Lonesome Luke: A Fish Explores the Existential Meaning of Futility
Who Is Lonesome Luke:
Lonesome Luke, more casually known as just Luke, is assumed to be one of about 45,000 hatchery raised summer steelhead smolts probably released into the Crooked River as a smolt in 2017. This is his story.
This story is based on facts presented at a recent Portland General Electric meeting. The real story is about a fish unable to find a mate, despite an all-out effort on his part. This happens when fish density is so low that fish are unable to find each other and promulgate their species.
The Way It Was:
For about 50,000 years trout and steelhead in the Pacific Northwest were adapted to clean water, bountiful pristine gravel, and an abundance of mates to choose from.
Then came a dam building frenzy that started as early as the turn of the 20th century with irrigation diversions. By the 1930s another frenzy started: dam building for generating electrical power and flood prevention. Concurrent with the dam building was increased agricultural use of land, leading to runoff laden with animal waste and fertilizer. Access to historic spawning beds was blocked and the gravel became silt and algae laden.
These changes did not make the fish happy. They demonstrated that unhappiness by reproducing less, with subsequent fish populations dropping. Precipitously.
The New Deschutes Basin Reality:
The first mega-insult to fish populations in the Deschutes Basin was the construction by Portland General Electric of the Pelton-Round Butte Hydroelectric Project, now co-owned by the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation, which blocked access to spawning habitat for thousands and thousands of steelhead and salmon each year. Then there was Bowman Dam, along with myriad other dams, large and small, in the Crooked River Basin.
The Attempted Fix:
The owners/operators of the Pelton-Round Butte Hydroelectric Project, after fifty years of totally blocking fish access to some of the most productive spawning grounds in the Pacific Northwest, embarked on a project to “reintroduce” fish into the upper basin. This highly contrived project that included a “selective water withdrawal tower” was constructed to create surface currents to Round Butte Dam. The currents are intended to attract downstream migrating salmon and steelhead, that have been planted in the tributaries to Lake Billy Chinook, to a fish collection facility. Once at the Tower the fish are collected, weighed, measured, examined, some tagged, and then all fish are put in a tank on a truck to be driven around three dams before being placed back in the Deschutes River. It is hoped they will then migrate to the ocean and return.
Luke’s Story:
Luke, like most fish, never knew his parents. More notably, his parents never knew each other. They were denied the opportunity to meet and mate, thereby denying them their one purpose in life. Instead, they were captured and their eggs and sperm extracted by hatchery workers. No romance, no dance on the spawning beds, nothing. Not even a casual flirtation.
Luke was then raised in a prison-like cement tank. Crowded in with other juvenile fish to the point where their fins were rubbed against each other, dulling the edges of those fins. Added to that, they were fed artificial food in the form of pellets that were tasteless, but supposedly nutritious. That said, the pellets bore no resemblance to what should have been Luke’s natural food, aquatic insects.
Finally, after suffering this unhappy and dysfunctional childhood, and at about eight inches in length, Luke joined other fish in being loaded into a truck (talk about an unnatural experience for a fish!) and transported and dumped into the Crooked River. From there, tasting freedom for the first time, and now in flowing water, he made his way to Lake Billy Chinook.
It was May of that year. Water surface temperatures in the reservoir were approaching 70 degrees, a temperature hostile to migrating salmonids. The water was choked with toxic blue-green algae. The pH was 9. To a human, this would have been like trying to cross the Sahara Desert barefoot and without water.
About 80% of Luke’s fellow smolts didn’t survive the trip through the reservoir. It was just too hard. That made Luke a total bad ass by any measure. He was fighting way above his weight class.
On arrival at the fish collection facility at the Tower at Round Butte Dam, things got really weird, although his hatchery upbringing was of some value in surviving his next experience. Strong water currents forced him into a long pipe about 300 feet long. One can only imagine what fish would be thinking. It was probably something like, “What the hell is this evil joke being played on me?” Little did he know it was about to get a lot weirder.
He was grabbed by a very large being, like the ones who had tossed pellets to him in the hatchery tank. To Luke, those beings must look like what those who have survived alien abductions see. Like with those who have been abducted by aliens, Luke was handled, examined, and observed. Then he was probed, which left him with little or no dignity. And left with a tag to prove it. A tag is an unseemly fashion statement for a fish and immediately marks a fish as a lesser being, a hatchery fish amongst wild fish. But Luke was not to be deterred. He was loaded into a truck and chauffeured downstream past the three dams where once again he was dumped, like a drunk being thrown out of a bar by a bouncer, into the lower Deschutes River.
The next months were easy. All Luke had to do was go with the flow of the Deschutes and then the Columbia River.
On arrival to the Pacific Ocean he began to dine on the ocean’s bounty. He grew and became strong. Then a powerful urge overcame him and he felt compelled to return to that river he had been unceremoniously dumped into so many months and miles before.
He swam upstream and against the current, up two fish ladders, and then turned into the Deschutes River. The urge he was feeling was becoming stronger. He needed to spawn and would do anything to fulfill that one singular need in his life. One hundred miles up the Deschutes he hit an impassable barrier. The Pelton Reregulation Dam. But at one point he thought he found a weakness in the barrier. Turned out it was the opening to a fish trap. Luke was once again taken from the world of fish and forced into the world of man.
Luke was gathered up and put back in a truck. Again. Then hauled to the fish collection facility where once more he was handled, measured and probed. Again, he was left with a tag. This time it was a Passive Integrated Transponder tag, an electronic device that would allow him to be tracked for the rest of his journey. Then once more, he was dumped into a body of water.
It must have been a shock to find himself back in that toxic reservoir. Again. But he sniffed his way back to the Crooked River. It smelled right and he felt that he was about to fulfill his life purpose. To mate. He could feel it throughout his entire body. The drive to find a mate carried him upstream all the way to Bowman Dam. But there had been no female steelhead along the way. He turned back and swam, once again, downstream. He turned into each tributary he passed, only to be disappointed each time by the lack of a potential mate.
Finally, after swimming about 120-miles up and downstream, back up again, then down, in the Crooked River, he gave up. It wasn’t meant to be. His life had been lived for naught. After all he had been through, after all of the unnatural indignities and the hardships that had been imposed upon him, he had failed at his one and only purpose. His, despite having survived so much, was an end to a futile life.
Conclusion and Moral of the Story:
My apologies to the children who heard this story and cried. But this is what life is becoming as we attempt to subvert nature to fit our own needs rather than the reality of nature. So get over it kids.
There is a moral to this story:
“Plants or animals rarely behave in an unnatural manner that’s contrary to their true makeup.” – H.E. Davey
Anthropocentric musing by Greg McMillian