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By Root 304 0

order to build a house on land that had no other marks of human contact. We collected clams and mussels—which were not restricted by regulations—whenever we could without regard for scarcity. On the biggest days during the weeks of dipnetting on the Kenai, fifty, sixty, sometimes seventy thousand fish pushed upriver in a single day. Whole fish piled up in the Anchorage landfill during the peak of dipnetting, dumped there by people who’d brought home more than they could handle. We took anything we could, enough for now and plenty for later. Perhaps this is what it felt like in the rest of America before the commons were commodified, before our own hunger hemmed us in.

JOHN AND CYNTHIA continued to ferry flopping salmon over to where the kids and I sat in the sand. All down the beach, people were gutting fish on whatever surface they could find. Some worked on the sand, while others used the lids of coolers until blood dripped down the sides. Others had carted down pieces of plywood or light folding tables. There were even a few ironing boards standing on the beach. Kids ran around with buckets collecting roe that people chucked onto the sand when they cleaned fish. The fish eggs could be cured for bait or eaten fried, salted, or prepared in many other ways. Although I hated to waste anything edible, the eggs were fishy and gelatinous and with pounds of beautiful salmon fillets in our future, I had no interest in keeping them.

In the middle of the chaos, Kaya and Ghen were thrilled. Ghen danced around the dying fish, and when John ran over with another, I ripped its gills to kill and bleed it and then asked the kids to help me clean it. I first clipped the tips of the tail off the salmon with a pair of scissors we had brought with us. As with the restrictions on gillnetting for personal use, the law required us to mark the fish in this way to ensure these fish wouldn’t dilute the already struggling commercial salmon market. Around me, people had tied scissors gunked up with blood, slime, and sand onto cooler handles so they wouldn’t get lost on the beach. The chances of getting caught were minimal but the risk—losing the ability to dipnet—was too great. I took a short knife and sliced the salmon’s belly, tail to head. The kids reached their hands inside the body and pulled out multicolored innards and tossed them onto the gut pile. I slid my hand inside and scraped the tips of my fingers against the backbone to clean out the bloodline. I could feel the ribs under a thin layer of slick tissue. Then I reached up toward its head and pulled out the heart. I unfolded my hand in front of the kids to show the grape-sized organ pulsing against my palm. They squealed with delight and each took turns feeling the shudder of the heart against their skin.

BY THE TIME we had nearly three dozen fish, the tide had receded far down the beach. All around us was a carnal scene of death and destruction. Fish guts and blood littered the beach, graying in the open air. A wrack of fish heads had formed at the water’s edge. A slurry of blood and fish slime pooled in the bottom of the coolers. Gulls swarmed as thick as gnats, fighting over fish heads and guts, though the beach was thick with it all. “I never hated seagulls before,” a woman cleaning fish nearby said. She had camped on the beach the night before and been kept awake by the birds’ incessant cries. There were no outhouses so people stole off into the dunes, leaving a rank mess. People cleaning fish for their families had lost hope of keeping up with those catching them. In their haste, people often discarded strips of belly meat because they contained small fins that were difficult to remove. This was the fattest part of the meat, succulent and oily, and white-skinned curls of flesh lay scattered across the sand.

It felt at once like a massacre and a celebration. When the fish were coming up the river in large numbers, everyone was excited, talkative, and helpful. There was more than enough fish for everyone, and we’d have it all winter long. It was this sense of plenty that was