The literary expressions of appreciation and affection for the salmon and the other cultural recordings of salmon significance registered in the previous chapter are all predicated on the perennial attributes of the wild salmon. When writing about what it means to be a salmon and what the salmon means to us, Williamson, Hughes and Alexie had an unequivocal idea of what made a salmon a salmon. Yet we can no longer speak of a singular salmon with an unchanging identity. Whether we like it or not, there are now many kinds of salmon: wild, hatchery, farmed and transgenic. And we have had a hand in making them all – the essential, wild one that the poets, novelists and storytellers have enshrined being arguably the most heavily constructed of them all. The product of history and human intervention (cultural as well as ecological) is a fish with multiple identities whose differences sometimes go far beyond those that distinguish the various wild species of the Pacific and Atlantic. The George W. Bush administration is seeking to define hatchery raised fish as biologically equivalent to wild ones for the purpose of counting salmon. Yet as a Canadian scientist has stressed, artificially propagated salmon are smaller and less genetically diverse than their wild counterparts: ‘It’s like saying Chihuahuas and wolves are the same’.1
Rather than leave the salmon as a woeful shadow of its former splendid self, it’s far more satisfying to serve it up as a creature that is both natural and mechanical, a self-willed biotic entity and a product of our ingenuity. The plurality of the salmon has given rise to some (not so) delicious ironies. During a recent visit to northern California, at the height of the California King salmon season, the salmon on the barbecue grill had come all the way from a Norwegian farm. And there’s another twist in the tale: many farmed salmon are now grown in Chile, thousands of miles south of the fish’s historic range. To compound the anomaly, many of Chile’s stock are the Atlantic’s Salmo salar.
What does it mean to be a salmon today? For a farmed salmon on the west coast of Scotland, being a salmon means circling around a floating cage and eating pellets containing dyes that impart the hue that its wild counterpart derives from krill. For a salmon raised in a hatchery, being a salmon may mean carrying around a tag. The coded wire tag is a tiny piece of metal injected into the head that contains information about its origins. When it returns as an adult to the river of its release, the tag is located with metal detectors and read under a micro-scope.2 The ‘PIT’ (Passive Integrated Transponder) tag is even more sophisticated – a miniscule glass tube containing an antenna and microchip (all weighing just 0.06 gm) that is injected into a salmon’s body cavity. The transponder (which gives ‘fish and chips’ a whole new meaning) is activated by sensors at dams that read data from fish passing within 18 cm and feed them into a computer. Each PIT tag carries a unique barcode enabling individual identification.
For a wild smolt heading down the Columbia to the Pacific, being a salmon means travelling parts of the way on barges, trucks and even planes. As they approach one of the mega-dams that block their passage, the young fish are diverted onto these ‘salmon taxis’ and reunited with their river below. As a Native American noted wryly in the mid 1980s: ‘Wheat used to be transported on land and the fish were in the river. Now wheat is moved on the river, and young fish are transported on roads.’3 This new form of assisted passage may strike us as the ultimate absurdity, arch-symbol of the revolutionary and deplorable changes over the past 130 years that have metamorphosed the fish we call salmon almost beyond recognition. But since humans first starting catching them, salmon have not dwelled in a world entirely of their own and on their own. And yet, despite our reshaping of the fish itself and our shaping of its world, the salmon has not been reduced to an entirely cultural creature. The irrepressible salmon returning to its former haunts in some English rivers, however tentatively, curbs the temptation to view the fish primarily as hapless victim subject to endless manipulation. Especially since these recolonizers may well be of hatchery origin (rather than ‘strays’), this reoccupation suggests the salmon’s continuing role as a protagonist that helps shape its own unpredictable story, going against the flow in more than one sense in a bid to recover a former identity.
What next for the salmon? Today’s wild Atlantic population numbers an estimated 3.5 million. Pacific salmon are far more abundant at around 500 million. But even if all the dams were torn down and all the farms were shut down, the wild salmon’s future would not be guaranteed. Global warming has huge implications for a fish that likes its water cold. The consequences of genetic engineering are also potentially enormous. What will it mean to be a salmon that grows as much in six months as a wild salmon does in six years? And will this fish be a first cousin to the wild salmon or a distant relative?
I shall pose the big question one last time. Why have we humans spent so much time thinking about the salmon and what the salmon has become? Because the salmon is the epitome of cosmopolitanism, roaming vast distances and disregarding international boundaries. Because the salmon is a connecting force across time and space. Salmon link Devon’s little East Dart River with British Columbia’s mighty Fraser. They connect the prehistoric Ainu with today’s supermarket shopper, and the former’s drying racks with the latter’s microwave. At the same time, the salmon that swim through these worlds and link these lives are intensely parochial creatures, endemic to very particular places, providing a natural foundation for regional identity in a McWorld of rampant homogenization where everything threatens to taste the same.4
We of the northern hemisphere are entranced by the salmon because we see the best of ourselves in the wild fish – nobility, determination, selflessness, endurance and love of home. We are intrigued by salmon because we have abused them as well as depended on and revered them – rough treatment that has lent the fish a tragic air. And we are passionate about salmon, passionate because our thoughts have become just as entwined with them as our economies. Over the centuries we have captured billions with net, spear, rod and all manner of contraption. And if ever our waters become empty of salmon of any kind, the wild one will continue to captivate us. Remember, you are a salmon.