The travel journal found in their inner ear – otoliths
I know the salmon are return,ing, when the fishing boats gather again, north of the St Johns Bridge. The parking lot beside the boat ramp fills with trucks, trailers, and hopeful fisherfolk. Others stand on the dock or on the beach trying their luck at catching a great fish. Fathers bring their children, hoping to keep alive theconenction between the river and North Portland, they had known as children.
The fish are on their way home; back to their birthplace, where they were once a tiny perfect egg nestled in a rock nest in wild streams, whose banks were lined with fir and pine and willow. Places where the stars filled the night sky and the chorus of frogs sang them to sleep.
They carry the knowledge of this birth place in the part of the inner ear known as the otolithos. Layers of chemicals in the river accumulate here. It creates a travel journal of here they have been and a map back home.
I try to imagine their time here in the Portland Harbor. I stare over old wooden docks and look for them. By the time they get to the Portland Harbor, they look like tiny fish and not the sunset golden eggsoof their infancy. I wonder what itis being collected in their otoliths as they move past large metal tanls that leak oil into the river as a part of a normal day. Or what they hear as oil trains blow their whistles, even in the quiet of night. It would be hard not to pass the outfalls, that were once streams and waterfalls tumbling down out of the forest. They must pass the old docks, rotting along our shores but left up just in case.
Many of our smallslamon friends will never make it past these 9 miles of superfunds and fossil fuels. Shade was sacrificed for commerce and flood plains built on, with no regard for this journey.
I imagine the baby chinook’s travel journal. “Today we made it through the hardest part of our journey. We could barely breathe for lack of oxygen and their was no clean water or places to take even a short rest.. But we have made it through to the Coulmbia and are on our way to the sea.”
In the news thousands of people die, each year, as a result of flooding. There is unbarable destruction and suffering.
The river asks to be given room to spread out and stretch. She promises an abundance of wildlife for food, rich soils and cooling waters. She will welcome the streams and other rivers and even us, who have tried so hard to conquer her.
The Fall Chinook, after a few years in the ocean, are heading home. The spring chinook, who have further to go upi nto the mountains, left earlier. And some, despite all odds, some make their way back through the contaminated waters, outfalls, and towers of oil tanks. They never stop to rest or eat and can move upstream about 40 miles a day, using the knowledge built up in their inner ear, a smell bank and the earth’s magnetic field.
Chinook Salmon are on the endaneged species list, due primarlity to a loss of habitat and dams. i think about their journey to the ocean and back and how, we as a city, make their time with us safe and welcoming. I suspect that the very things the salmon need, will also make life safer and healthier for our young.