Anchorage Daily News

HAINES -- Two big canners loaded with 64 half-pint jars of smoked salmon hiss and rattle on the stove while I watch them closely to be sure the pressure dial doesn't dip below 10 pounds. If it does, I'll have to start all over again, and it has taken me the better part of three days to get this far.

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Well, I haven't gone that far -- just up the river for the fish and across the garden to my smokehouse. For the next two hours I can't travel farther than five feet from the canner gauges. That is why my kitchen is so tidy. I've even written a short obituary for the Chilkat Valley News for a nice 93-year-old woman who lived here for 10 years some 35 years ago and whom no one can recall.

I called Clyde over at his seafood store because he knew the old-timers and I like to talk to him. When Johnny Cash died, Clyde played his music out the window for 24 hours for all of downtown to hear. "She was real nice," he said, but he couldn't remember anything specific.

My editor will not let me use "she was real nice" unless I can prove it, and everyone else I called said the same thing, but that was all. Which may be proof that being nice is not always the best policy.

The last call I made was to Nicki, who also said our gal was nice, so we talked instead about her granddaughter, Haines' own Genny Szymanski. Her dad is a fisherman, and she is swimming in the Olympic trials this week.

The swim up the river is why John says the salmon in my canners will taste better than the salmon caught in salt water. They came from Klukwan, his home village about 20 miles up the Chilkat River from my house. While I think the view here is heavenly, John says Klukwan is God's country.

Now, as I watch the salmon fill his net on the shore across the river from his smokehouse there, it looks like he's right. John could set the net on the village side of the shore and eliminate the need for fuel and a skiff, but says he doesn't because the king salmon use the deeper channel closest to his yard and he wants to be sure the few that make it up here spawn.

The Chilkat king salmon have not shown up this year, and no one knows why. And the Chilkoot River sockeye run, out in front of Haines, is alarmingly slow too.

It was windy down by the riverbank and threatening rain as we cleaned our catch. We tied rubber aprons over our jackets and jeans, fetched from a nail on the side of John's uncle's weathered plywood and screen smokehouse, which puffed sweetly nearby.

John is much better with a knife and a salmon than I am. He laughed at my raggedy fillets, and I have a feeling the ones that came home with me were not up to his standards.

I asked John how the salmon can see where they're going. The river a few feet from us is so full of glacial silt that it looks like gray-green paint. John said salmon can follow the scent of the water home.

We trample a path through the knee-deep horsetail grass to John's smokehouse carrying pails of brined fish and stand on stools to hang them by the tails on pine poles, flesh side out. John also split a dozen salmon up the middle and rested them horizontally facing upstream -- to show the other fish still coming where to go, he said. I said I thought they smelled the right direction, and he said don't be a wiseguy and mumbled something about white women and hippies talking too much.

The last thing we did was to cut dozens of half-smoked salmon sides into thin strips and re-hang them, like tinsel on a Christmas tree. The smokehouse ceiling was festooned with meaty orange streamers. John didn't have a watch, but I was surprised to see it was almost 7, time for me to head home and make dinner for my family.

Now the whole house smells like smoke and fish and the shot of vinegar in each canner to keep the jars sparkling. I wonder if the river smells this strong to homing salmon, and I wonder how we'll know if one day the scent fades and the salmon can't smell their way home. Has that already happened for some?

It was also the afternoon of my 49th birthday, so I was thinking historically. In 30 years will the salmon be gone and will all anyone can recall about us is that we were too nice to force the big changes needed to save them -- and, for that matter, life as we know it on earth?

I called John and asked if he was worried. He said he was. But he said "the fish will come back forever" as long as we take care of them and the water they live in. It's simple, he said. "You have to treat them gentle, like your wife" or mother, from the river to the smokehouse, it's all the same. We have to take care of the salmon so they'll take care of us.

Heather Lende lives and writes in Haines and is the author of "If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name." She can be reached at hlende@adnmail.com.

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