07 Nov

Growing up with local foods

Last week was the Sitka Wild Foods potluck, put on by my employers, the Sitka Conservation Society. I already transferred my meager stash of wild food to my freezer in Seattle where I can nostagically eat salmon and huckleberries over the winter, so I didn’t have anything to contribute. But, to the topic of wild and local food, here’s a half written essay on what I ate as a kid, inspired by a question from former supervisor (who is also active on the interwebs!). One thing I see now is that this essay doesn’t mention that my diet as a childhood diverged from the average American diet on account of living in Alaska, as well as having food allergies.

 “I want to know what you ate” said Mike, who’d been supervising me for a summer internship. “What was on the table?” I realize now that I should have made a crack about spam, since Mike’s from Hawaii.
I had food allergies as a child, so perhaps my diet diverged particularly far from the average American. The main things off-limits were wheat, eggs and chocolate, but I was on an opt-in plan, and went to sleep-overs with a list of allowable foods. If Mike was looking for tales of a subsistence lifestyle,  there were three main foods we ate “off the land” and that I still feel strange about buying in the grocery store — fish, rhubarb and blueberries.
Rhubarb grew in the yard of our house, near where we had a garden some years. Several starts had been given to my mother by a neighbor, and something about the soil made it very happy.  Those rhubarb plants are happily and abundantly growing to this day.
Our yard also had a few blueberry bushes, but not enough to feed the family. For that we made a yearly pilgrimage across the Bay to Seldovia in the late summer.  In the woods near the head of Seldovia Bay, the blueberries grew thick and sweet in the understory of the spruce forest. We filled five gallon buckets with berries and motored home with purple fingers. The berries would sit in the buckets, with water, for a day to drown out any bugs, then there was endless inspection to remove twigs and leaves before the berries were frozen in the full size freezer in the basement.
Fishing was mainly undertaken by my father. He had the magic touch, the siren call that fish could not resist. Or perhaps he enjoyed it more than my mother, and my sister and I were too young to compete. In any case, he was the provider of salmon, Dolly Varden, rainbow trout and so on. Occasionally we also went halibut fishing, which is pure torture as a kid.
 Here, we’re going to spend all day sitting on the boat, and we want you to do nothing but hold onto this fishing pole and waggle it up and down slowly. Tell us if you feel anything. Oh, and every so often you may reel up two hundred feet of line with a lead sinker attached to check if there is still a third of a herring on the hook for bait. There are exciting stories about halibut fishing – if you catch one big enough, you have to shoot it in order to kill it and keep it from thrashing apart your boat. The trick is to shoot it while it’s still in the water – but, by and large, halibut fishing is a terrible bore.
The only thing that kept me interested enough to participate was the knowledge that halibut is a milder taste than salmon. That’s right – I didn’t like salmon. It tasted funny. Now I am happy to get salmon, but when I was eight salmon was yucky, but halibut was pretty good. My favorite halibut dish? Cut in chunks and fried in cornmeal, eaten with ketchup and mustard.
Occasionally we had other proteins. We went clamming , although my mother is allergic to shellfish and couldn’t eat any. Clamming was much more interesting than fishing. You got to muck around on the beach, and find all sorts of creatures under rocks. We clammed at Big Jakalof, where there was a dock, and sometimes moored there overnight. Once there was a diver there, who brought up a huge sunflower star, blue and slimy with half a million legs, to the kids who were playing on the dock. Another time we found a wee little octopus and took him back to town for the display at the Pratt Museum.
When I was very small, I remember getting crabs and shrimp, but I think later the fishery for those was closed. There were a number of pots, made of rebar and mesh, slowly rusting behind the chicken coop in the yard. I suppose it’s neither fish nor berry, but we kept chickens as well, and collected eggs from them. Most years we got a pair of baby turkeys in the spring and named them Christmas and Thanksgiving. My parents never wanted to dispatch the turkeys in front of the children. One year our husky got loose and took care of it for them. Another year I came home from a slumber party to see nooses draped over the swing set; the turkeys had been executed.
I don’t think I was ever very upset about the turkeys, though, as I was never very attached to them. My mother tells me that when I was a year and a half old, they had a batch a leghorns chickens, which roamed loose in the yard rather than being cooped, and were supposed to be able to defend themselves somewhat. One day the rooster attacked me, scratching up my back with his leghorns. He was boiled up, and I’ve never been a big fan of birds.
29 Sep

Shooting salmon

As you can see, I went back and was more successful in my photographic pursuit of salmon.

