A River Never Sleeps

In a quiet run of clear water thousands of flame red salmon are jostling for position. Coming through shallow rapids below, waves of new sockeye are arriving, the distinctive humped backs of the males cleaving the surface. An eagle wheels down, pins a fish, and for a moment both thrash the water. After the primal moment passes there is silence. For a heartbeat. Then you hear the splash of spawning salmon again. The survivors.

Every fall a miracle takes place in British Columbia streams and rivers, when the salmon return from their epic journeys to distant regions of the North Pacific. There are lots of places to see salmon - but few places on earth provide a better stage for this drama, than the Adams River, just East of Kamloops. It is a place that is so captivating that people often lapse into silence as they stand on the river bank, watching the fish court and fight. The spawning act itself is rarely seen because it usually takes place after darkness has fallen.

The Adams is only about 10 kilometers long. And yet it features one of North America's greatest natural events as thousands - sometimes millions - of sockeye salmon return to pair off and mate.

The spawning of the sockeye starts towards the end of September, reaching a peak in the second week of October, and it has become one of British Columbia's leading tourist attractions. Some years only a few thousand salmon return to this perfect little salmon river. But on years of dominant, or peak, runs, the river fills bank to bank, with three or four million fish returning to spawn. And to die.

Unlike Atlantic salmon, which survive the spawning ritual, Pacific salmon always find sex to be a fatal attraction. A few days after the female has laid her tiny, bright orange eggs in a series of carefully crafted gravel nests, and after the male has fertilized it with a milky cloud of sperm, the fish turn belly up and drift away with the current. As fall progresses along the Adams River, and the groves of big cottonwoods in Haig-Brown Provincial Park turn golden, the gravel bars become increasingly littered with the carcasses of dead salmon. The air takes on a rich, pungent aroma. It is the smell of the sea.

To many of the tourists who come to the Adams River the sight and smell of the dying salmon is wonderous, but also deeply touching.

"I think it's so sad," says a school girl as her class watches a male salmon struggling weakly to stay upright. "Why do they all have to die?"

That is a question that even scientists can't fully answer. It has long been known that Pacific salmon start to physically deteriorate soon after they leave saltwater, to re-enter the rivers of their birth. Once back in freshwater the fish stop feeding and begin to draw on the fat reserves they have built up during a three-year odyssey across the Pacific.

In the 14-days it takes an Adams sockeye to reach the spawning grounds, travelling past Vancouver and up a connecting river system that has some of the wildest rapids on the continent, the fish shrink by one third. So perilous is the balance of energy reserves that, if they are delayed in their migration for three or four days, as they sometimes are by low water conditions, the salmon will die on the way to the spawning grounds.

Far from being a tragic waste, the massive post-spawning die off of salmon is natural and vital. Over the past few decades scientists like Dr. John Stockner, who recently retired from Canada's federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans, have learned that the carcasses of the dead salmon are key to the survival of their offspring.

To put it simply, the adult salmon must die in order to fertilize the rivers and nursery lakes where their progeny will be raised.

Mr. Stockner's research has focussed on the importance of microscopic forms of life known as phytoplankton. These organisms, so small one would have to be enlarged 100,000 times to cover a dollar coin, bloom in clouds that are fed on by tiny insects and larger plankton, which in turn support the newly hatched sockeye.

Just below Adams River lies Shuswap Lake, which is where the young sockeye will spend the first year of their life after emerging from the gravel nests in the river. The richness of plankton blooms in the lake are directly dependent on the size of the spawning run. That is to say, the bigger the run of salmon into Adams River, the greater the amount of fertilizer that will later be swept into the lake, stimulating the phytoplankton.

In Shuswap Lake, big fish eat little fish, little fish eat plankton - and enriching the base of the food chain are the decomposing salmon. Looked at another way, salmon can be described as nature's way of moving nutrients from the fertile environment of the ocean to the relatively infertile freshwater habitat of the interior nursery lakes. Seen in that light, the death of the salmon is not sad at all, but is a natural and beautiful process in which the life cycle folds back into itself.

There are few better places to see the miracle of the salmon than at the Adams. The river, about as wide as a four lane highway, lies in a forested valley that was cut by a glacier into the Columbia Mountains of south cental British Columbia. The region is in a dry belt between the rugged Coast Range, to the West, and the Rocky Mountains, which lie to the East.

Above the river is a long, deep lake, also called Adams, that produces a steady flow of crystal clear water. The upper Adams River, which feeds the lake above, once had a bigger run of sockeye than the lower Adams River. But a logging dam eradicated that stock of fish. A few years ago, for the first time, a big run of sockeye returned to the upper Adams - some 30,000 spawners - raising hopes that the huge runs of the past can be fully restored. The upper river is murky with glacial silt, however, making it a poor place to view salmon.

