An event approaching the miraculous

In all the crippling political cynicism and pervasive despair, something unutterably glorious is occurring.

First, let’s get the sinister and grotesque out of the way

In the National Post this week I put together something like a rogues’ gallery in the hopes of assisting readers through the deafening noise emanating from the clash of “narratives” involved in the collapse of diplomatic relations between Canada and India.

I may have mentioned here previously in this newsletter a rule of thumb I’ve devised that readers might find useful: Whenever you read the word “narrative” in a sentence, unless it’s in quotation marks or is used in an ironic or literary context, be on your guard.

Pay very, very close attention to the function of that word in the sentence. It almost always occludes rather than illuminates. An exception is the occurrence of the term “false narrative.” It’s a shame, really, because that term is ordinarily employed to offer a good-faith criticism; my objection is that it’s grammatically redundant. If what we mean to notice is a lie, or an untruth, we should be clear about it.

There’s a line in my National Post piece: The whole story is being put to the purpose of a long-standing popularity contest between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Justin Trudeau, and merely noticing Canada’s unclean hands in the contest is to risk coming to the attention of the authorities at Global Affairs’ foreign-interference watchdog, the Rapid Response Mechanism.

In that ten-page document, the term “narrative” appears 21 times. I don’t mean to assert that the term is being used disingenuously, exactly, but it’s necessary to notice something. To the extent that “Modi-aligned narratives” can be readily detected in the “journalism” about the diplomatic fracture, the Canadian media landscape is dominated by what you could call “Trudeau-aligned narratives.” This doesn’t render the RRM analysis entirely useless, but still.

You’ll find that same word “narrative” littering the landscape of the residential-schools debates in Canada, like improvised explosive devices in rhetorical minefields where journalism should be. When you’re done here, on that subject, here’s something new. It’s the video of an interview with Father Cristino Bouvette, in a too-rare exercise in candour and honesty about the subject.

Fr. Bouvette is an Indigenous priest who has served as a kind of interlocutor between the Vatican and Indigenous peoples. In the interview, he addresses the mistakes the Church made in the immediate aftermath of the Kamloops story, and in a sympathetic way he addresses Catholics who feel that their own clergy failed to defend them in the unprecedented wave of violence, bigotry and lies that was set in motion in May, 2021.

And now for the thing that’s putting a spring in my step these days. It’s great to be able to write about this, because The Real Story content isn’t usually very happy-making.

It’s because of the time of year. I wake up every morning to the sound of sea lions barking because the salmon have come home to us again, and here’s a story far from the coast that hasn’t got anywhere near the attention it deserves: 'Overwhelmed with fish': record sockeye run numbers through Okanagan Valley, with salmon returning further north.

A miracle in the desert

It’s difficult to resist the temptation to read too much into this. If it doesn’t make you fall to your knees in gratitude and wonder, that’s okay. Just to know what is happening here should be enough to knock you off your feet.

As recently as 1994, a mere 1,977 sockeye salmon spawners were counted in the Okanagan River. As of last Tuesday, the count is up to 300,000 fish. It’s a story that begins with stupidity and laziness but has since evolved into story about human ingenuity, dedication and natural resilience. It’s a “success story,” a wonderful story, but that’s not even the half of it. Most of it isn’t about us at all.

To begin to appreciate what is taking place as I write this, you’ll need know something about this particular tribe of sockeye.

The Ancient Mariner, home to die and make life to begin again.

Coyote got them through, by killing a witch

From the earliest days of the Holocene Epoch, these fish have been returning to the Okanagan watershed in uninterrupted cycles that confound the imagination, as accounts of the life stories of Pacific salmon always do. But these fish are not like other salmon, and they’re not like other sockeye.

For one thing, they are born and they die in a forbidding, unwelcoming and exceedingly unlikely place, a strange countryside where a third of all of British Columbia’s endangered animal species persist and a third of all of B.C.’s endangered plant species are found as well. It’s not the sort of countryside where salmon are known to flourish, even to be present, for that matter.

It’s nowhere near the temperate rainforests of cedar and fir and spruce and that vast ecological superstructure of optimal hydrology, gravel distribution, temperature and nutrients. There are no cold mountain streams here. The Okanagan sockeye arise and die in the northern reaches of the Great Sonoran Desert in a landscape of mesquite and bunchgrass, prickly pear and sage, tiger salamanders, sage thrashers and screech owls, rubber boas, spotted bats, painted turtles and Great Basin spadefoot toads.

Over the years, the Okanagan sockeye’s natal nursery and necropolis had been reduced to a five-kilometre stretch of the Okanagan River between the town of Oliver and McIntyre Bluff, mostly to a single kilometre just below Park Rill Creek, within the Osoyoos Indian reserve. It’s pretty much the only place where the river hadn’t been turned into a canal.

