On the eve of this week’s B.C. Salmon Recovery and Resilience Conference, organized by the Pacific Salmon Foundation, I was still dithering as to whether to attend. It was not that I did not want to go. It promises to be everything that speaks to me: salmon people, salmon stories, and salmon futures.
But I am turning 70 this week.
I was dithering between playing soccer with a new group of friends, continuing to learn how to play pickleball with another group, and going for a long, challenging bike ride. God knows why. Probably proving to myself, and an uncaring world, that I am not really 70. Then there was the opportunity to race my sailboat around Pender Island against a group of Salt Spring friends.
When I could dither no longer and had to choose between the three, it had to be salmon. Of course it had to be salmon. What was I thinking?
So I went ahead and entered the PSF portal to register. But the conference was full!
Despondent, angry with myself, and coming to grips with the fact that I squandered the opportunity to engage in what interests me most out of my fear of getting old and dying, I poured myself a glass of Irish whiskey and headed to the bunk on my small sailboat where I was staying for a few days. Never a good idea if I want a restful night’s sleep.
It was around midnight that I heard a mournful cry from the rigging above and felt a sudden blast of wind that caused the boat to shudder and the halyards slap a warning. The air chilled. The boat lurched to one side as if someone had stepped aboard. I pulled my comforter up to my chin and looked out from my bunk in the forepeak through the dark narrow space towards the companionway door-aft.
There stood an apparition, but not a frightening one, other than he had no body and was wreathed in pipe smoke. There was a kindness in his eyes. He looked like a ruffled old-school English fly fisherman. Which, upon a second look, he was. It was my childhood hero: Roderick Haig-Brown.
“Listen,” he said, “I don’t have much time. I have a grand bottle of merlot that I am sharing with Bruce Hill. I am showing him how to properly tie a Steelhead Bee.”
“You will be visited by three ghosts tonight”, he intoned in the old school, upper crust accent that I had in my head as I read his books growing up. “The ghost of salmon past, salmon present, and salmon future.”
Looking down upon me, he puffed on his pipe, generating a sudden cloud of smoke. As he faded into it, I heard a gentle but firm: “Heed them.”
I slipped back into a troubled sleep, wondering how Bruce’s cigar sized fingers were going to master a Steelhead Bee, when the halyards again began slapping madly against the mast.
“Damn that whiskey,” I whined to myself.
Suddenly before me stood a bear of a man. I had no idea how a man that size fit inside my boat’s cabin. I shrank back. Taking a step towards me out of the dark was my old boss, Murray Chatwin. Murray began his career buying gillnet fish in the mainland inlets for Ed Safarik Sr., who began his career catching chums in streams in East Vancouver as a kid before WWII, taking them into Chinatown by wheelbarrow to sell. By the time I met them Ed Sr was part owner of Ocean Fisheries and Murray was a VP. Murray cared deeply about salmon, salmon fishermen, the salmon industry, and hockey, not necessarily in that order. He was not a man to suffer fools, or much else, in his past life.
“Pay attention. I am the ghost of salmon past, and you and I are taking a trip.”
As was typical with Murray, it wasn’t open for discussion. Before I knew it, I was back in the Cessna 185 in which I spent so many hours and days every season through the 1980s and ‘90s. I somehow knew this flight recalled 1990—just nine Adams River sockeye lifetimes ago. I had just finished telling a reporter from Salmon Arm a couple of days previous that the famous cyclical Adams River sockeye return this year was only a shadow of what it was in the early 1990s.
Leaving Prince Rupert, we flew through time and space. Over hundreds of seine and gillnet boats fishing Nass pinks, chums and sockeye, across to Haida Gwaii to check out the fleets of trollers off North Island and down the west side of Haida Gwaii, back across Hecate Strait to Area 6 to watch seines loading up on pink and chum salmon.
Dropping down to Area 8 near Bella Bella, we watched seine and gillnet boats unloading to tenders for the trip to the many processing plants in Prince Rupert, Port Hardy, Steveston and Vancouver.
Suddenly, it was August, and we were in Johnstone Strait, watching seiner after seiner struggling to lift full ‘bags’ of sockeye over their sterns. We watched as seines and gillnets that called Alert Bay, Sointula, Port Hardy, Campbell River, French Creek, Quadra Island’s Cape Mudge, and a dozen other island communities home were unloaded onto tenders that would transport their salmon to the thousands of people working in processing plants from Prince Rupert to Vancouver, turning salmon into food for the world.
Leaving Johnstone Strait, we flew down to Steveston and followed the Fraser River from Steveston up to Mission. Each section had its own fleet of gillnet boats connected to a nearby community and they were all loading up. Then it was October and we were in Haida Gwaii again watching one of my favourite fisheries: fall dogs (chum salmon). Northern gillnets and seines fished in relaxed terminal fisheries from Skidegate down through Darwin Sound, enjoying the relaxed atmosphere after a hectic summer season.
Altogether, the combined fleets landed over 29 million salmon in 1990, compared to the maybe three million that will be caught this year by commercial fishermen along with another 700,000 that will be caught by recreational fishermen. Almost half of the commercial salmon caught this season were from one small terminal pink salmon fishery in one of the mainland inlets. None of the major fishing areas of the past produced much in the way of catch, except for Barkley Sound.
I turned to Murray in distress, “We had no idea it would come to this, none of us did. Not DFO, us in industry, no one.”
