The shelves are crammed with merchandise, from moose jerky in plastic bags to dark Belgian chocolate, small armies of colorful booze bottles, moss-green pickles, fishing equipment, cheap plastic toys, an array of hardware and a bunch of videos. The films' titles hint of violence and fairy tales: there is Defiance, Hell to Pay, Massacre at Fort Hollman and God's Gun, but also The Swan Princess.
"Do you have any lead weights, the kind divers use?" asks John. A small blond woman behind the counter says she sure hopes so, and if John waits two minutes she will check her ex-husband's gear: he is -- or was, since his gear is still here -- a diver. We wait, and she returns, shaking her head: no.
"Your ex, he is no longer diving?" I ask. "I don't know, " she replies. "He left me in April, didn't even take any of his stuff. I have been kind of numb all the time, but now I am thinking this: if he left me, maybe I do not really need him?"
I touch her sleeve and ask her name: it is Connie. She is smiling but not really. Maybe she does not need him, or maybe she does. Maybe the loud radio music is pushing the void he left behind into the corner of the store they used to run together, from 8am until 9pm, every day. "This is hard," says Connie, "these long hours, alone." We agree, tell her our names, and she shakes our hands over the counter, hard. Life is what it is, take it or run away from it, screaming, into the big dark woods of British Columbia right behind the store, or anywhere else when this void catches up with you. It is your choice.
"Anything else you need?" Connie asks, and I look around for some food. We have been on a river full of salmon for a good while now, and are running low. Bananas? One dollar each, Connie warns me, and then puts a bunch on the counter and says: let's make it 50 cents each, OK? so you can have them for breakfast. Tomatoes? Again, one dollar each, but hey, you can have them for 50 cents. No discount on chocolate or moose jerky, smoked by a native family living downstream, but we buy them, too, as well as some sandwich bread and a carton of milk. We also pump plenty of drinking water into our camper's tank using Connie's garden hose outside, free of charge. And: yes! Two pairs of swimming goggles for John, adult size, four Canadian bucks each. A pink pair and a black pair, the last of the season.
We return to the Adams River to photograph red waves of migrating salmon, shimmering in the swift current. Watching the largest sockeye run in the century in British Columbia has a Zen quality to it, and we often stand on the river bank and slip into the pulsing rhythm of the swimming fish, hour after hour after hour. John says their red skeins skirting large boulders resemble Andy Goldsworthy's garlands of leaves he sets afloat in streams, working -- according to the sculptor -- "in a quiet and subversive way."
By now, the fish have traveled hundreds of miles from the sea, up the silty Frazer and over the rocks and the clean gravel bottom of the Adams, their primary breeding habitat where they were hatched a few years ago. They have not eaten for many days and have been swimming hard, and as they lose their strength and immunity their smooth skin becomes mottled with infections and a flesh-eating fungus. Fishermen avoid them now, for their once succulent flesh is no longer edible, but black bears, coyotes, wolves, foxes and birds do not mind: good protein does not have to be pretty and sweetly scented to fill their needs.
Pulled by their genetic memory and a sense of smell, the salmon have been swimming by us every day and night for two weeks, alone and in large multilayer groups, swirling around in eddies and jumping as if trying to gain more speed. Their ruby-red sleek bodies are slicing the river, with green heads pointing upstream where -- soon, soon -- the females will turn on one side and twist-flop their bodies to excavate a nest in the gravel for the safekeeping of their eggs, and their mates will spill their milky fish sperm over the eggs. Then the pair will move upstream to repeat the process, until -- utterly spent, their hormones and bodies exhausted -- they will die.
Some sockeye die right by my feet as I slosh across small creeks. They take a running start upstream, struggle with the current, float hopelessly backwards, skitter sideways, struggle upright in the shallow water, and try again and again, until the effort becomes too huge and they lie down, motionless, with their fish mouths opening and closing, opening and closing. At first, stuck on dry land and in shallow water while John snorkels and wades in the river, I try to prop them up so they could swim again, but there is no use and I stop.
We are here because David, who was diving in British Columbia, sent us a glowing message a month ago when we were still in Alaska:
... have you heard about the RECORD sockeye run in the Fraser River...the biggest in at least a century, over 35 million sockeye expected, possibly the greatest migration of any vertebrate on Earth. Peak will be in about six weeks, best place to go is the Adams River.
