two. The hatchery’s first need is broodstock—fish to spawn next year’s smolts—and throughout the four-month season, Dave and company select a variety of sizes to keep the gene pool diverse. Each week, they sort the arrivals and fill quotas along the spectrum. In front of the technicians were six chutes, dark tunnels, each a vacuum leading to a different outdoor pond: something like the pneumatic tubes that propelled canisters to the tellers at drive-through banks of old. Ada passed each fish, briefly, into a metal detector, and pulled them out by the tail. If the buzzer sounded, she dropped the fish headfirst into Chute 2, no questions asked. As a smolt, it had been implanted with a tiny coded-wire tag (in the nasal cartilage of its snout), which would be reclaimed to see when and where it had been reared. If there was no alarm, then Ada measured the fish and called out its sex and length in millimeters. Dave would glance at his data sheet, holler over the sound of water, and scratch tallies:

“Buck 670,” yelled Ada.

“Yeah,” shouted Dave.

“Buck 800.”

“Yeah.”

“Buck 870.”

That’s thirty-four inches.

“No.”

“Oh, whoops, got him anyway . . . How about hen 810?”

“Yeah.”

“Hen 830.”

“Yeah,” said Dave, as a three-inch insect called a salmon fly, hatched out of the river with orange legs and abdomen, alighted on the small desk where he sat perched on a stool.

“Buck 800.”

“Yeah.”

“Buck 830.”

“No.”

“This one’s comical,” said Ada’s cowboy partner, as he passed her the next.

“How about a buck sub-350?” she said.

“Sure,” Dave replied. The smallest are known as “jacks,” males that try to spawn after a single year in the ocean. Fewer than ten pounds, and sneaky.

The sorting occurs in episodes of only a few minutes, fifteen or twenty fish at a time so they aren’t out of water too long. Then the crowder lifts again and more cascade onto the brail—zap. Over the course of the morning, Dave shouted “No” more often as broodstock requirements were filled. He referred to his paper, and each decision was impersonal. Nonetheless, it reminded me of an emperor lifting his thumb up, or down. “Yeah” sends the salmon into Chute 4 (after it receives an injection, to prevent disease) for breeding in the fall. Those genes, randomly selected, will carry on—have a chance to—and four years later (jacks aside), a fraction of the resulting smolt will return transformed. But a “No” from Dave sends the salmon hurtling through the black hole of Chute 6, for a moment, and into the pond reserved for “excess.” The afterlife begins.

You can’t quite see it from the hatchery, but the dam is there, lurking around the bend. Cole Rivers was built by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1973 in the wake, quite literally, of Lost Creek Lake, a reservoir created for flood control. The earthen wall is three hundred feet tall, three thousand long. More than six hundred square miles of mountain drain to the reservoir, and the dam spoiled all those spawning grounds: the upper Rogue and its headwaters. In essence, the fifty-eight-acre hatchery, with the help of sixteen employees and sophisticated fishery science, is to stand for those hundreds of miles of intricate streambed, those sinuous bends and side creeks filled with snags, plunges, and crystalline gravel stretches.

But what becomes of the thousands of grown salmon that, each year, are savvy or lucky enough to avoid a hook on their way home and yet aren’t selected for breeding? Once broodstock is in hand, the hatchery has no need for them, those colossal extra. In the parlance of ODFW, they must be “disposed” of, and a hierarchy, a ladder, exists for their “disposition.” Though the natural abundance of wild salmon in the Northwest is largely gone—70 percent of Oregon’s salmon are from hatcheries—even in death, these steel-tank-raised brethren continue to migrate toward hopeful ends.

About four thousand early birds at Cole Rivers are “recycled”: A few hundred salmon at a time are driven downstream in a tanker truck and, in the town of Gold Hill, poured back into the Rogue. Recycling capitalizes on the fishes’ proven fitness to offer anglers a chance at redemption. Slightly fewer than half of recycled fish successfully run the gauntlet again and climb back into the hatchery. But some of them swim the thirty-six miles in less than twelve days. That’s hauling. Pre-release, the hatchery hole-punches their gill plates so that they won’t be counted twice in the run total.

Another tributary is “stream enrichment.” Since wild populations have dwindled, far fewer salmon now decay in rivers and creeks, and the ecosystem suffers. As they melt into the shallows, salmon leave an important wave of nourishment from the ocean. Now ODFW casts carcasses into waterways, trying to replicate the fertile casualties of former times. They’ve used helicopters—very messy. Pitchforking them from bridges is cheaper, with the added advantage that it’s still good and messy. Personally enriching for volunteers.

Fish are also sold commercially to American Canadian Fisheries, a company in Washington State that sells fillets to stores like Safeway. You could be eating a marinated Cole Rivers fish tonight for dinner. The Rogue’s salmon are often a sore sight when they arrive at the hatchery. “But if you cut them open,” Dave Pease told me, “they’re an awesome-looking fish. I mean it’s red, bright red.” Hatchery programs are supported by this “carcass fund.”

Later in the season, American Canadian Fisheries then donates its services, filleting and packaging salmon for the Oregon Food Bank, which sends the fish throughout the state to outlets like the St. Henry’s Food Pantry in Gresham, near Portland. Its manager, Ann Prester, told me that in recent Februaries they’ve given coho, a winter arrival, to everyone who walks through their door: thirty-five families a day, almost four hundred pounds of salmon a year. “These are people who don’t have access to salmon otherwise, not at eight to nine dollars a pound,” said Ann. “Their eyes just light up.” Many have never seen a living salmon, she said, but they’re thankful it doesn’t live in a can.

