The arid West’s heart pumps a dry summer heat. Short grass and scattered sagebrush struggle forth upon sere soil, leaving one feeling far and disconnected from the ocean. Yet the great Columbia rolls on through here, too, helping drain the desert, giving the dry country’s sparse water to seagoing salmon.
Nearly a hundred miles inland from the ocean coast, at a vantage point several hundred feet above the water, I’ve pulled over to a road marker, which reads:
Celilo Falls.
A historic waterfall, fishing ground, and annual gathering point for untold generations of Northwest Indians, and always an obstruction to water travel on the Columbia, was buried deep beneath waters of The Dalles dam in 1957.
Traffic dusts the dry air. This spot so distant from the sea is where the intermingled history of humans and Northwest salmon is oldest; this dialogue spanned ten millennia, from about 8,000 B.C. until 1957. Lewis and Clark passed this way, walking. And writing: “Here is the Great fishing-place of the Columbia. In the spring of the year, when the water is high, the salmon ascend the river in incredible numbers.”
The natives called the Columbia River Nch’i-Wána, Big River, and for a length of time no one can really conceive of they had caught the fish at Celilo Falls, standing on makeshift platforms over the roaring white curling cataracts and whirlpools, and dipping salmon from the maelstrom with long nets or spearing the leaping ones midair.
The salmon were plenty enough to draw tribes from a wide region into trade. Alexander Ross wrote of the many “foreigners from different tribes throughout
the country, who resort hither not for the purpose of catching salmon, but … for other articles.” Coastal people brought whale and cedar products, clams, shells, beads, and canoes to trade. Southern tribes brought baskets, obsidian, water-lily seeds, tobacco. Buffalo robes, meat, pipestone, and feathers were carried from farther east. The Celilo Falls area became a major communications center where diverse cultures made alliances, exchanged stories, and spoke about religion and their history, in peace. What days those must have been, trading fine crafts and feasting and sharing tales and dances.
When The Dalles Dam backed up the river in 1957 and Celilo Falls was being submerged, Indians stood on the bank, watching. Some wept.
Celilo Falls was the navel of the Columbia, a birth scar, the pull and tuck cinching water, salmon, and humans tight together, a center of spiritual and defining power for the people, and of evolutionary challenge for the fish. Its removal deforms the figure almost too hideously to look at directly. Perhaps that is why, although there is a black-and-white photo of Celilo Falls in almost every home and office I enter, I have never seen it hung as the center of attention. Usually it is off to one side, or on a mantle with other memorabilia, perhaps next to a dusty porcelain figure or an antique coffee grinder or sepia photos of salmon in horse-drawn haul nets on the beach.
Just north, the prairie begins to undulate, wrinkling and crimping the earth until it resembles a tawny velvet cloth hiding some veiled sculpture. Enormous stanchions and high-voltage wires follow those undulations and wrinkles, radiating energy across the belly of the sky.
This landscape strikes me as stark and isolating. I can feel at home on the ocean—which is hostile to human life as any desert—but I’ve always found enormous arid spaces vaguely threatening. That feeling arrives now on the wind that has just begun whining through dry grass, carrying feelings of alienation and real discomfort. As a visitor from a well-watered part of the world, I can understand the urge to irrigate the brownscape, and how beautiful things can look to the lonely, homesick human eye when so unmerciful a place turns green.
Farther east now, about 210 miles from the sea, the sun strikes enough bare rocky ground that the word “desert” easily applies. The river is an unlikely blue ribbon sandwiched by two brown, dry plains of land. But here is yet another dam that salmon must cope with, the John Day. The Columbia has indeed been backed up into a series of lakes—no longer a river, some say. Columbia Aluminum Corporation has a plant here. Again, from this dam, the radiating high-voltage wires transmit power across the desert and out of sight. An ocean-sized barge sporting a huge and ludicrous smiley face is making its way westbound, from the “seaport” of Lewiston, Idaho, some five hundred miles from the ocean.
By the time I am roughly 270 river miles from the ocean, the land reclines and agricultural country first becomes visible from the highway, as does another
dam—McNary—and the surrounding town of Umatilla. Just uphill from the lake behind this dam are places with names like the Desert Inn and the oxymoronic Desert Marine Supplies. Seldom has so short a drive brought such sense of extreme transport. Toward dusk, nighthawks float in the sunset. At the dam, lights begin sparkling in the gathering gloam.
I have come not to see the desert but to meet a man of considerable notoriety, about whom I have heard sharply differing opinions:
“I’ve known Ed Chaney an awfully long time. This is not your run-of-themill person, and it would be pretty hard for me to say that he’s not a zealot.”
“Ed Chaney is the most moral man in the salmon picture. He has personally given up money, health, and marriages, to deal honorably with everyone. Ultimately, his failure makes him a tragic figure.”
“He’s so fixated on the dams that he’s lost sight of the whole picture. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t raise some good points. I just don’t pay attention to him anymore.”
“Chaney is just the best.”
“Ed Chaney is not a fisheries biologist. I can’t accuse him of violating professional ethics, because Chaney is just not qualified to make those kinds of judgments.”
“Chaney? A legend in his own mind.”
Ed Chaney, all six feet, six inches of his lean corporeal presence, is seated before me, wondering how he will consume the enormous breakfast just served him—but he will. He is given to excessive eating while he’s on the road. He has other imperfections: He smokes an occasional cigarette, and if it’s been a rough couple of days and he knows he’s not driving, he might have one drink too many. But while he’s never been called a saint—at least not to my knowledge—Ed has been called “the holy man of salmon.”
That descriptor seems to hang awkwardly upon him when you try to apply it. Chaney just does not come across as a spiritual presence. Sitting here behind his food, with his sunglasses tucked into the top of his short-sleeved black shirt where a puff of gray chest hair emerges, he is all too real. And his eyes are quick to twinkle with an unsaintly relish for mischief. Ed’s unangelic physiognomy bears testament to having survived past five decades; his bald head reflects the desert albedo, and what little is left of his sandy hair is graying. Chaney is thoughtful, but he likes to talk—he’s good at it—and his voice flows as smoothly as the syrup in which he’s drenching his pancakes and sausages.
Ed Chaney started this life in the Missouri hills and began his long biopolitical struggles in the mid-1960s, in Indiana’s natural resources department. “You either paid two percent of your gross salary to the Republican Central Committee, or you left. So I left. By accident, I went to Oregon in 1966.”
