Bristol Bay

“We flew over tundra and rivers in a little float plane, seeing the earth as God might see it, with the original design intact. The trees and forests were a carpet of mauve, yellow, and burnt orange mixed with evergreens. Below were rivers upon rivers, some small and wildly curving, cutting dark across the mossy tundra, others wide and braided and spilling over their edges with the season’s high water as they joined in the chaotic tapestry of channels, lakes, and ponds. We pressed against the plane’s windows as the sockeye came into view, ruby red in the clear water as they streamed in from the sea. Some spawned in the calm water of rivers, while others traveled all the way upriver to enormous lakes, where they lined the banks like red ribbons.

Landing on a calm patch of river, we explored farther on foot. Immediately I knew this was an ecosystem unlike any I’d seen before. Floating in slow, calm, rain-stippled channels, salmon were everywhere, both spawning and dying. The boundary between life and death here was blurred to the point of disappearing. As riverbeds were filled with new life, there were fish carcasses caught in the reeds and underfoot. In the air was a faint aroma of decomposition as spawning sockeyes porpoised; males chased one another away from redds guarded by females. […]

I realized that this was where the biomass that fed the ocean began, where nutrients from decaying carcasses flowed out from rivers and streams and were carried north by ocean currents. These frigid waters held the ocean’s richest soup, where whales, seals, sea lions, and orcas fed. Salmon fed here too and, with their next migration, returned the nutrients to the land to start the cycle anew.”