Totem Salmon : Life Lessons from Another Species [Paperback]

Freeman House (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0807085499 | ISBN-13: 978-0807085493 | Publication Date: May 12, 2000

Part lyrical natural history, part social and philosophical manifesto, Totem Salmon tells the story of a determined band of locals who've worked for over two decades to save one of the last purely native species of salmon in California. The book-call it the zen of salmon restoration-traces the evolution of the Mattole River Valley community in northern California as it learns to undo the results of rapacious logging practices; to invent ways to trap wild salmon for propagation; and to forge alliances between people who sometimes agree on only one thing-that there is nothing on earth like a Mattole king salmon.

House writes from streamside: "I think I can hear through the cascades of sound a systematic plop, plop, plop, as if pieces of fruit are being dropped into the water. Sometimes this is the sound of a fish searching for the opening upstream; sometimes it is not. I breathe quietly and wait." Freeman House's writing about fish and fishing is erotic, deeply observed, and simply some of the best writing on the subject in recent literature.

House tells the story of the annual fishing rituals of the indigenous peoples of the Klamath River in northern California, one that relies on little-known early ethnographic studies and on indigenous voices-a remarkable story of self-regulation that unites people and place. And his riffs on the colorful early history of American hatcheries, on property rights, and on the "happiness of the state" show precisely why he's considered a West Coast visionary.

Petitions to list a dozen West Coast salmon runs under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act make saving salmon an issue poised to consume the Pacific West. "Never before, said Federal officials, has so much land or so many people been given notice that they will have to alter their lives to restore a wild species" (New York Times, 2/27/98). Totem Salmon is set to become the essential read for this newest chapter in our relations with other wild things.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Freeman House lives in an out-of-the-way place. Tucked away where Highway 101 diverts inland from the Northern California coastline to avoid the 4,000-foot peaks of the King Range is a damp, verdant landscape of rolling hills, towering forests, and isolated pockets of humanity. The Mattole River drains much of the area, greeting the Pacific at the Lost Coast. For thousands of years, the river formed the connective tissue of human settlement--first for the native tribes, and later for Euro-American pioneers. Each year, salmon swam up the river to their natal spawning beds, marking the passage of time and providing sustenance for the people along the banks. Then, in the early 1970s, the salmon stopped returning. House found himself banding with other like-minded citizens in an effort to bring the once-prolific runs back. Their organization fought for curbs on logging in the watershed and more restrictions for the way timber can be harvested (buffer zones along streams, for example). They planted vegetation on the banks to provide shade and added structure to the river for protection.

Totem Salmon is House's memoir of river stewardship. It's also a blueprint for grassroots environmental action. And finally, it is a well-crafted and lyrical piece of writing that treats a regional problem with personal perspective and candor. --Langdon Cook

From Publishers Weekly

Although this is his first book, House displays a talent for lyrical writing combined with an ability to present information clearly. In the early 1980s, House became involved with several residents who were concerned with preserving the King Salmon, a fish native to the Mattole River, which runs through the westernmost watershed in California. He explains how the salmon have just one chance at reproduction. The female salmon swims upstream and builds her nest for depositing eggs, which are then fertilized after the male releases his sperm. This natural process has been thwarted over decades by an unregulated logging industry, whose companies built roads that contributed to the landslides that destroyed the equilibrium of the watershed, pouring rock, soil and debris into the river. House, a former commercial fisherman, and other activists began by building weirs that trapped the salmon. After House realized that their dedicated group could not, singlehandedly, save the salmon or the river, he built a coalition of residents committed to restoring the damaged river and its banks. House details how longtime community residents and more recent arrivals learned to compromise around a common goal. His inspired and well-written account of environmental activism is a terrific introduction to an ethic he calls "bioregionalism."
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 248 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press (May 12, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807085499
• ISBN-13: 978-0807085493
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.5 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #175,962 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #60 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Biological Sciences > Animals > Fish & Sharks

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Salmon splash in your heart., October 2, 1999

By 

Rhodes Hileman (Seattle) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species (Hardcover)

From "Totem Salmon - Life Lessons from Another Species" by Freeman House -

"My straining senses slow down the sound so that each of its parts can be heard separately. A hiss, barely perceptible, as the fish muscles itself right out of its living medium; silence like a dozen monks pausing too long between the strophes of a chant as the creature arcs through the dangerous air; a crash as of a basketball going through a plate glass window as he or she returns to the velvet embrace of the water; and then a thousand tiny bells struck once only as the shards of water fall and the surface of the stream regains its viscous integrity."

"I flick on my headlamp and the whole backwater pool seems to leap toward me. The silver streak that crosses the enclosure in an instant is a flash of lightning within my skull, one which heals the wound that has separated me from this moment -- from any moment. The encounter is so perfectly complex, timeless, and reciprocal that it takes on an objective reality of its own. I am able to walk around it as if it were a block of carved stone. If my feelings could be reduced to a chemical formula, the experience would be a clear solution made up of equal parts of dumb wonder and clean exhilaration, colored through with a sense of abiding dread. I could write a book about it."