Chaney started working with the Oregon Fish Commission and soon ran headlong into the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the Columbia River. In the waning days of the 1960s, when Vietnam was hot and the country tense, John Day Dam was nearing completion. At the time, it was the largest hydroelectric powerhouse in the world, and Vice President Hubert Humphrey was to make the dedication speech. The builders were behind schedule with the fish ladders, but the corps considered it unthinkable that the vice president might dedicate a finished dam that was not already holding back water. So they closed the dam before the fish ladders were ready. The entire run of surviving adults coming back ready to spawn encountered the barrier, hurled themselves at the concrete, and died by the scores of thousands.
“Two hundred thousand adult salmon and steelhead. Dead. Littering the shores. The corps denied there was a kill.” He waves his knife at me, marking time while he swallows. “Those were the good old days, when you knew who the bad guys were because they acted like bad guys. I went up to that dam, shot a bunch of photographs, and took ’em to the Oregonian, the daily newspaper.”
Pushing his eggs around with his fork, Ed continues, “I was under a gag order from the governor’s office. I’d expressed concern about what was going to happen to the fish, and I was told to shut up. I was—to use my supervisor’s phrase—‘jeopardizing the good working relationships between the state of Oregon and the Corps of Engineers.’ So I said to the paper, ‘You’re welcome to use the pictures, but don’t put my name in the story, because I’ll get in big trouble.’ The next morning, the lead story is ‘Ed Chaney Says This and That About the Corps.’ I open up: There’s a full page of photos and a little box, ‘Photos courtesy of Ed Chaney, Oregon Fish Commission.’ Well, I was in deep doo-doo, and I left for a job with one of the big conservation groups in D.C.”
Chaney is impressing me by being able to speak so animatedly while conveying a constant stream of fried potatoes, sausages, eggs, and pancakes into that same mouth.
He goes on, “The John Day Dam closure was a revealing experience. The corps had told the state that they were going to close the dam without the fish ladders working and asked what the state thought. Our state director—who later became director of the National Marine Fisheries Service—wrung his hands for about a month, saying, ‘Oh, oh, oh, what am I gonna do?’ I said, ‘What do you mean, what are you gonna do? Tell ’em No!’ He just couldn’t bring himself to do it. And we’ve had a series of people stamped right out of the same sheet of dough. Perfect example is the person now heading fisheries in D.C. They never upset anybody, so they can get appointed to their next political job. The turds always float to the top of the punch bowl. They steal the public’s money by filling chairs. They are nice folks, except they are largely responsible for the disasters we’ve got.”
More eggs vanish while Ed keeps talking. “All the agencies dealing with natural resources are part of that culture: the Army Corps, the Bonneville Power
Administration, the United States Bureau of Land Management, the United States Forest Service. Interchange the names; they are captives of the same pattern. Corporations that profit from the nation’s resources—here it’s the aluminum companies, the big pump irrigators, timber companies, the utilities—learn to protect and abet their own largesse through the political system. They are personally benefiting by depleting the public estate, and enriching themselves with billions of dollars of subsidies given to them through these government agencies. Then they invest those profits in political influence to control government. When that happens, the regulated control the regulators, and the whole purpose of government becomes co-opted. Government becomes the handmaiden of the companies that they’ve been forking the pork to. Then instead of looking out for the public interest, government serves a private mission.”
Ed engulfs a forkful of potatoes, synopsizing, “The Army Corps has built these dams, creating waterway transportation, irrigation, and hydropower. Bonneville Power Administration markets the electricity. So the government owns the infrastructure that produces income for people that don’t pay the true costs. Very much like the Soviet system. We have here in the Northwest a politburo of vested interests that—by God—are going to try to hang onto their iron grip.”
He bites a sausage in half, continuing, “These giant public-fund suckers all have penis envy of true private enterprise. They all want to be CEOs of actual businesses, but they couldn’t make a living in the real world. They’ve been on the public tit from Day One, mining the public’s funds and resources for private gain, privatizing the profits while commonizing the costs, and no matter how badly they screw up, they get paid.”
One might come away with the impression that Chaney is not fond of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers or the Bonneville Power Administration. “The Corps has slaughtered more salmon than fishermen have ever caught. What’s extraordinary is, they’re still getting away with it, because they’ve gotten a lot smarter.” Ed mops up the last bit of syrup with the last half piece of toast, swishing it all down with some coffee. “You will not find anyone in the corps today who doesn’t love the salmon, and you won’t find anyone in the Bonneville Power Administration who doesn’t want to save the salmon,” he bellows mockingly.
Ed pushes back heavily from the table, daintily wiping the downwardturning corners of mouth under his short brush of mustache. “I’m sure glad I ate all of that.”
Today we will be going to see a river—the Umatilla—where salmon had been extinct for seventy years. A government irrigation project had dried up the lower three miles of river in summer. Places where the Indians were guaranteed by treaty to be able to fish turned to dry gravel. “That’s as bad as it gets—no water. The government had sold the same horse to two people, promising the Indians and irrigators the same water. The irrigators got theirs. And the Indians wanted what they were promised.”
Chaney advised the tribe’s lawyer to claim their right to the salmon. The lawyer responded, “Salmon! There’s not even any water.” “Exactly,” Ed said, and laid out his plan: “to put some fish back in the river and make water for the tribe.” So while the river was dry down below the Three Mile Dam, Chaney got the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to put in hatchery-raised fall chinook upstream. The young fish went downstream during spring floods. “Then I went to the irrigators and said, ‘In a few years there’s going to be a whole bunch of big fall chinook trying to get back into the river, but there’s no water there, so we’ve got to do something. What they wanted to do was lynch me, but it showst’ -go-ya that if you want water, you’ve got to put fish in a dry river.”
Our first stop on tour of the Umatilla project is McNary Dam. All of the Umatilla River had been diverted into irrigation ditches. Chaney’s plan called for bringing water from the Columbia River—taken at McNary—for the irrigators, and putting the Umatilla River back into its riverbed. “The water comes out of the reservoir, goes into that ditch, goes around to the Umatilla River, is siphoned under the river and into the irrigation ditch. So that irrigation district is now getting its water out of McNary Reservoir, and not taking any water from the Umatilla River at Three Mile Dam. They’re letting river water go past their diversion, and they’re getting the same amount of water out of this ditch from McNary.”
