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HOME AT LAST
The carcasses are sold for a penny apiece. They are
throwi into large plastic totes with crushed ice and forklifted
onto a truck. "Supposedly, they go for cat food," the foreman
said, "but I've seen fish cut just like these — sometimes even
with the dye we use — at the Pike Street Market." There was
conjecture that some also end up in smokers, but that's not
under hatchery control. The deal is that the buyer gets them for
a penny, but has to take them all, for the whole season. They
count on him to remove them. Disposal is a problem. They used
to bury them, but eventually they ran out of room, and it smells
real bad when the cat gouges up a clot of carcasses buried a
year or two before.
Well, that's the nuts and bolts of what I saw that
morning. I am not an animal rights activist. I grew up around
small farms and am familiar with the gore and occasional
brutality that puts the meat on the table. I will not suggest we all
come vegetarian. But I am concerned about the Auschwitz-
like conditions typical of most commercial producers. Neither
should we duck the awareness that the slick facade of our
consumerist economy conceals an indifference to the suffering
and death that we cause in the natural world.
Several weeks passed and I again donned rubber boots,
this time for a walk up a pretty little creek. Gigantic spruce and
cedar stumps give a clue as what this area once looked like, and
their advanced decomposition allow a guess as to how long
since it was logged. It is in an area that has remained roadless
through benign neglect, and so it has had time to partially heal
The creek rushed along, swollen but not muddied by recent
storms. Kinglets foraged among the alder and hemlock, sala
manders and newts dawdled in the litter of fallen leaves. At a
small tributary on this small creek I watched as two red Coho
males courted a female. She nosed along the gravel bottom,
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looking up for just the right place to make her redd. The males
chased upstream and down, sliding and leaping over a small
log, while a jack hovered near the hen, hoping to make a meal
of her eggs. I could nearly straddle this stream. With moss and
fem fronds draped over the banks, the stream tumbled through
a small draw among the trees. These salmon were at home in
this forest, and when they die they will become a part of it. To
my mind it should belong to them. When it is logged, this small
tributary will probably not be protected. It will become one more
increase in the National Environmental Debt. Someday we will
have to balance that budget too.
Jack Scharbach lives in Naselle, Washington. His most
recent features in the NOTE were Guys & Guns (Jan/Feb. 96) &
Willapa Bay: Struggling To Retain Her Virtue (Dec.’95).