Before all these possible ends for excess salmon, however, Oregon tribes are allowed fish for ceremony and subsistence, as outlined in their treaties. I had journeyed to the Rogue to see salmon be given to the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians. This was the tributary of a salmon’s disposition I hoped to follow to its terminus. Members of the Cow Creek Band would arrive in the morning to haul off a fresh load for their annual powwow and salmon rite in a couple of weeks. I asked Dave when the fish I’d just seen collected would go to the chair. To the brail, for a stronger pulse. “If you come back around nine, you should be fine,” he said.

I camped on the Rogue’s upper reaches that night, above what’s known as Natural Bridge, where the stream is swallowed by a lava tube and disappears briefly from the light, a molten river turned cold. Down unmarked jeep trails, I found a stretch that poured over the wall of a deep basalt channel within the river, creating a long curtain of white facing the bank. In the morning, I rolled up my sleeping bag and drove the twenty minutes through towering pines to Lost Creek Lake, where the river also disappears.

To my chagrin, the fish had been zapped ahead of schedule. The Cow Creek Band’s volunteers were backing up a trailer on which rested two identical, empty turquoise containers, perhaps five hundred gallons each. I met Teri Hansen, her son Jake Ansures, and his five-year-old boy as they stepped from their white pickup. She had satiny black hair to her waist, bangs cascading down her brow, and a powwow T-shirt with short red sleeves that exposed her pale arms. Her voice was smoky, graveled. She was a clerk for the tribal court. Jake was athletic, in a scarlet DC skater’s shirt and a black cap with a stiff brim. His eyes were wide, his grin elastic. He worked as a sales and marketing manager for the tribe-owned Umpqua Indian Foods, known for its steak jerky.

Dave soon drove out of the spawning house on a forklift with a white plastic container that looked like a giant mail bin, a USPS flat tub. Inside was a thousand pounds of salmon. Fifty-nine fish, as it turned out. Their skins were mottled, jaundiced in patches. Some were without their snouts, which had been removed—severed—to extract those coded-wire tags. Other tribes want all of their fish entire, but the Cow Creek Band needed only two. “You could gut and fillet them also, if you’d like,” said Teri. Dave laughed, said his crew probably wouldn’t go for that.

The lift whined as Dave tilted the bin, and another technician swept and dragged the fish so that they spilled, slowly, into the tribe’s turquoise counterpart, leaving it speckled and streaked with drip marks. In black gloves and a white apron, he had the appearance of a butcher, and he took his time, to minimize splatters. He’d done this before. Blood as thick as syrup ran over the sides and, when I edged a little too close, my shirt paid a small price. My forearm, too. Jake shoveled ice into the fish as they fell like a lumbering waterfall, and before long it seemed they would all fit in just one of the turquoise containers. “One less tote to clean,” said Dave.

When the fish were tied down, we took a quick stroll around the grounds. The ponds looked like lap pools, but were tented with netting to prevent gulls and eagles, and maybe anglers, from diving in. They rippled with the backs of trout and salmon, and juveniles at all stages: fry, parr, smolt. We walked toward the fish ladder and collection pond. Sun poured through the ladder’s entrance, a roofless hallway into the river, where big fish were holding in the shadow of the wall. You could see them if you trained your eyes, if you squinted, and if the school nosed momentarily into the slant of light. They were poised as if waiting for some signal. Some decision.

I asked Jake when he had caught his first salmon. Nine or ten, he said. I asked after its size. “It was all right,” he said. “It tasted good, I can tell you that much.”

He put his kid on his shoulders, and they stood on the bridge above the ladder’s last step, the one that ultimately lofted those scarred-backs from the Rogue to their origin. Through the grate that separated the pen from the ladder, water roiled in an incandescent foam. As we stared down, mesmerized, instantly and inexplicably a slick teardrop form broke the surface and glided through the air into the hatchery’s motionless pool. “Ooooh,” we all said, as the salmon hurdled.

“Good job,” said Teri. “He wasn’t wasting any time.”

“He looked like he knew what he was doing,” said Jake.

Then another he, or she, leaped up and deflected off the concrete sidewall into the holding pond. It was a triumph and a bittersweet moment of finality. For this was the gate to heaven. And these fish were a day late for the ceremony.

The totes pulled out of the hatchery lot, and I followed. Salmon flies fluttered before the windshield and lay dead on the pavement. We turned toward Medford, but before we’d gone far, the fish swung right and headed skyward. Caution, a road sign announced, Limited Maintenance After Dark. This was OR-227, Tiller Trail Highway, the short-but-steep cut to Canyonville over a mountain pass. We were lifting the fish from their native drainage to the neighboring one, the South Umpqua, which seemed to embody the peculiar migrations of the modern age: Even in death, these fish were being transplanted to another river, the way planes let trout free-fall into alpine lakes; the way seedling invasive mussels hitch rides on trailered hulls.

