“Ish River—”

like breath,
like mist rising from a hillside.
Duwamish, Snohomish, Stillaguamish, Samish,
Skokomish, Skykomish … all the ish rivers.

I live in the Ish River country
between two mountain ranges where
many rivers run down to an inland sea.

— Robert Sund

What time does a salmon wake up? Surely someone must know. Such were my hazy thoughts on a morning in late May. It was a little after 5 a.m., and I was slouched in the bow of a short aluminum skiff. At the wheel was Brian Henrichs, a biologist with the Skagit River System Cooperative. Sitting next to him was Emily Howe, an aquatic ecologist with The Nature Conservancy. Both were considerably perkier than I. The state of the salmon remained to be seen.

We were flying up the Stillaguamish River, near Stanwood, a few miles from where it flowed into Port Susan Bay. The water was flat, reflecting perfectly the green trees on its banks and the blushed sky above.

This was my second visit to these parts. About a month before, I had gone with Howe to a different section of the bay, where she is helping to shepherd a large restoration effort. That visit had been timed to take place a few weeks before juvenile salmon — both Chinook and coho — were predicted to arrive from upriver on their way out to sea. At that time, Howe had wanted to know how much food — insects, mostly — those young salmon might find waiting for them. The amount of food was a test, in a sense, of how well her restoration efforts were working. Those sites were places of becoming.

The purpose of this trip was different. We were on our way to the first of several so-called reference sites along the Hat Slough to get a sense of how many fish they supported. Reference in this case meant relatively unaltered from an older state. These sites had not been diked, in other words, and had never been transformatively farmed by the Europeans who settled in the area in the 1800s; whatever changes they had experienced were part of larger regional patterns. But they had managed to retain much of their original estuarine character. In this, they were places that Howe hoped her restored sites might one day become.  

Into the unknown

Here in what poet Robert Sund has called the Ish River country, becoming is synonymous with change. Some changes, like those associated with the work of Howe and her many collaborators, are ones humans can try to guide towards desired ends. Others, especially those having to do with climate, are out of our hands to varying degrees. It is the balance between the nature of those changes — the ones we can nudge a little, the ones we can’t — that will go a long way to determining whether or not the rivers along this Pacific coast have salmon in the years and decades and centuries to come.

In the middle of all these changes swim the Stillaguamish Chinook. They are part of the larger Puget Sound stock that is listed as Threatened under the Endangered Species Act, and their run is perhaps the most at risk. It is for them that Howe has been collecting a large suite of data on the things they eat, on the physical characteristics of the waters they use, on efficacy of different restoration strategies. All of these data will go into a bioenergetic model that will help evaluate which restoration design plans are better suited to support Chinook salmon growth and dispersal across this recovering estuary in the face of climate change.

All salmonid species depend on estuaries to some degree, but Chinook are, as biologists have noted, complicated: more than other salmonids, juvenile Chinook enter the estuaries at a wide range of sizes, and so need those spaces for a wide range of months. As such, it is hard, if not impossible, to find one-size-fits-all actions to suit juvenile Chinook. The presence of large numbers of juvenile Chinook from hatcheries also confounds things. Hatchery Chinook may use estuaries in different ways than wild Chinook. They might be different sizes or eat different things.

More than that, Howe told me that old relationships are breaking down — between what scientists thought they knew about juvenile salmon and water temperature, salmon and oceanic conditions, salmon and the timings of their journeys. Current knowledge is shaded by the knowledge of before, which may have been incomplete. To wit: one of the most informative acts fish biologists do to figure out how many young salmon are leaving a river is put smolt traps out in February to capture fish as they migrate to the estuary, where they will spend some amount of time, depending on the species, growing and preparing for years in the ocean. From the smolt trap comes the idea that Chinook pulse out of the Stillaguamish in the early spring as parr — a life stage between fry (several weeks old) and smolt, which are newly adapted to saltwater. But there is evidence, or supposition, or both, that young Chinook might also be leaving as fry in the winter, maybe even as early as January. A smolt trap put out in February misses those fish, which might depress the impression of the Chinook’s overall numbers, or the importance of different habitats for early Chinook outmigrants. (This year, the number of outmigrating Chinook in the smolt trap was about 30% of the average.)

These are the things that, as Howe puts it, “keep me up at night.”

Then there is the question of what a positive result will look like for her larger project in the context of the reference sites. “If the restoration is successful,” Howe had said as we drove to the boat ramp before dawn, “it may mean we get fewer fish, because they have more habitat to disperse to. So you’d have lower density, even though you have higher abundance.” She shrugged. “You just have to be prepared for a lot of different outcomes, and know how to interpret what you’re seeing correctly.”

The first fish

Our first stop of the morning was to set up a fyke net across the mouth of a tidal channel. The fine-mesh net was long and black, with a weighted base that would help direct fish from its funnel mouth to the cone-shaped bag at its back. Howe and Henrichs arranged the net by attaching its mouth to two stakes on either side of the channel, and extending the net to its full length, so its back hung out in the river. The water was up, so Howe and Henrichs would leave the net for several hours. Acting as a fish trap, it would catch all the fish swimming out with the ebbing tide.

We next motored off to the first of several sites in the lower estuary. At each site, Howe and Henrichs would do a beach seine for fish while also recording the site’s characteristics: the water’s depth and velocity, its temperature and salinity, its levels of dissolved oxygen.

As we motored across the river, I saw what looked like a bunch of logs arrayed in the middle of the channel. Then one of the logs moved and I realized they were all harbor seals hauled out on a submerged sandbar. All their heads rotated with us, tracking our progress. We knew why they were here. “Everyone wants salmon,” Howe said. 

