Stirring the Cauldron

New Moon Newsletters from Jessica Prentice

New Moon When the Salmon Return to Earth

September moondark kitchen notes
from Jessica Prentice

The moon is new! We have just entered the lunar cycle known as the Moon when Salmon Return to Earth in the traditional calendar of the Saalish people of the Pacific Northwest. More specifically, this was the Moon when Dog Salmon Return to Earth, the last lunar cycle having been the Moon when Coho Salmon Return to Earth and the lunar cycle before that having been the Moon when Humpback Salmon Return to Earth.

For the Saalish, as for most of the peoples who lived within Pacific Coastal watersheds for millennia before the European conquest, salmon were a crucial source of food and a strong physical and spiritual connection to the landscape. It is no surprise that three out of the thirteen moons of the year would be named for their return.

But before I go on about salmon, I want to make sure you all know about my classes for the fall. The classes listed here are the only classes I will be doing this autumn, so that I can focus on working on the book. I hope some of you can join me! And there will also be one last Full Moon Feast for 2004, on October 30. It would be great to see you there as well. Now back to the salmon...

What exactly does 'Return to Earth' in the moon name mean?

Salmon have a fascinating and unique life's journey. Born in cool, running freshwater streams inland, once they are big enough to survive in the ocean they head out to live their lives in the wild, salty sea.

They travel incredible distances once they are far from land (earth), eating krill and swimming freely in the ocean for a period of 3, 4, or 5 years depending on the species and the individual fish. If they survive the sea for the length of their lives, they return -- by some mysterious mechanism of DNA, or sacred knowledge, or unbelievable sense of smell -- to the mouth of the exact freshwater stream where they were born. Being anadromous -- having the very special ability to change from being freshwater fish to being saltwater fish and then back again to being freshwater fish -- the salmon swim back up the rivers to the the streambed of their birth, and spawn.

The spawning happens like this: The female creates a nest, called a redd, in the gravel of the shallow, cool, shaded water of the stream.

In the center of the nest she digs with her tail a depression up to 15 inches deep, called an ovipository. When she is nearly done with her work -- which may have taken hours or days -- a male has begun to hover nearby, ready for his part in the process. The two fish will then swim back and forth over the nest, quivering, in a ritual that looks to humans like a dance of courtship. Sometimes smaller males will attempt to get into the action, with the larger male chasing them off. In his beautiful book, Totem Salmon, author Freeman House describes what happens next:

She may then go on and release her eggs two or three more times, in other nearby redds, in other showers of milt from other males. By the time she has finished building nests, releasing all of her eggs and protecting them, she is weak and scratched and scraped by her efforts.

Her life's journey is done, as is that of the primary male she mated with, and they both settle in at the edge of the stream to die. The bodies of these majestic fish are then carried off by forest animals who feast on them, or they decompose in the stream and contribute to the nutrient cycle of the stream. The journey of those salmon has ended in the act that will carry on their species.

At least, they've done THEIR part. The complex and fascinating life journey of wild salmon make it a species that is particularly interdependent with the world around it -- salmon are the opposite of isolated. Their survival depends on what is happening in their spawning streambeds, in the rivers and waterways they travel along to and from the sea, and what is happening out in the ocean as well.

Salmon have a special kind of vulnerability. When they return to the waterway where they were born, they seem to be offering themselves up to the creatures who would harvest them as food. In the days when the salmon runs were plentiful, the fish would be easy prey. These large creatures in shallow waters would not be difficult to grab, spear, or trap.

The indigenous people who depended so heavily upon salmon for food developed a technology that took advantage of the salmon's vulnerability without exploiting it, and put it into the context of spiritual connection. As Freeman House explains:

House goes on to quote a Yurok woman who remembered, in 1916, the fish dams of her youth:

The last fish dam at Kepel was built in 1906, and then the tradition ended. That was 99 years ago.

Things have changed drastically between human and salmon over the past hundred years.

The European American approach to salmon has been a bit different from the Yurok's. Salmon were harvested indiscriminately, swaths were cut out of the forests in logging operations, roads were built and streambeds made unpassable by the movement of earth, hillsides were dynamited to make way for train tracks. The special conditions that salmon need to spawn -- loose gravel, cool, shaded running water, continuous access from ocean to estuary to river to stream -- all were gradually eroded. In the 19th century, an attempt to revive the Atlantic salmon runs (which were already decimated on the East Coast) by collecting Pacific salmon eggs and hatching them on the West Coast produced none of the positive effects hoped for (Atlantic and Pacific salmon are from different genii, have different spawning patterns, and are not interchangeable), and in fact negatively impacted the native Pacific populations. And eventually, of course, huge dams were built that salmon, no matter how strong, how determined, how majestic, could never hope to scale. But we needed water for agriculture and for cities, and we needed electricity for cities, and that imperative trumped all other concerns.

