2680 bathtubs per second. That's how much Columbia River water passes through the turbines of the Chief Joseph Dam in Bridgeport, Washington. Enough water, according to the informational tape loop on the AM radio, to power all of the toasters, hair dryers, word processors, and electric amplifiers of Seattle, 200 hundred miles and a mountain range away. From the Foster Creek power substation, the enormous metal tubes that carry the water to the power generators gleam in the sun like new drainage culvert, except that each one looks big enough to swallow a pod of blue whales.
Ten days ago the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran the headline “Federal salmon listing carries human price”. People throughout rural Douglas County go out of their way to tell me, a stranger here, exactly what they think that price will be. Without introduction, a man at the Chevy dealer looks me right in the eye and says, "I don't believe in killing off humans to save fish." A rancher in Palisades blames everything on hypocritical Californians, migrating up through the urban sprawl of the Puget Sound and into the rural havens of Eastern Washington like a cancer, condemning the irrigation which feeds them. My co-worker Mike and I draw out their opinions like filings to a magnet; we have been driving through the orchards, wheat fields, and suburbs for the Public Utility District, updating the maps which portray the route of electricity through Douglas County in simple red lines. Driving, as it so happens, a literal dividing line between people and salmon.
Mike is from the arid southwest corner of Colorado, a land with no anadromous fish where the farmers grow Pinto beans and wheat without irrigation, praying for adequate rainfall like the Anasazi before them. He distrusts environmentalists and the Endangered Species Act, but whenever he sees the huge BPA transmission wires marching over the landscape like soldiers carrying power to the cities of the south, he says, "I see why people hate these things, it's just too much." When I laugh aloud at the radio, which is now boasting of water-skiing and Walleye fishing behind the dam, he nods in agreement.
I don't really know much about anadromous fish. I've watched Chinook spawning on the Sandy River, their splotchy, bruised bodies rotting off of their bones, and I've been to hatcheries where docile fingerlings await handfuls of food pellets from tourists, like cows at the hay truck. I've kayaked to the wild drainages of Southeast Alaska and seen Brown bears lined up along the streams, pulling out fat silver salmon like factory workers sorting apples. I remember the few lonely steelhead that would rest beneath Rosey's bridge on the Carmel River where I grew up.
But the story of the dying fish runs is written everywhere in this county. It's written on the grey transformer boxes that we crane our necks to record, in the newspaper article about proposed metering of irrigation wells, in the slow warm Columbia running through Wenatchee, where rock chucks and hobos shelter in the concrete rip-rap and sullen teenagers throw bottles at abandoned fruit warehouses. It's in the dispatch room of the P.U.D., the walls covered with pegboard maps and computerized displays of the power grid.
Mike happily abdicates the choosing of sides to me.
When the job ends and I drive back down Highway 97 to Central Oregon, I return to a very different sentiment about rivers. Every third person seems to be a fly-fishing guide, a rafting outfitter, or a kayaking bum. The romance of a wild river, or at least its marketability as a recreation opportunity, puts bread on their tables and money in their pockets. Beer breweries and laundromats put our rivers to use as marketing slogans. We are dependent, here, on leisure dollars and we lure them out with, among other things, our fishing and our rivers.
The people here are as restless and migratory as the salmon, pausing at a refuge that is, at least momentarily, cleaner and quieter than where they have come from. I know it is a kind of progress that our economy likes clean rivers instead of irrigation and kilowatts. Yet there is something hidden here, there is always something hidden in a place like this. People come here to escape, to retire, to get away; they come to leave it all behind. The hidden thing is complicity, the simple fact that we still must consume here what is produced elsewhere.
Power lines, of course, look the same everywhere. They weave throughout our lives with the same purpose, almost invisible in their ubiquity, just more static in the landscape. The other day, on Rocking Horse Road, I stopped at an electrical substation and realized I don't really know where the lines entering it come from. Or where they go.
Do they spread out and help suck golf course water from the ground? Does that one feed a ski lift, a cement plant, or my word processor? Where, on my newspaper map of endangered and threatened salmon habitat, is this power generated? In the beige that says steelhead, or in the green of the threatened Chinook?
Momentarily, I envy the simplicity of rural fear in Douglas County. Everyone knows where "their" dams are, which side they are on, exactly what they are up against. Like the infamous Bureau of Reclamation dam builder Floyd Dominy, who once said, "I like fish too, but there's other things to eat," they make no apology for their triumph over salmon. They choose with words what they chose with actions: their own survival.
I can't help but think there is a dishonesty here, where we choose clean water and wild fish with our bumper stickers, obscene consumption with the Sport Utility Vehicles they are stuck to. Where successful urban elites opt out of the noise and filth and into a paradise of outdoor recreation. It's obvious to me that river rafting, rock climbing, and mountain biking haven't produced people who use resources any better than farmers or ranchers. Rather, the economy of escape allows us what was once primarily an urban luxury; distance from the impacts of our lifestyle. If Bend starts to look like Boise or Vancouver, we'll just pack up and move on to Moab or Sandpoint or Hood River.
I have no precise idea, yet, where the power lines at Rocking Horse Road come from, or exactly which salmonids I would have seen in the Deschutes one hundred years ago. But I see where the anger of the stranger at the Chevy dealer leads, toward a desolate belief that humans somehow need only themselves. I will argue for the fish and their habitat, next time I see Mike, because the shackled rivers, blowing topsoil, and pesticide filled orchards of Douglas County look to me like the death of us all.
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