We get into my car—leaving Ed’s at the dam—and head out. Ed instructs, “Go straight up the highway, then we’ll be taking a right in a couple of miles. Watch your speed through here. It’s a favorite speed trap.” Chaney has not been back here for a while, but he’s driven these roads—as he says with some pride—a thousand times.
Chaney continues, “We were very lucky with the Umatilla River project that a fix was possible. Not every place has that. But it took years of just awful, gutwrenching persuasion, even though it was in their own best interest—as though the horse that is dying of thirst simply will not allow itself to be led to water.”
An early indication of what Chaney and the tribe were in for came at an informational meeting at the Stanfield Fire Hall. “It was packed with irrigators who were out for blood. And they got quite a bit. By the time I got out of there, I was shaking at the knees. But I come from a farm background—I was president of an irrigation district for a while—and I know you can’t give them an inch, because they’re like dogs that can sense fear and dislike people who are afraid of them. When we started, the irrigators asked, ‘Why don’t we send the lazy Indians to the ocean to fish?’ I said, ‘Why don’t we send you pork-barrel farmers down to the Willamette Valley to farm, where there’s water, and the government wouldn’t have to subsidize you?’ I think you want to bear right up here to catch the old highway.
“And it got rougher. I took verbal abuse beyond belief. The anti-Indian racism was very hard to bear. I had to keep explaining that, ‘This is not trouble—
you can avoid trouble here.’ It took years of fighting. The only thing that made it work was the irrigators’ fear that the Indians would go to court and get all the water. I personally don’t think there was a snowball’s chance in hell of that happening, because politics dictate how the law is allowed to work. But I didn’t offer that opinion at the time. Still, they might have lost an expensive court fight. This way, they get their water. Take a left here; here we are.”
We have arrived at Three Mile Dam on the Umatilla River, and we walk down to the willows growing along the shoreline. New fishways and fish ladders for the new fish now stand at the old, two-hundred-yard-wide dam. It is late morning, and a Swainson’s hawk circles the half moon hanging out to dry in a moistureless desert-blue sky. A gently sloping hayfield recedes from the opposite bank to form the horizon. Until the Bureau of Reclamation built the dam, circa 1915, salmon had spawned here for millennia. Their absence, which might have gone on forever, lasted only until Chaney had his idea three-quarters of a century later. When Chaney first came here this time of year, he walked on desiccated riverbed all the way to the Umatilla’s mouth. Until 1990, this river was dry from here down—three miles—except during big spring floods. “All we’re doing so far is putting some flow back in the lower three miles of the river, but after ten years of bloody battling, the sound of that running water sure feels good. And coho, fall chinook, and spring chinook have all been restored to this river—and Indians are fishing here again now for the first time since 1914.”
Brian Zimmerman, a fisheries biologist working for the Umatilla tribe, is at the dam site. Thinking he is helping me understand something, he says, “There’s a C and S fishery on the rez for spring chinook.”
“C and S on the rez?”
“Cultural and subsistence. On the reservation. It’s quite significant to the tribe.”
“Why don’t the Indians have Indians working on these projects?”
“Right now most of the tribe’s biologists are W.G.s, but—”
“W.G.s?”
“White guys. But our technicians are tribal members. Hopefully, there’ll be more of them going to school to get the technical training to run these projects.”
Zimmerman’s job is assisting the fish in getting up and down the river around dry stretches. “Basically, we catch all the adult fish here and take them upriver about thirty miles, past a dry area, then they spawn naturally there—not in a hatchery. When the little ones are coming downstream, if there’s not enough water for them, we catch them up above and haul them down here.”
I’m a bit confused. Chaney has for years insisted that trapping and hauling fish around the big dams is the main thing killing Columbia River salmon. I want to know why he’s doing the same thing here that he’s been crusading against on the main river.
“All the details differ drastically. Here you’re hauling them twenty miles. There you’re hauling them up to four hundred miles. We haul only when there is
no water, and the goal for this project involves getting permanent flows; this is a temporary part of the program. On the Columbia, it is the program.”
And who is paying?
“Bonneville Power Administration, to belatedly begin doing what they were supposed to do in the first place, which was to mitigate for the damage caused by the federal Columbia River power system.” For Ed, this is one seamless thought, and Bonneville will not be off the hook merely because they funded his project. If they restored the salmon runs throughout the entire Columbia Basin, one suspects that Ed Chaney would see it, pronounce it good—as good as before the dams—and forgive nothing.
“Bonneville had no intention of having these fish here. I have documents that show in tedious detail how Bonneville Power Administration fought this project to the death. In the end, we kicked their ass. Our senator finally told them to shut up. Then Bonneville immediately put up signs and made a video showcasing their ‘model project.’ But that’s O.K. That’s success, when you’ve got them doing pirouettes to claim credit for something they fought for ten years. Fought it bitterly. And in the process, blacklisted me. If anyone tries to hire me for any Bonneville-financed project, Bonneville won’t give them the money. So I make a living working for people who aren’t afraid of Bonneville, and that basically means outside the Columbia Basin.” Ed’s work has taken him to Arizona for the Navajo nation, to Puget Sound for tribes there, and to France’s Loire River, in all cases working on master plans for restoration of river watersheds and fish runs.
We continue through irrigated country, with farms and cattle on the open, rolling plains under a wide sky.
Impressed at Chaney’s ability to survive and thrive under challenging circumstances, I say, “Well, it seems like you’ve gotten into a position—even if you were forced into it—that many would envy. You can say what you want, you are a prominent defender of what you believe in, you’ve been hired by the government of—”
“Yes, it’s true. And all of that plus sixty-nine cents will buy you a candy bar at the corner store. I’m fifty-two years old. I’ve been around several blocks. I don’t expect to buck the economic and political forces in a death battle, and kick ’em in the butt daily, and have them not exact the kind of retribution they are capable of. I expect them to dry up the monies that might be available to me for consulting work in the Northwest. They have done that. And they put out the word that I am not professional, not a thoughtful person. Get in the left lane here.”
“They say you’re a zealot.”
“The bigger question is, am I essentially correct or not? I think I can make a convincing case that they are ruining people’s lives and costing the nation billions by destroying a major natural resource. So if a zealot is a person who persists at not letting them get away with it, you can call me a zealot, I guess.”
“They also say you’re not a fisheries biologist and so are not qualified to be in these debates.”
