One Fish, Two Fish, Bye Fish

NIMBUS â€”  Thousands of American River chinook salmon are returning to spawn at the Nimbus Hatchery, and the Department of Fish and Game is inviting the public to witness the event.

--From a department press release

Some days California fairly crackles with news. Canyon fires, political hanky-panky, earthquakes, celebrity scandals--take your pick, a journalist’s paradise. Other days you drive out to Nimbus and watch the salmon spawn.

I came to this November ritual on the banks of the American River as a novice, and I learned more about the life cycles of salmon than it is possible to share in this space. So many surprises. So much to tell. The first surprise was the size of the crowd. About 50 people had turned out on a rainy Monday in November to watch fish mate. “This is nothing,� a hatchery worker said. Some years as many as a half-million people visit the hatchery.

“You should have been here the day after Thanksgiving,� the worker went on. “The parking lot was overflowing. We had grandparents, kids in strollers. I’m not sure why, but everyone seems to want to come out here after turkey day and watch the fish. It’s like a tradition or something.�

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Driving up to “witness the event,� to borrow the Fish and Game publicist’s wonderful phrase, I had imagined a scene like something from “A River Runs Through It.� Lots of trees and leaping fish and mysterious shaking in the eddies. This would not be the case. The facility consists mainly of corrugated tin buildings and rectangular fish ponds. It sits hard by Highway 50, and is surrounded by the eastern suburbs of Sacramento. The dominant sound is the rumble of traffic.

The hatchery was built in 1955 after Central Valley Project dams deprived salmon of access to their natural spawning grounds upstream on the American River. The hatcheries would do for the fish what they no longer could do for themselves--re-create. It is, as everyone seems to agree, a less than perfect solution, and whether the trade-off is worth it remains a question of great controversy. Those who fish for a living, or march in the environmental movement, see it one way. Those who farm, or live on a flood plain, see it another.

The people who visited the hatchery did not seem overly concerned with such societal implications. They were interested in fish. Science can tell us what guides mature salmon back from the Pacific to the very freshwater spawning grounds where they themselves were created. It is the chemistry, the smell, of the river. What draws half a million people to this hatchery each year is, for those who work here, a more vexing mystery.

“I don’t know why,� I was told by one worker. “It’s something about seeing fish. It’s like they are just drawn here or something.�

The visitors came in various combinations--grandparents with somewhat reluctant-looking teen-agers in tow, parents with preschoolers, packs of retirees. They stood under umbrellas at the fish ladder, watching the huge salmon lunge toward holding pools. They studied the displays in the visitor center--jars of maturing eggs, glass boxes filled with stuffed fish and fowl.

Fish and Game “interpreters� floated about, at times making awkward attempts to field the birds-and-bees inquiries of adult and child alike. “Things are just going to happen to you when you mature and become an adult,� one told a young boy. “You know, like you will get hairy armpits.�

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The main event was the actual “spawning� operation, and for me this offered the most startling surprise of the adventure. I had recalled vaguely that salmon die after spawning. I had not been aware that, in the hatchery, the reproduction process begins with the killing of the fish. To borrow from Hemingway, the little death is preceded by the Big Death. What a lousy concept.

I stood with about 20 others and watched through a glass window as the fish, already knocked out with oxygen, were slid along a steel table to a man who wore a green rain suit and wielded an orange hammer. “When he hits them with the hammer,� a veteran visitor explained to us virgins, “they are basically dead.�

The hammer, we were further instructed, was reserved for males. Females were run through a device an interpreter described as “sort of like a guillotine.� Next, the workers opened the dead fish to unleash their loads of sperm or eggs. These were mixed together into plastic trays. From this mixing would come, hopefully, the salmon of tomorrow. Ah, the wonders of creation.

See what you can learn in California with a day to kill.