Nehalem (Place People Live)

Hap Tivey

Description

Nehalem explores the impact of illegal international fishing on a community where the ocean provides practical and spiritual meaning for local lives and relationships. Surfers and fishermen from a small Oregon harbor town respond to the threat of salmon extinction, when miles of deadly drift nets begin harvesting their coastal waters.

This exciting drama unfolds at a time when national media had not yet reported the devastating effects of factory ships slaughtering the ocean's wildlife. It looks back at a time when protecting the environment meant joining with trusted neighbors and fighting alone against the overwhelming power of multinational interests and corporate greed.

The deeper theme of the story examines how people manage practically and spiritually, when indifferent authority threatens the foundation of their community. Surfing transforms from daring sport to spiritual path, and deep ocean fishing evolves from practical livelihood to environmental survival.

Sujets

• Thrillers
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 05 avril 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456602529
• Langue: English

Extrait

Nehalem
(Place People Live)
A Novel
Hap Tivey
 


Copyright 2011 by Hap Tivey
 
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form.
 
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0252-9
 
 
Design and Cover by Liminal Light
 
Liminal Light Press
Suite 11R
1 Union Square South
New York, New York 10003
 
This book is solely a work of fiction. Characters, names, places, dates, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Maps have been redrawn, times changed and facts altered. Anyone wishing to find an accurate guide to surfing, hiking or fishing in these pages may be sorely disappointed. Any resemblance to actual locations, events, or persons, alive or dead, is entirely coincidental.
 


Foreword
To glimpse the imminent possibility of wild salmon extinction, one might look at a single historically abundant species. At one time, British Columbia’s Frazer River was second only to the Columbia in the scale and magnitude of its fishery and remains the last of the enormous river drainages that survive essentially free of hydraulic impoundments that strangle the migration of salmon. It also drains some of the greatest wilderness regions remaining in North America. In spite of that, 2007 saw the number of Sockeye salmon reduced to a count of approximately ten million. Before that number became a carefully monitored statistic used for wildlife management, the Sockeye population may have been ten to twenty times as large. The Pacific Salmon Commission, an organization created by joint treaty between Canada and the United States in 1985, estimates the number of Sockeye salmon returning in 2009 will be reduced to approximately 1.3 million. That number represents less than one half of the returning population predicted by 2008 figures. These numbers represent population declines greater than fifty percent each year.
Unlike Chinook and Coho, which are more highly prized and aggressively fished, Sockeye have traditionally maintained healthy wild populations. After the Columbia died, the Sacramento River Basin hosted the largest Chinook salmon run on the continental U.S. coast and a far more chilling statistic emerged this year from that watershed. In 2002, the Pacific Fisheries Management Council estimated the fall run of wild Sacramento Chinook at 775,000. An estimated 6,000 wild salmon are expected to return in 2009 – despite the fact that all commercial Chinook fishing (within the U.S. fleet) has been banned.
Virtually all commercial salmon fishing along the west coast of the continental US has been reduced to a tiny fraction of what it was four decades ago and this year, for the first time, major drainages have been closed to legitimate hard working fishermen, who are now subsidized to stay out of the water and wait. Presumably we are waiting for the return of wild fish to repopulate the rivers, but wild fish have inexplicably vanished and hatchery bred fish only know the route back to their hatcheries. Furthermore, hatchery stock’s ability to reproduce declines by approximately forty per cent with each inbred generation. The great North American breeding drainages are rapidly becoming barren. The fact that commercially farmed and hatchery bred salmon appear readily available for purchase disguises the fact that the sustainable populations of wild fish are spiraling uncontrollably toward extinction.
Numerous explanations for the devastating declines exist, including dams, clear-cut logging’s destruction of watershed, unregulated international fishing techniques, pesticide pollution, diseases and parasites broadcast into wild populations from fish farms and most recently, temperature change as a result of global climate shifts. Most of these receive some kind of publicity and it is most probable that all of them contribute, but addressing them in a factual scientific manner requires a different kind of book.
Nehalem is simply a story, which hopefully may raise some concern about our culture’s willingness to embrace extinction justified by commercial profit. It was inspired by people who enriched my life with their adventures, many of which I shared to some degree. I especially appreciate the time and effort my friends donated to help me fish, surf, and kayak along the magnificent Pacific Coast’s beaches and archipelagos.
 
 

 
For All The Empty Streams
A water bird comes and goes,
Leaving no traces at all
Yet it knows
How to go its own way.
 
