A Genesis story about salmon, from a person with self-diagnosed A.D.D.

I was over skipping through the bogs the other day, when I ran across a post about the salmon disappearing from the creeks. I do that a lot because I find blog posts to be interesting, and they pique my interest. There was this post about a fellow that was wading in a creek and came to the amazing (To me only) conclusion that the fish were gone, and.... it was the loggers fault. I don’t find it amazing that the fish were gone, only that it is almost the unanimous conclusion that anything that happen in the Eel river was, yep, the “loggers fault”. Not one word about the two floods was mentioned. At least he didn't blame the two floods on "Those Damn Loggers" as most do.

As I am wont to do. I started to wonder why everything was the loggers fault, and I started thinking about how lucky some people are that they can reach a simple conclusion and be completely satisfied with it. Myself? it makes me wonder, “What is a fish anyway?”. Where did it come from? Why does it come up the river 60 miles or so, find the clean clear headwaters of a nice fresh water creek, dig a hole in a gravel lined riffle, not too coarse a gravel, and not too fine, but just right, spawn it’s eggs and die. I get to wondering about, “why don’t they just spawn on the beach like surf-fish?” They wouldn’t have to die, but just turn back around and swim away. Then I thought that maybe they don’t like surf-fish, and their sense of modesty prevents then from displaying their most intimate moment in front of another species. I started to wonder if the “mate” in inti“mate” has anything to do with fish modesty. But, then I get back to my subject, which was why do salmon spawn in the creeks. Then I started to wonder if they didn’t like surf-fish because they are prejudiced. Are salmon really that sophisticated?

Maybe the salmon just like the thrill of swimming up a raging muddy torrent, clear up to the point that it is impossible to swim any further upstream, in a self imposed endurance test to prove their self-worth. Only the strong and lucky ones get to spawn and die. They say nothing is so alive as those that are about to die. It must be a proud final moment for them, just before they die, knowing that they are going to be the parents of all of the future of salmonkind. Their fry will head back to sea to feed, fatten, and prosper, and become the next generation to spawn and die. Only the fittest will pass on their seed. Wow! Maybe all the trash in the river is breeding a strong species of salmon. Maybe the pseudo-environmentalist will recognize this new specie of Eel River Salmon and call it the “Logger Hardy Eel River Anadromous Salmon fish“. Logging will have to be protected to keep the fish healthy and thriving. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful world? I know that I logged enough lumber to build a couple of thousand Hippie Houses, and I didn’t even get even a thank-you. Maybe if people knew that fish needed a little adversity they would worry less.

I use the term “Mother Nature” a lot when I talk about this world that we live in. Some people just attribute everything to “God”, that way they don’t have to think about it. Great for them, they can stick to their mono-focus. Unfortunately for me, I over-thought the God issue at the tender young age of 8 years old. I came to the conclusion that the existence of God is un-provable, so in my mind I concluded to take a wait-and-see attitude. I also know that the term I use, “Mother Nature”, is also not a real person, but I can use that term without upsetting the mono-focus of the truly devout religious folks.

Back to salmon, I worry a lot about the streams, and the salmon habitat. It’s not that I am not concerned for the fish, I am, but I have to think it all the way through. That means that I have to start at the beginning. Let’s just jump way ahead, to save you folks a bunch of reading. I have this theory that all life started out as a single celled animal, then evolution “complicated the hell out of things”. I think that was a line form a Harrison Ford movie about when his character fell in love. Okay, let me wander back to salmon. Lets move up to the point where “then there were fish”, the land masses hadn’t really formed yet. Fish made-whoopie and had babies, maybe right there in the ocean, or maybe they spontaneously gave virgin-birth like the Bible says that Mary did. Some reptiles still give virgin-birth today. Many species of lizards will give virgin birth if they don’t have access to a male. My mind went through a ton of digressions right there, I hope that I wasn’t too obvious…

Anyway, at some point the land masses pushed their way up out of the seafloor. They moved around on the molten magma below, they rammed into each other and even forced their way under each other in massive slow-motion collisions. It helps a lot if you try to see this as a natural progression, and not just; “Then there was land”. Hey, I’m getting closer to my point here, Okay?

