Mountain in the Clouds: A Search for the Wild Salmon

Mountain in the Clouds: a search for the Wild Salmon By Bruce Brown This book touched me. I don't read much non-fiction, and what I do read is usually skills-based How-To stuff about carpentry or plumbing or growing mushrooms. This book though, being non-fiction affected me to a surprising degree, and I know exactly why: location, location, location. A book like this can touch me precisely because it and I share a common experience. I've seen salmon jumping in the Dungeness; I've been to the campground on the Fork of that river. I've tasted wild Chinook and Chum and I can tell the difference. I've seen the stripes on a mating chum in its Redd, and smelled their dead bodies lining a stream channel in autumn. So, this is a book about my experience of Salmon as much as it was the author's - and because of that it was entirely poignant, touching upon the experiences of my life and things that were significant to me. That's what got me. But if it weren't for that - I suspect that the compelling yet fact-filled tone of the author would have done it just as well. A pioneering novel in the genre of "ecological history," he strikes the delicate balance, so precarious that most of the time you're poised on the front of your seat expecting to find out that all the salmon are dead and you just haven't heard about it yet. Yet, woven in with these truthful accounts of the state of affairs of the plight of modern fish are settings if great beauty, people who are good folks, and experiences of such great meaning that reading through them you could swear afterward that that had happened to you too; rather than just having read it in a book. The author's gift here is very apparent, and his creation is artful, inspiring, education yet provocative and beautiful: if only because he is able to give an accurate portrait of something that I find to be one of the most gorgeous (and delicious) parts of nature in my neck of the woods. If you haven't seen a salmon in Washington: this book will bring you here. If you have seen them, or have seen them your whole life: this book will bring you much, much more. There isn't anyone I know of who couldn't or shouldn't read this book - if only because it brings them a little closer to the Olympic peninsula and in doing so that much closer to me, and my heart, which was always here and probably always will be. The book did make me want to go out and slap everyone involved in Washington Fisheries before 1985, slap the fisherman and the gill-netters, slap the moneyed lobbies and the trollers and the loggers and the dam-builders and the pulp mills. I'd slap the people too - just for not doing anything about it if they did know about it; and slap them twice if they didn't. I wouldn't slap the Indians - they got screwed over just as much as the salmon; and I wouldn't slap the salmon themselves - if the river dries up or they're eaten, how could you blame them for that? The salmon don't depend on us; this book op

Experience wild salmon leaping up the wild rivers of the Northwest. In western Washington, salmon still return from the ocean to spawn deep within the Olympic Mountains. This book is a classic on conservation and wildlife. Pre-dating the current concern for salmonids as an endangered species, Brown engages the reader in the unique environment of the temperate rainforest of the Olympic Pennisula. He describes the people and the fish that are the central players in this life and death drama.