I don’t know why I came to Alaska. I wanted to see the world. I needed to do something with my life besides scroll on my phone past photos of the genocide in Palestine. The vibes are dire in American democracy, the ice sheets keep weeping, my Saturn is returning. Plus I got dumped. I couldn’t stop weeping, like an ice sheet. Everyone kept saying there were so many fish in the sea.
I also heard there was money in Alaska. Two Aprils ago, hurtling down some highway toward the solar eclipse, Eliza told me about salmon season: six grueling weeks of work, rising and sleeping with the tides, the never-setting sun, netting $25,000. The next year they worked even harder for even longer, but prices were down and then there was an oil spill, so they washed ashore eventually with $6,000, a dozen frozen fish, and a sunburn. Monocrop soybeans blurred the Great Plains; I felt alive, unalienated, swashbuckling just to glimpse this volatility. If being on a boat seemed intimidating, Eliza said, they’d heard of this other job where you spend all summer counting fish.
I imagined wearing waders, standing in the river with a clicker, like one fish two fish red fish blue fish five six seven million fish this year. I imagined the vastness of the tundra, and gazed about the drabness of my cubicle, and decided or resigned to escape from the gray indoors. Aren’t most fish factory farmed these days? I wondered into a puddle of soy sauce, staring at my reflection in a single-use plastic tray of gas station sushi. Who am I, anyway, if you are what you eat? I found the listing on governmentjobs.com: Fish and Wildlife Technician II.
Now somehow it’s a cloud-coddled Monday morning in Ketchikan in June 2025, and I am drinking a cup of Mr. Coffee in a Department of Fish and Game onboarding meeting, and Jack — no longer a square on my screen but enfleshed, in hiking pants and a hoodie with a day or two of beard, white, about my age and height, and instantly chill — is pointing at my name and position on a State of Alaska PowerPoint. I and these two young women with our packets of stapled paperwork are the FWT IIs — “but we just say port samplers,” says Jack, whom the screen labels Port Sampling Supervisor.1 The conference room is ringed by wall-tall topographic/bathymetric maps of the Alexander Archipelago. A taxidermied snowy owl is mounted above the TV.
Port sampling, Jack explains, means collecting real-time data on the commercial salmon season. We are the State of Alaska’s eyes and hands on-site when the fishermen arrive at the processor. Our data makes it possible for the Department to monitor the commercial salmon catches, model the migrations of the fish, and micromanage the permissions of the fishermen. Day by day and cove by cove, all summer long, the “management biologists” decide and decree when and where fishing is allowed and forbidden, and to what kinds of boats.
The PowerPoint speedruns the three commercial fishing fleets the Department independently licenses and regulates: troll, gillnet, and seine. The difference is in the equipment: Trollers drag dozens of hooks behind their boats; gillnetters and seiners, respectively, lower large and gargantuan nets. When the fishing vessels deliver the salmon to the processors all summer long, my co-port-samplers-in-training and I will be waiting at the dock to intercept, identify, and measure them. Processors? Once upon a time these were called canneries, but they mostly no longer can. There are three private processors in Ketchikan, selling a wide variety of seafood products: flash frozen, vac-packed, headed and gutted, preportioned into fillets. Jack says we will each be stationed at a different processor every day. He says the three processors will combine with the three commercial fishing vessel types to determine which of the four methods of port sampling I will perform this summer — on the five species of Pacific salmon. I take frantic notes as he flips through pictures of indistinguishable fish.
This bounty, we owe to the salmon.
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Jack points to Ketchikan on a colorful map, the very bottom dot of the Southeast Alaska panhandle, and I feel ridiculously distant from my Arctic dreams. We are one of about a dozen small teams distributed across Alaska’s coastline, he continues, each contributing hundreds of numbers a day to the Department’s vast and subtle datasets, which allow the management biologists to optimize (?) the fisheries simultaneously for profit and sustainability. Jack explains in detail and at length all day. I sense an undertow pulling me far out of my depth.
This is our cubicle. This is where I will come to collect the ruggedized tablets in the morning and return in the afternoon to synchronize data and charge them overnight. This is my yellow plastic metal-detecting wand. I can keep it in my port sampling backpack, which is black and heavy-duty and waterproof and Grundéns brand — as are the forest-green overcoat and the orange polyurethane overalls Jack calls my fishing bibs. Everyone in the office is white. I meet two Annas, an Anne, and an Annie. I am provisioned a pair of Xtratuf boots and offered my choice of hat. This has an Alaska Department of Fish and Game logo and will be my uniform this summer.
Reeling, I jumble along the island’s shoreline, down Tongass Avenue, Ketchikan’s spine, past flightseeing jetties, a dental office complex, the postcard-precious steeple of the Lutheran church. At the cruise ship pier, I turn up a steep street curving up a treey cliff and quickly off it onto the sunny slope of houses where my Facebook landlords live. Crunchy the cat is dozing on the long straight stairs cutting up the cliff face. Where Warren meets G meets Harding Streets, I climb the wooden zigzag to the patio of my studio and pause for a giddy instant to behold the blue view. The grand Gravina Island unfolds across the calm and shallow channel, so wide it looks less like an island than a riverbank in the distance. A literal bald eagle soars magnificently over the vista. So this is Alaska. I work for the biology bureaucracy! Maybe I will finally figure out what life is.
On Tuesday morning we pile into a recommissioned sheriff’s department SUV and drive across town to my first fish processor. Jack leads us between two hangars, up a steel staircase, across a tread-plate catwalk, through a door, and into a large bright space striated with Formica lunch tables: the break room. I sit where Jack does, down at a table with two more white women wearing ADF&G-branded baseball caps. These are the FWT IIIs, who onboarded last week and have been out port sampling already.
Cannily, Jack disappears behind the lockers to the bathroom, leaving us free to chat among ourselves, pleasant and professional and soon blazing past formalities. I ask a lot of questions and begin to discern the existence of a small class of twentysomethings, preprofessional biologists job-hopping around the Pacific Rim. They teach tourists to snorkel in Costa Rica or Cozumel in the fall, skip the American winter to study stingrays or sharks in Australia, and fly up to Alaska in June to work salmon season. Trump defunded the US Forest Service in January, so some of us State of Alaska seasonal workers get to live in the USFS bunkhouse this summer.