Let me know if you need more info; I will be going in four weeks.
Four weeks and dozens of messages later, we bushwhack to a small tributary of the Adams and embrace Gayle. David and Conor, a marine biologist from Vancouver, crouch in a shallow pool among slowly circling sockeye and look in their drysuits like a pair of fishing black bears. It takes us one day of scouting the river to get hooked, but we need some underwater equipment: a $100 underwater bag we quickly procured is a bit better than a ziplock bag and about as efficient.
The wheels turn quickly. Gayle and David, a master underwater photographer who took some good images in a couple of days, soon return to the Catskills where we all live, and Gayle raids our basement. She sends us two large parcels of John's underwater gear and more boxes are expedited by B&H in NYC. Aware that the Canadian customs will sit on our equipment for weeks while wrapping it in tons of bureaucratic red tape, we drive across the border to the US, and intercept all parcels in the house of our old friends. Andre and I go back to 1962 and our climbing days in the Polish mountains; Anne walked into our lives only a bit later.
Their living room is soon turned into a messy tinkerer's dream, since John is missing some crucial pieces of equipment and must make them from whatever he can procure. And in spite of his novice status as an underwater photographer, he also wants to build some extra devices to -- no doubt -- impress the sockeye. Days pass, and he labors from dawn to dusk, raiding hardware stores to buy many astonishing items and changing his design often. Anne and Andre feed us, their dogs -- Moopy and Sophie -- walk us, and one day we collect John's contraption we call gulgutiera -- from the "gul-gul' sound made by large sinking objects -- and sprint back to the Canadian border.
The red tape appears instantly, and after the compulsory timeout in the customs' office we are asked two questions, one designed for Alzheimer's patients to test their memory ("name all states of the Union you have lived in since you were 18") and another to see what grade of elementary school we could attend safely ("so, what were you thinking when you woke up one day and said to yourself: 'I want to go to Canada'?")
Eventually the scrupulous Canadians let us in, but it is already dark and BC mountains pile up like beached whales. We detour into a narrow valley and crawl into our bed -- used twice before, as we crossed and recrossed the border -- at Ladyhawke Vineyard in Keremeos. We come another full circle here because we have known the owner, Joann, since 1975: she was a girl then, and lived in the Northwest Territories. Her father, Willy, a legendary bush pilot, flew us to the Arctic and into the laps of the unsuspecting Inuit of Umingmaktok for our first National Geographic magazine assignment. Willy and his Bandits, as he and his pilots were called, infuriated a multitude of aviation regulators, but the people living in the remote Arctic communities he served -- loved him. Joann inherited Willy's grit and before she planted her first Marechal Foch grape stalk in Keremeos two years ago she managed her father's airline.
Next morning we drive further north, and soon kiss the Adams River on both cheeks: the sockeye are still there, swimming, red and glorious. I scout the watershed for the best spots, photograph the river and endless graphics of salmon carcasses, and stumble among mossy boulders. There are many photographers combing the river, including some feisty Japanese divers occupying our favorite pools and acting as if they owned the Adams. Yet at dusk, as they emerge from the bushes along the river, they suddenly become docile. They bend sideways and beg: "Please?" while I open heavy zippers on the backs of their drysuits and set them free.
John is never free. He loves the salmon, the way the fish press on with their dramatic and short lives, but every day his mind chases new possibilities of improving his gulgutiera or the images he is striving for. He photographs all day, every day, and at night he improves or repairs whatever has failed. I list items he has made and altered.
He built a long arm for his strobes, using aluminum bars wrapped in dark pipe insulator to eliminate their reflections; modified his quick-release L-shaped bracket and altered the underwater camera housing's attachment to allow vertical and horizontal formats without repositioning the strobes; stripped and carved the plug and removed the casing to get his wireless remote inside the housing; modified the said housing to accommodate a lens no one else is using underwater; used a commercial window cleaning squeegee with a 15-foot telescopic handle to construct a movable platform for his camera, allowing him to lower it to the bottom of the river and move it around without scaring the fish away from the lens; wrapped a Styrofoam block carved from the sheet yanked from under our camper mattress in a black plastic bag and attached it to the squeegee to gain buoyancy for his under-and-over images.