Most sockeye spawn at four years of age, and some are five-year-olds. Okanagan sockeye come home to spawn as three-year-olds, and yet when they return to freshwater they will have travelled farther into the North Pacific Ocean in their brief lives than any other sockeye run in North America or Russia.

When they set out on that seaward journey at the end of their first year of life, after tumbling down the Okanagan and then down the Columbia River to that great river’s mouth at Astoria, they enter the Pacific larger than any other sockeye smolts, about the size of armour-piercing bullets. When they come home to ascend the Columbia and the Okanagan to spawn, they are the smallest of all Pacific sockeye spawners.

In their two years in the ocean, they swim to the vicinity of the midway point between San Francisco Bay the southern capes of Japan’s Hokkaido Island, spending most of their high-seas sojourn in the krill-rich waters just south of the Aleutian Islands. The movement of their pelagic orbit is as mysterious as that of any of the Pacific salmon, but it’s unique to them, determined as with other salmon runs by something in the night sky or some subtle movement in the needle of a molecular compass we know nothing about, and then the chiming of some clock that makes them turn homeward.

To get home, they must traverse nearly 1,000 kilometres of freshwater roaring at them head-on. Roughly half of them ordinarily die as they battle their way around the Columbia’s nine mainstem dams, through various concrete ladder systems and fish-passage structures around the Bonneville Dam, the Dalles, John Day, McNary, Priest Rapids, Wanapum, Rock Island, Rocky Reach, and Wells. Then they turn into the Lower Okanagan.

They’ll linger and wait for the summer to wane, for the Okanagan River to cool, but they can’t tarry long. They cross into Canada just below Osoyoos Lake, where there’s only a narrow horizontal band of water between the fatally warm surface and the oxygen-depleted water below. In most years, half the survivors die in that final leg of their journey through the lake.

I am at a loss to express how humbled I am about all of this.

The Place of Death

Until about 20 years ago, when I first became preoccupied with Okanagan sockeye and started making a small contribution to the righteous mischief about their human-caused predicaments, McIntyre Bluff was the place where their journey ended. It was the place where the story of the Upper Columbia Basin’s ancient chinook salmon had come to an end as well. It was as far as they were allowed to go.

It’s a haunted place. As the story goes, a group of Secwepemc marauders from the north were making their way across a high sage plateau on a moonless night in late summer. An old blind man warned them that the plateau ended in a sheer drop into a deep canyon, but they didn’t listen. In the morning some local Inkameep women who were making their way along the river noticed that the cliff face below McIntyre Bluff was stained in blood. At first they thought some deer must have fallen, but then they noticed all the corpses in the saskatoon bushes.

Back in those times it was understood that Coyote is the one who made it possible for the sockeye salmon to establish a home for themselves in the Okanagan River. He’d subdued a witch at the mouth of the Columbia who was preventing sockeye from colonizing the interior. He tied her to a board and put her out to sea. He later slew a monster at Celilo Falls and commanded seagulls to escort the sockeye further upriver. But by the 1950s there was a dam at McIntyre Bluff, operated by the South Okanagan Land and Irrigation District, just north of the Deer Park Estates trailer park and Gallagher Lake Autobody, on Highway 97.

I guess it was partly anger that first drew me to tell this story, in an anthology edited by Sean Virgo, The Eye in the Thicket. I was angry because the Americans had done wonders with their massive dams on the Columbia, and yet here was this two-bit barrier at McIntyre Bluff that could have been easily improved by a few sticks of dynamite. This was my way of thinking, anyway.

The dam had begun as a simple weir, and it was all well and good to divert water into an irrigation ditch to sustain the orchards of bright red Okanagan apples that made a way of life for soldiers returned from the First World War. But the dam was expanded and hardened over the years, until the salmon could not pass.

The ancient habitats of salmon in the watersheds of Vaseaux Lake, Skaha Lake and Okanagan Lake became inaccessible. They say the chinook salmon that used to spawn in the streams around Okanagan Lake were as big as young boys. The old Inkameep people said that Coyote himself had first brought them up the river, carrying them on his tail, and then the chinook were gone, having died at McIntyre Bluff.

But the unimaginable has been made real this year. The first chinook salmon in living memory made it all the way to Mission Creek in Kelowna a few weeks ago. A lone male, but it’s a start.

It was about 15 years ago that the Okanagan Nation Alliance, the Ministry of Forests and the Operations people at Natural Resources figured out a way to integrate passages gates into the structure of the McIntyre Dam. Every year, things get better. There are improvements still to be made.

So there it is, 300,000 sockeye have made it to the Okanagan River, and I am indescribably happy.