The road was hemmed in with fir, oak, and lustrous madrone. Then it ran through clear-cuts with heaping slash piles hard on the shoulder. I felt as if I were in the wake of something remarkable, clandestine even. The turquoise of the container took on a kind of glow, freighted not just with the weight of the fish, but with their import to the tribe and the Northwest more broadly. The drive was a procession, a caravan into the clouds.

We crested the ridge and slalomed to Elk Creek, which joined the South Umpqua River at the townlet of Tiller, where many of the Cow Creek’s forbears are buried. They had built the first roads and bridges in the drainage for the government, some over the mountains on old Indian trails. Teri and her boys stopped at the general store. Inside was a framed black-and-white photo of a man with a pistol in one hand and a skunk dangling by its tail in the other: He was an official Douglas County champion skunk hunter, a dubious accolade. Teri and her grandson bought morning ice cream bars. Then we flowed on, past sturdy and decrepit barns, stacked wagon wheels, and shrink-wrapped hay bales that looked like fresh mozzarella in the fields; past signs for Eggs $2 (then, closer to Canyonville, Eggs $3) and Creation Camp.

Finally we reached the river’s confluence with I-5 and the Seven Feathers Casino, the Cow Creek’s cash cow. What had started, in 1992, as a bingo parlor had become a three-hundred-room resort with a thousand slot machines on its main floor. Not too big, as casinos go. Seven feathers, of course, is symbolic: The tribe, as reconstituted, began with just seven families, the survivors of the Rogue Indian Wars of 1855–1856. They had hidden from vigilante settlers in the mountains east of Tiller. Thus the tribe’s emblem is of seven feathers tied to a single staff, a common destiny. But there is other iconography. In front of the hotel’s porte cochere stands a heroic statue with its wings swept upward, its talons outstretched: It’s the largest bronze eagle in the world, at thirty-three feet tall and ten thousand pounds, and it’s striking a salmon.

The turquoise totes snaked to the rear of the casino and backed into an open bay lined with shelves of humongous cans and twenty-five-pound bags of flour and sugar that were heavier, just barely, than the salmon. I parked and was escorted down a corridor to obtain a behind-the-scenes badge that read Visitor. When I returned, the dead had been unloaded in clear plastic tubs and carted into the commercial kitchen, where a dozen chefs awaited, all in white. They had donned a hierarchy of toques and berets, and on the stainless steel preparation tables before them, each had a V-shaped wooden carving board to cradle a fish. The casino had made these some years earlier for precisely this purpose, the annual pre-powwow cleaning. It was clear much bleach would be needed.

Several other tribal members arrived to help prepare the salmon, including Kelly Rondeau. He wore a faded T-shirt printed with a wraparound American flag and sunglasses atop his ashen hair tied in a ponytail. His face was tall, his nose broad and prominent, his rugged smile lines framed by a moustache. “So which one do I get to take home?” he said jokingly. Half-jokingly. The Rondeau family is one of the seven original. His grandfather had been instrumental in starting the casino, and now Kelly was on the tribal board. He told me of the 180,000 steelhead smolt the tribe had helped release into the South Umpqua over the last decade. “We’re going to have to start claiming some of them,” he said, wryly.

I spent time with Dennis, Buffet Captain, and Victoria, Sports Bar Cook. Dennis did the cutting. With a forceful cleave behind the gills, their heads, those sunken and rosy eyes, were the first to go. For those that had already lost their snouts, it seemed an act of mercy, aesthetic at least. In many of the salmon, this first cut revealed shining clusters of roe behind the shoulders: translucent orange orbs that, in another life, would have overwintered in the small crater of a redd to first become big-eyed alevin, which stay hidden under gravel with a yolk sack slung to their bellies. The chefs scooped these refulgent masses into gallon bags for those on hand and lucky elders. Kelly held up two bags as if raising the spoils of a contest. He would thread them like beads onto a hook and bait steelhead, but one could also flash-fry them with flour.

The fish were butterflied, from the anal duct upward. The glossy innards were slung into trash cans. With the knife’s tip—or better, a fingernail—the chefs scraped out the coagulated red that ran against those spines newly exposed to the fluorescent light. I asked Vicky what this spinal gunk was called. “Spinal gunk,” she answered with her signature staccato laugh. “I have no idea.” I’ve since learned that it’s called the bloodline: the river within the fish, those arteries and veins that allow these dense muscles to thrust and quiver, and fight their way home.

“I like fish,” said Vicky, “but not in the raw. Don’t think I’d want to do this for a living.” She did the washing in a stainless basin, her chubby hands swirling inside the open book of each salmon. “This is not how they get’m at Safeway,” she added. The steady sound of the faucets was like a recollection of a river and, rinsed, the salmon recovered some of their silver brilliance. They’d given up their heads, but not their tails; not their elegance. Teri, Kelly, and the other members of the tribe helped package them: shrouded in plastic garbage bags, wrapped in white butcher paper, stacked once more on a stainless cart. Some were marked with a Sharpie for the mid-July powwow, others were reserved for a second event. Teri selected a small fish, one to fit her oven. “Everything you do, you do with a prayer and good thoughts,” she said. (“What is that,” asked Kelly, “a trout?”) The rest were wheeled into the freezer.

