Don’t be Too Quick to Judge!
November 16, 2006
As I was filleting salmon for some successful clients one morning along the banks of the lower American River, a lady I did not recognize walked up to me. I could tell from her attire that she had been jogging along the bike trail. Apparently, she’d seen me cleaning fish and came over to investigate. Her scowl told me her visit wasn’t going to be a pleasant one.
I looked back down at the issue at hand and finished removing two beautiful fillets from the salmon and then I took its carcass and tossed it back into the river. At that point, the woman decided she need to stick her nose where it had no business going.
“I should report you to the authorities!,” she said in a voice dripping with equal parts of disgust and anger.
“Huh?”
“It’s people like you who ruin the beauty of the great outdoors,” she continued, her scrunched face suddenly turning lava red.
“I know I’m not the best-looking guy in the world, but don’t you think you’re being a little extreme?”I asked with more than a hint of sarcasm. I didn’t know what this woman was up to, but I didn’t like her tone.
She pondered that for a moment, realized I was being a wise-ass and got even hotter. She covered the 15 feet that separated us in an instant and then got right up in my face.
“That’s it, I’m calling the police,” she screamed. She was so mad now that she was spitting when she spoke.
I wiped a droplet of her venom off my cheek that had shot out of her mouth when she had emphasized the “P” in police. I looked her in the eye and asked her in a firm, clear voice to kindly leave us to our business. I was starting to get annoyed, but tried to retain an element of professionalism for the clients’ sake.
“You can forget about that,” she yelled. “I’m staying here until the cops come and give you a fine for littering.” She was seething now. I realized that she was referring to the fish guts and started to laugh.
“Are you talking about me throwing the fish carcass back into the river?”
“You’re damn right I am – you’re littering and I hope they throw the book at you!”
I desperately wanted to tell her to march her yuppie, know-it-all self right back to whichever big city she had just moved from, but I opted for a more diplomatic approach. Instead, I gave her a little biology quiz.
Pointing to the freshly cleaned carcass on the riverbed, which had already attracted the attention of three crawfish and a school of opportunistic juvenile squawfish, I asked: “Do you have any idea where the other 50,000 salmon that swim up this river go when they die?”
She was silent.
“They all die in the river,” I said, trying not to sound too condescending. “Every last one of them. And did you know that the dead salmon are the foundation from which all life in this river springs? Yep, the nutrients from their rotting bodies go to feed the baby salmon and steelhead, squawfish and suckers and sculpins; they feed the crawdads and raccoons and vultures and ducks and on and on. Everything in this ecosystem benefits from these nutrients and, mam, I’d be doing this river a disservice by not returning a cleaned salmon to the water. Without these fish, the river would be almost sterile.”
To her credit, she digested all that I had said for a moment and then apologized. She looked a little embarrassed and didn’t hang around for any idle chat. As quickly as she had appeared, the jogger lady headed up the bank to the bike trail and then went on her freshly enlightened way without another word.
That incident, along with several others like it that I’ve had over the years, keeps me coming back to my theory as to why fishing and hunting are such important activities. When you get involved with the life and death process of these sports, you’re exposed to a whole new view of the world. I’ve always said that I think everybody needs to, at least once in their life, kill something and then eat it. By catching a trout, cleaning it and then putting it on the grill, you gain perceptive. You learn a little something about yourself and the world in which you live. Same holds true for shooting a duck or a deer and then dressing it out and having it for dinner. People really need to realize that steak comes from cows, not the supermarket; that a chicken breast is really a piece of chicken anatomy, not something that comes in a shrink-wrapped package.
And when that happens, maybe people will understand why a dead salmon thrown back into the river is a good thing.
READER RESPONSE LETTER…
Mr Richey, I thoroughly enjoyed your article on cleaning the salmon. Too many people have no idea where that meal they are eating comes from.
I remember an incident a few years back. Some friends got together for breakfast and one of them ordered pancakes with whipped cream on top. I talked about how good cream is when you skim it from the top of milk after milking the cow. The woman was utterly surprised. She had no idea whipped cream came from a cow. She insisted it came from a can.
Happy writing. I send your articles to my brother up north. We used to fish together as kids and he loves them, too.
Jeri Bartow
Auburn, California
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