Three of us are fresh out of college. Two of us grew up in Ketchikan. Four of us have, or almost have, marine biology degrees. The least like the others of us is Ana, who is, at 55, the oldest of us by far. Ana is a credentialed science teacher, but after a career in Washington state and three years all the way up in Utqiaġvik, she now teaches welding at Ketchikan High School. Ana met Kurt Cobain in a bar once in college, and now is a terminology stickler, insisting for instance that fish means more than one conspecific organism and fishes means more than one species. I like her immediately.
Processor workers amble into the break room. They fill the back of the room before the front, seemingly self-segregated into language blocs. I hear Spanish, Tagalog, West African French, and — is that Russian? “Probably Serbian,” says Ana. “Last year there were some Ukrainians.” Two of them begin a game of Jenga. The blocks clatter amid the mounting din. One of us conjures a deck of ADF&G-branded playing cards, and I am organizing my hand and relaxing into this easy scene when eight tall skinny beautiful white women walk in.
“Who’s that?” I ask quietly.
“That’s Sarah.”
“Who?”
“Sarah.”
“Which one’s Sarah?”
“They’re all Sarah.”
“?”
“It’s an acronym. Southern Southeast — um — Regional — ”
“ — Aquaculture Association,” finishes Jack, returning. “S-S-R-A-A. They run the hatcheries. In Southeast, anyway.” Hatcheries? I wonder, suddenly conscious of how the chunky baseball cap sits on my ponytail. Jack waves, and the SSRAAs wave back like waves, when a voice cuts through the noise to get our attention.
Reluctantly I turn to face the front of the room, where a portly man in a purple T-shirt is beginning . . . another PowerPoint. A long list of rules forbids things like jewelry and pens and AirPods in the processor, anything that might disassemble into fiddly metal parts or fall into the food. But if you wear only one AirPod, he insinuates unsubtly, and keep it under your hairnet, and keep the volume low, and as long as I don’t see it. He thanks us all for modeling proper behavior. If all goes according to plan, he says, in a tone that somehow sounds both like a joke and a threat, the machines won’t turn off until September.
Jack keeps glancing out the office window all Wednesday morning, past the condo complex behind the Safeway and out onto the water. At around 1000 hours he spies “A boat!” So we drop what we’re doing and hustle two blocks down the sidewalk to the second processor we’ll work at this summer. I follow Jack’s example as he splashes his boots in the sanitary dip, washes his hands in a metal sink, stretches a hairnet over his head, and repositions his emblazoned baseball cap atop it. He moves fast, so I hardly take in the heavy metal freezer doors we speedwalk past, the complex machines, the two dormant sirens, one labeled emergency, the other ammonia.
We pass a row of parked forklifts and arrive at a station where a short square man in square glasses stands at a slanted desk scribbling something. Jack speaks loud over the background whir. He points at an open gate at the far end of this large, enclosed area, where sunlight floods an angular metal table on the wet concrete floor. He enunciates: “Did these kings come from that troller?” The man looks us up and down and nods. “Can we sample them?”
Like ten fish lie slimy in a white plastic tub on a wheeled metal frame between us, resting on a scale built into the floor. They are bigger than I imagined, like silver toddlers. They glisten in the fluorescence. Their bellies have been slit and emptied and repacked with shaved ice. The man says, “Couple minutes,” in a quick clipped Filipino accent, and Jack takes off again. He opens a door and we follow him back outside into the bright summer day behind the building, where I am confused to find myself on a thin gangway seemingly levitating over the sunshining water.
The processor is built out over the channel on wood and metal pilings, so the boats can pull up directly to the dock doors. There is a crane at our door — and a boat moored just down the gangway, far below the dock line but with an intricate rigging rising up above eye height — and the mountainous vista — and so many birds: gulls, ducks, pigeons, ravens, more bald eagles, all swirling in circles and quacking and honking and lifting little stringy things from the water into their beaks. I am fumbling with the plastic clasps of my state-issued bibs when Jack points to a spot subtly churning on the surface of the water. “The birds always swarm whenever they turn on the outflow pipe.”
By the time I arrive back inside Jack has wheeled over two plastic tubs half full of fish. He calls these traycos. Across the lip of a third, empty trayco he balances a metal surface he calls the fish board, then attaches a custom-welded tablet stand and cup. He boots up the tablet and demonstrates how to copy some numbers from the software onto the paper scale cards, then uses his gloved left hand to lift a fish from the nearest trayco. With his bare right hand, he grabs the yellow plastic metal-detecting wand and rubs it strangely tenderly around the salmon’s head. The wand beeps loud and its LEDs blink red because we have a CWT.
I conduct an FPD. I read a PDF or three. I learn that petroleum profits are also “common property” in Alaska, and that every citizen gets an annual dividend called a PFD.
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CWT stands for coded wire tag. As a noun, it refers to a microscopic metal rod engraved with a series of tiny numbers and implanted into the snout of a baby fish born and raised in a hatchery. A hatchery, I soon learn, is another kind of fish factory: not the processor, where we are standing, but a lab where scientists incubate eggs and rear baby salmon before releasing them into the wild for fishermen to catch. Neither of these is a fish farm. There are no fish farms in Alaska, Jack explains proudly later this week; fish farming is illegal and environmentally destructive — though the governor keeps threatening to allow it, he mutters. Farmed fish swim their whole lives in captivity, eating nutrient pellets formulated to turn their flesh the most appetizing shade of orange. Those farmed fish are Atlantic salmon, anyway: distant, docile cousins of the mighty Pacific salmon we sample in Alaska. Pacific salmon don’t take to farm conditions, so they can’t be contained, only tracked.
So the first of my duties as a port sampler is to determine which fish have been carrying CWTs around the ocean. The second is to recover these tags for lab analysis. This means cutting off fish heads. Jack unspools a yellow plastic roll, tears off a numbered strap at the first perforation, records the head number into the software, and threads the strap with his quick fingers through the gill slit so it sticks out bloody from the fish’s mouth. These salmon, I realize, have not only been gutted but also gilled. He cinches the strap tight around the salmon’s jaw, so that when he beheads this fish in a minute it has an ID tag to correspond with a row of software data. CWT is also a verb, as in: We are about to CWT all sixteen king salmon from this offload. But Jack is reaching first for the tweezers, because we also need to ASL and FPD these fish.
ASL stands for Age-Sex-Length, lol. I get lost in the details as Jack lifts specific scales from the fish with tweezers and snips the tips of the designated fins. “The fish slime should glue everything directly to the sample cards,” he says. I watch him use his gloved left hand for the gross and heavy tasks, his bare right hand for tools and tablet and fine motor control. Then he grabs the fish’s face with his glove, slides and dangles it over the edge of the fish board, and with his data hand, his science hand, his mental not his manual hand, reaches for the knife.