Anonymous
 
August 10
4:30 AM: South Jetty
Neahkahnie Mountain absorbed dawn’s color, and night ended with an Oregon mist that blurred the horizon in mirror haze. Before warmth moved the air, Nehalem’s jetties slowly materialized, levitating into that monochrome void like mandibles sampling Pacific offerings. They collected the night detritus that would ride the rising tide through the river mouth into the bay, and before the ocean pressed in or light revealed the placid water, small black shapes assembled between the jaws, where they hovered, like bits of punctuation poised to structure the day’s inevitable text.
Two boys listened to surf breaking in the distance as they climbed into the moist darkness surrounding the south jetty. They had left their trailer before dawn, following a familiar route lit first by streetlights and finally by harbor lights to a trail that led up through jagged blocks of black basalt. When they reached the concrete surface on top, the older boy walked ahead shining his flashlight into sharp holes on either side of the crumbling pavement and then onto the path behind him, reassuring his brother’s steps. Salt spray and floods had eaten away sections of the road that once allowed motorized access to the jetty’s beacon and in shadow-less light, dark boulders merged with the voids between them. They passed the rusted warning sign prohibiting vehicles, and continued slowly for the first hundred yards until dawn challenged the weakening flashlight.
When distinct details of the world finally appeared, they stopped to listen and the older boy pointed the beam at the water where it met the rocks. He studied the swell as it slid past barnacles, mussels, a few starfish and sea anemones wilting in the low tide. Strapped to their backpacks, they carried homemade crab traps constructed with chicken wire bound to sticks. The smaller boy collapsed on the dusty concrete, shrugged off his pack and dropped his feet into a hole. “It sounds like cannons going off. How big do you think it is?”
His brother pointed the dying beam into the haze revealing nothing more than a faintly glowing cone dancing before a long dark shadow. “A lot bigger than you. Definitely overhead, maybe six to eight. I can barely see the north jetty. Doubt if anyone’s in the water. When we get halfway out it should be light enough to tell, but if the swell is this big over here, it’s gotta be overhead on the north jetty. This glassy, they’ll be out.”
The younger brother tightened his sweatshirt hood as he swung his legs between the boulders. “Let’s stay here till it’s light. Your batteries suck. Half the time I don’t know where you’re going.”
Quinn offered the flashlight with a note of impatience in his voice. “I want to get out there while the tide is still slack. You take the light. I don’t need it anymore.”
“I don’t need it, either.”
“Take it.”
“I don’t want it. I just want to sit here a while.”
Quinn ignored Rhys’ request and added, “If you don’t want to use the light, just stay behind me and watch where you’re going. It’s getting light, but I don’t want to carry you back with a broken leg.”
Rhys didn’t get up. “Why are we out here in the dark anyway? We can catch crabs anytime.”
“I already told you, pea brain. You catch crabs on an incoming tide just after it turns; tide brings in food, but crabs don’t eat when it starts rippin. They hunker down in the rocks.”
“Smells like the tide’s turning right here and I’m cold. We’re supposed to be hunkered down in bed like normal kids.”
“Normal kids don’t surf. You want to surf?”
Rhys considered the sound and the dark water. “Not out there.”
Quinn’s irritation increased with Rhys’ stubborn refusal to accept his authority. “You want a surfboard; you sell crabs to the Crab Pot. You want to catch crabs; you take the weather.”
Rhys started untying his trap. “You sound like dad. I’m for fishing here.”
“Crabbing dill weed. We need to go all the way to the point.”
“You just want to go out that far so you can see them better. There’s plenty of crabs right here. I’m tired of lugging this crap.”
Quinn began walking. “Fine, you stay. I’m going out where I can catch crabs. I told you not to come – that this was too hard for a little kid. Just sit here for an hour till I get back and don’t fall in a hole if you try to catch up.”
“I didn’t say I was staying. I said I wanted to fish here.”
“Crab. I’ll carry your trap, but I get half of anything that comes up.”
“No way. I’m putting it in here. I’ll get the crabs out when we come back.”
The older boy stopped and looked across the channel at the junction of the north jetty and the sand spit, where headlights appeared and started a slow crawl out the access road that remained intact on the north side. “Alright, I’m waiting three minutes; then I’m leaving. Don’t slide off the rock slime and get drowned.”
Quinn watched passively as Rhys picked the remains of several fried chicken wings from a greasy fast food container at the bottom of his pack and straightened the sticks inside the trap. He baited it by suspending the bones with heavy twine in the center of the crumpled wire cage, and attached a length of clothesline, which he tested as he lowered it into the rocks below the path. Rhys descended to a large flat boulder a few feet above the high water line and dropped the trap beside him, while h