Month: September 2009

When the salmon were running, my grandfather fished them from Deer Creek with a pitch fork, hauled them home in a wheel barrow, and fed them to the pigs. My dad said they rarely ate salmon from the creek at the table; only when they found one still in good health and intact from its trek up the Nooksack. Even then, they were not nearly as tasty as the beautiful fish the Lummi Indians brought around to trade for potatoes. Deer Creek salmon were all ready to spawn and die. The Lummis had their traditional fishing spots where they caught salmon just right for eating.

At close to twenty dollars a pound for premium salmon, I don’t suppose that anyone is concerned about salmon as pig fodder anymore, but in case you are considering it– don’t feed salmon to hogs too close to slaughter– Dad said salmon fed pork tastes like fish. All this took place long before I was born, and Dad is not around anymore to ask, so the line of reasoning is a little dicey, but I think that from this, we can infer that there was a healthy spring run of salmon on Deer Creek ninety years ago. Grandpa butchered pigs in October and only ever kept one or two sows over winter, so he would not feed salmon in the fall, but he would feed the pigs salmon from a spring run. The run must have been healthy if Grandpa could fill a wheel barrow with a pitch fork.

I thought about salmon in Deer Creek this week because the fall run would be about now. The creek is a half mile north of the farm. We had to cross the Littleton place to get to the creek. The Littletons replaced the previous owner, Doc Hurd. Doc was a horse veterinarian from long before my time. He had the farm to the north of us and the creek ran through his property. The intervening thirty acres between our place and the creek was subdivided a few years ago and now has houses on it and a sappy real estate name, Whisper Ridge, but to me, it is still “Littleton’s” or when I am thinking about old stories, “Doc Hurd’s.”

We watered our stock from water pumped from our well, first pumped by a wind mill, later by electricity. If the wind did not blow enough to keep the stock watered, Dad or Grandpa would have to lead the stock through Doc Hurd’s place to the creek, mutual cooperation that was a matter of course in those days. November can be a lean month for wind in Whatcom county. Sometimes we have a streak of foggy still weather that lasts long enough for the stock to drain a wind mill holding tank. I wonder what the folks in Whisper Ridge would think if I lead a herd of cows through their lawns today?

I have personally only seen one salmon in Deer Creek. That was in the early 60’s when my cousin Dave and I sometimes went back to the creek to fish for trout. I spotted the salmon barely moving on a little gravel shingle. She had deposited her eggs and was about to call it quits. One old salmon girl, doing her duty.

If there was a male salmon around to fertilize her redd (nest of eggs), she might have a few descendants in the creek today. I hope so. The old creek is probably more hospitable to salmon now than back in the days when Doc Hurd owned the place. Back then, Whisper Ridge was all wooded, but the north bank was cleared cow pasture right up to the creek, exposing it to dirty runoff and sunshine.

One year, my cousin and I found the carcass of a dead cow in the creek, nearly completely rotted. When we told Dad about it, he just shook his head. Not our business, but nasty. I hope no one was taking their drinking water from the creek downstream and I imagine it was bad for the salmon. The little ten, fifteen cow dairy herds that used to be everywhere are gone now, and even the big dairies are being replaced with houses, so the run off must be changing. I hope it is better for the salmon.

When my cousin and I fished for trout, we seldom caught anything. Some of the best spots were near a small irrigation pond that filled from a spring that came from the side of the bluff on our side of the stream. The overflow from the pond into the creek was cold spring water, and once in a while one of us caught a barely legal rainbow or dolly varden in the cooler water below the pond. But for the most the creek, the murky water was warm and sluggish all fishing season. The salmon enhancement people have planted trees that can be seen where the Northwest Road crosses the creek and others where the Aldrich Road crosses. They are not even head-high yet, so they have just barely begun begun to cool the water and clear the run off, but they will eventually have a big effect and I believe they may already have improved the water quality.

One of these days, I’ll put my dog on a leash, cut through the houses on Whisper Ridge, and check on the salmon run in Doc Hurd’s creek.

Labor Day weekend, we visited Victoria. In many ways, Victoria is a colonial city. It was at the hub of the British colonial exploitation of the northwest, which was not as lucrative as India but the sea otter and seal skins extracted from the indigenous hunters of Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlottes were enough to put extra silver tea services on tables at Brighton, uncork an extra bottle of French claret at Oxford and Cambridge, and keep the upper lips a bit stiffer in London.

All this came to mind as Rebecca and I ate lunch in the Bengal Room at the Empress Hotel, whose creaking parquet floors, marvelously matched grain woodwork, worn leather, and ancient tiger skins intentionally evoke the Raj, which was still alive when the hotel was built.