He makes it look effortless. He slits through the tendon connecting the fish’s neck to its chin. He sticks the serrated blade under the gill slit, or operculum, makes two quick saws, and tilts his wrist to flip the fish. “Watch your fingers here,” he says, “because they’re right where your knife wants to be.” In again under the other operculum. One more thrust. “And then if you just kinda twist like this” — he twists — “ta-da.”
The salmon’s head dangles upside down by the jaw from one gloved finger. The door is still open behind it and the sky pours through its mouth.
Jack is an efficient teacher: By the end of this first set of fish, the three of us have divided the labor and are doing it ourselves. One of us snips and tweezes the samples, the other records the data in the tablet apps, and I lift the fish out of the trayco and onto the fish board and back. King salmon are heavy. I am surprised by their sharp small teeth. And the insides of their mouths are terrifying, all spikes and sidewise slits. After sampling sixteen fish, there are six silver heads in our blood-spattered trayco. We toss them in the cooler for Jack to mail to Juneau, where lab techs will extract and interpret the CWTs.
As I learn how to port sample this week, the process of the processor swims slowly into focus. The upstairs office doesn’t start buying fish until 0700, but there’s usually a line of floating trollers waiting in the water when we arrive at 0645, and sometimes the processor workers have already started to offload the first fish. They grade the salmon by weight and flesh color: large, medium, and small; red, white, and blush. They roll the traycos of sorted fish over to the floor scale man to weigh by grade. A piece of paper goes upstairs to the office, sometimes with the fisherman following to get paid in person. We follow the fish from the door to the scale and wait until the scale guy lets us take them to our corner to CWT and ASL and FPD.
Instantly and passionately, I love troll watch. I feel like Ishmael on the mast-head, daydreaming into the mystic distance.
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FPD stands for fisheries and performance data. I generate this data by means of a scripted dockside interview, entering answers into the tablet. “Where have you been fishing?” I ask the captain. “How many days have you been out? How many hours per day did you have your gear in the water?” This last question is updated for the 2025 port sampling manual, a disambiguation. “Are you keeping any fish for personal use? Did you catch and release any jacks?” Jacks, says Jack, are young king salmon, but because we can’t know how old the fish are until someone studies their scales, the distinguishing heuristic is twenty-eight inches from nose to tip of tail. In private, we call them short kings.
All the troll boats I meet this first week are captained by white men, middle-aged or older. They seem stressed. Jack says commercial fishing licenses are expensive, and fishing boats — don’t even get him started. The captains are technically independent entrepreneurs, hiring and managing their crews via family, friends, and Facebook, and in debt up to their receding hairlines. Some hold a contract with a processor, which supplies the fishermen ice and bait and stores their nets all winter in exchange for the right to buy the fish they catch.
This fisherman answers laconically and exactly. He names where he was fishing by the statistical subdistrict: “Mountain Point, 101-45.” I am leaning down from the pilings; it is low tide, so he is ten feet below me; we are speaking across a distance but not shouting. “Two jacks.” He clips the hook of the crane to the corner loops of a mesh brailer bag sloshing in the hold of the boat. The fish lift and spin into the processor, dripping a viscous mix of ice water, blood, and slime.
“Any other comments?” I am enjoined to ask at the end of the interview.
“Fucking orcas,” he somehow both mutters and projects.
“Imagine this happening to you after you die,” I say mid-sample on Friday, still tweezing scales at the wrong angle, brushing the cold fish with my bare knuckles, cringing.
“It sort of is what happens, if you leave your body to science,” says Ana, wiping the slime off my tablet screen.
Is this true? I almost like it. As if fish are to us what we are to science: inferior creatures, an order of magnitude less complex, to be studied and eaten at the maximum sustainable rate. Ana walks me patiently through the steps of desiccating the fins and scales. She takes care to always say “samples,” even though the other port samplers call the fins and scales “data,” as in: “Pack the data properly between the silica packs so it doesn’t mold.” A different lab in Juneau will genotype the data to determine which fish came from Canada and which from Alaska, so the Pacific Salmon Commission can assign distinct national fish populations and mediate boundary disputes. We wheel the fish to the workers, who clean them and wheel them around obscure corners. But we — we open the door out onto the panoramic vista and settle onto the warped wooden planks of the gangway for troll watch.
Troll watch involves using Department binoculars to scan the horizon, keeping an eye on both mouths of the waterway, to be ready to meet the trollers when they arrive with fresh-killed fish. But none of the boats chugging through the channel this afternoon bear the troller’s distinctive diagonal poles. And the weather is so pleasant, the wind so crisp, the boat fumes a minor blemish that only makes the composition richer. Ana tells me about Ketchikan, long the first stop on the colonial, commercial, and cruise shipping lines connecting Alaska to Seattle. It was first a Tlingit salmon camp, then settled in the 1880s by white frontiersmen as an enterprising cannery town. Filipino workers followed, initially exempt from the Chinese Exclusion Act. But we are barely fifty miles from British Columbia — and in the center of the largest and lushest temperate rainforest in the world, says Ana, gesturing expansively around the archipelago. This bounty, we owe to the salmon.
Before I arrived in Alaska I had read enough to gain a basic grasp of the salmon cycle, but as I ask and Ana answers in authoritative teacher voice, the fish become stranger and more complex. I am already amazed that every summer the salmon stampede upriver to make their way exactly, improbably, back to the spot where they were born. This makes them anadromous animals, says Ana: Ana means upward or backward and dromous means running. But I didn’t realize that scientists still don’t know exactly what ancient instincts make them do this: some mixture of memory and underwater odors and geomagnetism pulsing down their lateral lines. Nor did I know that when they cross from their ocean adulthood into the final freshwater phase of their life, salmon stop eating food and essentially enter ketosis, consuming their own bodies.
Their fish flesh deteriorates daily as the salmon swim monomaniacally upstream, leaping waterfalls, dodging birds and bears, some for hundreds of miles, to return home to spawn and die. By the time the fish arrive to lay eggs in the gravel and fertilize them with milt, they are unrecognizable, their colors and body shapes and pressure-regulation systems completely transformed. At the end of the life cycle, they maybe twitch around a little longer as “zombies” — technical term — before rotting on the riverbank, disintegrating into fish mush, transferring enormous reserves of nutrients from the ocean to the forest. This explains why Southeast Alaska smells like fish sauce in September, says Ana. She also says that in China they use salmon milt for skin care.
