“The great mystery of salmon is the return to the place of birth. The salmon not only finds that river after traveling thousands of miles away, but it returns to the very same stretch of gravel in that same crook in the same stream where it was born some years before.” - Mark Kurlansky, Salmon
Watercolor by Lori LaBissoniere O’Neil
Where we normally go to Clear Creek, under Doug-fir, cedar, and a ten-story cottonwood, a boulder forces the current to one side. Taller and wider than I am with arms outstretched, the boulder only becomes an island after heavy rain, when a smaller channel fills on the boulder’s other flank. Once the creek drops back to its normal height and bed, a small pool remains beside the boulder, lazily fed by the creek. Half a foot deep, the little pool spans only fifteen square feet, just big enough for salmon fry.
I’m always looking for fish in the rivers and creeks here. Not because of some fisherman’s instinct — I’m only a novice — but because I’m an amateur ichthyologist with a focus on salmonids. Before the dominance of Euro-Americans and their insistence on natural resource extraction, the Sandy River basin raised uncountable legions of salmon. Now only a token few return each year.
Chinook, coho, and steelhead (I’ll collectively call them salmon), all members of the five-million-year-old Oncorhynchus genus, have made tributaries like Clear Creek home since the creek appeared, hundreds of thousands of years ago. I keep my eyes open for them, hoping to witness a remnant thread in the former web of natural life here, rarely with luck.
Since the 1800s humans have ravaged Clear Creek (and almost every other waterway in the region) in a variety of ways, all of which negatively affected salmon. The removal of beavers and large woody debris in the stream stripped away the pools and shelter that fry need. Roads crossed and paralleled the creek, leading to erosion which chokes salmon eggs with sediment. Dikes, berms, and channel straightening cut the creek from its floodplain, which sped the water’s flow in storms and carried the gravel needed for redds (spawning beds), and the fry, away. Wetlands were drained, homes built, fires accidentally started, and hundreds of acres were commercially logged between the 1960s and 1980s, exposing the creek.
Hatcheries downstream on the Sandy River introduced salmon that compete with the native stocks for food — outsider fish that would change the native species’ stream-specific DNA.
Two dams blocked the lower Sandy for almost a century, but by the early 2000s they no longer made sense, or dollars, so Portland General Electric removed them. Today, Clear Creek connects with the Pacific Ocean via the Sandy and Columbia rivers, unobstructed, an anomaly in the Northwest.
Private landownership along much of Clear Creek makes salmon habitat restoration all but impossible. Yet despite the ravages, salmon still return to Clear Creek, mostly to its small, less-damaged upstream tributaries, as if forgiving us.
The other day, during a routine dog walk to the creek, I stood over the boulder-side pool half-expecting to see some baby fish, and did. Not even the size of my pinky finger, the toddlers, called fry, moved as a group through the shallow water. Greenish-brown with black spots and big black-centered eyes, I assumed they were coho. The fish biologist at the Zig Zag Ranger station, a few miles from my home, told me Clear Creek produces the third-most number of coho smolts (juveniles that head to sea) in the Upper Sandy basin. But they could have been rainbow trout (which can become steelhead), or maybe chinook, or even something else. In a relatively fishless creek, a fish is a fish.
As I watched them relax to my presence, obviously curious of me, I felt like I knew the creek slightly better now. Here was an exhibition of the aquatic life that remained. Normally the only wildlife I see on the creek is a black-feathered pair of ouzels.
Eighty-degree heat lingered in the forecast, and I figured these fish might die. A few days before, I had toiled to remove a shredded blue tarp from a small wood jam in the creek, so without thinking I began to move rocks so that more water would enter the pool. With each rock the fresh, clear streamlet intensified, especially after rolling basketball-sized rocks from the edge of the creek’s swift flow.
Lori watched as she held Alix, cheering me on as the intake grew.
“They like it.”
I glanced over and saw the fry cruising their pool and checking out the influx of new water. I kept at it until debris clouded the mini stream and began to enter the pool.
“I don’t want to silt it.”
“They’ll be fine. The water level’s already going up.”
I looked for the fry every few days, whenever we were down on that stretch of creek. A large ring of dried sediment surrounded the smaller pool, but it and the fry had survived the summerlike weather. I excavated more, despite a bit of rain. Like the generations of Oregonians before me, I was trying to intervene in Nature’s affairs without really knowing what I was doing, without understanding the machine I was attempting to tinker with. Fortunately, I worked on a very small scale.
I’m not sure how the fry could endure the summer in a creek without permanent pools. If the side flow I helped open ceases as the creek drops, they’ll have no fresh water and their pool will seep and evaporate away. I fear returning in late June to find a scattering of faded fry belly-up on the grey gravel. Like the loggers, fishermen, and trappers here before, Clear Creek knows no pity. But the creek at least possesses a divine reason behind its madness.
A week later, heavy spring rain raised the creek enough to fill the side channel. The pool became creek as water wrapped around the boulder with a steady current, rendering my rock removal work useless. I might have helped the fry through the dry days, but this storm would have taken or protected them anyway. A few days after the creek dropped again, I stood patiently over the pool and did spot a few fry swimming alongside the boulder, future salmon or trout, perfectly used to this sort of thing, unlike myself.
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