“We think of our state as a place built on salmon. Native peoples have been eating salmon in Alaska for more than 11,000 years” From 1843mag
I had salmon on my mind when I decided to move to Alaska 20 years ago. My boyfriend at the time, who was trying to convince me to migrate north with him, grilled up delicious fillets of wild Alaskan sockeye for me. That deep red flesh lured me out of vegetarianism and to higher latitudes; a month after he packed the back of his old Volvo station wagon and hit the Alaska Highway, I stuffed a backpack and two duffels, hopped on a ferry and headed north to join him.
It might be odd that Homer calls itself the “Halibut Fishing Capital of the World” when it’s salmon that truly captures locals’ hearts. Halibut are dun-coloured flatfish; we think of them as meat that swims. Their firm, white flesh is a mild and adaptable ingredient that makes for a good break from salmon. But no one feels a special kinship with halibut. No one gets tattoos of them, either.
When we’re not talking in code , when we talk about salmon we’re talking about fish from two different genera: the Atlantic salmon, a single species –and includes six salmon species each with multiple names. There’s king, otherwise known as chinook; silver/coho; red/sockeye; dog/chum; and pink/humpy, as well as the lesser known masu or cherry salmon, which lives along the coast of Asia from Russia to Taiwan.
Sometime between one and seven years later, the real salmon magic begins – the stuff of myth and metaphor. Using an extremely fine-tuned sense of smell and, likely, the earth’s magnetic field, these fish return to the freshwater sites where they were born. Pressing against the current, flinging themselves up waterfalls, the fish journey home, travelling up to 2,000 miles upstream in the process. Most don’t eat during the voyage.
In Alaska, we pride ourselves on having a different salmon story. Alaska has more miles of coastline than all of the other states combined and the bulk of our coastal waters are salmon habitat. We think of our state as a place built on salmon.
Climate change is a likely culprit for why salmon are returning to Alaska’s rivers smaller than in years past. Our oceans are changing too of course – with rising temperatures, increasing blooms of toxic algae, and shifts in the populations of salmon predators and prey. These changes, coupled with the release of unsustainable numbers of hatchery salmon, are also likely the reason why some of our highly prized king salmon runs have crashed.
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