Murray slowly turned to me and growled, “You think not?”
Before I could think, we were standing on an empty dock at Donaldson’s Landing in Rivers Inlet. Murray reminded me that both Rivers Inlet and Smith Inlet, just next door, were the home of a thriving gillnet fishery for decades. A fleet that, when Rivers and Smiths sockeye disappeared, migrated to the Skeena, disrupting fishing patterns and connections for the First Nations fishermen who had fished the Skeena for generations. This, within both his and my career.
As I acknowledged this loss, I found myself watching a young Murray and his friends buying gillnet fish from a bunch of characters in the mainland inlets. The older Murray came up alongside me as I slowly took in the community feel of the fishery.
“I watched this disappear too,” he said mournfully. “The fish, the people, and the communities.”
We then watched the last gillnet fishery for Fraser River springs. We understood what the fishermen did not; this was to be the last time they would haul their large mesh spring salmon gillnets out of the netloft. The fish that fed them and Southern Resident Killer Whales were becoming a memory.
Suddenly, we were back up in Prince Rupert watching Japanese gillnet fishermen delivering chums from far up Area 3. I was shocked to realize that I recognized the boat, fisherman, and even the delivery; not understanding at the time that it would be the last time I, or anyone else, would see it.
Murray then reminded me of attending a lecture by Dr. Welch in Sidney. Dr. Welch told the audience that Pacific Ocean temperatures were warming and that it would likely lead to a significant decrease in the abundance of B.C. salmon.
Murray turned to me and said flatly, “Do you not remember that we sold a major portion of our seine fleet into the buyback based on his thoughts and what we were seeing?”
“Yes,” I quietly agreed.
“Do you also not remember that you began making fishing decisions based on marine water temperatures that were being modified by a warming Pacific Ocean?”
I guiltily agreed that I had.
“Then don’t tell me we didn’t know,” he roared, “The salmon began disappearing on our watch!”
Stunned by this realization, I slowly realized I was alone and back in my bunk; shaken and guilt stricken.
I pulled the blankets up over my head praying for the night to be over.
Exhausted, traumatized, and feeling very alone, I drifted into a fitful sleep. I was woken again, this time by a soothing voice.
“Greg, I am the ghost of salmon present, and I am here to give you this.”
She held out a beautifully decorated cake, with multi-coloured sprinkles across the top. I shakily took it from her.
Looking down at the cake, I just had to have a slice. But before I could, the ghost took me by the hand, still carrying the unspoiled cake, into a dark cavernous planetarium-like space. We floated high up in the air, looking down into nothingness. Below us, if you squinted, memories of losses that I couldn’t quite bring into focus drifted like shadows in a fog across the moors.
She turned to me and quietly said, “I spent years creating this.”
Reaching out her arm, she pointed at a small section of the dark expanse. It erupted into light. Graphs, figures, and pictures describing the diversity, distribution, habitat, and status of salmon in the area elevated into the air, turning on every axis, making it feel like I could penetrate, absorb, and be part of the data. It was miraculous.
She pointed at another section, then another, and another, faster, and faster. I began to notice they were colour-coded. Most were red or amber. A very few were green. It dawned on me that these were Wild Salmon Policy designations: red for being at high risk of permanent loss; amber indicating that the salmon population is vulnerable; and green indicating the population is abundant.
As she swept her arm across the B.C.’s innumerable salmon watersheds, few glowed green, most were amber or red.
“God,” I moaned. “How did it get like this?”
She looked at me with sadness, and said in tones one would hear at a funeral, “This is your cake.”
I looked down at it and for the first time, noticed that the multi-coloured sprinkles on top mirrored the colours she had just displayed across the landscape.
She then stretched out her arms, inviting me to watch, and slowly waved them across the breadth of the space. All of B.C.’s salmon populations slowly illuminated, brought alive through their data.
She took a deep breath that seemed to stick in her chest and again spread her arms across the salmon landscapes. But this time, they were overlaid by future pipelines, logging scars, ports, fires, floods, oil spills, and urban growth.
I looked down at my cake, and for the first time, I noticed a foul odour of oil, burnt soil, bad water, and corruption emanating from it.
With sadness and wisdom she looked at me and said, “Yes, you can have your cake, but it might be best not to foul it more before trying to eat it.”
Finding myself back in my bunk, I squirreled down as deep as I could go, promising myself I wouldn’t come out until morning, no matter what.
Suddenly, the covers were torn from me, and a voice thundered, “I am the ghost of salmon future.”
I summoned the courage to open my eyes and could see nothing. My voice quavered as I asked, “Where—what are you?”
“Idiot,” the voice thundered out of the dark again. “I am the future; I haven’t been written yet.”
“But contemplate this,” he continued.
A passenger train with 36 windows, one for each salmon season since 1990, burst through the dark of my small cabin, each window lit up as it sped through the dark, but each window was dimmer than the one before it.
Then, another similar train of 36 cars burst through, but this time the windows were dimmer and many remained dark.
That first train came from 1990, nine sockeye generations ago. The second train projects the next 36 years, or nine sockeye generations,” he growled. “People 35, or younger, will be the age you are today when it arrives in 2062.”
“You are showing me how fast our salmon have declined and how fast they will likely continue to collapse into the future? I don’t want to see anymore,” I said in a wavering voice.