Two weeks later, I found myself on the Rogue-Umpqua Divide, staring out from under a fleece cap at a vast series of drainages. The Cascades’ ridges seemed to live up to the range’s name: a long line of waves being pulled down, slowly, by gravity. The snow had just melted, the earth was soupy, and the mosquitoes whined. I immediately had to stoke a fire to ward off these evil spirits. But there were tiny yellow violets strewn across the wet jeep tracks, and I was otherwise alone. At dusk, I became apprehensive for a moment, thinking a truck was coming around the bend. But it was the moon.

In summer, the Cow Creek Band also climbed to these heights, which were known, almost mythically, as the Huckleberry Patch, as if it were the first and only berry-picking spot on earth. They felt closer to the Great Spirit at these heights, slept in the open air, and dried venison and berries for winter. Sometimes they descended to the Rogue to hunt and trade, and went across Natural Bridge as far as the Klamath Marsh. They roamed west into the Coast Range or through the Rogue watershed to the Siskiyous. They told origin stories about the cradle of Crater Lake, Mount Mazama, whose shield feeds the Rogue and so, with a little help from the government, gave life to the salmon frozen in Canyonville. Here on the divide, the idea of carrying fish between drainages suddenly didn’t seem so unnatural: From this edge, water ran two ways, arbitrarily, and as a result entered the sea one hundred miles apart. But this view described the Cow Creek’s territory long before it was renamed a “wilderness” even as surrounding hillsides began to lose their trees.

In 1853, the Cow Creeks became the second tribe in Oregon to forge a treaty with the United States, ceding more than eight hundred square miles of land in the South Umpqua watershed, though they had no idea something so essential could be signed away. They were compensated 2.3 cents per acre, and the United States turned around and sold those acres to settlers for a dollar and a quarter. Afterward, the Cow Creeks were literally and figuratively driven into the hills, toward the Rogue-Umpqua Divide. Though they were promised a reservation and more, the tribe was only truly recognized when, without notice, its sovereignty was dismissed by the Western Oregon Indian Termination Act of 1954. But in 1982, Congress reacknowledged the tribe and, two years later, the courts awarded it 1.5 million dollars for lands lost. The tribe’s leaders prudently rolled the sum into a trust that helped spawn the casino and, now, a growing empire in Douglas County.

Come morning, I drove in low gear down the swelling Umpqua, to the falls where the Cow Creek Band had long congregated for salmon and still gathered for its summer powwow. The campground was a clearing nestled against a ridge on the north side of the river, an old Forest Service camp ideal for large groups. Tribal members had arrived the night before and parked among the trees at the meadow’s edge, in the sanity of the shade, in their annual spots. Families stretched tarps between RVs and firs to bridge their camps and shelter their stoves. The two teepees present were vastly outnumbered and looked out of place (historic Cow Creek houses were dugouts with pine-board ceilings). Space was already tight, so I pitched my tent in the meadow, in the morning shadow of a lone oak tree, poison oak ascending its trunk. I should have thought about how that might make me stand out a little, but no one cared. The tribe welcomed me. When my unstaked tent blew off that afternoon, someone corralled it and tied it to my roof rack like a balloon.

Before noon, an assembly line began to gather around a long, pinegreen folding table, and there I reconnected with Teri and Kelly. Supplies were waiting: cylindrical cartons of Morton salt, fresh-cut lemon wheels in gallon Ziplocs, terrifying jars of minced garlic, and most important, an unopened case of mayonnaise. All to dress the fish. Also a box of sweet Walla Walla onions, which first had to be chopped. It was a merry affair with few tears. “Look at all these Indians, with all these knives,” said Kelly, “and everyone’s still got their hair.”

Then at the head of the table stood a man named Wade Wells, bare-and barrel-chested, in sunglasses, his slate hair crew cut. He lived in Sutherlin, just north of Roseburg, and coached sports at the high school from which he graduated; his upper arms were about as swole as the fish. He kicked off the proceedings by pulling a loud, blinding sheet of tinfoil over his head so that it illuminated, then shaded, his torso, and he brought it forward through the breeze, a metallic cape trailing behind him. “Dancing with foil,” shouted one onlooker. It stretched clear across the table.

Two young men with a Marine disposition were assigned to unwrapping the thawed fish from their garbage bags and carrying them by their tails (gingerly, firmly) to the foil. The fish were headless and, with scissors, the guys now docked the stiff points of their tails so they wouldn’t tear the foil. As each fish was laid down on a new sheet of foil, Kelly massaged its flesh with mayo, inside and out, his disposable gloves nearly hidden in a swirl of egg yolk and vinegar. “Caress that fish,” said a woman named Jessica Jackson, an Air Force member in a maroon tank top and short brown braids. “Let the fish know it’s loved.” At some point during the assembly, Kelly held up his hands, grinned, and said, “All I have to do is clap my hands and everyone gets mayonnaised.”

Others hovered over each fish momentarily to shake on more salt than you would believe and stuff it with handfuls of yellow garlic and chopped onions, a surrogate for the innards removed in the casino weeks ago. Then the “lemon girl” took her turn and placed four or five slices inside each belly, all in a neat, overlapping row. Trying to clamp the cavity shut was like wrestling a suitcase. Finally, Jessica and the day’s chef, Barry McKown, each lifted one side of the foil, creating a tall aluminum A-frame. They rolled the sheet’s ends together until the fish was snug. They folded and crimped the long edges to finish the pocket. Then Wade tore more foil, and each fish was double-wrapped. “Got’a keep my juice,” Barry reminded us. “Double-wrapping helps me out a lot.”

