Dari Elek at the Cannon Beach Public Works Department
saves me words and phrases that he collects. We share a
mutual interest in turns of phrase and word histories. I guess
we're sort of grass-roots etymologists. Etymology is the
study of the history and origin o f words. I love this stuff.
Word-smithing is a fascinating process. Words are a dam
sight cheaper to collect than antiques, and every bit as much
fun. The English Language is a magnificent jumble of
collectibles influenced through the ages by the gibbering o f
Danes, Celts, Norsemen, Frisians, Teutons, Normans, Piets,
Greeks, Latins, and the good Lord knows who else.
(Interesting word "gibberish," eh? It’s related to jabber and
chatter, and harks back to at least the 1600s). My
observation is that we tend to use our language with little
sense o f the history of its terms and phrases. Oh, granted,
once in a while we'll find some term and ride it to death The
use o f the term "closure," currently in vogue, comes to mind.
The Professor would like to pique your interest w ith a glance
at a few examples o f language at work. Join me if you can
tear yourself away from that television for a few minutes.
Why "mad as a March hare"? Because European hares
breed in March and become amorously addled. How about
"harum-scarum," confusion and disorder? The term
apparently derives from liare 'em-scare 'em. Can you picture
those rabbits running and scampering when frightened? My
frierxls tell me they're Blazer "fans." The word "fan" comes
from fanatic. By their behavior I see the connection How
about "cute"? "Cute" is an aphetic form of the word "acute,”
originally meaning "clever," the initial "a" having been
deleted. Somehow clever tinned to pretty through the years.
Interesting, huh? We speak o f someone’s "tacky" furniture or
clothing. I n a time gone by "tacky" referred to a "degenerate,
weedy horse," o r a poor white person in the southern states of
America.
Maybe you think I’m "pulling your leg" when I tell you
these things about our language. Do you have any idea
where that phrase originated? My sources tell me that
liangings in early England were often unpleasant events.
Some folks dangled from the noose for long periods o f time
without dying. Hirelings hurried the process by pulling the
victim's legs to ensure speedy death after the "bucket had
been kicked" from under his feet. Hmmm.
Many terms have nautical referrents. "Stem to stem" or
"stem to gudgeon" means from the front of a vessel to the
back, or to include the entire vessel. If a drunken sailor was
"three sheets to the wind," he courted disaster, just as a
sailing ship with too many sails flying begged for trouble.
Drinking heavily might give him a "wobbly boot" and make
him vulnerable to "shanghai" ora"m ickeyed" drink.
A good number o f terms describe behaviore or emotions.
"Waffling," or vacillating, initially meant the movement o f
an object back and forth by the wind. "Wafting" originated
here too. "Dawdle" (I love the sound of that word!)
combines two terms: "daw," to come awake from a swoon,
and "daddle," to walk totteringly. Isn't that a sweet word?
In a recent past ladies got "gussied up." A gussie was a pig­
sty. The nasty little implications seem obvious. I recall a
character from my childhood reading called the Flim-flam
M an He was a poseur and scamp. "Flim-flam" harks back
to Old Norse , "Aim” being related to lampoon as well as Old
Norse "flimska” meaning mockery. The "haggle" in
"haggling over a price," dates back to the 1500s when the
term meant to "chop, cut, or mutilate." If someone asks you
to deliver a message "posthaste," they want the dispatch
quickly. In the 16th century that meant travelling with the
speed o f the king's post riders, or couriers, who were
stationed at intervals along the king’s highway much like our
Pony Express riders. Recently a friend told me his brother
had begun to slip "beyond the pale." "Palings" were fence
slats in early England. The "Pale" indicated those boundaries
that encompassed the realm of the English monarch-that
imaginary fence enclosing English interests and civilization.
A limited number o f terms and phrases appear to have just
popped up like mushrooms. That fact certainly doesn’t
diminish their colorfulness or interest. "Quandry" is one.
"Hoodlum" is another. Between the yeais 1870-1872, the
term "hoodlum" cropped up in the San Francisco Bay area.
A newspaper article o f the time refers to "All the boys
trained to be rowdies, comer-men, pettifoggere, idlers, polite
loafere, street hounds, hoodlums, and bummers...."
Yorive got to love a language w ith that much zest.
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Time is a means of measuring change. Time can be
measured by months, in rough approximations of lunar cycles.