Instantly and passionately, I love troll watch. I feel like Ishmael on the mast-head, daydreaming into the mystic distance. On the dock of the postcolonial cannery, at the crossroads of state science and climate change, where a global migrant workforce turns fish into food, I get paid to bask in Alaska. Cloudshadows dapple the channel. Non–commercial fishing vessels drift through our binoculars: the Coast Guard, the Alaska Marine Highway ferry system, sport-fishing charters, the daily container barge headed north to the Ketchikan Walmart. The cruise ships sound digital ding-dongs, honk their foghorns, and depart in the early afternoon. The duckboats bob yellow and blue past the processor, tour guide monologues muffled through the Plexiglas windows. We wave to the tourists. I do a dab. They wave but don’t dab back.
Next week I finally figure out the art to cutting off a fish head — how to maneuver the knife around the cartilaginous atlas area, slicing into the top of the spine so as to leave the least flesh behind. This cut creates a cross section of the salmon’s nasal passages and exposes the viscous goop behind the eyeballs to its first-ever air. If you’re feeling evil, which I am today apparently, you can stick the point of your knife into the back of the eyeball and puppeteer it around the plastic tubs and metal surfaces and concrete floors of the processor dock. These fish were born in a hatchery. It makes sense that this is their destiny, right?
I spend three minutes this morning shoveling shaved ice into an ice-white trayco. The fish heads gleam for an instant, yellow chin straps like plastic leashes or long tongues. I bury them under shovelfuls of white ice. It is nice to feel my muscles working, sore and stretching and satisfying and simple, and I feel healthy and strong, outdoors and offline, purposeful and useful following instructions. For a moment I am invaded by a vision of myself as a cog on a flywheel feeding America: bodybuilders staring at the Aldi fridge calculating protein per dollar, boomers clinking champagne flutes on the cruise ship, a million cats racing into kitchens when they hear the click of the can. Is this what I was looking for when I came up to the bottom of the top of the world? I have hardly thought about the genocide this week, submersed in my salmonology, riding high on the antipodal tide.
Wild suddenly strikes me as a stretch. These fish are something much stranger.
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When the gillnet fish begin to arrive, I meet my first few tenders. These are not fishing boats; they are more like floating fish refrigerators contracted by the processor to go out to meet the gillnetters, buy their fish, and bring them back to the plant so the fishermen can stay out fishing. The tenders tie up along the dock under a medium-size crane, but the tender has its own small crane onboard, which the captain uses to deconstruct and rebuild a ziggurat of blue and gray totes: industry-standard insulated plastic coolers with rounded edges and forklift divots. A tote weighs one thousand pounds when full of ice water full of fish. Deckhands — sometimes the captain’s teenage sons, more often young men of color — unhook one crane and attach another crane. A man at the plant winches the totes from the deck up to the dock, where I stand and attempt to identify the salmon.
But ASL includes GSI, and there are more exceptions than rules, and I still can’t tell a king from a coho. Soon I decide that my favorite boat in the fishery is the tender from Metlakatla — two islands over, the only reservation in the state after it rejected the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act — because the port sampling protocols become so intricate that I tap one field and the tablet apps autopopulate the rest. The Metlakatla tender deckhand is built like a linebacker but moves like a dancer. He pushes the totes across the boat wearing red Beats by Dre. On Friday I’m lifting the lid of a tote containing five salmon spangled across a shallow puddle when he climbs to the deck and asks me, “You know what kind of fish that is?”
They are smaller, somehow silverier than the last toteload. “Sockeye?” I basically guess.
“Money fish!” He grins big, debonair in his fishing bibs, sack balanced on his shoulder, splashing toward the laundry room.
This processor must have been built in the past twenty years. Crimped metal buildings sprawl out across the compound, segmented into mechanized spaces where I’m not allowed. When I arrive at 0645 I walk past the egg house, a glaze line, a pack line, an ice bay, two machine shops, and out to the concrete dock, where we keep our port sampling stuff in a plastic garden shed under a tall metal structure Jack calls the Line. Forklifts whiz past, swivel around towers of totes of fish, honk around corners, and beep in reverse, syncopated and microtonally out of tune. The crane operator is wearing a hoodie with an image of a Minion wearing a hoodie that reads go hawks. The totes are six or seven shades of blue, with mismatched lids. They glide off the boat like ice cubes. Yet another crane lowers a long orange corrugated-plastic vacuum hose into a hatch in the center of the boat that the deckhands have just pried open. It is dark and spumy, gray and red, in the boat’s bilgewater. Everything gets so loud and the dock starts to shake when the man turns on the pump.
The hose is like a foot and a half in diameter, and a tender tends about a hundred thousand pounds of mostly chum salmon, so it takes around an hour for the pump to suck all the fish through the hose: out of the boat, up along the dock, and into the side of the elevated Line, where some mechanism must redirect the salmon sideways into a metal hopper, judging from the way the fish clang and boom in there. The Line tech electronically opens and closes a gate of weighted pins, and salmon spew out from the bottom of the hopper onto a conveying rubber belt. I watch them slide down the Line when I climb up with my tablet to take — make? — data. “Apartamos un king, cuatro cohos, y un bin de sockeye,” say the four or five Line guys from Calexico. “Esos son los money fish.”
I metal-detect their heads and carry a couple of coho down the safety stairs to port sample on the fish board. On my way back to my trayco I pass a bin of bycatch: jacks, flounders, jellyfish, steelhead trout, next week a small stray shark. When the tenders turn away for the day, the Line tech electronically opens the bin’s trap bottom and they all get hosed into a tote labeled trash fish.
Around 0700 one morning I hear laughter and look up and the SSRAAs are walking in. There are three of them, also in bibs, one explaining something, the two others nodding and following. Ana is clicking the tweezers, waiting for me to lift her the first fish of the day. Acting casual, I lean into the tote and sink past my elbows into the ice water.
It turns out we share a corner of the factory floor and even do similar jobs: The SSRAAs are port samplers, too. But where we cut off fish heads, the SSRAAs cut through fish faces. They poke their tweezers under each salmon’s brain to extract its otoliths, then toss the carcass into a trayco, where it lies looking like a Picasso, a second mouth gashed perpendicularly through its head. This afternoon on troll watch, I roll up the cuffs of my bibs to try to look a little less formless. This is difficult in a hairnet. The sky is a low quilt of clouds knitted into sastrugi, and it is high tide, which makes the gangway feel somehow enclosed. I take a deep breath of the salty, ammoniac breeze and bravely ask a couple of questions.