“Ha!” he just about roars. “These debates have nothing to do with biology. Anyone who wants fishery biologists can hire fifty of them. They’re everywhere. Thank God I’m not a fisheries biologist. I hear that all the time from the bureaucrats: ‘He’s not a biologist.’ Oh yeah? Well you’re not an engineer and you’re arguing to me that the dams can’t be modified. Left turn, I think. Oh, sorry; take a right. I think I really screwed us up; I’ve only driven this a thousand times, but—”
Chaney describes himself as a generalist. The degree he wanted did not exist, so he cobbled together an education—a bachelor’s in English, and a bachelor’s in natural resource science—that he thought would prepare him for what he calls “strategic planning in natural resource management.”
Ed pauses as though considering whether to divulge more, then allows our discussion about his professional history to lead just a bit into his personal life. “There was a time—long time ago—when I burned out. I just wanted a normal job with no political implications. I tried very hard getting a job in agriculture, even in office work in the food industry, but they wouldn’t hire me because they were afraid I was overqualified and wouldn’t stay.
“I was desperate. I had a three-year-old kid, and I was just about out of money. Finally, the guy at the state employment office felt sorry for me, and he removed everything from my resume except my work in construction, on farms, and for the railroad—which I did for two years when I dropped out of college. Everything else—all my professional experience—he took off. Everything.
“He finally felt he’d lined something up: feeding sheep for a rancher. It paid three hundred and sixty dollars a month plus room and board. I told the rancher I’d take it. I told him I couldn’t live in the bunkhouse because of my young son, but that I’d rented a little place and I’d just come to work every morning. He looked at me. He was a real cowboy type—nice fellow—and he said, ‘Well hell, room and board comes with the job.’ I said, ‘That’s O.K. I’ll just eat lunch. You won’t have to pay me any more money, and I’ll just go home at night to be with my son.’ He scratched his chin and looked at the floor. He said, ‘Well, I dunno, I never done it that way before.’ I needed this job bad. He said, ‘I guess I’d better pass.’ And I thought, ‘I can’t even drop out.’
“I took my son, my books, my three dogs, and my three hundred dollars and moved to Boise. I thought, ‘Holy smoke, now what am I gonna do?’ I used all my money to make the rent and security on a little place, and I hit the streets trying to find work. I didn’t find squat. I borrowed money on my car. I hocked my shotguns. I was down to the wire. And I finally got a job doing a fifteen-hundreddollar consulting project for the Bureau of Land Management. If a big consulting firm had taken it, it would have been about a ten-thousand-dollar job. But it allowed me to pay some bills, and it led to a steady job turning their scientific reports into English. Okay, up here you have to go left.”
A couple of years ago, the Bonneville Power Administration—which Chaney has fought, as he says, to the death, and which has blacklisted him—tried to hire him. Thick in the middle of Senator Mark Hatfield’s much-touted—and failed—
“Salmon Summit,” there was an interesting sideshow: “Bonneville wanted to blame everyone—and thereby no one—for hurting the salmon. I tried to focus on the agent of extinction—the dams—as opposed to all the things that have ever affected salmon. I think we want to take a right up here.
“I essentially failed, but I had no money and of course Bonneville had millions. But they knew facing us in public was a problem. Okay, right turn here.
“I was tired. I had been up all night as usual, fighting these bastards across the table. I was sitting in the bar of the hotel in Boise, and the Bonneville troops, including the one who was their spear carrier at the summit, came over. They said I could be a lot more effective at changing—” Chaney cracks a broad smile. “I can’t even repeat this with a straight face now, after all this time, it’s so bad. That I could be much more effective at changing Bonneville from the inside”—he is laughing now—“from the inside than from the outside. I began to laugh. I was exhausted. I hadn’t had any sleep. My back was hurting. But I couldn’t stop laughing. I had tears running. This guy just went right on with the canned speech he’d been sent to deliver, even after I just broke out laughing in his face. Can you imagine? He said, ‘And of course, once you are on the inside, you could no longer be a public advocate for the salmon. Well, what do you think?’ I was so tired, I couldn’t think. I was watching everybody straining to see what my reaction was gonna be. So I just said, ‘I’ll get back to you.’ Imagine what agony they must have gone through to offer me a job!”
At the time, Chaney was borrowing money on his house to attend the conference. “Driving home, I thought, ‘I should have taken the job, then given half the money to someone to do what I’m doing now.’ I went home and told my then wife that maybe I should think of some way that I could take this job, and she said, ‘If you do that, I’m leaving you.’ Yet it was my continual work that led to the dissolution of our marriage. Take a left here. Wait. No. Go straight.”
“Bitter breakup?”
“Oh no.” His voice softens. “No, it was tragic. I was living a life that was not conducive to a good relationship—or to my health. She was right, of course, about the job. I’ve watched a lot of good people who went to Bonneville, trying to work from the inside. I don’t think it’s possible. The resource agencies won’t allow it, really. You’ve got to decide which side you’re on. That doesn’t mean that one side is all right and one is all wrong, but you have to pick the side that you’ll be on.”
A channel appears alongside the road, exposing a thin vein of water. “See the little trickle right here running alongside the road? This is the river below two diversions. Pull in up ahead.”
A cloud of dust envelops us as I stop the car near a chain-link fence. “This is the diversion for Westland Irrigation District. You can see that they totally divert the entire river right out of its bed into this dirt ditch, then onto farms.”
Ed peers into the ditch, then calls me over. There are a lot of little fish on the downstream side of the diversion. “See these fish here? The bulk of them are
spring chinook. Some fall chinook, coho, and steelhead. All the juvenile fish go into the irrigation ditch, obviously, because the whole river goes into the ditch. But, of course, the river in the ditch runs not to the sea but onto farm fields. So here the young fish are screened out with these big round fish screens that are turning. They rotate so as not to clog with debris.”
The system is a surprisingly high-tech affair, entailing copious concrete and steel and numerous chains driving different rotating cylindrical screens that are each about fifteen feet long. A pair of barn swallows that have affixed their nest under a catwalk are feeding their young. This is an expensive birdhouse; the cost of this 150-foot-wide screening plant was around a million dollars.
There are still thousands of unscreened agricultural water diversions. In the mid-1990s, more than 80 percent of the sites pumping water from the Columbia River for irrigation still failed to comply with requirements designed to protect salmon. The subsidized farmers who caterwaul about providing food for our tables don’t seem to mind removing it from the tables of salmon fishers and their families.
I go down to the stone-lined bank. The operator tells me to watch my step: “Listen for rattles.” A mink, the first wild one I’ve ever seen, slides off a log and swims toward shore.
