Wonders of Nature

By Sam Churchill

It was something I hadn’t watched from a creek bank since my boyhood days in an Oregon lumber camp, but there it was, happening right before my eyes – salmon, hundreds and thousands of salmon, fighting their way upstream to ancestral spawning grounds.

It happened in a smallish stream named Big Creek in the Coast Range mountains near Astoria on the Oregon Coast. The year was 1970. Oregon Department of Game employees termed it one of the biggest salmon runs in modem times.

Big Creek, although a modest sized stream except when fall rains or spring runoffs send it heaving over its banks, drains a vast timber basin that used to be the working area of the Big Creek Logging Company. The primeval forest that was there when I was a boy, the hundreds of men, the camps and the logging railroads were gone.

But a new generation of trees, a new generation of loggers and a new generation of salmon have returned.

Big Creek, itself, flows into the Columbia River near the little community of Knappa. A state operated fish hatchery straddles the stream a few miles above its confluence with the Columbia.

While visiting in the area Dorothy (my wife) and I drove out to the hatchery. We were astounded to find Big Creek virtually clogged with salmon. A dozen or so men at the hatchery were working day and night sorting fish to separate males from females, stripping eggs from females, transporting live fish to holding tanks for later continuation of their journey to spawning beds further up stream.

The eggs taken from the females would be artificially cared for, hatched, the fish reared to survival size and then released back to Big Creek or some other stream. They would work their way to the ocean, disappear and add size and weight for four years, then return to their home stream a 25 to 35 pound adult salmon.

I had watched this phenomenon of nature many times as a boy at the Western Cooperage logging camp. Hordes of desperate salmon coming in from the Pacific ocean, over the bar at the mouth of the Columbia River, across Young’s Bay, up Young’s River, a left turn at Olney and then up the Klaskanine River to the spot they had left four years before.

It was a drive for survival. Back to the shallow spawning grounds where they had been born. The female scooping out an egg bed in the quiet shallows of her home pool and then releasing her eggs. The male, close beside her, then drifting over the eggs, releasing his sperm which would fertilize the eggs and produce a new generation of salmon.

Following the egg-laying and fertilizing ritual, the parents, ravaged by hunger (they take no food while migrating to their spawning grounds) and battered by rocks, fight their way through shallows, drift exhausted with the current and in a matter of hours, die.

It was an unforgettable experience to stand again on the bank of a small stream watching those valiant creatures of nature forcing themselves with every ounce of waning strength to reach one last pool or slide across one final rock or drive over one remaining rapid.

Life is such a wonderful, precious gift.

Nature’s salmon prize it. I wonder why man, so often, seems to have so little regard for it.

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