Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [326]
The tenacity of the Sacramento River salmon was remarkable because of the deadly obstacle course the fish, juveniles and adults, have to run from the beginning to the end of their lives. Shasta Dam blocked off enormously productive spawning beds in the watershed; other dams on important tributaries, especially the Yuba and the American, did the same. The Red Bluff diversion dam, at the gateway to the last mainstem spawning reach, frustrates many thousands of upriver-migrating adults despite a fish ladder that goes around it. The intake at the Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District, capable of diverting 3000 cubic feet per second, swallows millions of downriver-migrating juveniles each year. In drier years, when Shasta Lake swelters for months in hundred-degree heat, the warm water emanating into the lower river cooks vast numbers of eggs and juveniles, which usually cannot tolerate water warmer than 60°. An abandoned mint near Shasta leaches ghostly wastes when it rains, and agriculture adds pesticides and herbicides.
But the worst hazard to the fishery is the battery of pumps at the south end of the Delta, which feed the aqueducts that sustain southern California. When the State Water Project began operating in the late Sixties, joining the Central Valley Project, another couple of million acre-feet of water that used to pour out to sea was sucked across the Delta by the pumps, confusing the upriver-migrating adults and entraining tens of millions of hapless juveniles, which go wherever the river currents, natural or artificial, want them to go. In wet years, in the Sixties and Seventies, when the Delta pumps diverted only 20 percent of the Sacramento outflow, the escapement ratio was high and millions of young fish made it to sea, where they could fatten in ocean pastures and return in great numbers to spawn. But in drier years, when as much as 50 percent of the Sacramento River outflow was sucked toward southern California, escapement was low, salmon mortality was high, and the commercial fleet—still comprised of many hundreds of boats—braced itself for poor seasons in the years immediately to come.
As it happened the 1986 floods coincided perfectly with a heavy outmigration of young fish, so the escapement ratio was better than great. It was fabulous. The offshore catch in two or three years, when fish of the 1986 class returned to spawn, was going to be the best in decades.
I first encountered that prediction a few weeks after the floods in an obscure publication called Fridays, the biweekly house organ of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, which is put out by the PCFFA’s only paid staff member, a fish processor’s son with a law degree named Zeke Grader. He is one of a handful of people in the world who are paid to think exactly as a salmon would think, which means that his thinking tends to be the opposite of most everyone else’s.
In the dry months and years following the 1986 floods, Grader’s optimism about the 1986-class fish was counterweighted by a deepening pessimism over the fishery’s long-term prognosis. His reasoning was simple and not arguable: Salmon have to confront a drought right away. Everyone else, cushioned by years’ worth of reservoir storage, does not. It might not be obvious to people, but it was already obvious to the fish: California, in 1987, had entered a year of severe drought, and because droughts tend to come in cycles, there was apt to be another dry year—and then, conceivably, several more. No big floods (“surplus flows” in water-buffalo argot) were going to flush tens of millions of newly hatched salmon and steelhead past the insistent pull of 300,000 horsepower Delta pumps—not to mention the 160-odd diversion intakes, most lacking fish screens, between