What We Saw at the FIsh Orgy

So, in a normal year we'd have gone to the Tea Festival this past weekend, down at the Seattle Center. But with furloughs and shutdowns and what not, we're on something of an austerity kick right now. So instead of going around various booths and trying (and buying) a lot of teas (plus entry fee, plus parking), we went down to Dash Point (no entry fee, thanks to our year-long pass) and had a picnic on the beach Saturday.* Then on Sunday went to see if we could see the salmon run on the Cedar River.

The salmon come up the river every year, of course, but this is the first time we had advance warning via a posting from Bruce Cordell (thanks, Bruce). The Renton Library, which is built as a bridge right over the river, offers a spectacular view of the river at any time; turns out it also serves as a good viewing platform for watching the salmon directly below. The Cedar River is wide and fast and shallow, having been artificially engineered to be that way back the better part of a century ago by the idiots who re-routed all the rivers in King County (destroying the Black River entirely, leaving behind only one small shallow lake). But it does make for a fine salmon-viewing stream. We walked upriver a bit to a second bridge, and then crossed I-405 (via a pedestrian underpass I'd never known was there) to discover that there's a weir on the river (never seen a weir before, though I've often read about them, most memorably in my favorite Dick Francis novel). Having a variety of places to choose from, we managed to see a lot of salmon over the course of the hour or so we were poking around.

This was all the easier because (most of) the salmon turn bright red when they're swimming upriver to spawn, making them look rather like koi; the rest turn grey, looking and acting for all the world like giant minnows (which, I guess, they are). One of the riverbank docents told us that in addition to the main (Sockeye?) salmon, a few King salmon come up the river too, and that all their nests are identified, marked, and protected. A little later Janice actually spotted what must have been a king salmon (bigger and much longer than the other ones, bright red with pale coloring at either end) making its way under some overhanging foliage, either making a nest or scoping out good spots for one.

I didn't keep any kind of count, but we did see a lot of fish, and thoroughly enjoyed our outing. And while seeing the fish-ladders at the Ballard Locks a few years ago was interesting too, seeing the actual fish, and in natural surroundings like this, was all the better. Plus we learned there's a walking path on the south side of the river extending quite a ways upstream (apparently there's a dog-park up that way) -- something to come back and check out another time -- and that there's a dam some twenty miles up river, at a place called Landsdown.

What struck me most was the sense of seeing something as primal and impressive as birds migrating. And a sense of hope that, no matter how much we mess things up, nature has a way of doing an end-run around us. These salmon, upon a time, used to swim up the Duwamish to where it spit into the Green River and the Black, then up the Black River into Lake Washington, then up the Cedar to their spawning grounds. Now there's no more Black River they swim past the Ballard Locks to Lake Union, then through another set of locks into Lake Washington, and then up the Cedar River from there. Quite a detour, but they manage to work it out. A good thing to see, and a good thing to be reminded of.  And, all in all, a good day.


--John R.


*it wd have been Salt Water State Park, but we missed the turn-off and decided to try Dash Point, where we'd not been in a long time, instead. Some beach crows turned out to be happy with that decision.


current reading: TARAN WANDERER by Lloyd Alexander
current viewing: DUSK MAIDEN OF AMNESIA, MAZES AND MONSTERS, DOCTOR WHO new series season five (next to last story).