“We are a well-oiled machine!” Jessica declared, which was not untrue. Especially considering the mayo. She had the flare and spunk of a leader. Wade began to sing—Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone—Got’a whole lotta of love—as he drew out long crackling sheets, one after the next, and danced them forward. The foil caught the sun through the cumulus and reflected it onto the faces of the volunteers. It was like a photo shoot. “Mayo, Led Zeppelin, shiny lights—I was starting to have a little seizure,” said Wade. Again the salmon piled up, this time like silver ingots, until there were eighteen. Each lay wrapped as if in homage to its gleaming self, only, in this life, with straight edges.

Finally, the ceremonial fish: cleaned, but otherwise untouched. Still with its head and tail. This one was sacred, the core of the afternoon. This particular Chinook, of the thousands that would return to the Cole Rivers Hatchery. “We only got two of them,” said Jessica, urging caution. “Can’t be running to the store to get another one.” In case of disaster, a second entire fish was on hand, still with its head, but it was slated for a fall powwow. The tribe had grown so large—to more than sixteen hundred members—that now it hosted two intertribal gatherings each year.

The guys brought the fish before us. Its face, its robust lower jaw, was bruised and rubicund, as if the blood were welling back after the long cold spell of the casino. Its bronze eye was sunken slightly, but still bright: That you could meet the gaze of this fish did seem important; you knew whom you were bound to. We all looked into its pupil, which had seen something of the Pacific’s depth and returned to stare blankly at us.

The men held the heavy animal so that it could be blessed by Grandma Gin. She was indeed warm and grandmotherly, with deep laugh lines and eye shadow. Her bangs were coiffed, but her dyed auburn hair was otherwise long and straight down her shoulders and back. She intently wound a smudge stick—a smoldering bundle of white sage—around the fish’s body, leaving a trail of incense that carried me to the dry side of the Cascades, to the brush of the high steppe. To rain shadow. She trailed it over the pile of aluminum packets, and around each volunteer, her lips moving as she went. Once finished, she replaced the lit smudge in the warty trough of an opalescent abalone shell. The smoke would allow only good spirits.

The fish was laid on the foil and slathered in sacred mayo. Then the matron of the tribe, the eldest elder, was brought forward by Grandma Gin to formally bless the fish, as was tradition. “Okay, Kelly,” said Grandma Gin, “you want to come stand near Aunt Rena? She’s going to say her prayer.” Rena was slightly hunched and held to a smooth walking stick. She peered out from thin-rimmed tortoise-shell spectacles and pursed her small mouth. Her white hair was short, hardly longer than the lobes of her ears. She wore a pink windbreaker and a hat that said Native Pride. This year was Rena’s first as eldest, and she was trembling with emotion. She was ninety-four years old.

“Come on, my powwow princess,” said Gin, “you can do it. We love you.”

Rena sobbed and her words were a quiet babble into Gin’s ear.

“I know you do,” said Gin. “But he is here, in his spirit. All our ancestors are here in their spirit.”

Aunt Rena had lost her husband decades ago, but he was in mind, very much so. They were married before she finished high school (she’d started school late, at the age of nine). He had worked for the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps before they moved to Union, on the dry side of the Cascades, for his job with the railroad.

“All right, Grandfather,” said Rena, finding strength. “I ask that you bless the people that gave us the fish. And I ask you to bless each and everyone that wrapped it . . . Thank you, God, for giving us the fish that we will partake of our elders with. That’s all.”

“Aho,” said the crowd. “Aho.”

Gin rubbed Rena’s shoulder. “There you go,” she said. “He’s here. He’s here. Come on.”

“God bless you, Aunt Rena,” said Kelly. “My dad’s here, too.”

“The brightest star in the sky last night was Buster,” Rena replied, referring to Kelly’s father. The Cow Creeks also believe that a shooting star is a spirit arriving to inhabit a newborn.

“Yeah, I know,” said Kelly. “That’s what I was thinking.”

“They’re all here, honey,” said Gin. “An eagle flew over this morning, remember, Kelly? When we raised the flag, the eagle went over.”

“He did?” said Rena.

“Yes, he did,” said Gin. “Your eagle . . . he’s here. He’s teasing you . . .”

“He didn’t come and bow to me, that rascal.”

“He will,” said Kelly.

“You’ll see him,” said Gin.

Boys had been up all night tending the pit. It had been dug in the meadow, not far from the logs, those whole trees that framed the dancing grounds, where men in full regalia would circle and stomp during Grand Entry on Saturday. Cedar billets had been thrown down and kindled, and the kids had stoked the fire through the dawn to build up coals. One boy was discovered asleep on the dirt pile from the pit’s excavation. Wade had kicked his foot away from the flaming wood (his buddies had made no motion to help). In midafternoon, the boys still hadn’t retired to their sleeping bags; in the shade, with a subwoofer, they were having a deliriously good time as local heroes.

