I almost hate pink salmon.
My hands hurt. Pink salmon, aside form being present in excessively large numbers, have sat little kitten/ puppy teeth that nick and scratch and leave your hands rough and scratched. Sometimes you don’t even know you have cuts…until you do something like each dishes in hot water. Ouch!
My back hurts. Pulling in a net that you hope is filled with Chinook and finding that, again, it’s full of pink salmon, is so frustrating. You pull the few Chinook, and maybe a sockeye or two, out and either release of put into tubes…and than you just find a spot and sit down in the river and start untangling the ridiculous number of pink salmon tangled up in the net.
My neck hurts. Same as above.
Every. Damned. Set.
A fee Chinook, and then that mess.
And then. we raft downstream, and do it all over again.
As we rafted along the river Simmy pointed to a log…..it was a bit humbling to see those claw marks in the log. A human would probably have been dragged under the log…..the grizzly…”meh”.
A few ripe fish. A few grizzly tracks, but no bears on the river today, only on the road. But some of the tracks on the river bank were pretty darned fresh!
And that’s a wrap on the river. My back is tired and sore. My hands are nicked, scratched, and a bit ragged. My neck is sore. And I’m pretty sure I’ll have a bruised butt after slipping on som slimy rocks while pushing the raft out. I slipped, stumbled, and the basically gave up and decided falling on my ass was less harmful than a potential fall forward onto my knees on the rocks. A run up and back down the tote road to collect a truck left at the entry point reminds me that I am completely comfortable on some of the worst 4×4 driving that one can entertain, and an entertaining few hours managing data collection after our regular data person took a load of fish back to the hatchery …a three our round trip.
All in all it was a good week, and I am glad I made the effort to overcome the roadblocks to coming up after arriving to discover that half the crew was away and rather than two crews daily, only one crew was possible for each day this week. I was actually truly needed and that was great. I like that I am not a visitor needing baby sitting, and, although I now appreciate the buddy system while crossing faster waters, I know where I fit in on a crew, and the crew doesn’t need to give me any direction.
And probably the nicest thing I heard at the end of this trip was “The community basically accepts that anyone who has been here for ten years is a community member, you’ve been coming for twelve years now. You’re a local now Paige.”
Huge Heart emoji.
I really do love this place and its people. And I am really glad that I was stubborn enough to buck all of the travel issues and find a way to come in here….drive a government vehicle rather than fly, buy groceries instead of take per diems, and decline to overtime to make the trip happen. The work is more important than the entitlements. And it was really nice to receive the gratitude for making the effort in the face of the staff absences.
Same time same place, next year. See you again Bella Coola.