It was sunny over the weekend, so I spent quite a bit of time at the beach and in the creek, trying to get as up close and personal with the salmon as possible, without actually touching them.

The live ones would flee from my shadow, desperately thrashing upstream if they sensed my approach. The dead ones were much easier to work with, but that’s a post for another day. Still, after 700 and some photos, I got a handful that I really like.

It’s easiest, of course, to successfully see the fish and focus on it if you can catch it partly out of the water. However, I’m pretty happy with some of the pictures I got with the fish entirely underwater.

 Then there are some of the ones with only a selected bit of the fish out of the water, like a tail or a back.

Definitely worth standing in a creek for an hour or two!

09 Aug

Roly poly fish eyes

Warning: If you are squeamish about slimy insides of fish, don’t read this post!

This weekend I went out on a kayak fishing expedition. This involved getting up at 5:30 am (although in an Alaskan summer this was not before dawn), paddling for an hour, and then spending 8 hours fishing before paddling back. Although my companions caught a number of rockfish and even a little halibut, I didn’t catch anything.

Well, that’s not true. I did catch something that felt like the mother of all halibut, or possibly a nuclear submarine, but eventually I cut the line because we all concluded it was actually the bottom. Dangit.

When we got back, the fellow we rented the kayaks from was there with his wife and 5 year old son. We got to chatting, and the son, like any good Alaskan child, wanted to see the fish. So we showed them to him, of course, and had a chat about fish he has caught – three herring this spring, apparently.

Then it turned out that, actually, what he was most interested in was the fish eyes. He was poking at them with his fingers, and he wanted them.

My compatriots began to edge away and become very engrossed in the conversation with his parents, so I took a knife and helped him extract the eyes from a rockfish and a halibut. He stuck his fingers right in there until it was loosened up and then I cut through the nerve cord holding it in. I also cut through a membrane layer that covered the whole eye – fish may not have eyelids, but their eyes are covered and secure, not so ready to pop out as ours are.

One of the rockfish eyeballs we sliced open so he could remove a particular small nodule of something hard inside. I’m not real up on my eyeball anatomy, so I couldn’t say exactly what it was, but it was also round, and he regarded it as the true ball of the eye.

His mother fetched a plastic bag for the eyes, and explained that they already have some salmon eyes at home in the freezer, and these will join them.

We actually did an interview with the dad a few weeks ago, and he told us

I love watching my kid play with salmon. He’s fascinated by salmon – he’ll even pick up the dead ones. Pick them apart and try to see what they’re made of and what’s inside of them, what’s in the gut and what they’ve been eating. You know I didn’t teach him that but he’s just fascinated with the whole thing and the fact that they’re half rotten doesn’t bother him at all.

I’ve been thinking about it for the last day or two. Is a fascination with fish an integral part of being a kid in a fishing community, or does it point to some sort of scientific leaning?

I believe both theories are probably true – given the right circumstances most kids are very interested in how things around them work, and circumstances in Alaska provide a lot of fish as part of the things around you. Earlier this summer I worked an art booth at a kid’s fishing derby. We had a bunch of silicone casts of fish that kids could slather paint on and then slap onto paper to make fish prints. Most of the kids over 4 could identify most of the fish species. I also had a conversation two weeks ago with a ten year old boy about pink salmon returns and fishing tactics. He was more on top of it than me.

I know that my sister and I probably spent a fair amount of time dissecting fish as children. I certainly remember watching my dad gut fish, and we also used to check inside the stomach to see what they’d been eating. In high school, I spent a few summers working in a cannery. We didn’t actually put salmon in cans, but I spent 10-15 hour days with salmon guts, sorting the eggs, or roe, from the other slimy bits. (And yes, I got permeated with salmon, myself. If you ever take such a job, pick one set of clothes to wear to work every day, and throw them out at the end of the season.)