Traditionally, salmon fillets were splayed across western redcedar staves and leaned over a fire. The cedar’s natural oils flavored the fish, while its tannins resisted flame. Now, however, a giant grate with legs had been pulled over the coals, a devilish cot, and Barry McKown laid the fish on it in two shining rows. Nineteen fish shoulder to shoulder, the way they might jostle upstream through a gauntlet, but here insulated on a pyre. I’d met Barry first in the casino kitchen. As powwow grill master, he had come for a glimpse of this year’s raw material, which met his approval. He’d worn a Hawaiian shirt then, and he wore another one now, white palm fronds on blue. Barry has a round face and mustache, and his brown locks stayed stuffed under a Cow Creek cap with an embroidered bald eagle hauling off a salmon. Of course.

Barry had been in charge as chef for twenty-six years. It was Kelly’s grandfather who had asked him if he would take over the cooking duty. “Yeaaaaaah,” Barry had replied, in his rural-dude twang. “It would be a great honor.” Each year since, he has baked roughly three hundred pounds of Chinook, about twenty fish. He flips them every half hour, for three and a half hours. Afterward he would “stack them like wood” under a tarp. “As it’s cooling down,” said Barry, “it sucks that juice back in.” His priority was wholeheartedly “my juices” and “extra juicy.”

If to chop your own wood is to warm yourself twice, then Barry was satisfying his hunger seven times over—and warming himself, too, because this sucker was hot. In preparation for a flip, he donned heavy leather gloves that covered his wrists and forearms, just like those the woman from Wildlife Images wore as she handled the captive bald eagle (or the barn owl, or the Swainson’s hawk) at the powwow for show-and-tell. But as Barry cradled the heavy fish and set them back down—rotating them from the grill’s interior to its periphery—it was more like placing sandbags during a flood. This year, he was shielding his bare shins with a sheet of corrugated tin. “I’ve been burning my feet and legs,” he said. “Only took me twenty-six years to figure that out.” With each flip, sweat appeared instantly on his brow and streamed down his cheeks.

A wall clock was leaned against a fir beside Barry’s camping chair to help him monitor the fishes’ progress. He grew slightly concerned. The salmon were taking awful long to bake and time was beginning to run short, the shadows lengthening across the parched meadow. He didn’t have his briquettes, as he was supposed to—the organizing committee had forgotten them—and the cedar wasn’t white-hot. “I could get scalped and hung up from a tree if the fish don’t come out,” Barry said. As he handled the fish, gradually they reclaimed their native shape, the foil conforming to their curved bodies, while leaking juice browned their crinkled topography and sizzled away. Across one end of the grate, roasted lemon rings lay scattered like a spill of enormous roe.

Another flip, and then Barry took me to the river. In a year of heavy snows, the South Umpqua Falls plunges classically along the north bank, the near side: headlong from ledges, in a torrent. But on the far side, it’s less a falls than a glide. A smooth, low dome of bedrock spreads the water so thin that it appears as a ten-thousand-thread sheet pulled across the stone. People were walking up and down this easy cascade barefoot or in flip-flops. A woman held the hands of her two kids, one a toddler, as they made the brilliant, flowing descent in yellow and red life jackets.

In the old days, salmon also walked up the dome with their bellies on the slab and their dorsa in the air—and they still made the climb, apparently, on certain moonlit nights. Once the tribe built weirs atop the falls and set cone-shaped traps, woven of hazel shoots, in the fast channels below, so that the thwarted fish would be swept back into these basket funnels and pinned by the strong current. You’re no longer allowed to fish for salmon at the falls, but sometimes, Teri had told me earlier, you can glimpse them deep in the pool, if you swim with a mask. If you brave the cold. “But you seldom see them,” said Barry, “there are so many people here making noise.”

Kids were hollering and sliding off the ledge into the bracing pool. Some on inner tubes, others on their bums. The seasoned or foolhardy launched into backflips. “Yeah, it’s really high,” said Barry. “Big falls this year. Beautiful. I love the way the water just rolls down the hump of rock.” It was six or seven inches above usual, he estimated. A concrete fish ladder ran up the north bank for times of low water, when the dome might go dry. “Might as well make it easy on them,” said Barry. The ladder was like the one at Cole Rivers, only smaller, and these stairs led to a different kind of afterlife. The ascending fish would forge into the narrowing mountains, toward the Rogue-Umpqua Divide, to offer their offspring the best possible start: cold, clear water.

“This place can fill with hundreds of people,” said Barry, as he surveyed the bright, roaring scene and looked at his watch. The salmon were waiting. Barry had started coming to the powwow in his midtwenties, and this year was his thirty-seventh. “All the people that had to work today,” he said, “they’re going to come in this weekend. They’re going to start coming in bumper-to-bumper.” They would be hungry.

Jessica wasn’t happy about the state of the sacred fish. It wasn’t exactly cooked, and tension was simmering between her and Barry. Traditionally, the meat of the one ceremonial salmon is gleaned and eaten, while the skin and bones are left untouched. Jessica and a friend named Lottie were hunched over the table like surgeons over a patient, and this procedure wasn’t going well. Normally the skin peels back easily, as one, but this time it was resisting—and then tearing. Inside, the fillet was sloppy, a vibrant raw orange, as wet as a kiss. Slipping the flesh from the hair-thin bones was nearly impossible.