Ed reminds me that when phase two of this project comes on, supplying water to these irrigation districts out of McNary Dam, the river water will be allowed to bypass the diversion and the Umatilla will be flowing again all the way down to the Columbia. “Usually, if you are at a place saying, ‘This will never look the same again,’ it’s because it is about to be built on. But here I can tell you it will never look like this again because next year this river will be flowing—straight out of the mountains.”
When we next glimpse the river from the road, we have gained some elevation and the land feels different. About ten miles back we started ascending. Ten miles upstream of here, the gradient increases into the Blue Mountains, and timber country begins. We are driving alongside the Umatilla River above the irrigation diversions now and can finally see what the Umatilla looks like before it’s dried up.
Ed tells me to turn left and pull over. We get out and walk to the center of a small bridge spanning the riverbed. The river is wide and shallow, flowing steadily. Cottonwood trees line the banks with shade that contrasts with bright green irrigated fields nearby. A truckload of some of the biggest, juiciest-looking onions I’ve ever seen thunders over the rattling bridge. Chaney says, “This is extraordinarily productive country when you add water. Corn, potatoes, alfalfa, wheat, melons—this area is famous for melons.”
After a moment’s contemplation of the moving river, Ed, leaning his forearms on the bridge, looks out at the broad landscape, saying, “When you think about what a hostile environment this was for people, trying to make the desert bloom was really quite an extraordinary vision for the technology of the time. I can
understand those irrigators that fought me so desperately over water and salmon. To them, I was questioning the whole concept of what human progress is. We have to remember that a lot of lives have been burned up trying to create something here that these people see as civilization itself. To give that less than its full due understandably disturbs people who have been part of that.”
I glance at the man some call a thoughtless zealot. He is looking into the water again.
Most water withdrawn for irrigation-two-thirds of it—does not return to the rivers. What does return is often warmer, less oxygenated, saltier, siltier, and of course carrying fertilizers, pesticides, and other toxins. And remember that so much water is lost into the ground in irrigation ditches or evaporates into the desert sky that it takes ten feet of river water to put two feet on a potato field. So much water is taken from the Snake River (a major interstate tributary that gave rise to genetically unique races of salmon) that it goes completely dry at times. This is seen as a good thing, since none of the water is “wasted” on fish or let out for other users. It appeals to a certain fractured sense of thrift—something like “Waste not, want not” but with a lot of waste, and excessive wants.
“All a salmon asks,” Ed says as we head back to the car, “is, ‘Let me get to the ocean in reasonably clean water, and I’ll just keep producing wealth for people forever.’ That was the deal humans had with salmon for thousands of years. People have a hard time imagining the numbers of Columbia salmon—between ten and sixteen million spawning adult fish annually. And in fifty years, we’ve brought our options for having salmon down to a very bare minimum. That’s quite an accomplishment, and it could only have been done without any concern for the future. Out of sheer stupidity, we have virtually annihilated one of the world’s most valuable and productive systems.”
“When you say ‘stupidity,’ you’re acknowledging that honest mistakes were made,” I point out.
“There were a lot of honest mistakes. The mentality at the time was nonmalevolent: a nation out to prove it was biggest and best. However, the Corps of Engineers knew that salmon must go upstream to spawn, yet as you know they designed Bonneville Dam without fish ladders. They were willing to write the salmon off.
“We could absolutely have had the dams and the fish. The Columbia system wouldn’t look a whole lot different than it does today, and would produce nearly as much irrigation, transportation, and hydropower as it does today, and we could have virtually all the salmon we once had.”
There would be a few differences, Chaney explains. You wouldn’t have built the Grand Coulee Dam or the Snake River dams as they are—totally blocking about a third of the basin to salmon and destroying the giant chinooks. You would have built a different kind of dam, or two dams, where Coulee is.
Damming the Snake was a giant pork-barrel project to make Lewiston, Idaho, a seaport five hundred miles from the ocean, so they could barge grain—which is shipped by railroad from everywhere else. Ed says, “If they’d built a lock-anddam system like on the Mississippi, Lewiston would have their pork-barrel waterway, we’d have a flowing river, and we’d have the salmon. But other than that, the other Columbia dams could still be there; they would just look a little different.
“So,” Ed continues, “we did not fulfill the early vision of the Congress: to realize the power potential while ensuring the salmon’s survival. And what used to be the world’s largest salmon and steelhead runs are now teetering on the edge of extinction. This is not the inevitable price of progress. It’s the inevitable price of stupidity. The place is up here on the right.”
The man we’ve come to see is seated and waiting in the roadside restaurant. His long braids, snaking out from under a cap, are joined at their ends over his belly above his big silver belt buckle, producing a stethoscopic appearance. Antoine Minthorn is no W.G. This guy is a real Indian who looks and sounds it. He speaks with the soft, inflectionless, laconic tone typical of American Indians, and his voice has a hint of gravel in it. For the last thirteen years he has served as the Umatilla Tribe’s general council chairman.
Antoine is explaining some of the tribe’s political history under United States occupation. “When we signed the treaty of 1855 we signed away six point four million acres. Just like that. That was the economy of the tribe.” Sitting with his arms crossed over his lavender shirt, he continues, “The treaty gives us fishing rights in all streams running through and adjacent to the reservation. Our rights were violated with the building of the Three Mile Dam on the Umatilla, which affected our subsistence, in other words our life, being, existence—however you want to say it—by destroying the salmon.
“They didn’t leave us with much to work with. I came to understand this one day in the 1970s, when I went with my son up a creek on the Lostine River, where in the 1960s there had been plentiful salmon. We went way, way up before we found three salmon, two males and a female. My son gaffed out the female. We didn’t fully realize what we were committing. But when that female came ashore trailing a stream of eggs, I suddenly understood the seriousness of what we had just done, and I have never forgotten that moment.”
When the first adult salmon returned to the Umatilla in 1988, Minthorn went down to the river, and he stood in the shade of streamside cottonwood trees, watching them a long time.
Ed and Antoine are old and close comrades in arms, and Ed is in the mood to reminisce about the wars, telling Antoine, “At one meeting, Bonneville Power Administration was complaining about the cost of the Umatilla project. That’s when they were fighting it to the death. And one of them said to you, ‘Well, Antoine, how much are these fish worth to the tribe?’ I’m sure his next move would be to say, ‘O.K., here’s a check, now go away.’”
“Basically, that’s right, he’d have said, ‘Here’s money, now cease to exist.’”