“No, you self-absorbed fool,” he grumbled with contempt, the voice now coming from beside me. “I am telling you people understand salmon abundance, diversity, and distribution from where they stand now, not the abundance, diversity, and distribution that was present just a few decades ago, or even a sockeye generation ago.
“As salmon populations decline,” he continued, “each generation grows up with fewer fish in fewer places and takes that as normal. People lose sight of how much has already been lost. That is a shifting baseline.”
“It distorts our understanding of the ecological, cultural, and social importance of salmon. And it limits our imagination as to what can be done to save them, and gives permission to those that would sacrifice them.”
“You are coming with me,” he said.
I wanted to say no, but who, or what, would I say no to?
I found myself at the 2026 Return of the Salmon Festival in Tsútswecw Park, formerly Roderick Haig-Brown Park, alongside the Adams River. I stood amid the many visitors that attend this miracle each day through the spawning season.
My ghostly escort rumbled in my ear, “In 1990 almost five million sockeye spawned here. This year there may be as few as 300,000 or 400,000. But it will be this year that these people will measure future years against.”
In a blink, I found myself outside a busy Save-On-Foods. Looking around, wondering what I was doing here, it dawned on me that I was back in Prince Rupert. Looking closer still, I realized my vantage point was near where I slept all summer above the noise and chaos of the salmon processing lines at the Royal Plant. A variation of Joni Mitchell’s lyrics from “Big Yellow Taxi” came to mind: “They paved over memories and histories…”
Suddenly, we were beside the George Massey Tunnel where the cannery I started at, Cassiar’s Rice Mill, had been flattened to allow for an actual parking lot to store equipment and materials for the construction of a replacement tunnel.
Then, I was standing over a rotting corpse. I wanted to look away but could not. I was compelled to look at it.
“It’s me!” I choked out in horror.
“Who cares about you?” the ghost tiredly asked. “That’s only a bag of skin and bones. What died is the stories you told. You are the last of the generations who experienced salmon abundance and the people, communities, and cultures they supported. You were one of the last few small brakes on that speeding train of shifting baselines.”
“But we can invest in recovery and resilience,” I stammered.
Back on the boat, the cabin flared red.
“Recover to what existed in 1990? Recover to what is left today? Recover what? Where? For what purpose? Who decides what to recover?’ He demanded. “The same with resilience. It is like deciding that a person who was struck by the train that just tore through your boat needs painkillers. Of course they are going to require damned painkillers!” He snarled, “But painkillers cannot make them whole again or even save him.”
“What can we do?” I pleaded.
The anger in his voice changed to disgust, “Haven’t you been paying attention at all? You cannot have your cake and eat it too. You cannot build ports over estuaries, construct and operate toxic mines next to salmon streams, clear-cut hillsides, place fisheries over fish, choose water for agriculture and industry over spawning salmon, allow fish farms, pump more heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere and say you want to restore or preserve salmon.”
Then I was back in my bunk, feeling depleted, full of loss and despair, when I was revisited by the ghost of salmon present. As I finally fell into a deep slumber, she gently whispered in my ear:
“For those who say making such a choice is impossible, or that the politics of the day demand difficult choices, remember Roderick Haig-Brown. Haig-Brown fought, and won, back in 1972, the battle against all the political and industrial interests of the day who told us that the Fraser River had to be dammed to secure B.C.’s future prosperity.”
“Both the ‘invincible’ industrial and political interests behind the dam, and Haig-Brown and his colleagues, promised us legacies,” she continued, “the legacy promised by the dam’s promoters was always a sham. The Province grew and prospered without the dam as everyone knew it would. Haig-Brown’s legacy is the wild salmon that still course through the Fraser Watershed’s streams and creeks.”
The next morning I threw myself out of the bunk—immediately regretting it as my body now takes much longer to wake up and catch up to my energy— determined to honour Haig-Brown’s legacy.
Maybe the Pacific Ocean can’t nurture wild salmon as it once did and maybe their estuarine and freshwater habitats have been compromised by climate change and development. But salmon found ways to survive the last ice age and they can survive our age.
So damn to hell those that tell us we can dam the rivers; destroy the last of the Fraser estuary, drive development through watersheds; desecrate salmon by discarding them to die as and call it recreation; replace wild fish with hatchery clones; drive roads, pipelines, and clear cuts through streams and creeks because if we don’t; we will sacrifice growth and prosperity. It is the chicanery employed by corporations and their politicians to get their way. To convince us we can have our cake and eat it too.
Convening people to talk about salmon is always a good thing as long as we remember that talk of recovery and resilience feeds the chicanery employed by those whose legacy is stock values. We first need to guard salmon by recalling what Haig-Brown said our legacy must be:
‘It seems clear beyond possibility of argument that any given generation of men can have only a lease, not ownership, of the earth; and one essential term of the lease is that the earth be handed down on to the next generation with unimpaired potentialities. This is the conservationist’s concern.’ Measure of the Year, 1950
Which legacy are you going to fight for when you get up tomorrow? Which legacy will you be remembered for? I know Roderick Haig-Brown, John Fraser, Brian Riddell, David Suzuki, David James Duncan’s names. I couldn’t begin to tell you the names of the US and Canadian proponents of the Moran Dam.
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On the eve of this week’s B.C. Salmon Recovery and Resilience Conference, organized by the Pacific Salmon Foundation, I was still dithering as to whether to attend. It was not that I did not want to go. It promises to be everything that speaks to me: salmon people, salmon stories, and salmon futures.