Between subtle frowns, Jessica told me the origin of the tribe’s reverence for salmon, a story that, in its essence, holds true for much of the Native culture of Cascadia: “Long ago, animals walked upright like humans. Once we arrived, some of the animals realized we were starving. We weren’t able to feed ourselves. Salmon was one of those animals, and they said, ‘We will provide for you and be your food.’ So that’s when they went to the river and became fish. They go out to sea, they come back, and the females of course give birth, but their body nourishes their fry. That’s why we honor them. The salmon is one of those people that stepped forward. They chose to give their life up for us, so that we wouldn’t starve.” Implicit in this story, of course, is that we are the “fry” of salmon, that they are our parents even as we catch and devour them—as perhaps all children do—and sometimes make an awful mess of them, as we have with dams and stream degradation in more recent history.

The ceremonial salmon was in tatters. When Jessica and Lottie were finished, they endeavored, carefully, to reconstruct the fish. But frankly, it looked monstrous as it lay on the tray, with its shredded gray skin draped unconvincingly across its midsection like a blanket full of holes. Its eyes had baked to an opaque white. The conspicuous teeth of its upper jaw suggested a mischievous smirk, as if the salmon knew of and enjoyed the trouble it had made. It was sprawled in a slurry of mayo, fat, and sloppy orange shards.

“Turned out nice, didn’t it?” Barry said.

“No,” said Jessica.

“Yeah, it’s not done yet,” Barry replied. “The fire never was hot. I didn’t have my briquettes here this year. They just lowered the grate, instead.”

Aunt Rena noticed when she was led forward for another blessing.

“It’s not cooking fast enough, so this is what they did,” said Grandma Gin. “Will that be okay?”

We held our breath.

“That’ll be all right,” Aunt Rena said, to palpable exhales. “We will have it this way, this year. But next year, it better be done. They better put it on earlier than you did today.”

“Give me briquettes next year, and it’ll be done,” Barry said softly.

The boys lined up in front of the table, three still in their baby fat, two others older and slimming. Their T-shirts told of the region and its predilections: Go Ducks with the bright yellow O of the university in Eugene; skater designs with frenetic lettering and skulls wearing bejeweled crowns; the 18th Annual Strawberry Cup at the Willamette Speedway in Lebanon, Oregon (sponsored by Napa Auto Parts). One boy sported a fauxhawk, his hair shaved on each side, but robust, tussled, on top. Another had an epic scrape across his cheek, a raspberry from an encounter with pavement. A third was much taller than the rest. Somehow he’d evaded this rite of passage, until now.

The kids didn’t look so much Native, as American, both healthy and unkempt. They looked as if they’d been camping in the woods of Oregon. The five of them stood before tribal elder Robert Van-Norman, a retired logger and Vietnam vet, who held the wing of an eagle and slowly fanned the smudge smoldering in its abalone. The white tendrils drifted over the boys, and over the fish presented on a tray lined, naturally, with foil. It remained a horrendous sight, which made it the more serious and captivating. Behind the kids stood friends and family, and the dedicated few—not the whole tribe—some leaning against a faded pickup with peeling blue paint. This included girls in the shortest of jean shorts, generous belt buckles, and blond pigtails, and I wondered what they made of this moment: whether they felt brave and left out.

Aunt Rena again:

“Grandfather, I would like for you to bless us . . . and the river, who has provided us with the salmon that we will partake of at the elder’s dinner. That’s all I’ve got to say.”

“Aho,” the crowd echoed. “Aho.”

“Now those boys are going to go down in a minute,” Rena continued, turning to address them. “When you get ready to push this fish in the river, you pick up that foil and slide it right to the bottom. Robert, you get busy when they start that into the water. You say a prayer. All right, that’s it, honey.

“I don’t know whether I did it right,” Aunt Rena said to Grandma Gin.

“You did it right,” she replied.

“We can do it our way,” said Kelly.

Robert then took over as master of ceremonies, stuttering a little. He was silvered and portly, down-to-earth, and he wore a beaded, bear-claw necklace. He read a simple poem by a cherished elder and then told it like it was:

“These five young men that we have here today . . . we’re going to take this salmon down to the river and return it so that we may be able to enjoy this ceremony and the nourishment that it has brought to our people for, for, a lot of years.

“These young men have stepped up and volunteered to do this, and what is great about it, is that they’re going to pass on to their . . . maybe one day their children will want to be a part of it. These young men are somebody, or some, that we can be proud of. To step up and do this. Younger people that, that . . . to see them and know what they are doing is a wonderful thing.”

Rena jumped in, as a damselfly landed on her mottled hand and flickered away: “You young people—pardon me, Robert—listen to your elders, and you obey everything that your daddy teaches you. The tribal children, even the white ones . . . walk the straight and narrow, and when it comes your turn, and you’re grown up, you can carry on, and your children, and your children.”

Robert: “Before we do go down, there are some people who I would like for us to honor. Their names are in the program, so I’ll just go ahead and read them. Let’s keep them in our hearts and think of their families.

“Honoring friends in passing,” said Robert.

Donald Allan, Jr.

Barbara Davis

Robert Davis

Delbert Rainville

Deagan Season

James Sturgeon

Thomas Sturgeon

Florence Watkins

Melissa Wheelock.

In the coming year, Rena Cox would be added to the list.

Three boys gripped the tray, and two followed, and they led us through the tents and trailers, a quiet procession across pine and fir needle with the hum of generators all around. At the road, they looked both ways and went across to the river: their eyes on the fish, so the tray wouldn’t tip; and on the ground, so they wouldn’t stumble. Down the trail they shuffled, past stands of blackberry and stinging nettle, to a little graveled beach where Robert would speak of their common journey and responsibilities. I had been asked not to follow, not to take pictures, but I watched from above as they stood, knee-deep.