“And you just sat there for a long while, until the silence was getting embarrassing, and then you said exactly these words: ‘How can I tell you how much the fish are worth? The salmon define who I am.’ That was one of the most powerful and interesting things I’ve ever heard in thirty years in this business, and I immediately wrote it down. You will be known for having said it.”
Antoine turns to me. “You can put a dollar value on it, but it’s your being. I don’t know how to explain it in English terms. It’s just like the land. I don’t know how to explain that either. The land is there. The land is being. Without it, we just don’t exist. The fish are our being. I don’t know how else to say it.” He gropes for a word and finds one so fundamental it needs to be stated twice: “Reality. Reality. So with the fish. It’s just the way things are. Genocide. That’s the other word. Genocide. They did to the fish what they did to us. Genocide. Part of you goes.”
As we head back down the road to the Columbia, Chaney says, “A decade and a half ago, Congress passed the Northwest Power Act, which unequivocally states: ‘Thou shalt give fish equal importance as all other uses of the river. Thou shalt provide adequate flows. Thou shalt not study this emergency any longer. And thou shalt develop a plan within sixty days that will restore these fish runs.’ That is the law.
“You know what’s happened? Nothing. Why? The Power Council—the Powerless Council—created by the act turned into a dumping ground for out-of-work politicians and former legislative assistants, a crowd whose whole culture was that the process was the product. They have processed the salmon to death. No yawning absence of progress is enough to humiliate them. The jobs are too cushy. For complexity that will create inaction, anything will suffice. ‘Oh! But it’s just so complicated! There’s the commercial fishermen, the killer ocean, land use, too much dissolved nitrogen—.’ Everything but the dams. Their favorite is: ‘The science we have is not conclusive.’ They’re just like the tobacco-industry lobbyists who say the link between smoking and cancer isn’t proven. Until the salmon are all gone—even after they’re gone—they’ll say, ‘You can’t prove conclusively, absolutely, that the dams did it.’ Left here.”
Something seems missing in Chaney’s interpretation, and I decide to press it. “You seem to dismiss logging, fishing, ocean temperatures, and a lot of other factors, but salmon are hurting outside the Columbia, too.”
“Those things all contribute, but I dismiss them as agents of extinction in the Columbia system. Ocean temperatures have been bad only during the last few years. But we have measured how many fish the dams killed annually.”
“But the runs were way down before the dams went in,” I point out, “because of habitat problems and overfishing.”
“We had enormous numbers of fish until recent times. Yes, there was horrible overfishing in the old days. Fishing has been restricted. But remember—sockeye
salmon were not fished for, and they are all but gone. And there are thousands of miles of pristine spawning habitat in the Snake River system, yet salmon there are on the lip of extinction.
“The main problem in the Columbia drainage,” Chaney declares, “is the dams’ effects on juvenile fish that need to migrate downriver. On average, it’s fifteen to twenty percent mortality per dam, and most fish have to pass several. They’ve been barging young fish around the dams for decades, and the results are in: The salmon are going extinct.
“Barging assumes that these animals don’t need to migrate downstream, only to arrive at Point B. It eliminates a whole portion of their life cycle. It’s like catapulting cows from the pasture to the barn, and then wondering why the herd has thinned. Their thinking is not that catapulting cows is a problem, it’s that we need a better catapult. It goes against everything we’ve learned about living organisms. Salmon typically have a window of time to make the transition from fresh- to saltwater creatures, triggered by environment and genetics. If they make the migration within that window, the system works. If they don’t, then the system doesn’t work and they either become saltwater animals before they get to saltwater, or they get to saltwater while they are still freshwater creatures. You can’t continually remove these fish from their environment and expect them to survive. The results are in: It doesn’t work.”
Invoking a small amount of knowledge, I counter, “But in nature you have fish spawned close to saltwater and fish spawned a thousand miles inland, so they must have tremendous flexibility in that window.”
Ed reminds me, “The different runs’ particular timing is evolved and adapted to their local environmental conditions and challenges. One size does not fit all. Yet, the thinking behind all their pipes and ducts for moving fish around is that we just have to build a more intricate collection and barging system—an advanced catapult—to fix it. They have diverted the debate away from the real issue of allowing the river to simply act more like a river again.
“To fix the problem,” Ed concludes, “the laws of nature reduce the options to one: If you’re going to leave the dams in place, you have to draw the reservoirs down periodically to mimic a natural river.”
I ask how.
“All we need to do is to modify—slightly modify—this gargantuan system, to allow most of the young fish to get downstream. Your goal is to speed the young fish through the reservoirs and spill them past the dams without going through the turbines. You can draw down the reservoirs temporarily, from mid-April to mid-June, when the majority of the fish would naturally go out on the spring snowmelt. This would speed up the water. Once you get the fish to the dam, you can spill them through ports that could be opened. So you speed up the fish and get them past the dam.
“It’s so simple that the most difficult thing to understand is why anyone is resisting it.” A fly is buzzing annoyingly and Ed is wiping at the air to get rid of
it, but he doesn’t lose his cadence. “The modifications are straightforward. The military engineers tell me, ‘This is easy, we can do this.’ But the administrative boys won’t willingly let it happen.”
“What other effects would there be?”
“Fish ladders would need modification. About fifteen irrigators would have to extend their pump intakes to reach the lower water. While the reservoirs are drawn down the barges can’t travel the river. The other impact is reduced electrical generation for that ten-week period. The total annualized cost of making these modifications, including the forgone amount of electricity, fixing the pumps, and additional subsidies to the waterway transportation people, is about fifty million dollars a year.”
“Coming from where?”
“It would represent a savings. Salmon can make the system more efficient. First of all, much of that fifty-million-dollars-a-year calculation is money the dams won’t make because of reduced electrical revenue. But the forgone value to the salmon fishing industry—the money real people will lose because the fish are disappearing—is never figured into their equation. I tried to get them to do it. They won’t. So I did. We calculated the costs to the fishing industry at three hundred million a year during the last twenty years. Present value, it calculates at one point eight billion a year. The utilities put together a team of economists to shoot down my study. I kept waiting for the attack, but it never came. You know why? Because I was conservative in my estimates. So on an annual basis, grinding the salmon down is costing much more than the fifty million they claim it would take to get the fish back!”
“You said that’s just annual costs. What’s the up-front cost for all the modifications?”
“Capital costs? The worst-case estimate is a billion dollars. The low-end estimate is six hundred million.”
