Reasons to jump into our rivers

Mara Leveritt portrait

PHOTO BY GLORIA TOWNE | ALL AROUND TOWNE PHOTOGRAPHY

A young girl, I’d guess about nine, stood with her mother watching the Chinook salmon swim and leap in the concrete holding pens at Tumwater Falls Hatchery. Having recently taken a class on the life cycle of salmon, I was there too, offering information as a Stream Team volunteer.

I’d just explained a bit about how these remarkable fish, after spending several years in the Pacific, had turned around sometime last spring to start a thousand-plus mile journey back to their home in the Deschutes River to spawn. “Why do they jump?” the mother asked.

I began to say something about how strong and athletic these fish have to be to swim upstream against river currents, when the girl jumped to her own conclusion. “I think they jump from jubilation!”

Indeed, these were the survivors—the ones who’d made it back. When the final count is done, staff at the hatchery expect that more than ten thousand salmon will have made the run back to Tumwater.

The ‘escapement’

They’re called “the escapement” because, in the years since they entered the Deschutes as fry, crossed into the saltwater of Puget Sound, and spent most of their lives at sea, they’d escaped being eaten by eagles, seals, whales, bears, and all the other hungry critters, including us, who thrive on salmon.  

And now these prodigious swimmers have returned, where hundreds of delighted watchers like me have come to witness their iconic migration, first at the 5th Avenue Dam and now, finally, at Tumwater.

This arduous return was easier on them a hundred years ago. Descending the Sound on their way home, they made the adjustment from saltwater to freshwater gradually when they reached the estuary where the waters of Budd Inlet and the Deschutes River mixed.

That all changed 74 years ago with the construction of the dam. Suddenly, the salmon’s transition from salt to fresh water became abrupt, an adaptation they had to manage over hours at the base of the dam, while hungry harbor seals stalked them for dinner. On the other side of the dam nowadays, the build-up of silt from the river into Capitol Lake began making it shallower, warmer, and less oxygenated, further stressing the fish.

I was born in a landlocked state without salmon, far from Olympia and its new manmade lake. But by the time I was in high school, dams were going up throughout the U.S. The day before President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, he’d stopped in Arkansas to dedicate a new one.

Years later, I became a reporter there. As segregation’s dark past was trying to fade, dams were reaching their zenith. Yet even then, during what would become the heyday of dam construction, concerns were trickling out. I began reporting on some of those worries.

Two rivers, two dams

This summer, to my delight, I moved to Thurston County, where I was surprised to find two problematic dams waiting. The first is the one on 5^th Avenue, smack in downtown Olympia. The other, a less visible one, is the point near Exit 114 on Interstate 5, where two bridges span the Nisqually River—and where a decades-long accumulation of silt around their bases has made them de facto dams, choking the passage of salmon.

I am now beginning to learn about the momentous decisions that have been made—and that will yet have to be made—to correct the environmental harms these structures are causing. The processes in both cases will be incredibly complex.

Dams themselves are simple ideas. What kid hasn’t tried to block a stream with stones? But removing one requires consideration of significant cultural, political, engineering and financial factors, not to mention constraints like the timing of salmon runs and the demands of human transportation.

I think of it like surgery: the careful application of new science to remove well-intentioned devices that were implanted decades ago but which have proven disastrous over time. As with any intense and lengthy surgery, life-support systems will have to be maintained. Similarly, the order and timing of steps will be critical.

New as I am here, I hope to catch up on what has been done so far, to understand where things stand, and to report on these projects as they unfold. I will lean heavily on the work already done and attempt to wade, as fairly as possible, through various interests and options. I will seek help from the many experts and other good folks whose passion has carried these efforts thus far.

Like salmon heading home, we are all embarking on an essential and challenging endeavor. I look forward to sharing it with you.

Editor's note: This story introduces Mara Leveritt, an award-winning journalist and author, who now makes her home in Olympia. Look for her new column, “Follow the Salmon,” every other week in The JOLT.