Teaming up with David James Duncan to remove lower Snake dams

Posted on February 2, 2010 | Filed Under: Dams & Dam Removal , Restoring Rivers

Amy Souers Kober
Senior Director of Communications

Author and river advocate David James Duncan

American Rivers is teaming up with writer David James Duncan to restore the Columbia and Snake rivers in the Pacific Northwest. American Rivers has played a lead role crafting the economic, scientific and legal case to remove four dams on the lower Snake River to save the basin’s wild salmon. Duncan’s passionate and poetic voice has helped inspire hope and action in support of dam removal. I personally appreciate the humor and spirit he brings to this often frustrating and sometimes depressing state of affairs.

Duncan, the author of books including The River Why, My Story as Told by Water and The Brothers K will speak at our Northwest regional office’s 8th annual dinner and auction in Seattle on March 4.

Here he is in an interview with 1859 magazine, describing taking a film crew up into the Snake River’s headwaters and unexpectedly finding spawning salmon.

An enormous female spring chinook swept into the crystalline wilderness water and spawning gravel at the tail of the pool. Jim Norton (the actor Ed Norton's brother, a salmon lover like me, and the progenitor of the film) and I went nuts. Then the East Coast fellas saw her, caught on to the one in a million miracle of it, and went nuts too. These men had been filming every techno-debacle in the Columbia/Snake system starting with a time lapse of the eight dam gauntlet.

At the sockeye facility at Redfish the techno-utopians who run the place had written WELCOME HOME SOCKEYES! on the laboratory wall where they kill and slit open the guts of every returning fish and start throwing antibiotics and antifungals to fight the head-rot the salmon get from concrete tank abrasions, and maybe athlete's foot ointment and Preparation H too … So though she was 600 feet below us -- or if you're into Symbolism, because she was 600 feet below us -- we were blown away by this perfect fish, huge and unmarked, her body looking as if the ocean and estuary were a quarter mile away.

“Is there a male? Is she alone? Is it useless that she made it?” The crew started worrying … As if in answer to their worry she was joined by a jack -- a male of 6 or 7 pounds. A mere boy in salmon terms, but carrying milt, and so better than nothing. And his presence stimulated her. Right there in bright sun, water clear as air, that queen of a salmon turned on her side and began ramming a redd into the spine of this continent, her body shining like a silver knife blade, water churning, stones visibly flying, not a mark on her, the jack going nuts, swimming circles around her, over her, under her…

Far downstream from the Snake headwaters, in a Portland courtroom, a federal judge is reviewing the administration’s salmon plan for the Columbia-Snake. As it stands now, the plan doesn’t do nearly enough to recover the salmon. American Rivers is committed to working with the fishermen, farmers and communities of the basin to find a lasting salmon recovery solution.

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