“Ouch.” I wince.
“A billion dollars is a lot of money. But spread it over the region’s rate base, over a hundred years of the project’s lifetime, and it gets lost in the rounding errors. The utilities admitted it publicly. I pressed them, saying, ‘Don’t you agree that in fifteen or twenty years the price of energy here is going to be the same whether we have salmon or not?’ And the head lobbyist for the utilities—the Darth Vader of salmon—said, ‘That’s right. But it’s the costs right now that we’re concerned about.’ Well, we should be thinking about more than tomorrow’s subsidized-aluminum-industry balance sheet. Government certainly should be. But thirty-some-odd years after John Day Dam closed, we haven’t changed anything, really. The only difference is, the corps has killed the Snake River’s coho, sockeye, and fall chinook, and it’s about this far away”—he demonstrates with fingertips almost touching—“from killing the Snake River spring and summer chinook. That’s why we need the drawdowns. Now.”
“But what if drawdowns don’t work? You can’t really be sure—”
“We’ve got ten thousand years of empirical evidence saying, ‘If you let me get downstream, I will come back.’ That’s very conclusive. Saying, ‘It’s not certain, it’s not technologically feasible, it’s not politically feasible, it’s not economically feasible, we don’t have enough good science’—all these phrases simply mean we’ve slipped our moral and ethical moorings.”
“But, Ed,” I counter, “other people’s belief in taking natural resources and converting them into electrical power and products is a moral and ethical belief.”
“Yes. We share that belief. I’m absolutely bought into that. But we’re just asking those people living and gorging at the public trough to back up an inch. Let them gorge—just back up an inch. But they’re willing to sacrifice the fish, the tribes’ cultures, every commercial fisherman, everyone tied to sportfishing, every boat, motel, and restaurant operator—everyone who buys and eats salmon, every person who wants to see salmon. They’re willing to sacrifice all those people and these resources just so they don’t have to give up one crumb at the public trough.”
Back at McNary Dam, the fish-viewing facility’s sliding glass doorway bears two signs:
CAUTION: STAND BACK
CAUTION: DO NOT STOP IN DOORWAY
I ignore the first sign and obey the second. Inside, a continuous blasting of shining bubbles is whipping whirling vortices behind glass panels that form a window into one rung of the fish ladder. A squawfish is wavering unsteadily in the current, and a lamprey holds onto the glass with its bizarre, jawless, rasplined parasitic sucking disk of a mouth.
A boy says, “Those eels are cool!” Most people come into the viewing room with children, the generation to come, as though they should know something about salmon but it is not something adults need take a real interest in. Like piano lessons, perhaps.
A man with two kids tells me he’d like to take the lampreys and throw them out into the parking lot. I say to him, “Well, we eat fish, so do they.” He says, “Yes, but somehow it seems more sporting when I eat fish.”
Sporting?
A chinook salmon bores its way into the swirling silvery maelstrom. So they really do come up hundreds of miles from the ocean! I had intellectually understood this; now, here in the desert, I can feel it. A second chinook enters, turns back as if undecided, then reappears a moment later. Transformed by the time
and effort they have expended in their river journey, the chinook have become deeply colored, charcoal-bronze animals. At the window’s exit port, both fish are delayed by the buffeting current. Engaging a burst of power, their tails speeding to a blur, the creatures suddenly overcome the seemingly insuperable torrent, propelling through. I stifle an urge to cheer. Ed does not.
“God! Look at that guy!” If you had not just spent the day with Ed, you might think he was a ten-year-old, seeing his first salmon.
Another chinook—large, going on thirty pounds—comes before us.
Every salmon seems to perform open-heart surgery on Chaney. “Jeez, what a fish! These creatures absolutely inspire me. Anything that can take this kind of abuse, can take everything that the government and the pork barrelers can throw at them—everything!—over and over, year after year—. The fish aren’t gonna give up. That’s why we’re gonna beat the bastards. These fish are just not gonna go extinct. They are not gonna go down. They’re just—. They’re not. These creatures are gonna defeat everything. It’s corny, but I think it’s a matter of right versus wrong. It is not right to destroy benign things. Civilization is a very thin veneer. This is really a battle of civilized people against uncivilized people. Intelligence against—. Who in the hell knows what motivates me. I don’t think I want to. It’d probably scare me.”
I’m looking at Ed, who is transfixed by the sight of the fish. He pauses a beat, and to redirect my attention to what is important, says in a hush, “Look, here comes another one—a steelhead. So beautiful.”
This fish looks a little tired, laboring and struggling against the current. Ed says with intensity, “Not surprising, when you think of the thousands of miles it has come. Come on,” he says, encouraging the fish. “There you go!”
As the lonely steelhead drives into the current, a toddler named Dakota, holding her father’s hand, has her large brown eyes opened wide at the sight of such a big living thing. She says to it, “Go bye-bye. Go bye-bye.”
Ed must be thinking the same, in even fewer words.
It struggles through. “It was just pausing,” Ed says, as though trying to deny that the fish was unwell.
“I think it was ailing,” I say.
“It’s unbelievable; that one was really laboring, but rather than take a rest it just drove itself onward.”
Another, much more vigorous fish enters. Ed says, “Boy, that is a big steelhead. God! isn’t that a beauty?” With its rosy blush, it certainly is. Not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these. Chaney whistles in appreciation and wonder at the profound mystery of it. It shoots right through.
When the next big chinook makes its entry, someone who has come to stand behind me, a cowboy sort—hat, black jeans, boots, picking his teeth—says too loudly, “Oh man. Yeah! That’d be a nice fish to play with on the end of your line. I’ll believe we’ve got a shortage of fish when they stop them Indians from gillnettin’.”
I address the gent, seeking clarification on his point: “You don’t think there’s a shortage of salmon?”
“Oh, there’s a salmon shortage all right. But Canada is catching them all. Ooh! Look at that big fish.”
His buddy says, “I’ll tell ya, the way they’re managing, it just doesn’t make sense.” This guy really has his volume turned up, and I suspect there’s a recently emptied six-pack or two in their pickup. “You get some eco-freak—and there’s a difference between a conservationist and an environmentalist: You’ve got to have your common sense removed from your brain before you can become an environmentalist.” Beat. “Bee-cuzz, you can’t just let humanity suffer. There’s got to be a balance between man and nature.”