But I am turning 70 this week.
I was dithering between playing soccer with a new group of friends, continuing to learn how to play pickleball with another group, and going for a long, challenging bike ride. God knows why. Probably proving to myself, and an uncaring world, that I am not really 70. Then there was the opportunity to race my sailboat around Pender Island against a group of Salt Spring friends.
When I could dither no longer and had to choose between the three, it had to be salmon. Of course it had to be salmon. What was I thinking?
So I went ahead and entered the PSF portal to register. But the conference was full!
Despondent, angry with myself, and coming to grips with the fact that I squandered the opportunity to engage in what interests me most out of my fear of getting old and dying, I poured myself a glass of Irish whiskey and headed to the bunk on my small sailboat where I was staying for a few days. Never a good idea if I want a restful night’s sleep.
It was around midnight that I heard a mournful cry from the rigging above and felt a sudden blast of wind that caused the boat to shudder and the halyards slap a warning. The air chilled. The boat lurched to one side as if someone had stepped aboard. I pulled my comforter up to my chin and looked out from my bunk in the forepeak through the dark narrow space towards the companionway door-aft.
There stood an apparition, but not a frightening one, other than he had no body and was wreathed in pipe smoke. There was a kindness in his eyes. He looked like a ruffled old-school English fly fisherman. Which, upon a second look, he was. It was my childhood hero: Roderick Haig-Brown.
“Listen,” he said, “I don’t have much time. I have a grand bottle of merlot that I am sharing with Bruce Hill. I am showing him how to properly tie a Steelhead Bee.”
“You will be visited by three ghosts tonight”, he intoned in the old school, upper crust accent that I had in my head as I read his books growing up. “The ghost of salmon past, salmon present, and salmon future.”
Looking down upon me, he puffed on his pipe, generating a sudden cloud of smoke. As he faded into it, I heard a gentle but firm: “Heed them.”
I slipped back into a troubled sleep, wondering how Bruce’s cigar sized fingers were going to master a Steelhead Bee, when the halyards again began slapping madly against the mast.
“Damn that whiskey,” I whined to myself.
Suddenly before me stood a bear of a man. I had no idea how a man that size fit inside my boat’s cabin. I shrank back. Taking a step towards me out of the dark was my old boss, Murray Chatwin. Murray began his career buying gillnet fish in the mainland inlets for Ed Safarik Sr., who began his career catching chums in streams in East Vancouver as a kid before WWII, taking them into Chinatown by wheelbarrow to sell. By the time I met them Ed Sr was part owner of Ocean Fisheries and Murray was a VP. Murray cared deeply about salmon, salmon fishermen, the salmon industry, and hockey, not necessarily in that order. He was not a man to suffer fools, or much else, in his past life.
“Pay attention. I am the ghost of salmon past, and you and I are taking a trip.”
As was typical with Murray, it wasn’t open for discussion. Before I knew it, I was back in the Cessna 185 in which I spent so many hours and days every season through the 1980s and ‘90s. I somehow knew this flight recalled 1990—just nine Adams River sockeye lifetimes ago. I had just finished telling a reporter from Salmon Arm a couple of days previous that the famous cyclical Adams River sockeye return this year was only a shadow of what it was in the early 1990s.
Leaving Prince Rupert, we flew through time and space. Over hundreds of seine and gillnet boats fishing Nass pinks, chums and sockeye, across to Haida Gwaii to check out the fleets of trollers off North Island and down the west side of Haida Gwaii, back across Hecate Strait to Area 6 to watch seines loading up on pink and chum salmon.
Dropping down to Area 8 near Bella Bella, we watched seine and gillnet boats unloading to tenders for the trip to the many processing plants in Prince Rupert, Port Hardy, Steveston and Vancouver.
Suddenly, it was August, and we were in Johnstone Strait, watching seiner after seiner struggling to lift full ‘bags’ of sockeye over their sterns. We watched as seines and gillnets that called Alert Bay, Sointula, Port Hardy, Campbell River, French Creek, Quadra Island’s Cape Mudge, and a dozen other island communities home were unloaded onto tenders that would transport their salmon to the thousands of people working in processing plants from Prince Rupert to Vancouver, turning salmon into food for the world.
Leaving Johnstone Strait, we flew down to Steveston and followed the Fraser River from Steveston up to Mission. Each section had its own fleet of gillnet boats connected to a nearby community and they were all loading up. Then it was October and we were in Haida Gwaii again watching one of my favourite fisheries: fall dogs (chum salmon). Northern gillnets and seines fished in relaxed terminal fisheries from Skidegate down through Darwin Sound, enjoying the relaxed atmosphere after a hectic summer season.
Altogether, the combined fleets landed over 29 million salmon in 1990, compared to the maybe three million that will be caught this year by commercial fishermen along with another 700,000 that will be caught by recreational fishermen. Almost half of the commercial salmon caught this season were from one small terminal pink salmon fishery in one of the mainland inlets. None of the major fishing areas of the past produced much in the way of catch, except for Barkley Sound.
I turned to Murray in distress, “We had no idea it would come to this, none of us did. Not DFO, us in industry, no one.”
Murray slowly turned to me and growled, “You think not?”
