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Outside Magazine August 2003

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The Water Issue: Fueds
River Impossible (Cont.)

A VIEW TO A KILL
AT REQUA, ON CALIFORNIA'S Redwood Coast, the Klamath pours over a black bar of volcanic sand into the Pacific, dumping 20 million acre-feet of water a year into the ocean. There's salt spray in the air when 43-year-old fishing guide Mike Kuczynski, owner of the Eureka Fly Shop, meets me below the levee, on the last bit of road to touch the Klamath for the next 26 miles. We clamber into his 18-foot jet boat, then rip upstream through a long, green bend.

It's raining, by the way. That's so normal here—50

The die-off of 35,000 salmon couldn't be ignored. When the tribes convinced FedEx to deliver 500 pounds of stinking fish to the Interior Department, the Klamath finally got Washington's full attention.

to 80 inches a year—that Kuczynski doesn't seem to notice. ("Oh, this isn't rain," an innkeeper told me. "It's only rain when it bounces.") Kuczynski guides about 100 days a year, following the steelhead trout migrations in the summer and fall. Spawning chinook and coho salmon, coastal cutthroat trout, and shad also make their way up the Klamath and its major tributaries, the Trinity, Salmon, Scott, and Shasta. Only the big fall runs are fished commercially, on the coast, and anglers work the lower river from late summer to early winter. The landscape here is perpendicular—sharp cliffs or broad, alluvial gravel bars. Towering redwoods fringe the banks. Requa was once a thriving town built on lumber and salmon, but both began to run short in the early 20th century. After 1964, when a hundred-year flood took out what remained of the old fish canneries, the only structure left was the Requa Inn, built out of redwood planks, high on a hillside. The inn still serves fishermen and boaters, but for two weeks last September the main view was of thousands of suppurating salmon, 94 percent of them adult chinook.

First the salmon stacked up in a long pool, waiting for the rush of water that signals the fall migration. When it didn't come, they started dying, five deep on the stony banks, filling the air with an inescapable stench.

Everyone lost something. The inn lost business. The Yurok and Hoopa cut back on their annual quotas, to protect future runs. Commercial fishermen along a 250-mile stretch of the Oregon and California coasts lost their entire fall season.

I ask Kuczynski to show me where the kill happened, but he just shakes his head, casting off drops of water as we hurtle upstream. "They were everywhere," he says, "along both sides of the river, all the way up to the Trinity. Forty miles or so. We first started to notice several dead fish on the bottom of the river. That was on a Tuesday. By Thursday, there were dead salmon floating down everywhere. People had to stand in dead salmon to fish."

I ask him to describe the smell. "Dead salmon," he says.

So what killed them? Kuczynski first disclaims any special knowledge, then points to how low and nutrient-rich the Klamath was last year. Although both factors are related to farming, nature arguably played a role, too: The size of the run was only slightly above average, but the sizes of the individual fish were staggering, a reflection of a slow, irregular recovery in the baitfish stocks that salmon gorge on during their three years at sea.

"I've never seen so many salmon that were so big," he says. "The average size on the Klamath is eight to 12 pounds. These were 30- and 40-pounders. Everywhere. Fish up to 50 pounds." Trapped in isolated pools, the big salmon crowded against one another, vulnerable to oxygen deprivation and disease.

Now, in the early spring, steelhead are returning to the river, but as we pass into the Yurok Indian Reservation, which runs one mile deep on each side of the Klamath for 44 miles, we cruise right over some great fishing spots. One hole at a wide bend looks perfect, but Kuczynski doesn't even slow down.

"You see that house?" he shouts over the motor's roar. I hadn't: Buried in the trees is a round, Yurok-style dwelling. "The owner doesn't like people fishing in her hole. Last year she took a shot at a fishing guide—a new guy who didn't know what he was doing. He parked right on top of her hole and started fishing. Bam. Four or five shots, actually." He throws a wave at the hut. "Don't worry," he says. "She's a terrible shot."

So this is Northern California. These wet forests have always drawn prickly individualists, along with a fair number of redwood rednecks and chainsaw hippies. Add a few DEA squads roving over huge federal land holdings in dark helicopters and the result is a cocktail of paranoia straight out of Vineland, Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel about a fictional town somewhere near here, where addled sixties refugees battle rogue federal agents. Locals still talk about living in "Jefferson State," which began as a 1940s plan to secede from both California and Oregon and endures as a peculiar Klamath state of mind.

The fish kill brought out some of Jefferson State's wiggier citizens, including Barry Clausen, a self-styled crusader against ecoterrorism who lives in nearby Redding. Clausen told the Siskiyou Daily News that the salmon were killed not by low water but by "foreigners" in "armed boats" traveling up and down the Klamath. What he meant was that Mexican drug dealers had killed the fish. At least five clandestine labs for producing crystal meth, or crank, have been found in the backcountry, largely staffed by illegal immigrants and replete with toxic chemicals that get dumped who knows where.

Kuczynski finally pulls the boat into a gravel bar. We wade the cold water, fishing for an hour in the driving rain. Almost routinely, a steelhead tugs on my line with the soft double jerk of someone pulling my sleeve. This happens a dozen times, but nothing sticks.

The scene around me is silent, rainy, cold, and spectacular. A blue-green world. Kuczynski lights a pipe, and dragon puffs of tobacco ghost down the river. I keep an eye peeled for gun-toting crankheads. Maybe they don't come out in the rain.

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