Behind me, the procession coiled into a circle in a small grove on the upper bank. Everyone held hands as Jessica spoke: “Grandfather, we ask you to protect these members of the tribe. We ask that you give them guidance, to lead them along a good path, a straight path. We ask that you give them the wisdom to face the tough choices that they’re going to have to make in their life. And we ask that you give them a caring heart so that they can listen to it and make the best choices, not only based on what is right in the world, but what is right in their souls.” Then the women began to sing.

The Cow Creek Band had lost track of much of its heritage during its fragmented years, but now it had come back together to re-educate its youth. In addition to the powwow, the band holds an annual one-day Culture Camp for about fifty kids, during which a batch of salmon is cooked the authentic way: on cedar staves over flame. As Teri described to me, a more traditional salmon ritual is also observed at the camp with a small audience on hand: “Everybody comes up and they take a bite of the fish, and then they put a piece on a cedar bough for their family, for prosperity and prayers. Seven or eight young warriors—boys that we choose—they’ll dive . . . it doesn’t matter what time of year. Each takes a bough, and they dive down to the bottom of the river and give it back to the river.” They place the salmon under stones.

But today the boys simply slid the metal tray into the river and the ragged skin was given over. They were braves now, their feet in a flow that could only be believed, not seen. From my vantage point, I could see the carcass release a cloud of mayonnaise, leaving a milky footprint on the waves. This was milt in its own right. I imagined bits of orange flesh scattering downstream among the cobble to waiting crawdads and rootlets, and perhaps the fry of wild salmon. Slowly the skin drifted. It hung on a ledge, unhurried, and then gathered steam, turning over like an old plastic bag toward the Pacific, toward the casino. The women finished chanting, and the boys climbed back up the stairs of the bank and were greeted by whoops and cries; and the salmon carcass flashed vaguely silver as it ghosted past two lovers sitting, hip to hip, on a mossy boulder above the South Umpqua.

When the boys returned to the campsite, each was presented with a long object bound loosely in blood-red cloth. Cautiously, around the same table where the salmon had just lain in state, they unwrapped the fabric to reveal eagle feathers—some golden, some bald. In this day and age, only tribal members and certain educators may legally own such a thing. With serious eyes, in the thick sage light, they held the quills’ hollow stubs and ran their fingers down the long vanes, smoothing and reuniting the barbs as if to make each feather perfect for flight. I wondered if they were picturing the six-foot wingspans of these birds—those whiteheads—that, on some rivers, gather by the thousand to scavenge the salmon that give themselves up to their progeny, to eaglets and boys.

Later I asked one of the boys, Scott, age twelve, from the nearby town of Riddle, if the salmon ceremony was important to him.

“When they honored me with the eagle feather,” he replied in a voice that approached silence.

Did he have somewhere in mind for it?

“In my dresser,” he said.

“Seems like a safe place,” I replied.

“I got’a go . . . ,” he said.

I asked another of the new braves, Trevor, if he was going to enjoy the salmon dinner that was on its way that evening. His cousin, DJ, there by his side, took the words right out of his mouth: “He doesn’t like it. He likes fish sticks.”

Trevor nodded solemnly.

At last, the time grew near. The salmon had been lifted by human hands at least fourteen times: Once when they were sorted at the hatchery. Once after they were killed. Once when they were unloaded at the casino. Once in its kitchen. Once to hitch a ride to the powwow. Once to be mayo’d. Once foiled. Seven times over the pit, in the hands of Barry McKown. Now they would be lifted at least twice more. Once so that their flesh could be harvested, mounded for the buffet; and one last time, on the tines of a fork.

They had remained an extra hour on the grate and finally cooked, and now Barry and others carried the radiant packets to another table. A box of latex gloves awaited volunteers. This time, I wanted to lend a hand, to earn my keep for the weekend. Unwrapped from the aluminum and its own blue-gray skin, the flesh was at first too hot to touch and shrunk the plastic around our sweating fingers. But we managed to loosen the meat, with the help of spatulas, all of us reaching onto the table. Hands working over these lemon-adorned bodies, beautifully destroyed, their bones minted at sea. “Those aren’t bones,” said Jessica. “Those are Indian toothpicks.” We plied and piled those pastel chevrons, mortared with ocean fat, onto silver trays to serve to the tribe at large. The sweet, clean-smelling steam rose visibly in the warm air.

For six months, following a strong, or perhaps weak, moment just after New Year’s on a subway platform in New York City, I’d been an honest vegetarian. But as I picked over the soft fish, my fingers lifted an orphaned piece to my mouth. First one stray flake. A minute later, a second. Then the floodgates opened, and it was all I could do to keep my lips off the sticky gloves. Even in death, these salmon were the antithesis of dry, and tasting them, I felt, like everyone else present, that here was our own flesh come back to us, with a hint of mayo. Those boys may have stood more firmly in a spiritual flow—in the runoff of these mountains—but I felt something like a current then, as dinner was announced over the PA and people queued up in a long line with their eager stomachs, their aluminum camp ware, and their ancestors on the tips of their tongues, if not everywhere overhead.