Before I could think, we were standing on an empty dock at Donaldson’s Landing in Rivers Inlet. Murray reminded me that both Rivers Inlet and Smith Inlet, just next door, were the home of a thriving gillnet fishery for decades. A fleet that, when Rivers and Smiths sockeye disappeared, migrated to the Skeena, disrupting fishing patterns and connections for the First Nations fishermen who had fished the Skeena for generations. This, within both his and my career.
As I acknowledged this loss, I found myself watching a young Murray and his friends buying gillnet fish from a bunch of characters in the mainland inlets. The older Murray came up alongside me as I slowly took in the community feel of the fishery.
“I watched this disappear too,” he said mournfully. “The fish, the people, and the communities.”
We then watched the last gillnet fishery for Fraser River springs. We understood what the fishermen did not; this was to be the last time they would haul their large mesh spring salmon gillnets out of the netloft. The fish that fed them and Southern Resident Killer Whales were becoming a memory.
Suddenly, we were back up in Prince Rupert watching Japanese gillnet fishermen delivering chums from far up Area 3. I was shocked to realize that I recognized the boat, fisherman, and even the delivery; not understanding at the time that it would be the last time I, or anyone else, would see it.
Murray then reminded me of attending a lecture by Dr. Welch in Sidney. Dr. Welch told the audience that Pacific Ocean temperatures were warming and that it would likely lead to a significant decrease in the abundance of B.C. salmon.
Murray turned to me and said flatly, “Do you not remember that we sold a major portion of our seine fleet into the buyback based on his thoughts and what we were seeing?”
“Yes,” I quietly agreed.
“Do you also not remember that you began making fishing decisions based on marine water temperatures that were being modified by a warming Pacific Ocean?”
I guiltily agreed that I had.
“Then don’t tell me we didn’t know,” he roared, “The salmon began disappearing on our watch!”
Stunned by this realization, I slowly realized I was alone and back in my bunk; shaken and guilt stricken.
I pulled the blankets up over my head praying for the night to be over.
Exhausted, traumatized, and feeling very alone, I drifted into a fitful sleep. I was woken again, this time by a soothing voice.
“Greg, I am the ghost of salmon present, and I am here to give you this.”
She held out a beautifully decorated cake, with multi-coloured sprinkles across the top. I shakily took it from her.
Looking down at the cake, I just had to have a slice. But before I could, the ghost took me by the hand, still carrying the unspoiled cake, into a dark cavernous planetarium-like space. We floated high up in the air, looking down into nothingness. Below us, if you squinted, memories of losses that I couldn’t quite bring into focus drifted like shadows in a fog across the moors.
She turned to me and quietly said, “I spent years creating this.”
Reaching out her arm, she pointed at a small section of the dark expanse. It erupted into light. Graphs, figures, and pictures describing the diversity, distribution, habitat, and status of salmon in the area elevated into the air, turning on every axis, making it feel like I could penetrate, absorb, and be part of the data. It was miraculous.
She pointed at another section, then another, and another, faster, and faster. I began to notice they were colour-coded. Most were red or amber. A very few were green. It dawned on me that these were Wild Salmon Policy designations: red for being at high risk of permanent loss; amber indicating that the salmon population is vulnerable; and green indicating the population is abundant.
As she swept her arm across the B.C.’s innumerable salmon watersheds, few glowed green, most were amber or red.
“God,” I moaned. “How did it get like this?”
She looked at me with sadness, and said in tones one would hear at a funeral, “This is your cake.”
I looked down at it and for the first time, noticed that the multi-coloured sprinkles on top mirrored the colours she had just displayed across the landscape.
She then stretched out her arms, inviting me to watch, and slowly waved them across the breadth of the space. All of B.C.’s salmon populations slowly illuminated, brought alive through their data.
She took a deep breath that seemed to stick in her chest and again spread her arms across the salmon landscapes. But this time, they were overlaid by future pipelines, logging scars, ports, fires, floods, oil spills, and urban growth.
I looked down at my cake, and for the first time, I noticed a foul odour of oil, burnt soil, bad water, and corruption emanating from it.
With sadness and wisdom she looked at me and said, “Yes, you can have your cake, but it might be best not to foul it more before trying to eat it.”
Finding myself back in my bunk, I squirreled down as deep as I could go, promising myself I wouldn’t come out until morning, no matter what.
Suddenly, the covers were torn from me, and a voice thundered, “I am the ghost of salmon future.”
I summoned the courage to open my eyes and could see nothing. My voice quavered as I asked, “Where—what are you?”
“Idiot,” the voice thundered out of the dark again. “I am the future; I haven’t been written yet.”
“But contemplate this,” he continued.
A passenger train with 36 windows, one for each salmon season since 1990, burst through the dark of my small cabin, each window lit up as it sped through the dark, but each window was dimmer than the one before it.
Then, another similar train of 36 cars burst through, but this time the windows were dimmer and many remained dark.
That first train came from 1990, nine sockeye generations ago. The second train projects the next 36 years, or nine sockeye generations,” he growled. “People 35, or younger, will be the age you are today when it arrives in 2062.”
“You are showing me how fast our salmon have declined and how fast they will likely continue to collapse into the future? I don’t want to see anymore,” I said in a wavering voice.
“No, you self-absorbed fool,” he grumbled with contempt, the voice now coming from beside me. “I am telling you people understand salmon abundance, diversity, and distribution from where they stand now, not the abundance, diversity, and distribution that was present just a few decades ago, or even a sockeye generation ago.