Otoliths are little crystals in the fishes’ inner ears, one SSRAA says. Like salmon scales or tree trunks, they grow from the inside out, in rings. Another SSRAA opens up a dimpled sample package and tweezes two tiny things into my palm. They look like canine teeth, the size of grains of rice, pointed on one end and furrowed down the middle. They are so small I feel no weight. In the hatchery, she says, they can manipulate the temperature of the incubation chamber. Heat controls how the otoliths grow, so subjecting the salmon embryos to a sequence of bursts of hot and cold creates a particular pattern of thin and thick bands.
“So, you print barcodes inside the fish.”
“Basically, yeah. Isn’t that awesome?” It has been so long, I hardly recognize myself developing a crush.
“Can I see the hatchery?”
“Well, it’s closed to the public,” says the third SSRAA.
I point to the logo on my slimy, drying baseball cap. “But I’m not the public. I’m the State.”
Floatplanes go brrrr past the processor, skidding gently on their pontoons. Bald eagles perch on the roof, heads swiveling like surveillance cameras. Dopey scoter ducks bob below on an iridescent skim of spilled oil, and sometimes a lion’s mane jelly floats past on the lazy current, undulating like a psychedelic daffodil. In late June, Ana points out a whole school thunderclouding under the gangway, each fish maybe three inches long and glinting. As individuals, they dart in short, chaotic bursts; as a group, they teem in blooms and streams, multitudinous and lithe. She thinks these are pink salmon smolts just arriving downriver, adjusting to life in saltwater in the relative safety of the intertidal zone. It is a little soon, she says, but the waters are warming and this happens earlier every year.
Work is slow at the processor these early weeks. I scroll on my phone on troll watch. Ana tells me that Atlantic salmon sometimes escape Canadian fish farms, swim haywire, join shoals of Pacific salmon, and get caught in Alaskan nets. I read about Soviet fish-farming experiments; straying Pacific pink salmon have recently colonized rivers near the Baltic Sea. I read about whirling disease, a salmonid epidemic, which deforms their developing skeletons and makes the little fish spin in circles until they die young.
I work for the biology bureaucracy! Maybe I will finally figure out what life is.
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One resplendent Monday, one of the SSRAAs leaps up pointing from the gangway: “Orcas!” Ana says that she was wondering whether we’d see them today, that the Ketchikan Whale Spotters group said the B7 pod was moving through the channel. And I learn that every whale in the sea has also been identified and is tracked in real time by citizen-scientists on Facebook. The B7 pod travels as a family: B7 is the matriarch, B13 her disfigured son, IDable by a mangled dorsal fin. B14 and B16 follow, splashing and puffing from their blowholes. Three Serbian workers rush out into the sun with their smartphones.
Yesterday Trump sent a fleet of B-2 bombers from Missouri to attack Iran. Today I imagine a pod of orcas swimming through the sky and suddenly feel queasy, as if tweezed by the overextended tentacles of some hungry white leviathan, constricting and caressing the world into a sustainable slaughterhouse. Tomorrow there are even more smolts under the gangway. Smoltification, Ana explains, is the life phase when schools of juvenile salmon siblings break up into individuals, destined for their ocean adulthoods alone. I stand apart from the other port samplers and squint into the fish-eat-fish abyss and feel real fear. Out there, in the Alaska Gyre, industrial trawlers scrape up pristine seabeds. Beyond — the amnesiac ocean — the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — what even could be done? When salmon women summer camp ends, what will I do? I want to throw my baseball cap into the water. But I don’t. I pull out my phone, too, and take a fish-eye photo.
The management biologists want the lengths of at least ten sockeye out of every forty per sample card this summer, at least until we meet our weekly Objectives. The sockeye arrive in overloaded totes, not gutted or “dressed,” but whole or “round,” so there is no belly cavity to grab into. And it doesn’t help how cold my hands are, plunged into the slush. After half an hour I can barely bend my fingers. I borrow a pair of glove liners from the gear zone at the plant entrance, even though Ana says to be careful, this processor launders them with abrasive chemicals and they gave her a hand rash last year. I bob for sockeye until I discover that the trick is to squish through the gills with my forefingers and steady the fish with my thumb in its mouth. It is important to the eventual market price that these salmon have never been frozen, but they can stay in the slush for up to three days, so some of the fish are chilled stiff and curl up unhelpfully from the fish board. I learn to give it a sec. Out of the slush, the fish will relax.
This thawing moment gives us just enough time to sex the salmon. With ocean-phase sockeye, says Ana, this is more of an art than a science: much harder from the outside than the inside. But there are signs you can learn to read. They’re mostly all going to be male this early in the run anyway. The females follow. It will get more obvious later in the summer as the fish keep transforming, she says, but it’s good practice to learn to look now. At the abs, for example, which will be distended sideways in the females from all those eggs, and at the kype, which is salmonese for nose, which in the males should have already started to hook. The distance between the nares and the snout is much shorter in female sockeye. Ana demonstrates how to hold the tweezers up to the front of the fish like a calipers.
I hate this task instinctively. It conflicts with my queer sensibility. I feel like a fearmongering future archaeologist, callously assigning an irrelevant identity to these fish, who for all I know swam around the ocean enacting and believing some underwater otherwise. Glowering, privately floundering, I wonder how different male and female fish lives even are. Sea lice, horrible gelatinous parasites that wild Alaskan salmon catch from Canadian fish farms, cling to their flanks indiscriminately. We’re back at the processor that’s just one wide warehouse, and as I start to poke my kype around, I watch a man slam each precious specimen onto a mechanical spike. A pneumatic guillotine piston pumps its head off, it lands belly-up in the divots of a crenellated belt, thirty international hands swoop down bearing electric knives, and the sides are peeled from the spine by the Ryco Bandfilleter.
Here, the pump that sucks the salmon into the processor is not down on a distant dock but built into the wall next to our workstation. By the end of the morning, all that ice water and fish slime in the vacuum hose start to churn into a light pink foam. After almost two hundred thousand pounds of salmon pass into the plant, the fish crash out of the wall fewer and frothier, covered in a scum of bubbles. Fish foam gurgles from the pump in waves, splashes against the plastic Uline drop cloth hanging mercifully in front of our sampling corner, and pools and wrinkles on the concrete when the water swirls out of the emulsion down the floor drains. Three, four, five salmon spill off the sorting line and flop to the floor mat. The sorters here are Serbian women in baby-blue disposable plastic surgical gowns. They lift the fish indifferently, hum to Nirvana on the radio, and throw them into open totes.