He also wrapped his wireless transmitter in a ziplock bag while protecting its antenna with cardboard cut from a cereal box and using a neck strap from a nylon cord which traveled with us for 30 years; replaced a flash battery compartment lid (held by a flimsy washer which got lost right away) with a piece of a yogurt container lid; used plenty of electric tape purchased in New Zealand 15 years ago; employed a monopod head and quick-release clamps for controlling the angle of the camera and the arm holding the strobes. Lacking a drysuit, he opted for his water-repelling kayak suit (not fully waterproof) and to prevent drenching he slipped on his rain pants and jacket before the suit went on. He also borrowed a diving hood and mask with a snorkel from Conor.
John's kayaking gloves and a pair of khaki colored Crocs (the fish hated his yellow ones) completed his river attire. And the lead weights, necessary to keep his feet from floating up as he bent down to stick his head underwater? He stuffed ziplock bags full of coarse gravel into his suit's leggings and placed some rocks around his waist.
Yet John's inventions are put aside when another old Arctic friend, Margo, and her family come to see us on the Adams. Margo and her husband Howie flew down from Qurluktuk, an Arctic community in Nunavut: they wanted to be around while their younger daughter gave birth to her first baby, and the little girl -- Pitikhi in Inuktitut, Zasha in English -- arrived safely. John, still dripping, emerges from the river, and we attack the fried chicken the family brought, finishing the feast with our moose jerky.
The dark aromatic meat remind us of 'mipku,' dry caribou strips we carried in our pockets many years ago, when young Margo and the two of us, also young, went fishing for trout in Arctic Sound where her parents had their traditional Inuit camp. After midnight the wind dropped and ferocious Arctic mosquitoes descended on us in dense unforgiving clouds, but we caught our fish and returned triumphant. Little Pitikhi has not met these mosquitoes yet, but if our vaguely articulated plans work out, we may all go to Arctic Sound next year. Who knows? And who knew we would still be rushing across the continent to see each other, admire the new baby, watch the sockeye, and suck the bones of BC chickens and dry moose meat -- together?
On our last day on the river we hike to a beautiful "fisheries pool" hidden behind scraggly conifers and ancient yellow birches. Here rapids veer toward one bank of the Adams, leaving a quiet eddy on the side where young workers of Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans congregate to count, sex, tag and release hundreds of sockeye, trying to approximate the size of the run. It is their day off and we have the pool to ourselves, so John shuffles into the river and begins his aquatic gyrations: bending motionless with his snorkeled face in the water to watch the fish, quietly floating on the surface above the salmon, and raising his squeegee handle like a Volga's river raft guide wielding his push pole.
After several hours he sends me a happy thumbs-up, for today nothing got stuck or malfunctioned. Smiling, he sloshes ashore carrying his impossible gulgutiera, but soon his mood darkens: the dome protecting the lens rotates but fails to unscrew. Still dripping and trapped in his suit, John tries to free the stubborn acrylic bubble, but nothing works.
"I am screwed," he declares and tires again. No go. Exasperated, he inspects his gulgutiera made of many modified parts and says: "I need a crowbar."
A crowbar? To attack the fragile acrylic dome and, since John's bigger model would not fit inside, bang on my poor camera trapped underneath it? And I suddenly remember how 35 years ago John dismantled his large format Linhoff with a small hatchet and a screwdriver, fixed it, put it back together, and when I asked what he was planning to do with some parts he left out, replied confidently: "you do not need them." And we didn't.
Quietly, I walk into the bushes and return with one of the 5-foot long iron spikes the fisheries' crew pounded into the river's bottom to hang their sockeye nets.
John's eyes light up. He slides the rusty end of the bar into the bowels of his apparatus, finds the right spot, hits the other end with a rock, and something inside the gulgutiera shifts. "Now I need a really narrow and hard object," he says and we are lucky again: my car key set includes just the right key, which after some pushing, prodding and banging finishes the job. John unscrews the dome to change his lens, and we laugh like crazy and hug on the river bank, with the red salmon swimming right by us, undaunted and unstoppable, to their destiny. And we realize the embrace of our friends who helped us see and admire the fish feels like a safe eddy must feel to the salmon: restful, reassuring, important.
©Yva Momatiuk
©Yva Momatiuk