“As salmon populations decline,” he continued, “each generation grows up with fewer fish in fewer places and takes that as normal. People lose sight of how much has already been lost. That is a shifting baseline.”
“It distorts our understanding of the ecological, cultural, and social importance of salmon. And it limits our imagination as to what can be done to save them, and gives permission to those that would sacrifice them.”
“You are coming with me,” he said.
I wanted to say no, but who, or what, would I say no to?
I found myself at the 2026 Return of the Salmon Festival in Tsútswecw Park, formerly Roderick Haig-Brown Park, alongside the Adams River. I stood amid the many visitors that attend this miracle each day through the spawning season.
My ghostly escort rumbled in my ear, “In 1990 almost five million sockeye spawned here. This year there may be as few as 300,000 or 400,000. But it will be this year that these people will measure future years against.”
In a blink, I found myself outside a busy Save-On-Foods. Looking around, wondering what I was doing here, it dawned on me that I was back in Prince Rupert. Looking closer still, I realized my vantage point was near where I slept all summer above the noise and chaos of the salmon processing lines at the Royal Plant. A variation of Joni Mitchell’s lyrics from “Big Yellow Taxi” came to mind: “They paved over memories and histories…”
Suddenly, we were beside the George Massey Tunnel where the cannery I started at, Cassiar’s Rice Mill, had been flattened to allow for an actual parking lot to store equipment and materials for the construction of a replacement tunnel.
Then, I was standing over a rotting corpse. I wanted to look away but could not. I was compelled to look at it.
“It’s me!” I choked out in horror.
“Who cares about you?” the ghost tiredly asked. “That’s only a bag of skin and bones. What died is the stories you told. You are the last of the generations who experienced salmon abundance and the people, communities, and cultures they supported. You were one of the last few small brakes on that speeding train of shifting baselines.”
“But we can invest in recovery and resilience,” I stammered.
Back on the boat, the cabin flared red.
“Recover to what existed in 1990? Recover to what is left today? Recover what? Where? For what purpose? Who decides what to recover?’ He demanded. “The same with resilience. It is like deciding that a person who was struck by the train that just tore through your boat needs painkillers. Of course they are going to require damned painkillers!” He snarled, “But painkillers cannot make them whole again or even save him.”
“What can we do?” I pleaded.
The anger in his voice changed to disgust, “Haven’t you been paying attention at all? You cannot have your cake and eat it too. You cannot build ports over estuaries, construct and operate toxic mines next to salmon streams, clear-cut hillsides, place fisheries over fish, choose water for agriculture and industry over spawning salmon, allow fish farms, pump more heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere and say you want to restore or preserve salmon.”
Then I was back in my bunk, feeling depleted, full of loss and despair, when I was revisited by the ghost of salmon present. As I finally fell into a deep slumber, she gently whispered in my ear:
“For those who say making such a choice is impossible, or that the politics of the day demand difficult choices, remember Roderick Haig-Brown. Haig-Brown fought, and won, back in 1972, the battle against all the political and industrial interests of the day who told us that the Fraser River had to be dammed to secure B.C.’s future prosperity.”
“Both the ‘invincible’ industrial and political interests behind the dam, and Haig-Brown and his colleagues, promised us legacies,” she continued, “the legacy promised by the dam’s promoters was always a sham. The Province grew and prospered without the dam as everyone knew it would. Haig-Brown’s legacy is the wild salmon that still course through the Fraser Watershed’s streams and creeks.”
The next morning I threw myself out of the bunk—immediately regretting it as my body now takes much longer to wake up and catch up to my energy— determined to honour Haig-Brown’s legacy.
Maybe the Pacific Ocean can’t nurture wild salmon as it once did and maybe their estuarine and freshwater habitats have been compromised by climate change and development. But salmon found ways to survive the last ice age and they can survive our age.
So damn to hell those that tell us we can dam the rivers; destroy the last of the Fraser estuary, drive development through watersheds; desecrate salmon by discarding them to die as and call it recreation; replace wild fish with hatchery clones; drive roads, pipelines, and clear cuts through streams and creeks because if we don’t; we will sacrifice growth and prosperity. It is the chicanery employed by corporations and their politicians to get their way. To convince us we can have our cake and eat it too.
Convening people to talk about salmon is always a good thing as long as we remember that talk of recovery and resilience feeds the chicanery employed by those whose legacy is stock values. We first need to guard salmon by recalling what Haig-Brown said our legacy must be:
‘It seems clear beyond possibility of argument that any given generation of men can have only a lease, not ownership, of the earth; and one essential term of the lease is that the earth be handed down on to the next generation with unimpaired potentialities. This is the conservationist’s concern.’ Measure of the Year, 1950
Which legacy are you going to fight for when you get up tomorrow? Which legacy will you be remembered for? I know Roderick Haig-Brown, John Fraser, Brian Riddell, David Suzuki, David James Duncan’s names. I couldn’t begin to tell you the names of the US and Canadian proponents of the Moran Dam.
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On the eve of this week’s B.C. Salmon Recovery and Resilience Conference, organized by the Pacific Salmon Foundation, I was still dithering as to whether to attend. It was not that I did not want to go. It promises to be everything that speaks to me: salmon people, salmon stories, and salmon futures.
But I am turning 70 this week.
