KODIAK -- Many years ago, the late poet John Haines complained to me that every new Alaskan needed to write an "ode to a dead salmon." Enough already, he was saying. Find something to write about that hasn't already been done a thousand times.
At the time, I had already written my "ode," one of the first things I'd published after becoming an Alaskan. It was an essay about pink salmon spawning, and I thought I was clever to call it "Pinks and Redds." (I had just learned that the "nests" salmon make for their eggs are called redds.)
I was thinking of John and odes and what is enough already as I approached a Kodiak Island salmon stream in late August. Can there ever be enough said about the sight and smell of salmon choking a stream, each in its deteriorating, fungal-ridden condition, fighting its way "home" to spawn? Should we ever stop paying attention to the cycles of life that bring us those salmon, and the wealth that the whole spectacle means for us, our environment, and all those who share this magnificent place with us? Does it matter that "real Alaskans" scoff at the lowly pink salmon, thinking them fit only for cat food and Europeans?
After a hot, dry summer -- a forest fire only miles away had just burned up a couple of homes and the library in the town of Chiniak -- a little rain had fallen during the night to boost the Kodiak stream. Salmon schooled at the mouth, where a dozen seals bobbed and innumerable gulls squabbled. Hundreds of dead, discolored, eyes-pecked-out salmon littered the beach where they'd been left by the tide and scavengers.
Salmon stench
My two friends and I turned upstream, following the bank, looking for the fresh, green-sided pinks just starting their final run, and for the few larger chum salmon among them. We watched for fox tracks, kept alert for bears.
The bank-to-bank salmon swayed like one organism as they held their positions, narrow-humped backs shining above the surface. They jammed the pools, alive and fighting, dying, dead and washing downstream. Startled, they surged one way and another, beating the water with a sound like hundreds of eggbeaters. The stench to me, an old commercial fisherman, was less off-putting than fecund. It was the smell of enrichment, the season turning, dust to dust, ashes to ashes, rotting salmon to new life.
Pink salmon spawn in the lower parts of streams, often intertidally, and so I watched for spawning behavior. Some salmon were courting, males appearing to guard females and lunging at other males. But I didn't see a single female turning on her side, digging at gravel with her tail. Perhaps, I thought, the gravel had already been dug and re-dug, eggs buried and unburied, the newer salmon heading farther upstream for fresh territory.
We followed the stream into meadow, into brush and among trees. Thousands of pink salmon swirled and rippled. We found where birds, fox, bear had all been eating: salmon stripped of their skin, bellies bitten out and heads off, flesh turned to mush, spilled eggs.
About a mile from the sea the stream dwindled to nothing, disappearing into gravel, a streambed absent its stream.
So many salmon. My fisherman mind mourned the waste. The fleet could have taken the excess, the ones beyond the needs of the next salmon generation and the foxes, bears, birds, other fish, bugs, microbes, and plant life that benefit from nature's extravagance.
It seemed a little strange that I hadn't seen actual spawning. That's what salmon do, so they must have or they would. I'd seen eggs in the stream. Wasn't that proof of spawning?
Global crisis
Two days later I returned to the stream. I squeezed dead salmon. Out came eggs. Out came milt. The dead fish weren't spawned-out. They were simply dead. They had died before reproducing.
We live in a warming world, one in which ocean and stream temperatures are higher than usual, where rain doesn't fall or does fall in the "wrong" seasons and amounts, where a rainforest has burned, where the water in streams is too low and too oxygen poor for the returning salmon.
An ode can celebrate something that leads to a revelation, or it can express intense emotion at the onset of a crisis. I celebrate salmon, and I'm saying -- in one more revealing of the truth of our time -- that we face a global crisis. I'm certain that my old friend John Haines, who cared so for this world, would be with me on this one.
Nancy Lord is a Homer-based writer and former Alaska writer laureate. Her books include "Fishcamp," "Beluga Days," and "Early Warming."