salmon coast

I'm in the beautiful Broughton Archipelago, at the Salmon Coast Field Station on Gilford Island -- home to noble fir, hemlock, and salal, huckleberry, cougar, and belted kingfisher.

We're working to sample individuals of chinook salmon, collecting tiny cuts of their heart and gill tissue to screen for viruses, but it's been slow; the fish aren't biting in this area. So we occupy ourselves with the tasks of not-science:

Coady built a fish smoker and we keep it running all day. Two early morning fishing trips out of Cramer Passage left us with several pink salmon and a few coho; we feast and feed the green alder fueled fire below the screens of fish strips, salmon candy for visitors and for the winter. We haul firewood up the hill, clean garlic bulbs from the garden, and watch the water for humpback whales lolling and rolling in front of Echo Bay. We harvest and chop kale, dig potatoes, and bake rhubarb cake.

Every day-or-so, I hike into the dockside community of Echo Bay, following up our waterline to a stream where our drinking water and showers are piped down from. From there, I follow a stream down to the estuary, scouring up and down the streambank for mushrooms and forest treasures; salmon bones, flowering succulents, animal scat, ripe huckleberries.

I jump in the green-grey cold sea every day, eyes open under the surface, looking for hazy fish darting between the kelp, log-floats, and barnacle-shoreline. Yesterday a seal lifted his head above the water, watched me kick my fin-feet through the deep. This evening some Pacific white-sided dolphins came close while we were swimming; the ocean is alive.

Coady and I run around on his little boat; we visit the nearby Blackfish Lodge, a floating fishing lodge located across the passage from us to collect samples for our project, to eat birthday cake, and giggle with four-year-olds. After the party, we peer through the pitch dark to guide our ride back to the station. Thousands of bioluminecent fish shoot away from the hull of the open aluminum boat; their bright silver bodies obscured by the opaque darkness of the midnight waters' surface -- our route guided by the forested silhouette shape of the hills imagining a whale-propelled galaxy of plankton exploding beneath our tiny boat.