Humpies in the Skeena

The night Daddy didn’t come home, the salmon were spawning and dying on the sandbars of the Skeena. A couple of weeks before, he’d called us kids together.

“I want to show you something,” he said. “Get in the car.”

My sister, brother and I piled into Pegasus, the old black Mercury.

Where are we going, Daddy?”

“The salmon are running. we’re going to the Lakelse River to see the fish ladder.”

For what seemed like hours, we bumped along over the rough gravel road. Each passing car raised a lingering cloud of dust that hung in the air.

“Daddy, why does the road smell oily?”  

“They sprinkle it with bunker fuel to lay the dust. It's volcanic ash, fine as flour.”

We were getting close to the river. As we pulled up and parked., I tried to imagine a fish ladder. The image in my mind was of Daddy’s wooden carpentry ladder. But how could fish swim up a ladder?

We walked down to the river and Dad led the way onto the rickety wooden structure that spanned the wide fast-moving stream. It was scary. To avoid looking in the water, I kept my eyes on Dad’s shabby twisted hush puppies as I walked slowly out behind him.

“Look for movement.” He paused and we stopped behind him, looking where he pointed. I peered down into the black murk of the flowing water.  

“See there. That flash.”

In an instant what had been dark murky water came alive.

“I see them!”

Beneath the dark water they crowded in the thousands, slashing their shiny tails back and forth with astonishing speed.

“So many,” Dad’s voice held awe. He seemed to be talking to himself. “You could practically cross the river on their backs.”

The day he didn't come home was a Saturday. When I came into the kitchen in the morning and he wasn't sitting in his usual chair with a coffee in front of him, I asked Mom where he'd gone.

“I don’t know, my dear. He didn’t come home.” I noticed right away that her voice held no trace of the impatience she usually showed after he went out drinking. He’d never stayed out all night before.

There was no trace in her voice or face of her usual motherly reassurance either. I was shocked.

As she took a log from the woodbox and pushed it into the stove, she seemed to be speaking to herself rather than to me or my brother. “I suppose he’s all right. If anything happened to him, I suppose I’d hear something.” There was doubt in her voice, and puzzlement. It frightened me.

There was only one thing to do. I turned to my brother. “Let’s go down to the river.”

“Here, Sam!” Dave called our dog, and off we went.

We loved going down to the river, and so did Sam. On the sandbars of the Skeena, we witnessed the annual miracle of the salmon run. The life cycle of salmon begins in a small stream, where the fish hatch and grow till they are ready to go to sea. There they feed and develop into large adults. When the adult salmon feel the call to mate, they return to their home streams to spawn. To accomplish this, they must first endure the ordeal of swimming up big salmon rivers. On the final part of their journey, they do not stop even to feed, but simply fight the current to keep moving upstream until they can lay their eggs on home ground. There they die as a new generation begins.

My brother was two years younger, and I spoke to him with pretended confidence. “By the time we get back Daddy will probably be home.” He didn’t answer. Walking on under a sky of steely gray, we smelled the river before we saw it. The wide sandbar where we usually played was littered with dead and dying fish.

During the spawning season, the male fish turn a bright vermilion-orange and grow humps on their upper backs. Called humpies, these fish are so exhausted and slow-moving that you can easily watch their final struggle. They swim, rest, hold their ground, swim again. We watched for awhile, absorbed by the rare chance for a living glimpse of the fish the Skeena was so famous for.

That morning, an overpowering smell of rot hung in the air and the sandbar was littered with stinking carcasses. Awed, we peered into the channel to see the bright orange fish. Some of the humpies had gray spots, wounds, or open sores. It was as if their bodies had begun to rot though they were still alive. Barely.

Dave and I didn’t stay long at the river. After crossing the sandbar to look into the rapidly flowing main channel, we turned homeward by silent mutual consent. Sam was rolling in the sand among the rotting fish carcasses.

“Sam!” When we spoke in unison, laughter lightened our mood. Sam bounded up, ready and willing as always to please.

“Pew!” Dave reproached him. “You stink!” Then in a tone of glowing praise, he said, “You’re a dumb, ugly mutt.”

Sam wagged his tail, then turned and raced after a sandpiper, kicking up gobs of wet gray sand as he went.

We dawdled on the way back. I felt that if we only walked slow enough, Dad would be there when we got home. He wasn’t. Mom still had no idea of his whereabouts. 

Time dragged on and I wondered. Are we fatherless children? How can Mom manage without Dad? She doesn’t work, or have money of her own. Maybe we’ll have to go on welfare. That thought made me cringe. We had seen thin times, but things had never been bad enough to ask for welfare. Sometimes when Dad was away working and didn’t send enough money. Mom would say “the wolf is at the door.” Then would scrounge around in the cupboards and “make something out of nothing.”

When Dad finally appeared, he was sober and sheepish.

“My blessed hope, Leonard,” said Mom. “You had us all worried sick. Where were you?” I could tell she was glad to see him. She was calling him by his name, so she wasn’t mad.

“I spent the night in jail,” he said. We gaped. Except for driving drunk, which many men did, Dad was not a lawbreaker. He'd never been in jail.

Anyway, he was home now. Things would be all right. I looked at Dave and shrugged. While Mom got out the frying pan to make Dad some breakfast, my brother and I went outside to play.