Or time can be measured in seasons. Elsewhere in North
America they have four. For all practical purposes, we have
two: the Season of Torrential Rains and an ever-expanding
Tourist Season. For the native peoples of the northern
Oregon coast, time was measured by the appearance of life,
particularly that life which one could eat. The last half of
April was "the time of salmonberry sprouts," when
salmonberry bushes (Rubus spectabilis ) burst forth with
magenta flowers and soft young stems which, when peeled,
could be eaten raw, or cooked and eaten like asparagus, ITie
months o f May and June were "salmonberry time," during
which this plant’s delicate orange and red berries were picked
and eaten alongside stored, smoked fish, Late June to August
was "salal berry time" when these purple berries would be
picked and eaten, or pulverized, dried, and stored in oil for lata*
use. Then the fish would arrive. Late August through
September was "Chinook salmon season," October was
"Silver salmon season" and November was "chum salmon
season." As this issue of the Upper Left Edge is released, it
will be the final moments of "steelhead season," a time of
sporadic winter fishing which ran from December to early
April. And, as spring returns and the salmonberries
sprout once again, this will mark the final moments o f the
fishing seasons.
The final moments. Time marks change, and much
has changed on this coast. One era of human history, several
thousand years long, has passed and another is well underway -
- the transition between these two epochs has been marked by
a radical change in the relationship between humans and the
land they inhabit. The seasonal comings and goings of
plants and fish would no longer serve as seasonal markers.
Their arrival is no longer watched with urgent concern. Food
is trucked in from thousands of miles distant — if the salmon
does not arrive here we can ship it from Alaska. Or simply eat
something else. But, even if we were watching our local
plants and the fish closely, we would be disappointed.
Aboriginal berry plots have been overgrown by scrubby
second-growth forest and bulldozed for development The
Oregon coastal steelhead, Salmo gairdneri, and the chum
salmon Oncorhynchus beta are now under serious
consideration for 1 endangered Species Act protection.
So, too, is the "Silver" or "Coho" salmon, Oncorhynchus
kisutch. From August to early April, time passes, but the
fish do not. If we could bring back the people who lived at
Ecola Creek’s mouth 200 years ago, what would they call the
seasons? What would they say?
Ecola Creek and other north coast streams have long
been a stronghold of a small coho salmon population. During
recent years, official coho counts on these streams were large
enough to suggest the presence o f a viable, wild coho
population. Fish counts from the last year, however,
suggest that the north coast coho population has dropped to
alarmingly low levels — averaging less than 3 fish per mile of
stream during their peak migration. Something has changed.
N o longer does this appear to be a genetically viable
population. Assuming that there aren’t more coho
hiding somewhere, unseen, this small number of fish will not
be able to survive without inbreeding; but of course, they will
not be able to survive long with inbreeding. By official
National Marine Fisheries Service standards, runs o f this size
may qualify the north coast’s native coho as officially extinct.
And, as the saying goes, extinction is forever. Every
salmon run is uniquely adapted to its own maternal stream.
The home stream is
embedded in their genes - the timing of local rains and the
speed o f its water, the steepness of its climb into the
mountains, its distinctive assortment of plants, insects, and
predators, its temperature and chemical composition, the
textures of its gravel. They have become adapted to highly
localized environments through a gradual winnowing of
the gene pool, carried out over several thousands of
generations. Those salmon, returning too small or early for
local conditions, might not be able to jump through certain
chutes or over a particular small waterfall, and will not reach
breeding areas upstream. Those who are genetically prone to
be in the wrong place at the wrong time, entering the stream
during very low water, severe floods, or momentary peaks in
the number of predators, don’t live to pass on their genes to a
future generation (which would have possessed a similarly
poor sense of timing). Salmon are finely-tuned organisms, the
product of a million previous successes among a particular
breeding population within a particular environment. We
cannot reinvent an Ecola Creek salmon.