So this is the commodity process. All that is fish foams into food. On troll watch I study a wholesale catalog from the upstairs office: The processor sells all five species of Pacific salmon, plus halibut, cod, sea cucumber, rockfish, roe, milt, geoduck clams, and something called salmon block, a mushy paste destined for pet food and fertilizer. My head swims on learning that these fish are not only preportioned and canned for human consumers and bourgeois animals, but also ground down to pulp for industrial agriculture. Even the soybeans eat salmon.
July 1 marks the new fiscal year. I get a 3 percent raise, to $19.62 an hour. I go to the grocery store after work, resolved to buy and cook and eat a prime piece of local fish, but the fish fridge at Safeway doesn’t carry local salmon — only frozen fillets from Washington state, and Atlantic salmon factory farmed in Canada, Chile, and Norway. When I ask Jack about this, he says that all the locals either fish for themselves or accept gifts from their fisherman neighbors, who catch as much as Department regulations allow and keep their freezers full all year.
I ask the upstairs office if I can buy a fish directly from the plant, but the woman at the desk says the minimum order is 150. At the loading bay I watch the money fish, headed and gutted and glazed, roll out of the freezers, clack into plastic-lined cardboard boxes, and get forklifted into the backs of refrigerated trucks. But where do they go? Omakase? Whole Foods? The Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle? There’s one store on the island called Fish from Trish that buys direct from fishermen and sells to locals, but it’s a long bus ride up the road and only open three hours a day when I’m at work. I try downtown, but the tourist markets sell last year’s fish, smoked and canned, for $14 — or $25 for a lox crêpe with a long line.
Something’s . . . fishy. In the plate-glass window of a tourist shop selling totem-pole tchotchkes and fox-fur bikinis, I spy the logo of the Ketchikan Chamber of Commerce, a yin-yang-shaped insignia: one half salmon, the other half cruise ship. The cruise industry boomed to compensate when the pulp mill closed in the 1990s, which explains why downtown Ketchikan has a diamond district. But this week I also start to notice bumper stickers on trucks around town: friends don’t let friends eat farmed fish. support alaska’s wild fisheries. And wild suddenly strikes me as a stretch. These fish are something much stranger.
But I don’t understand why until I open a tote to discover the biggest salmon I will ever see: a 55-pound king, 995 millimeters, a tank of a fish, caught out by the coast. He is powerful and beautiful, and suddenly I feel unforgivable, complicit in a vast life-on-life crime. Does he really command the same market price as the hatchery kings with the CWTs, full-grown to half his size? I can’t even lift him out of the tote. I port sample him where he lies, thank him for his ecosystem services, and cover him in shame with shaved ice.
Next week, I learn that Alaska was already overfished when it became the forty-ninth United State. Before SSRAA, there was FRED: Fisheries Rehabilitation, Enhancement, and Development. And I realize that the common property fishery — its rugged frontiersmen, my romantic fantasies — depends on a disappearing product upsold as a defense against the encroachment of industrialized fish farms. And that this lush and lovely lifeworld remains sustainable only thanks to hundreds of millions of “enhanced” salmon per release site per year. That’s why so many fishermen contribute a part of their paychecks to fund the hatcheries. SSRAA is Stepmother Nature, stocking the oceans with fish. Last year, she midwifed 16 percent of all Alaskan salmon, worth $576 million. And in Sitka, there is NSRAA; and in Juneau, DIPAC rears and releases Douglas Island Pink and Chum. Does this make the ocean a farm? Or a factory?
The hatchery is a low sloped green metal building on Salmon Row. Ha. SSRAA meets me on the front porch, and I hardly recognize her in her street clothes. She unlocks the front door and ushers me past research posters, tables of tools, a pallet with a pile of fifty-pound bags of fish food, and into a wide pale room the size of a rec center basketball court, with the same sickly lighting. Walkways grid and gird a dozen large low circular green fish tanks, each as big as a tote on the processor dock. It smells like a pet store, caustic and musty.
SSRAA shows me the wall of shelves of plastic tubs where the eggs sit and incubate. She flips a switch and bathes the room in red light, and it looks like the scene in The Matrix where Neo realizes AI is doing exactly this to humans: raising us in captivity, harvesting our energy, feeding us dreams. There are so many fish in the tubs, uncountable thousands, ranging from small to tiny, swimming at so many speeds that I look down into one vortex and can’t tell which way it is whirling.
This is the area where SSRAA keeps the coded wire tagging equipment. She describes anesthetizing the fish with clove oil to make them docile and easy to stick face-first into the machine. She shows me a video on her phone of a fingerling in her hand, upside down and unconscious but still swimming instinctively through a current. She admits that sometimes the machine will malfunction and not clip the CWT small enough, leaving the Frankenfish with a wire sticking out of its forehead like a unicorn. Outside is the hatchery yard, enclosed by a huge cube of mesh predator net, where two men are tossing plastic scoops of fish feed into a bigger grid of even more fish tanks.
In the ground is an eddying pool SSRAA says feeds into Ketchikan Creek. She shows me a map of release sites all around Southern Southeast, describes loading the smolts onto trucks and boats and shooting them via fish cannon (!) into eight or nine prescreened ponds and streams. It is tricky, she says, to pick the right moment when the fish are ready to imprint the primal memory of the gravel of home. The calculations are by necessity imprecise. Some grown salmon swim back to the hatchery instead, and there’s always a small subset who stray. But the ones who don’t get fished, who by some miracle or optimized model make it “home” to complete the salmon cycle, spawn and rot on the riverbank, and their offspring are indistinguishable from any old fish in the sea.
One of the outdoor tanks has a window built into its side. I crouch to peer in. I wonder if you can ever take the tank out of the fish. Small and striped, they swim and they swim and they swim in the window, all to the left except this one tiny fry, trying with all its writhing might to swim with the school, but it’s too weak and ends up buffeted backward by the artificial current. It finally occurs to me to ask: “Do salmon swim against the water their whole lives?”