We arrived at the first site and Henrichs nudged the boat up against the bank. The rest of us clambered out with a tub full of instruments. Susan Dickerson-Lange, a hydrologist out for the day, grasped one end of the beach seine net. Henrichs took the other end in the boat and puttered up a few meters before tossing that end to me. I marched back to Dickerson-Lange over the riverbank, dragging the net, enveloping some span of the shore and water. When I reached her, we both hauled in our ends. In the pocket of the seine, I could see a host of small fish realizing they were caught.

Howe, Dickerson-Lange, and I lugged the net onto the marsh grasses and spread out the mesh to see a mess of fish. We sorted through them as they hurled their bodies about. Many were juvenile coho, identifiable by their large eyes and the dark stripes on their bodies, but there were a few other species. We measured each and called out numbers while Henrichs tapped out IDs and measurements into a handheld computer. When we were done we tossed each fish back into the river and watched them disappear.

It was at our second or third site that we caught a little fish that was a bit larger than all the other little fish, with a different mien.

“That’s a Chinook!” Howe said. Although I felt a thrill at finally seeing one, I also remembered an email Howe had sent the day before. “So, if we get a Chinook, we will kill an ESA-listed spp., ” she had written. “I find it’s good to tell people that straight out of the gates.”

The Chinook flipped and flopped in the net. Howe picked it up and thwacked it on the head with her finger to kill it. The fish went limp. Howe determined it was a hatchery fish — it was missing its adipose fin on its lower back — and then measured it; it was about two-and-a-half inches long. She next took a small clip from its fin, for genetics. She wedged a syringe full of water into its mouth and depressed the plunger, flushing the contents of the salmon’s stomach into a sieve; the contents went into a plastic baggie for diet analysis. Finally, Howe put the fish in its own little bag to take back to a lab, where its otoliths, or ear bones, would be extracted to age it, and its caloric content would be determined to see how robust it was.

Earlier, Howe had told me that what happens on the Stillaguamish can have far-reaching implications for regional salmon management. The Chinook runs on this river are the most imperiled of the several Puget Sound stocks, she said. Because they swim to Alaskan waters to mature, their mere presence influences the catch limits for the Alaskan salmon fishery, which is valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. “They can’t catch so much salmon in the ocean that it might threaten the Stilly stock.”    

I watched now as a little plastic bag containing one of those precious stock was stowed away in small cooler. I want to stress that I understood the rationale for removing this fish, and the vital purpose it would serve. Even so, it was hard not to do a little math in my head, that the Stilly stock now equaled N – 1.

Undoing the damage

“‘Ish River—’ / like breath, / like mist rising from a hillside. …” That short verse serves as a preface for Robert Sund’s eponymous poetry collection, which he published in 1983. He lived not far from Stanwood and the Stillaguamish, a few miles north, in a rough wooden shack built on a mudflat of the Skagit River, which this year sent more than one million young Chinook into Puget Sound. He could only reach the shack by boat, and he could only row up when the tide was high enough.

Sund’s poem speaks to a set of assumed durabilities that are the character of this country: rivers, mountain ranges, hillsides, the exchange between river and the inland sea, which is Puget Sound. But ish is a Lushootseed word that means, roughly, people or people of. Sund, in the conception of country this poem offers, has left out the human dynamism surrounding those physical durabilities: the indigenous peoples who live in these parts and have for thousands of years, the settlers who arrived in the 19th Century and transformed the land and water so much.

It is the settlers’ work, primarily, that Howe is focused on undoing. Reference, restore, reverse — I think of how these words relate to one another out here on the river. Obviously they imply some sort of temporal root state, and people much smarter than I have thought and written a lot about how best to define that state, how best to achieve it: the degree to which it is tied to function alone, or whether it also can have a more aesthetic quality, and the interplay between aesthetics and function in restoration ecology, or ecology more broadly.

Sometimes we boat under a bridge on our way to a site, or next to a road. Other times, we sit in grass so lush and tall that it looks like it has been here for a thousand years. The associations may be unusual, but in both places we are counting fish. “It may be useful to think of estuaries in the lives of salmon and trout as in some ways havens, highways, and traps,” the salmon biologist Tom Quinn has written. But there is also a way to think of this work as supporting some kind of phenomenon that is also a regional marker. “We may fail to appreciate,” Quinn has also written, “that the feat salmon accomplish routinely — migrating between fresh and salt water — is most unusual.”

Dreams of the future

Fish, I have since learned, do not sleep like terrestrial organisms do. They might hang in the water, or nestle themselves among aquatic vegetation, or slowly drift. They don’t close their eyes since they don’t have eyelids. Even if they did, closing your eyes in a world full of things that want to eat you is never a good idea. But their activity levels decrease, and this counts for them as rest. Apparently how fish sleep is an active area of research; and the world remains full of mystery.

After five or six hours of boating around and seining, including one extended tramp across a marsh where I managed to fall in the mud, my own circadian rhythms had more or less synched with the day. Around this time we returned to the fyke net. The tide had long since left, so I could appreciate how the channel was really a deeply gouged gully. From that gully the fyke net spilled out, the bag at its end engorged with fish.

We hauled the net up onto the drier land — it was incredibly heavy — and dumped its contents into a white plastic bucket. Dropping to our knees, we each began to scoop with small nets, or feel through the muddy brown water with our hands. Fish were everywhere in it, slipping through our fingers, darting over the backs of our hands.

We pulled and counted and measured. Henrichs tallied on his touchpad. We flung names and numbers to him as we flung fish back into the river. Shiner perch. Peamouth chub. Sticklebacks and prickly sculpin. (“Stickles and prickles,” someone said.) Coho. So many tiny coho, with their enormous eyes and silvery skin, and their particular habits. And a few Chinook, too, which were duly collected. The number of fish seemed to me astonishing, from this one small channel on this one small river, running down to an inland sea.