Salmon hearts have little valves on them that look like teeth, human molars, the type that you see on posters about dental hygiene. The intestines make a stringy mass like a mop, or seaweed. And the eggs, glistening inside a membrane sac, are gorgeous. The prettiest are chum salmon eggs, which are globular, orange, opalescent. They are full of fats and nutrients, of course, to feed the next generation of salmon, and maybe it is the oils that makes them so lovely, like bath beads or tiny glass marbles.

I realize it’s a very odd thing to wax nostalgic about, fish eggs, but my point is that I learned to appreciate the internal beauty of the fish, and I didn’t stop checking out their insides when I grew up.

When I was a kayak guide we occasionally found fish. Once I dissected a good sized sculpin with a family who had two boys age 8 and 10 or so. It had two little rock crabs in its stomach, and was definitely the highlight of their day. Another time I had an adult guest who came back down to the dock after the trip to watch me hack open the head of a pacific cod we had found (it was missing its tail and was probably discarded by a seal). We found the tiny brain inside, which resembled nothing more than a loogie, and the ear bones, called otoliths.

All of which is to say that I didn’t mind cutting up fish eyes at all. It was pretty fun. I haven’t paid for renting the kayak yet and I got an email from the little boy’s dad that if I don’t pay, he’s going to send me a bag of frozen fish eyes. I’m going to pay him today, but not because I’m afraid of fish eyes!

Edit/update: here’s a picture of the eyeless fish. Just because!


04 Aug

What’s a weir?

In the first photos I posted from our trip to Redoubt Lake, I included this one of Mama Bear, leading her cubs over one of the fish weirs.

redoubt-blog-21
Now, I suppose that not everyone knows what a “weir” is. I didn’t really have much of an idea when I started this job, although I did get excited because I saw a reference to a “vortex weir” which sounds like something totally awesome. I still don’t know what a vortex weir is, but the one you see above is a “picket weir.” Essentially, it is a picket fence in the water.

The back side of the weir is supported by big wooden tripods. The front side is metal poles, or pickets, which are threaded through two or three layers of framing to hold them in place. Since they hold up with bears walking across them, you can see that it’s a pretty sturdy structure.

Weir from the backside. Orange-pink bits below the weir in the foreground are salmon carcasses discarded by the bears.

Weir from the backside.
Orange-pink bits below the weir in the foreground are salmon carcasses discarded by the bears.

The advantage of the pickets, since they slide up and down, is that they can follow the contours of the bottom of the stream. The bottom of the pickets are covered with sandbags, which hold them down and cover any gaps, making it “fish-tight.”

Since all the returning salmon want to go upstream, or, at Redoubt Lake, up the falls and into the lake, they get backed up behind the weir. (That’s why the bears are there.) The Forest Service staff who are spending the summer working at the weir pull up the pickets to create gaps and let the fish through, counting every one.

Jon counting fish as they pass through the weir

Jon counting fish as they pass through the weir

Most of the fish get through with no hassle, but 10% of the fish that go through find themselves inside a fish trap, and become research subjects.

Laura nets a fish in the trap.

Laura nets a fish in the trap.

Since the bears are sloshing around in the water by the weir, and the water is always pushing to get through and down the falls, they check the weir to make sure it is still fish-tight.

Not a corpse - just Joe in a drysuit, snorkeling along the weir and checking the sandbags.

Not a corpse – just Joe in a drysuit, snorkeling along the weir and checking the sandbags.

It turns out to be pretty hard to take a picture of someone snorkeling in which they don’t look like dead body, so you might get a better idea from some of the video taken by Elizabeth, the intern working with me.

We’re talking and making noise so that the bears know where are while we’re sitting on the weir and counting fish. On the right you can see Jon standing on top of a log; he’s looking around the corner at the second weir, and then blowing an airhorn to tell the bears they can’t start fishing over there because we’re still around. In the background noise, first I am translating a Russian folksong which I’ve just finished singing, and then later starting to sing the only other Russian song I know. Not captured on this video is my exciting rendition of Angel from Montgomery.