And SSRAA says, Close but it’s complicated, it’s called rheotaxis; their lateral lines are mechanosensory; salmon swim upstream or go with the flow depending on a thousand tiny variables, like temperature, turbulence, light source, pressure, predators, competitors, pathogens, prey, bluff bodies, benthic scents, fractionation, like for example when kings like these are young and in the freshets . . . She explains at length but I drift away watching the whirling circles, these misbegotten fish turning feed into flesh into food into money into cannery into colony into hatchery into processor into hatchery, out of history into this artifishial endlessness, whose real product is a slippery grip on control.
I enter a doldrums. I doomscroll. I dream I am swirling with the salmon somewhere dark and deep and disorienting, prey eyes facing outward not forward, a gradient of radiant blue. The Tongass Narrows heaves and breathes. I cross-reference its cycles with the tide table in my pocket, which has predicted and printed every swell this summer down to the minute and inch. The bright iron-gray sky wobbles in daubs on the surface of the dark gray water. Two statistical weeks shade in and out of mist and fog and haze. The salmon are finally transforming, the sockeye getting redder down the sides, the males’ noses stretching like needle-nose pliers, and harder to sample once they start to absorb their scales. The chum become angry, scary monsters with snouts and fangs, green with vertical purple stripes like they’ve been throttled.
One day there is a serious earthquake off the coast of Kamchatka. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — “Noah” — issues a tsunami warning for Alaska, which the National Weather Service overrules within an hour. One day I realize I haven’t seen a bald eagle in a while, and when I ask Ana she says they are all at the annual convention in Skagway. One day a worker wanders over to our science corner of the fish factory carrying a bycatch coho, which must have some mutation, because it should not be fluorescent yellow. I spend whole shifts fantasizing about making foam angels on the factory floor.
Seining opens — then closes, then opens. Say a gillnetter hauls in three thousand pounds of fish per landing; a seiner will catch thirty thousand. Their nets are so big and destructive — “efficient,” says Jack — that they are only allowed to fish two days a week, and only from 0500 to 2000, when they turn back to the processor to pump fish up the hose all night long. Those evenings and the following mornings are fantastically busy, and when I snap back to consciousness at the end of a shift, my PVC gloves, my orange polyurethane bibs, and my neoprene Xtratuf boots are spattered with glittering scales. I saw off the fishes’ heads, I sex them nonconsensually, I send them down the disassembly line one traycoful at a time. I notice I am starting to assign the indeterminate salmon female. Am I . . . identifying?
The rest of the days, five a week, are slow and long and futile feeling. The tenders in the morning carry two hours of fish for us to sample if we’re lucky. Sometimes a lone troller motors over in the afternoon with a couple dozen coho or a few hundred chum. I do my fish phrenology. I conduct an FPD. I read a PDF or three. I learn that petroleum profits are also “common property” in Alaska, and that every citizen gets an annual dividend called a PFD. I chat with the workers, who are bored, watching race cars or body-cam footage or The Shining with ads on YouTube on the Roku in the processor break room. Several ask me urgently, anxiously, where the fish are; they came all this way and there’s no work. Jack says this is indeed a weird year, a slow year, though it’s still too soon in the season to say whether the fish are later or fewer than expected.
One day he says an atmospheric river is approaching. It is supposed to arrive tonight and last five days. But the following morning is glorious, and impossibly slow on the processor clock. I read a paper in which a team of scientists tortured twelve salmon to prove that fish can feel pain. I read the abstract of a paper suggesting a link between incubation temperature and sockeye sex, and infer unscientifically that global warming will turn the salmon trans. I read an essay by Enrique Salmón, who says, “Yes, I am a Homo modernus industrialii, and I share breath with the trees that are in and around my neighborhood, and the avocado in my guacamole is a relative.”
A new machine appears near our sampling corner: a meat grinder, eight or nine feet tall. Two dark-skinned men spend days on end pulping the whole season’s backlog of totes of trash fish, fresh from the freezer. One tilts the prongs of the forklift. The other hacks at the heads inside with an orange rubber mallet. Frozen fish heads tumble into the hopper with a muted thud — not the slap fresh fish give, I am dismayed to discover I can distinguish — and onto the bottom of an upslanted rubber conveyor belt cleated with teeth. The heads, each about the size of my fist or human heart, climb, roll, tumble, settle, and ride up the belt to the top, where they tip into the machine and disappear past a plastic splash guard. By 0800 this funnel brims with a frothy pink sludge, darker in color and looser than the pink-gray paste that extrudes out its other end.
Pink salmon are forecast to swim home into District 101 this statistical week. Pinks are the most predictable of the salmon. Their strict two-year life cycle has resulted in genetically distinct even- and odd-year populations, who take turns spawning in the same streams. Even years generally see fewer fish. In odd years, like this year, we expect a lot of pinks. They are not valuable but voluminous; the seiners encircle and surface huge schools. Pinks get canned. For some reason the fishermen aren’t allowed to keep the bycatch money fish, so I watch half a dozen king salmon get bruised through the pump and sorted into the trash fish tote, which I have started to eye covetously.
The storm finally arrives three days later, as I am driving the port sampler SUV across town to pick up an evening shift. The atmosphere is staticky, sky roiling with angry tumors of cloud, and it is raining gently when a dark green seiner flying the One Piece pirate flag plows headlight-first through the fog and ties up to the dock. Ana and I climb the Line to stand by the belt. PSR stands for pink sex ratio, she says. You need at least 150 fish for a representative sample; the ratio of males to females we discover will tell the management biologists how far into the salmon run we are, to help them decide how soon to cut off seining. I pick up a pink. It is green. It is limp. It flops from my glove, slush-cold. Rain pings like a gamelan off the Line’s many metal surfaces. Behind the lowering clouds, the daylight has all but disappeared.
Ana keeps saying you can use the fish’s weight to let it slice itself open down your knife, but I don’t understand the technique and hate how back-and-forth I have to saw, the jagged gash it leaves. The belly knife is curved like a scythe and has a bulbous tip like a spawning sockeye’s snout. The blood from the belly is thick and dark. It oozes, viscous like petroleum. It mixes with the mealy fish shit that coats the organ cavity when I puncture the intestines. This is a skill issue, I realize, locking in. The gonads are long and white; the eggs are clustered in bunches, a deep, rich, almost holy orange. Eggs tumble out of the unzipped fish onto the slippery belt, get trapped between the belt and the stainless-steel surfaces, turn and overturn. Bored sorting workers spin the bloody fish in circles. One pink, then another, flops from the hopper still alive, tiny sharp jaws agape. A man puts these fish out of their misery with a punch to the head, and the curtain of relentless rain suddenly sounds like fshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
It is drizzling Friday evening when I climb the hill behind downtown to go see The Fish Pirate’s Daughter, Ketchikan’s annual musical melodrama, now in its fifty-ninth season. The Ted Ferry Civic Center looks like a conference hall or an airport lounge, a gray-speckled international nonplace sprouted improbably in the rainforest. Oil paintings of Tlingit elders share the walls with industrial abstraction. I sit at a table in the back of the ballroom with an old white couple eating crudités.