I was dithering between playing soccer with a new group of friends, continuing to learn how to play pickleball with another group, and going for a long, challenging bike ride. God knows why. Probably proving to myself, and an uncaring world, that I am not really 70. Then there was the opportunity to race my sailboat around Pender Island against a group of Salt Spring friends.
When I could dither no longer and had to choose between the three, it had to be salmon. Of course it had to be salmon. What was I thinking?
So I went ahead and entered the PSF portal to register. But the conference was full!
Despondent, angry with myself, and coming to grips with the fact that I squandered the opportunity to engage in what interests me most out of my fear of getting old and dying, I poured myself a glass of Irish whiskey and headed to the bunk on my small sailboat where I was staying for a few days. Never a good idea if I want a restful night’s sleep.
It was around midnight that I heard a mournful cry from the rigging above and felt a sudden blast of wind that caused the boat to shudder and the halyards slap a warning. The air chilled. The boat lurched to one side as if someone had stepped aboard. I pulled my comforter up to my chin and looked out from my bunk in the forepeak through the dark narrow space towards the companionway door-aft.
There stood an apparition, but not a frightening one, other than he had no body and was wreathed in pipe smoke. There was a kindness in his eyes. He looked like a ruffled old-school English fly fisherman. Which, upon a second look, he was. It was my childhood hero: Roderick Haig-Brown.
“Listen,” he said, “I don’t have much time. I have a grand bottle of merlot that I am sharing with Bruce Hill. I am showing him how to properly tie a Steelhead Bee.”
“You will be visited by three ghosts tonight”, he intoned in the old school, upper crust accent that I had in my head as I read his books growing up. “The ghost of salmon past, salmon present, and salmon future.”
Looking down upon me, he puffed on his pipe, generating a sudden cloud of smoke. As he faded into it, I heard a gentle but firm: “Heed them.”
I slipped back into a troubled sleep, wondering how Bruce’s cigar sized fingers were going to master a Steelhead Bee, when the halyards again began slapping madly against the mast.
“Damn that whiskey,” I whined to myself.
Suddenly before me stood a bear of a man. I had no idea how a man that size fit inside my boat’s cabin. I shrank back. Taking a step towards me out of the dark was my old boss, Murray Chatwin. Murray began his career buying gillnet fish in the mainland inlets for Ed Safarik Sr., who began his career catching chums in streams in East Vancouver as a kid before WWII, taking them into Chinatown by wheelbarrow to sell. By the time I met them Ed Sr was part owner of Ocean Fisheries and Murray was a VP. Murray cared deeply about salmon, salmon fishermen, the salmon industry, and hockey, not necessarily in that order. He was not a man to suffer fools, or much else, in his past life.
“Pay attention. I am the ghost of salmon past, and you and I are taking a trip.”
As was typical with Murray, it wasn’t open for discussion. Before I knew it, I was back in the Cessna 185 in which I spent so many hours and days every season through the 1980s and ‘90s. I somehow knew this flight recalled 1990—just nine Adams River sockeye lifetimes ago. I had just finished telling a reporter from Salmon Arm a couple of days previous that the famous cyclical Adams River sockeye return this year was only a shadow of what it was in the early 1990s.
Leaving Prince Rupert, we flew through time and space. Over hundreds of seine and gillnet boats fishing Nass pinks, chums and sockeye, across to Haida Gwaii to check out the fleets of trollers off North Island and down the west side of Haida Gwaii, back across Hecate Strait to Area 6 to watch seines loading up on pink and chum salmon.
Dropping down to Area 8 near Bella Bella, we watched seine and gillnet boats unloading to tenders for the trip to the many processing plants in Prince Rupert, Port Hardy, Steveston and Vancouver.
Suddenly, it was August, and we were in Johnstone Strait, watching seiner after seiner struggling to lift full ‘bags’ of sockeye over their sterns. We watched as seines and gillnets that called Alert Bay, Sointula, Port Hardy, Campbell River, French Creek, Quadra Island’s Cape Mudge, and a dozen other island communities home were unloaded onto tenders that would transport their salmon to the thousands of people working in processing plants from Prince Rupert to Vancouver, turning salmon into food for the world.
Leaving Johnstone Strait, we flew down to Steveston and followed the Fraser River from Steveston up to Mission. Each section had its own fleet of gillnet boats connected to a nearby community and they were all loading up. Then it was October and we were in Haida Gwaii again watching one of my favourite fisheries: fall dogs (chum salmon). Northern gillnets and seines fished in relaxed terminal fisheries from Skidegate down through Darwin Sound, enjoying the relaxed atmosphere after a hectic summer season.
Altogether, the combined fleets landed over 29 million salmon in 1990, compared to the maybe three million that will be caught this year by commercial fishermen along with another 700,000 that will be caught by recreational fishermen. Almost half of the commercial salmon caught this season were from one small terminal pink salmon fishery in one of the mainland inlets. None of the major fishing areas of the past produced much in the way of catch, except for Barkley Sound.
I turned to Murray in distress, “We had no idea it would come to this, none of us did. Not DFO, us in industry, no one.”
Murray slowly turned to me and growled, “You think not?”
Before I could think, we were standing on an empty dock at Donaldson’s Landing in Rivers Inlet. Murray reminded me that both Rivers Inlet and Smith Inlet, just next door, were the home of a thriving gillnet fishery for decades. A fleet that, when Rivers and Smiths sockeye disappeared, migrated to the Skeena, disrupting fishing patterns and connections for the First Nations fishermen who had fished the Skeena for generations. This, within both his and my career.