As the land pushed up from old sea floor, the rain and wind washed it back into the sea. The north coast is young and tender, as far as land masses are concerned. The north coast is only 5 to 10 million years old. In fact the whole area west of about -the Grand Canyon- is about that same age. Redwoods are at least 100 million years old as a specie. Redwoods are in the cypress family, which has a tendency to grow in swamps, maybe that’s why they seem to need lots of water. I would tell you about how Redwoods grew all over the world at one time, but that would be distracting from the salmon story. But, the redwoods existed with the dinosaurs, yet no dinosaur ever wandered the North Coast. Dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago, during the end of the Cretaceous period, unless you count “birds” which  evolved from dinosaurs. Anyway, California lifted out of the sea 5- 10 million years ago, it didn’t happen “Bam” like Chef Whatsisname says. But, it was a 5 million year process, and it is still happening today. That’s how the redwood trees grew onto California after the dinosaurs became extinct. Redwoods became extinct throughout the whole rest of the world after the redwoods covered California. I‘ve often wondered, “what is unique about the north coast of California that the whole rest of the world doesn’t have?” Well, it has a land mass over a subduction zone, which means that a tectonic plate is pushing under the redwood zone, called the north coast, home of the redwoods. That insidious rape of our land mass by a sea-born land mass is what is pushing the redwood land up out of the sea. The tender young land mass, previously sand and mud, is softly formed and highly erosive, Thank-“God” for that! I mean, “Mother Nature“, or “evolution“. Can land masses evolve? When they erode is it called “devolve”? So, back to the salmon. But, you can’t go back to the salmon without talking about the redwoods first. The redwoods thrive in soft, silty, flood plains. They thrive in the loose nutrients that is highly nutritious to their root systems. They even thrive on the loose sandstone hillsides. Wherever redwoods grow, sandstone, or youngly lifted seafloor is not far underneath. Caviar for the redwoods, YUM! And the silt is creme' brulee!

Start a new paragraph here. I was getting tired of that last one. It would have probably saved me a whole bunch of thinking to have just figured out that, when the redwoods disappeared all over the whole world, that it was probably those “damn loggers”, and not the fact that the north coast of California was the last place in the whole wide world that redwoods can grow, that it had wet winters, and young uplifted soils filled with redwood yummies.

When I was a young lad, I was highly motivated to play geologist, along with my cousin “Oregon”, who owned the only geology pick between us. So if we didn’t go “fossil hunting” together, I didn’t get to pick fossils, so he was a valuable companion. I often miss the days when a kid could spend all day in the creeks and hills fossil hunting. I bet that’s why I was able to stay off drugs. But, then the back-to-the-land people showed up, along with their fences and “NO TRESSPASSING” signs. It kinda’ belied the “Back to the land” thing, because it drove the kids out of the “land”. Tis a pity, such a loss.

When we went fossil hunting, we would emulate people like Monroe Tobin, who back in the early 1900s found a whale fossil and showed a couple of famous archaeologists the bones. The geologists stayed at the Tobin Hotel in Garberville and just happened to ask the Tobin kid, jokingly, if he knew about any good fossil grounds. He did! As did most kids that grew up around here. They thanked him for the “find” and they always took him on fossil hunts with them. My cousin and I figured that if we could find a unique fossil, we could, maybe, be invited to tag along with a couple of famous geologists. Anyway, that was our goal, to become world famous fossil discoverers. My cousin and I did find Tobin’s whale bones. Sadly, they are buried beneath the freeway, just below the town of Garberville. Just across from the town sewer-pond.

All this leads me up to telling you how I know a little bit about the geology of the north coast. As we searched for “fossil grounds” we would find evidence of a great Eel River flood, much more serious than the ‘64 flood. There was a flood plain at the level of the Garberville flat, the one that the town is built on. That same flat is at the level of the Garberville airport, the town of Redway, the conservation camp and so on. There is a small ledge of river gravel just above my house in Benbow, on the exact same plain as the rest. The plain can even be found to be evident on the west side of Richardson Grove. I don’t know how the redwoods in Richardson Grove fit into this story, but on that same flood plain, there is an uprooted redwood tree, that has THREE layers of roots that were caused by at least two major floods, sometime in that redwoods life span. I’m not going to pretend to explain how the tree was flooded two times and formed three different roots systems, but I do enjoy knowing that it has to be a fact that it happened! It is well above the “normal” ‘64 flood plane of the river. In our 8-12 year old brains we decided that, that flat had to have been caused by the seafloor uplifting to the point that it backed the river up to that level for thousands of years, then slowly washed back out to sea. Remember, just recently, with-in our life spans, we had an earthquake on the north coast that lifted Kings Peak 16 inches higher, and the seafloor at Petrolia lifted 4 feet out of the seabed. I saw it myself, with my very own eyes. The earthquake was so strong that it bounced a D-8 Caterpillar Tractor off of the ground and moved it sideways three times. It was declared the most violent upward thrust ever recorded. Back to the Flood plain. We wondered how the salmon could possibly have lived through such an utterly devastating flood. See, I told you that this is a “salmon story“. It’s amazing how things can come to a person's mind if they don’t attribute everything to God, or “those damn loggers”. There have been hundreds of floods, and hundreds of  upheavals on the north coast since the beginning of the California North Coast. I can only hope that someday it will all fit together, for all of us, that ALL of life and nature is precious, and it all fits together. You shouldn't protect just one thing, but be cognisant of all of nature.

If you have been able to follow these ramblings of an obviously Attention Deficit Disorder sufferer, you might find that I don’t really consider thinking about EVERYTHING as a disorder, but I find it greatly entertaining, and in the end I hope that my mind never closes to anything, and I’m not likely to pass off the ecology of the north coast as the fault of “Those Damn Loggers”.