The lights dim. Our protagonist is Sweet William Uprightly, age 24, so born in 1942, boy wonder become management biologist. His secretary and housekeeper do the three-finger scout salute, practically goose-stepping when they address him as “United States Commissioner of Fish.” But Kurt Von Ohlson, the notorious cannery owner, hires a shady poacher to steal a million salmon from a distant fish trap. He is a caricature of a capitalist in his pinstripe suit and red suspenders; the audience is encouraged to pelt him with marshmallows. The microphones glitch. The songs are way too long. Sweet William fucks around and finds out that his mother is the town’s mysterious madam, because Ketchikan’s creation myth, which I realize I’m watching enacted onstage, does not pass the Bechdel Test. FPD stands for the Fish Pirate’s Daughter, whom Kurt Von Ohlson abducts and whisks away to his boat, the Black Brailer. Sweet William shakes his fist in pursuit: “You’ll hang for this!” The Commissioner of Fish kisses the Fish Pirate’s Daughter and the audience says aw.
It smells like ozone when I walk back out into the evening. I wander downhill, downtown, into the heart of the shabby city, which, illuminated neon in the 2130 sunset, looks like a slot machine for sucking money out of tourists. Happy families chat in droves and carry paper shopping bags aboard the Quantum of the Seas. I pass in peace. I walk down to the docks to listen to the water lap. Purple and orange starfish speckle the old wooden poles anchoring the concrete floats in place. Sea cauliflower, sea cucumbers, alien underwater life-forms jut from the dock’s wooden understructure, distending, almost dancing, in the boats’ bobbing shadows. Off the end of one pier, I see a small gray commotion and kneel to get close.
My training overtakes me. Maybe eighty? Are they sockeye smolts, on account of the way their skinny sides flash silver? I watch them writhe awhile, drifting in the reflection of the underside of Tongass Ave. Pigeons roost on the girders supporting Sockeye Sam’s. I lie down on the dock. I reach out my hand. I hover. I grab fast and catch one but she’s even faster out of my fingers, and the fish all start racing as the splash my hand made settles into small waves. A dead chum floats by, belly-up. Another school of stupid smolts lilts lazily into my wingspan. I hover again and am poised to snatch, watching imperiously from on high, when I realize that every fish thinks it’s following another. That no one is leading. That the water is leading. The longer I watch, the more silhouettes appear down where the water gets green: spiny fish, finny fish, taily fish, some as fat as my palm.
A skinny teenage boy squeaks down the dock, iPad strapped around his chest. In his highlighter-yellow hoodie and blue bibs, he looks . . . like a Minion. I stand back up and flag him down. “Are you — ?” I start, and he is indeed a port sampler, not in Commercial Fisheries like me but across the hall with the Division of Sport Fish. I ask and he shows me his iPad, loaded with different apps. He samples smaller catches of fish and many more species than we do. He lists a dozen rockfish, and I get dizzy imagining another bureaucracy, a similar summer happening across the hallway, registering another unreality altogether. He says he grew up here, fishing. It’s been a slow year for Sport Fish too.
“But where are all the fish???” I insist.
“In the ocean, I guess.” He shrugs, nonchalant. And I feel like I am falling through a mirror or the surface of the water or a screen, disintegrating into data, because I know in my pinbones there are fewer fish in the sea than there used to be. And that no one will ever know how many were spawned by scientists like me, to prolong some disappearing dream I want to no longer need to believe.
I wake early on my last day in Alaska and walk the long way through the forested mountain valley, past the rec center, past the skate park, and down into the backside of town. I stand on a bridge over Ketchikan Creek and take a photo of some French family who asks nicely. Two spotted salmon slither slowly upstream, splashing with their tails. They are reaching the end of their lives, gray and white and almost moldy looking. One turns to join the current for a moment of negative rheotaxis, then turns around again and faces forward, inexorably upstream. I watch another fish swim through the rusty body of a bicycle. This salmon blends into a river bottom full of rocks — except oh, oh no, those aren’t rocks. Gently, going nowhere, the fish glint and wriggle, swimming forward in a holding pattern against the current of the creek.
There are so many fish in the creek. I see at least a hundred, even though I know counting fish is impossible, even though my instinct is now to try. Next summer I have a right to return to my port sampling position, but I think I will relinquish it. The sun glares off the rippling river top. Splash, goes one fish. Splash, go forty more. How many are hatchery supplements? How many are calculated surplus? What are they waiting for? But I’m just upstream from the waterfall downtown — which means these are the fish that already made it up. No wonder they look so stunned and ragged, in my freshly ex-professional opinion. These fish must be exhausted, having just completed a feat of nature. Even if it is all human nature now.
I walk down the sidewalk, marveling at the unidentifiable salmon, more and more of them in the shallow slow pockets of the stream bank. Water crashes over the rocky bottom, spews and sprays, hissing and sucking only louder when I cross toward the wooden deck overlooking the waterfall, which roars and churns with a foam of its own. Ballerina salmon leap up the waterfall, wriggling at hyperspeed, jumping from the froth, swallowed back an instant later. Some opt instead for the salmon ladder, a rushing ramp of concrete and metal built into the waterfall to help them climb. One fish gets battered against a rock and floats dead downstream.
Tourists point and coo in the mist. It looks impossible, like physics is glitching. The fish are flying. They twist in midair, silhouetted for a fraction of an instant in the crash of rushing water, not enough time to spy their humped spines and their flanks marooning and the cheapness of their precious lives and identify them as pinks. I walk catadromously downstream. Just below the waterfall are you wouldn’t believe how many fish, waiting and turning and writhing and waiting, schooling up again at long last, pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing, forward, upward, backward, gentle, graceful, mindless, endless, holding in position until the intricate conditions tell the inborn instinct to tell them it’s time, meantime swimming against the current to keep still.
Names and identifying details of individuals have been changed. ↩