Ed is already outside smoking a cigarette when I find my way into the sunshine and fresh air, and he says: “It’s important to know what the average guy thinks, because it reflects the information he’s exposed to. This is a measure of how successful the boys are. This guy said we have to deal with everything—Indians, Canada, nets. And we do. But the basic premise of the disinformation program is that you have to solve all the problems at once. And solve the other problems first. Until we deal with everything, we can’t stop killing the fish at the dams. It’s like saying, ‘Until we have world peace, we shouldn’t have peace efforts.’”
We stroll toward a building labeled NEW PERMANENT JUVENILE FISH FACILITY. Referring to the facility, I say, “For all your dissatisfaction, Ed, you have to admit that an unbelievable amount of money and effort has gone into trying to save the fish.”
“No, it’s gone into avoiding changing the way the projects are operated. The dams killed the original population, and they’re unchanged.”
“But look at this new facility—”
“This is much cheaper for them. And it looks good. I mean, aren’t you impressed?”
“I am impressed.”
“Oh, it is impressive,” he says. “But it is a search for a technological fix to an ecological dilemma. They have angled screens tacked on to the turbine intakes. Young fish dive for the current and are diverted up, inside the dam. There they go into this pipe, and they sort them, handle them, stick tags in ’em, and then take them two hundred and fifty miles downriver in barges and trucks. And remember, these are fragile creatures. You pick one up, and the scales come off in your hands. How can we treat these wild animals like this and expect anything less than catastrophe? But, hell, if it worked, I wouldn’t care if you FedExed them to the coast. What’s interesting is that they’ve been barging the fish for the last twenty years while the fish are going extinct. At some point, results have to count.”
Ed halts abruptly at the sight of a small sign hung across a path. “Oops, no trespassing.”
I am game to proceed.
“No,” he warns, “they’ll come and get you.”
I look at him inquiringly.
“They will. I can’t afford to risk it.”
We turn and walk slowly toward our parked vehicles. “Well,” I say, “what is this guy Chaney really advocating?”
“It’s really quite modest: Just do the right thing and obey the law, and I’ll go home. I’ll make a living, have a family again. I’d get a life. Ah, but that is the talk of a zealot.” He’s smiling, his eyes shining mischievously.
“What would a life be, if you got one?”
“More time to spend with my kids. With my bird dog. Find a mate. Do some writing. It’d be nice not to worry about working all the time. Save a little money. I don’t have a dime in the bank.
“But,” he says, debating even himself, “I can’t remember a day that hasn’t been interesting. That’s been worth a great deal. I don’t know if it’s worth the price I paid, but I can’t remember a day that I didn’t wake up charged, thinking, ‘God, I’ve gotta get this, I’ve gotta do that.’ The older I get and the more I see what other people have to do, or have chosen, the more I’m realizing it’s not bad to get up with a fire in your belly every morning and delay going to bed because you’re thinking, ‘If I stay up a little while longer, squeeze a few more hours, I can finish this or that.’ I didn’t always realize this. But that’s worth a lot. I’ve convinced myself that what I’m doing is important. Cosmic scheme of things, of course, it means absolutely nothing.”
“Is anything important in the cosmic scheme of things?”
Ed shrugs. “Who knows. Probably not. So, relatively speaking, this is very important.”
Ed pauses in thought, as though gathering a grand summation. “Stripped of everything, it comes down to people who don’t care and people who do. They’re not going to win this. I’m not quite sure how we’re going to whup ’em, but we are. I’m confident we are.”
“You are confident?”
“I am. I have my dark moments. I mean, the greed and corruption run so deep you have to wonder how to avoid drowning, but I feel more energized than I did twenty years ago, because now people are starting to listen. I can smell the final battle, and I know it’s do or die. And the fear that the stakes are high—it’s scary stuff. So it’s got my adrenaline running. And you know that the boys you’re up against have no moral or ethical foundation; they’re really dirty fighters. They’ve lied. Deliberately. They are conning and propagandizing themselves as much as anyone. They have to, because who really wants to be responsible for wiping out the world’s largest chinook salmon and steelhead runs? There are laws on the books to stop them; they have not been followed. The political onslaught is just so overwhelming. We have no congressional champions right now. It’s hopeless. And the Idaho congressional delegation is just the worst of the worst, transmitting
the propaganda of Bonneville Power and of the aluminum industry. I’m hopeful that when this is all over, the people in Idaho will see how our senators have sold them out, and—”
“Wait a second! Hold it!” I’m waving my hands in front of his face, signaling time-out. “You say the propaganda is overwhelming. It’s hopeless. You have no congressional champions. The governor of Idaho can’t get his delegation to move. What is getting you pumped up? Where’s the palpable smell of victory?”
“They’ve run out of excuses. The politicians can’t ignore that the fish are going to go extinct on their watch. I think at the final hour the public will rise up and smite them, and Congress will be forced to take action. I think at the final hour the system is gonna work. I think this country is not going to stand by and let the pork-barrelers destroy this resource for no reason. You’ve gotta believe this, or you just say, ‘To hell with everything.’ The law is clear that the fish are to be preserved. I think the public is smart enough to see through the con at the eleventh hour. I can’t believe they’ll watch the buffalo hunters do to the Northwest what they did to the Plains.
“This was half of the world’s chinook salmon and steelhead runs. I mean, this was on a scale—. Animals whose individual range goes from the Continental Divide to two thousand miles out into the ocean. We’re talking about something that makes the great herds of Africa look piddling. In sheer numbers and economic value, there’s just no parallel to this. Anywhere. I mean, this is the Big One. If you can’t prevail here, then the whole system is bankrupt. And I won’t believe it; I will not accept that.
“And I do smell fear. Goliath is sweating. These people are scared. Their lies are getting more and more shrill, more and more desperate. And there’s nothing more heady to me than to see a bureaucrat who was out to harm the public interest starting to sweat. To smell fear on these people is intoxicating.
“They’re gonna get the blame. And that scares the hell out of them. And I like that. The Nuremberg defense—‘I was just following orders’—is not going to work here. My job is to kick that rotten door in, and I hope I can break it down before the fish are gone. It won’t be much longer, because they’re vanishing right now before our very eyes. Extinction on a scale that’s unprecedented is happening. So these are interesting times.”
Ed pauses. The sudden silence is awkward. I am looking at my shoes. He says calmly, “Wow, I do sound like a zealot this morning, don’t I?”
“This morning you do, Ed, yes.”
“Well,” Ed says, glancing at his watch, “I need to get out of here.”