And here it is.

The Mattole River, where this story takes place, flows from the northwestern tip of California's Mendocino County, first a dozen miles northeast and then about sixty miles northwest through remote rural Humboldt County to its mouth at Petrolia. What keeps the river from reaching the Pacific Ocean any sooner is the King Range rising precipitously from the "Lost Coast", a stretch of beach frequented only by hikers and the occasional small plane.

Getting to the Mattole from the freeway is at least an hour's drive on winding country roads. This area, like much of Humboldt County, was logged in the fifties and sixties, and in the late sixties and seventies a substantial portion of it was sold to urban refugees, "reinhabitants". Over the next three decades, quite a few of them committed to the task of restoring the watershed to health. Two of these were David Simpson and Freeman House who together conceived and founded the Mattole Watershed Salmon Support Group. "Totem Salmon" tells the story of this work.

Salmon are an indicator species. Their health, as a population, closely tracks the health of the watershed to which they return. If you want to know how well a river valley is doing in the Pacific Northwest, look at the salmon runs, if there are any left. The principal enemy of the salmon is silt, produced by erosion usually from badly built roads and culverts, and from logging. Salmon need clean gravel in the streambed for eggs to survive and hatch. Well forested valleys with little erosion provide the best stream habitat for hatching and rearing salmon.

In 1950, before logging, it is recalled by the older Mattole valley residents, that, when they were running, "you could walk across the river on the backs of the salmon". In 1980, before restoration work began, the runs were down to perhaps 200 fish. More, those fish were the last wild salmon run in the state.

Looking back after reading the book, one could see the first phrase, "I am alone...", as a key to the work. Rooted in an explicit sense of self, spiraling out through sensory subtleties of immediate nature, to the larger cultural complexities, Mr. House melds what are usually seen as distinct worlds into a coherent portrait of a personal and multi-species reality. Like the salmon traversing the several worlds of ocean, river, air and creek, the personal, philosophical, cultural, historical, administrative, ecological, and cosmic threads are finely woven into a narrative yielding a shimmering presence of spirit and nature.

The book is a deeply enjoyable memoir of a long personal relationship with salmon. Along the way we see the history of the Euro-American relationship with this species, and that of the Native-American people who were here managing these watersheds long before. We learn of the state and federal administrative context of salmon management and the history of our, first, ignorance, and then, study of the anadromous species and their rivers. In clear and moving images, and with affection and humor, we see the people on the Mattole River who have joined hands for eighteen years to rescue this last wild run of salmon from extinction. Lastly we see the hopeful results and the tenuous circumstances of their work.

We might expect it to be a text for salmon restoration, and while the specifics are there they are widely scattered throughout the book. More attention is given to the wider question of how we got here, and how we can get through this to a more wholesome, rooted, and appreciative life in our particular place. If it is a text -- and Mr. House would say it is not -- it is a meta-instructional one, showing a way to become a people who will do the right thing for the watershed and thus for the salmon. The personal explorations in the book demonstrate by example the message beneath the text: by immersing ourselves in the reality of our local valley we can rescue both the health of our watersheds and our sense of ourselves. In the end, we see that they are the same journey; the salmon reflect to us our understanding of self and place.

The epilogue quotes Paul Schell, Mayor of Seattle, "Ironically, as we work to save the salmon, it may turn out that the salmon save us."

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Learning from Life, Nurturing Place, December 17, 1999

By 

Joel Russ (British Columbia, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species (Hardcover)

The book is a first-person account telling the story of a group of people who have dedicated themselves to rehabbing a river, a watershed, and saving some special strains of wild Pacific salmon stock. They decided to use salmon-hatchery technology (and other procedures) as a way to learn from the native salmon, rather than to introduce non-native species to their river. Freeman House is a truly impressive thinker and writer. His engaging intelligence is not just wide and deep, like a rockclimber his awareness gets into some unfamiliar and little-explored crevices of life - nature and human nature. House and his cohorts are questers who may ultimately discover something as important as did William Harvey or Sir Albert Howard. I'm tempted to call the book a riveting read, but the experience is warmer than that metaphor implies. It's hopeful. A strangely wise book.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful, December 3, 2000

By 

chris berry (Half Moon Bay, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Totem Salmon : Life Lessons from Another Species (Paperback)

Briefly...as an environmentalist from both the non-profit, agency and barefoot,dreadlocked worlds I really appreciated this book. The author brings out the complexity and poetry of the technical, natural and spiritual mosaic involved in watershed work in the northwest (and eveywhere for that matter). For anyone who has ever (or even never) been through similar experiences that the author describes, it brings shivers up the spine with the descriptive imagery and his obvious intimacy with the Mattole. I highly recommend this book.