Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species

Excellent book. Interesting read. Inspiring call to action.

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.

I read a lot, but I almost never pin my husband down to read him sections of a book. When I was reading Totem Salmon, I couldn't help it. I kept saying, "Listen to this one." I owned a home in the Mattole River Watershed in the late 70's and early 80's. I was amazed at how well Freeman House captures the essence of the area and the people without caricaturing either. Over and over he writes a few sentences which really "get it right" in explaining the landscape, the weather or the people of the area. This is not an easy "how-to" book on bringing back the salmon, but it brings out why it is worth the effort for as long as it takes.

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.

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 hat