The lower river meanders back and forth, snaking gently through the valley, creating pools and gravel bars as it goes. There are fast runs of shallow water known as riffles, deep pools in rocky canyons where native tribes once gathered to fish, and quiet back channels of calm water. An easy-to-hike trail system allows access to all the spawning water along the lower river, and follows the east bank all the way to the headwaters. Along the west side a paved road allows glimpses of the river, and there are some short side paths to spawning areas.

On peak years the Adams salmon run draws as many as 500,000 tourists from late September to the end of October. But even on the busiest days, with 40 school buses in the main parking lot, it is easy to get away from the crowds and find a quiet place along the river.

"The thing that blew my mind," said Charlie Powell, "was how quiet it was even when you were standing with a crowd on the river bank. The people treated those salmon with absolute reverence. It was very moving."

Mr. Powell, a writer from Washington State, visited the Adams because he wanted to see a natural salmon river in all its splendor. An increasing number of Americans have been making the Adams River pilgrimage , because salmon stocks have collapsed throughout the Pacific Northwest. The Adams, which is at the southern extreme range for sockeye, is simply the best place left, outside of Alaska, to see a river full of wild salmon.

Mr. Powell said he was awestruck when he first walked along the river, watching salmon spawn in pool after pool after pool.

"We used to have salmon runs like that in the (U.S) Pacific Northwest, and I hope that one day we will again," he said. "I want my kids to see the Adams run so they can appreciate what we lost. And because it's a fabulous experience."

What Mr. Powell probably didn't know is that the salmon he watched in the Adams River may well have originated in what is now the United States. Ten thousand years ago a massive dam of glacial ice blocked the Shuswap Lake system from spilling out, as it does now, to the West. Instead the water flowed East and then South, joining the Columbia River, which was the world's greatest salmon run until it was destroyed, over the past century, by a series of hydro dams. When the glaciers melted and the ice dam broke, the Shuswap's flow suddenly swung to the West, moving with it any salmon that were in the system.

To reach the Adams River, sockeye now enter first the mighty Fraser River, which flows into Georgia Strait, at Vancouver, just north of Seattle. Moving up through the Fraser Canyon, and a torturous set of rapids known as Hell's Gate, the salmon pass through a series of net fisheries. At the river mouth Canadian and American seine boats and trollers take the fish, which are still bright silver and red fleshed. In the lower Fraser, a series of native tribes set gillnets in the back eddies and sports anglers cast lures from the river bars. Native fishers take the salmon all along the Fraser, and up through the Thompson River, the ancient route the Adams run follows. The tribes have fished the salmon ever since the salmon were there. Native legends are laced with references to salmon, and salmon-like spirits, and ancient village sites are invariably found at good fishing locations.

The Trans-Canada Highway parallels the Fraser and Thompson Rivers, so it is possible to trace the route of the salmon all the way from Vancouver to the mouth of the Adams, stopping along the way to watch natives fish from the rock canyon walls.

Last fall, returning from a few days on the Adams, we pulled our car off the highway near Kamloops, just below Shuswap Lake, when we saw fire on the water. It was near 11 pm, and there, flickering in the middle of the Thompson River, was what appeared to be a bonfire. We crossed through a meadow of damp, waist-high grass until we came to the river bank. A few minutes after we arrived a small boat drifted by below us.

Hanging over the gunwhale was a wire basket holding burning chunks of wood that was being fed by two young boys. Each time they threw a new piece of wood on the fire, plumes of sparks fell on the dark water or rose with the wind to vanish in the sky. On either side of the fire basket were men, leaning far over the side. They held long poles. Every few minutes one of them made a thrusting movement, spearing a fish that was hauled aboard, twisting in the firelight.

Standing on the river bank in the cool darkness, I couldn't help but think of a Shuswap Indian legend that deals with the death and rebirth of salmon. In the apocalyptical story, war is made on the fishes by humans and all the salmon are killed save one, the pregnant wife of a large figure called Tsotenuet. She gives birth to a son who aligns himself with the god of thunder and eventually drives the people from their river bank homes by hurling down bolts of lightning. Afterwards, the salmon boy goes into the mountains, the way sockeye do by following rivers, and jumps over the bones of his people, bringing them back to life.

As we crossed the flats back to the car I recalled that there are ancient, native village sites all along the Thompson and up to the head of the Adams. They are there because of the salmon. For a moment I could hear chanting, and the sound of fish spears beating slowly against the sides of a wooden boat. It seemed to be echoing through time itself. Now and again you'd hear a big fish jump in the darkness. Far upstream the salmon were spawning, as they have been since the time of glaciers.