The salmon no longer come to us, we have to go to them. Catching and spearing fish for food during the Moon when Salmon Return to Earth is no longer possible -- there aren't enough of them. So now we have a salmon fishery, and men and women go out in boats for days or weeks at a time, trolling for salmon and bringing them back to shore. The season for salmon is in the summer now, instead of the fall or spring when they are running. The kind of salmon that can be caught, the length, the location, and the time of year are all highly regulated by government agencies. But while the Yurok regulated their capture of salmon proactively, with ritual and community gathering, in order to prevent there from ever being a shortage, we regulate retroactively, with bureaucracy and policing, with fish and game inspectors who mount boats and measure fish. Which strategy has been more effective in yielding an abundance of fish? Back to Totem Salmon:

And now, wild salmon populations are threatened by an even newer use of an ancient technology: using nets to create fish farms. Large, open sea pens are built in the ocean, where hatchery bred fish are dumped to grow into adults. They are fed a feed containing soy meal and ground up wild fish. Like their land-based, bovine counterparts, they have to be given antibiotics to prevent diseases, and their waste is so concentrated that it creates a dead-zone all around the pen. They have to be fed dye in order to make their flesh pink -- otherwise it would be gray. Nowadays, all Atlantic salmon available commercially is raised this way. The wild spawning stocks are gone. Many people are concerned about the effect these fish feedlots will have on ocean ecosystems. Others are worried about the effect eating these antibiotic and dye-laden fish will have on people. Those who care about the livelihoods of independent fisherman worry about the way that fish farming drives down the price of salmon and makes it harder than ever to make a living by fishing.

But what bothers me the most about these fish farms is the way that they rob salmon of their life's journey. While it might make sense to farm a bivalve like oysters that attach themselves to one place and spend the rest of their lives eating plankton from the water, it is a totally different story with a species like salmon. Born to journey out from the comfort of their natal stream and to swim free in the wide sea, and then to make their fateful journey back home again to spawn and die, the lifecycle of the salmon is a great and enduring symbol of freedom and return, death and rebirth, decay and regeneration. For a thousand years or more, humans and salmonids coexisted on this coast in such a way that both populations could flourish. Respected and honored by the people, the salmon made their epic journey year after year, and year after year they seemed to offer themselves up to nourish the people who depended on them so heavily for food. That relationship has been strained and broken. Most of the salmon we eat today is farmed, and what is wild is mostly from fish that were hatched in hatcheries and then released.

But there is hope yet that the salmon will indeed return to earth. For the past 40 years or so, there has been a groundswell of interest in protecting salmon and their habitats. Americans of every cultural background, ecologists, ranchers, marine biologists, fishermen and women, schoolchildren, and activists have worked on restoring the watersheds of the Pacific coast so that native populations of salmon can flourish once again. I am reminded of the time almost a year ago when I was privileged to witness the miraculous results of these efforts. Camping in a nearby state park that my partner and I frequently stay at, we were told to be particularly respectful of the creek running through the park, as it was salmon spawning season.

Along the creek, riparian areas had been restored, and groups of concerned citizens had placed fallen branches and other natural debris in the water to create the kinds of nooks and crannies that salmon love to spawn in. We were told that if we watched the water closely, we might see the annual rite of return in action.

And so we sat on a bridge that fords the creek, and watched, and waited in the silence as the winter rains came down lightly and gently. We watched for what seemed like a long time until we saw a bit of commotion in the water up stream, and watched the turbulence closely until it was right under us: and there they were -- a pair of salmon, one more red, the other more silver, enormous, sea-sized fish in that shallow, tiny creek. We only saw them for a minute, but it was magical, truly magical, to witness the salmon's return to earth, and to death, and to rebirth.

And it made me so proud, and so grateful, for all those who have dedicated decades and more of their lives to making it possible for those salmon to do the thing that makes them salmon, that makes them sacred, that makes them totem.

Blessings to you all on the Moon when the Salmon Return to Earth. May there always be such a moon.