salmon run

a glorious day at the american river...

the "milked" salmon get flushed back into the river.

now, and only on a superficial intellectual level, i can understand dam building. flood control for the settler residents of sacramento valley. hydro-electricity for all of the street lamps lighting up the night sky.
the dam at folsom dammed salmon spawning, and closed off hundreds of miles of waterway that the salmon have spawned in for ages and ages just dandy.

the river is swarming with bright red masses of mature salmon, just beneath the surface.

i could only sit, in tears, and witness the unnecessary struggle of my wet brothers and sisters.

so they considerately built a handy concrete ladder for the salmon to jump over, for their spawning satisfaction. then the fish swim into a facility, where a few disgruntled technicians squeeze out bright red eggs and milt (spermy stuff) into a bucket and slosh it around, then the fish get flushed down a tube back into the river. 

the salmon swim, being anadromous (meaning, roughly, running upward) they come so far, using magic magnetoception and scent and the stars to return from the ocean to their natal spawning ground. oh, wait, they don't. their magnificent wild bodies lead and thrash into a metal gate instead. nature, denied.

ladder.

this means the female doesn't nestle down in egg-protecting cobble, or that the fry spend their youth in the more nutritious up-stream waters (they grow up in a number of concrete canals at this particualr hatchery). this means that hundreds of miles of stream and river bed won't be fertilized with the carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, etc, that the numberless carcasses provide, and the bears and eagles residing higher in the mountains will be without a major food source. the salmon is a keystone species, meaning it supports more it's share in food web/life cycle proportions than one could imagine, and it can only go so far. 

in my area, and many others, this life cycle has been commandeered for the good of mankind, engineered and manipulated to work around modern improvements.

these fish, like along with feed lot turkeys, hogs, cows, chickens, etc, no longer reproduce on their own. man needs to intervene and do it for them, perpetually. until it's competently forgotten by their dna. a solution to another solution.

he could watch the salmon all day. they're quite acrobatic.

with a fever i scan the gawking crowds, searching for a mirroring expression: anyone else who's feels wild with grief. nothing. no one. no one else feels disgruntled or doubtful about our industrial improvisations to an already perfected cycling flow.

they've lost something. we've taken something.

tell me we've done something good. that it's better than nothing. tell me that we have clean energy, a former winter flood plane now safe and littered with tracts of houses. and the salmon species will continue.

tell me i'm unreasonable and that i care more for fishes than people.

that night i go to bed angry. and wake up heavy.

nature has her way, and it is perfect.