Stories about "the salmon being so thick you could
walk on their backs" during the late 19th century were
exaggerations, but only marginally so. In the space of two
human lifetimes, Europe’s progeny have eliminated or nearly
eliminated entire stocks of native salmon throughout the
Northwest, salmon stocks that had supported native societies
for several hundreds o f generations before our arrival. There
are many culprits on the north coast. Past logging practices
are foremost among them. Clearing of the forest, for logging
or any other purpose, changes everything in the salmon’s
environment. Summer water temperatures skyrocket. Winters
bring unprecedented floods and washouts as rainwater runs
directly off the land, unimpeded by the forest canopy; with less
vegetation to retain water during the dry season, summers can
bring waters to a low level once seen only during severe
droughts. Silts washed from deforested lands will bury "redds,"
gravel-lined nests full of salmon eggs, while other redds will
be washed away. (In the 1950s and 1960s, logging operations
behind Cannon Beach would drag downed trees, from stump to
loading area, through the middle of streams with salmon
spawning beds — some of the most abrupt declines in fish
population ever recorded on the Creek soon followed.)
Reduced streamside vegetation can expose young salmon to
predators, while the absence of large, woody debris (which used
to "dam" sections of the stream, creating backwater pools)
inhibits the development of backwater gravel beds in which
some salmon breed. The bacteria which abound in our sewage
and agricultural waste consume vast quantities of oxygen, and
salmon will literally suffocate in their maternal stream. Some
researchers suggest that the synthetic chemicals which we
release into the environment, both intentionally and
unintentionally, may inhibit salmon spawning by interfering
with their finely-tuned hormonal cycles. Pollution and the
filling o f wetlands is particularly problematic near the mouths
o f streams, where coastal towns now develop at a
breakneck pace; here, salmon must linger long to feed and to
adapt to the changing salinity on their way out to sea or back
to land. Certainly, salmon have also suffered from overfishing
at sea by commercial ships from the United States, Canada,
Russia, Japan, and elsewhere. But the biggest threats are on
land - generally, the longer a salmon species spends in the
river during its annual breeding cycle, the worse it has fared in
the 20th century.
Could our local wild salmon be replaced by hatchery
fish? Genetically tied to some other stream system, hatchery
fish tend to do poorly when transplanted to new streams with
different sorts o f environmentalconstraints. They tend to be
smaller, less healthy, and return to spawnin lower numbers
than wild fish. Spending their youth in bigjeatureless tanks
with protective coverings and regular feedings, hatchery fish do
not learn to hunt for local foods or hide from local
predators. In such highly crowded conditions, hatchery
fingerlings are extremely prone to disease. Moreover, in these
featureless cells, they become nasty little thugs, gnawing on
one anothers’ fins while in the tanks, and acting strangely
combative toward other fish once released into the wild. And
every hatchery fish released into a stream with a remnant wild
population raises the threat to native salmon, adding
competitors to what may already be a severely overtaxed
environmental system.
Local salmon may still survive into the future. Their
continued presence, even in small numbers, might provide a
window of opportunity. Local watershed organizations and
other advocates o f the wild salmon now attempt to improve
the quality of the environment on which the salmon depend,
planting trees along streambanks, placing large logs in the
water to form new gravel bars, monitoring water quality
downstream from logging operations, eliminating sources of
chemical contaminants. It remains to be seen whether the
population trends can be reversed, but it would be inexcusable
not to try. Some things change in cycles, coming, going, and
coming back again like the salmonberry shoots that mark the
beginning o f spring. Some things, like the displacement of
Native Americans from this coast, cannot be reversed; they
change forever. We are now in the final moments of the time
o f salmon, the fall and winter seasons, but we also may be the
final moments o f a much longer time of salmon, one that
lasted for millennia and that will not repeat itself. What we do
in the next year may determine whether the decline of our
native salmon is a momentary change, or one that lasts
forever.
If you are interested in getting involved with salmon
restoration efforts on the northern Oregon coast, contact your
local watershed council, or the Columbia River Estuarine
Study Taskforce (CREST), a coordinating taskforce which can
direct you to salmon and watershed restoration organizations in
your area. CREST can be reached by phone at (503)325-0435,
by fax at (503)325-0459, or by mail at 750 Commercial
Street, Room 205, Astoria, Oregon, 97103-0435. People
who are interested in reading a classic work on the causes of
the disappearance o f wild salmon (particularly in western
Washington) should locate a copy of Bruce Brown’s Mountain
in the Clouds: A Search for the Wild Salmon - an updated.
University of Washington Press edition was published in
1995. A particularly good technical account of the different
salmon species o f the Northwest and their adaptations to local
conditions can be found in Cornelius Groot and L. Margolis’
Pacific Salmon Life Histories (University of British
Columbia Press, 1991).
--------------O
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