Singing the salmon home

It's hard to take a photo of a fast-moving salmon – even when you are surrounded by them.

They splash. They skitter. They hit your kayak and soak your shirt. One second they are a tiny ripple in the water and the next they speed past your camera, while you snap pictures of empty water.

On Sunday morning at low tide, 10 of us welcomed chinook salmon back to the Samish River with the Skagit River Poetry Foundation. Our agenda: drift among the salmon, talk about salmon habitat and lifecycles, read some salmon poetry, eat some salmon.

It was a golden ticket to an utterly different world. Northwest of the Bayview-Edison bridge, the river was shallow and studded with sand bars. From our kayaks, we watched these 24-pound salmon go from subtle ripple to splashing silver fiend as they zigzagged through the river. Sometimes their fins circled us slowly. Then they would dash dozens of yards. Rest, dash. Rest, dash. "They are sprinters," Alison Studley of the Skagit River Fisheries Enhancement Group told us.

In the shallowest spots, their fins became wings. They flew past us. Each time one came near I was drenched. One snuck between me and the river bank not 18" away. Wet again.

Another salmon landed right on top of the sandbar. Seagulls pecked at it fruitlessly. These scavengers need an eagle to start taking the body apart. With nary an eagle in sight, one seagull kept trying. The carcass was gone 20 minutes later.

We had all the time in the world. The salmon didn't. After eluding Alaskan fishermen and hungry orcas for the last four to six years, these big fish were determined to get upstream to lay their eggs, in nests called redds.

In the estuary at the mouth of the Samish, where salmon transition from salty sound to freshwater river, they weren't caught by a heron. But these tough fish weren't home free yet. A hundred yards upstream, fishermen lined the banks. "I was whispering the salmon a warning about what lay the beyond the bridge," said Maggie Wilder.

The salmon arriving Sunday morning were born at the hatchery near Pomona Grange county park on Highway 99, Studley informed us. That's where most will be intercepted so their eggs can be born and grow safely.

And yes, at the end of their long and perilous journey, all salmon die. "But their lives are just beginning," said Studley. "They have so much more to give!" Salmon carcasses nourish other species and the forest when predators drag their carcasses ashore.

Post-drift, around the lunch table we learned that chinook and the other four species of salmon found in the Skagit River system (of which the Samish is part, said Studley) don't all come at once. Guided by different signals, the humpies being fished by the west side bridge come in odd years, while fall and spring chinook runs happen less frequently. Each species seeks out a particular kind of habitat and stays in the river a different length of time.

Coho salmon that want to spawn in small streams don't swim upstream until rain has swelled the tributaries. Chinook prefer to spawn in the mainstem river, so they don't need to wait for rain. The diverse habitat of our river system supports them all.

Salmon need a healthy chain of habitats, and that chain can break, Studley reminded us. Marine conditions and freshwater conditions can decline, caused by humans or by natural cycles. "When marine and freshwater declines coincide, it can be hard for a species to rebound."

This was discouraging. When she's disheartened, said poet Holly Hughes, "salmon help. They give me hope." To cheer us, Hughes and commercial fisher Tella Aasden led us in reading aloud from "I Sing the Salmon Home," an anthology of poems about salmon by Washington poets, edited by former poet laureate Rena Priest of the Lummi tribe.

You can find this beautiful and challenging collection (including poems by Georgia Johnson, the late Robert Sund and coastal Salish poet Sasha LaPointe, who lived on the Swinomish Reservation as a youth) at the La Conner Library, for the grant that paid for the volume also paid to place one in every public library in Washington.

To see some very small salmon, you can stop by La Conner Schools in January, when students will begin growing 200 Coho salmon eggs in a 55-gallon aquarium to release in the spring.

To see very big, tired salmon, go stand on the Bayview-Edison bridge this week and listen for the splashing, skittering salmon. Sounds I will always remember.

Or join one of Skagit River Fisheries Enhancement Group's "Salmon Sightings" this fall at Oyster Creek near Taylor Shellfish and Pressentin Park near Marblemount to see returning salmon for yourself. Information: skagitfisheries.org.