The British attitude toward the indigenous population of North America differed from the American attitude. Most significantly, the British had little interest in possessing the country, they merely wanted to profit from it. According to J. G. Swan, an American oysterman, Indian teacher, collector for the Smithsonian, diarist and first hand witness to the interplay between Indians and whites on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state, the British systematically worked with the natives, carefully manipulated prices of trading goods, and methodically grabbed the most they could from their colony with a businesslike eye on longterm maximization of profits. Tending to the welfare of the natives was a form of scientific cropping.

The Americans– Bostons, as they were called in Chinook jargon– were inclined toward harum-scarum idealism and less systematic, generally regarding the native people as a bad-smelling hindrance to full use of the resources of the land and sea, which were the destined possessions of the American whites. The Bostons fretted over converting the savages to Christianity, sold them illegal, and occasionally poisonous, whiskey at street drug prices, and generally had neither hesitation nor scruple about robbing them blind, hoping all the time that they would go away.

Victoria is charming. It maintains the image of a bastion of British civilization on the edge of the world with the frantic and sincere effort of tourism bureaus and local boosters everywhere, but with effortless grace, the city hosts a collection of totem poles and indigenous art associated with the Royal British Columbia Museum. The collection is a portal into the unique civilization of hunter-gathers in a paradise so plentiful that they could stay in one place and develop an elaborate and elegant society comparable to, but vastly different from, societies that arose around the stationary abundance of agricultural economy.

When the Europeans arrived, it is hard to determine who was more sophisticated, the Indians who used the simple seamen as pawns to gain status in the elaborate coastal social structure, or the Europeans who made fortunes freighting sea otter skins to China. Reading the record of the northwest coast in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it is not clear who is taking advantage of whom. Eventually, smallpox and whiskey decimated and unnerved the Indians, leaving them to struggle as the Bostons and British took over their territory, but until the mid-nineteenth century, coastal arts flourished. Larger and larger lodges were built, taller totem poles erected and mightier and mightier displays of wealth were made at huge potlatches, all based on the influx of goods fleeced from the ignorant Europeans.

The history of this fine period can be seen in the displays at the RBCM, where the poles, carvings, and artifacts were harvested and put on display. I spent two days of the long weekend drinking in the power of the bizarre Indian images. I am not an art historian, or a connoisseur of the visual arts so I can’t say much, except to comment that the elaborate vocabulary of the images shouts out that the artists said something important and dramatic to their fellows, but what it was, would be insulting for me to guess.

We have sweet corn tonight. Of all the crops you can grow for yourself, sweet corn is the one that is always clearly and unmistakably superior when grown at home. Even corn bought from a farmer wearing black suspenders and an old panama hat on the roadside, even if the tobacco chewing old geezer pulled the ears that very morning, the corn has begun to deteriorate by the time it is at table.

I pulled the first half dozen ears of corn from our sweet corn patch before I sat down to write this and Rebecca is heating water now. The ears are not as ripe as I like them. They remain at the blister stage; the milk in the kernels is still watery. In another three or four days, the milk will be opaque, but not starchy yet, which is  perfect for me. Rebecca and my father (when he was still alive) prefer the corn at the blister stage.

I planted two varieties of yellow sweet corn, just like my father always did: Kandy Korn and Golden Jubilee. Kandy Korn ripens a little earlier for us than Golden Jubilee, but I think Golden Jubilee has better flavor even though Kandy Korn is an “extended sugar” variety which is purported to be sweeter than the old style Jubilee. By planting two varieties that mature at different times, the corn season is a little longer. There will be plenty of corn for us and a few others, but the crop is nothing like the bounty I imagined when I planted. I had hoped to take bushel after bushel to the food bank. There may be a chance for that yet, but I have doubts.

I’m not a good farmer for a number of reasons. I travel too much, which means I am discussing computer configuration management in San Jose or New York when a farmer would be out in the garden. A flush of Canadian thistles will not wait for the return flight from SFO. A loose coupling that holds the Alaska run from Las Vegas to Bellingham on the runway in the desert for 4 hours does not slow up the quack grass. I marvel that I travel at six hundred miles per hour thirty thousand feet above the ground, and the weeds sit still at zero feet, they win.

Second, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and the after effects of the septal myectomy which I had last November  tire me easily. Many evenings, I am too tired to weed and hoe like a serious farmer.

Finally, I lack knowledge and skill. I am a computer programmer and a crypto-chinese scholar, not a true farmer.  I did not adjust my cultivator properly and plant accurately. The rows in my corn field are uneven and hard to follow, wandering like a dog on a hunt. Unlike my father who operated his tractor with delicacy and refinement that demolished weeds without ever touching a crop, I am clumsy and obliviously destroy great swaths of corn in seconds as I wollow through the cornfield on my tractor.

No matter. We have sweet corn tonight.