As I acknowledged this loss, I found myself watching a young Murray and his friends buying gillnet fish from a bunch of characters in the mainland inlets. The older Murray came up alongside me as I slowly took in the community feel of the fishery.
“I watched this disappear too,” he said mournfully. “The fish, the people, and the communities.”
We then watched the last gillnet fishery for Fraser River springs. We understood what the fishermen did not; this was to be the last time they would haul their large mesh spring salmon gillnets out of the netloft. The fish that fed them and Southern Resident Killer Whales were becoming a memory.
Suddenly, we were back up in Prince Rupert watching Japanese gillnet fishermen delivering chums from far up Area 3. I was shocked to realize that I recognized the boat, fisherman, and even the delivery; not understanding at the time that it would be the last time I, or anyone else, would see it.
Murray then reminded me of attending a lecture by Dr. Welch in Sidney. Dr. Welch told the audience that Pacific Ocean temperatures were warming and that it would likely lead to a significant decrease in the abundance of B.C. salmon.
Murray turned to me and said flatly, “Do you not remember that we sold a major portion of our seine fleet into the buyback based on his thoughts and what we were seeing?”
“Yes,” I quietly agreed.
“Do you also not remember that you began making fishing decisions based on marine water temperatures that were being modified by a warming Pacific Ocean?”
I guiltily agreed that I had.
“Then don’t tell me we didn’t know,” he roared, “The salmon began disappearing on our watch!”
Stunned by this realization, I slowly realized I was alone and back in my bunk; shaken and guilt stricken.
I pulled the blankets up over my head praying for the night to be over.
Exhausted, traumatized, and feeling very alone, I drifted into a fitful sleep. I was woken again, this time by a soothing voice.
“Greg, I am the ghost of salmon present, and I am here to give you this.”
She held out a beautifully decorated cake, with multi-coloured sprinkles across the top. I shakily took it from her.
Looking down at the cake, I just had to have a slice. But before I could, the ghost took me by the hand, still carrying the unspoiled cake, into a dark cavernous planetarium-like space. We floated high up in the air, looking down into nothingness. Below us, if you squinted, memories of losses that I couldn’t quite bring into focus drifted like shadows in a fog across the moors.
She turned to me and quietly said, “I spent years creating this.”
Reaching out her arm, she pointed at a small section of the dark expanse. It erupted into light. Graphs, figures, and pictures describing the diversity, distribution, habitat, and status of salmon in the area elevated into the air, turning on every axis, making it feel like I could penetrate, absorb, and be part of the data. It was miraculous.
She pointed at another section, then another, and another, faster, and faster. I began to notice they were colour-coded. Most were red or amber. A very few were green. It dawned on me that these were Wild Salmon Policy designations: red for being at high risk of permanent loss; amber indicating that the salmon population is vulnerable; and green indicating the population is abundant.
As she swept her arm across the B.C.’s innumerable salmon watersheds, few glowed green, most were amber or red.
“God,” I moaned. “How did it get like this?”
She looked at me with sadness, and said in tones one would hear at a funeral, “This is your cake.”
I looked down at it and for the first time, noticed that the multi-coloured sprinkles on top mirrored the colours she had just displayed across the landscape.
She then stretched out her arms, inviting me to watch, and slowly waved them across the breadth of the space. All of B.C.’s salmon populations slowly illuminated, brought alive through their data.
She took a deep breath that seemed to stick in her chest and again spread her arms across the salmon landscapes. But this time, they were overlaid by future pipelines, logging scars, ports, fires, floods, oil spills, and urban growth.
I looked down at my cake, and for the first time, I noticed a foul odour of oil, burnt soil, bad water, and corruption emanating from it.
With sadness and wisdom she looked at me and said, “Yes, you can have your cake, but it might be best not to foul it more before trying to eat it.”
Finding myself back in my bunk, I squirreled down as deep as I could go, promising myself I wouldn’t come out until morning, no matter what.
Suddenly, the covers were torn from me, and a voice thundered, “I am the ghost of salmon future.”
I summoned the courage to open my eyes and could see nothing. My voice quavered as I asked, “Where—what are you?”
“Idiot,” the voice thundered out of the dark again. “I am the future; I haven’t been written yet.”
“But contemplate this,” he continued.
A passenger train with 36 windows, one for each salmon season since 1990, burst through the dark of my small cabin, each window lit up as it sped through the dark, but each window was dimmer than the one before it.
Then, another similar train of 36 cars burst through, but this time the windows were dimmer and many remained dark.
That first train came from 1990, nine sockeye generations ago. The second train projects the next 36 years, or nine sockeye generations,” he growled. “People 35, or younger, will be the age you are today when it arrives in 2062.”
“You are showing me how fast our salmon have declined and how fast they will likely continue to collapse into the future? I don’t want to see anymore,” I said in a wavering voice.
“No, you self-absorbed fool,” he grumbled with contempt, the voice now coming from beside me. “I am telling you people understand salmon abundance, diversity, and distribution from where they stand now, not the abundance, diversity, and distribution that was present just a few decades ago, or even a sockeye generation ago.
“As salmon populations decline,” he continued, “each generation grows up with fewer fish in fewer places and takes that as normal. People lose sight of how much has already been lost. That is a shifting baseline.”
“It distorts our understanding of the ecological, cultural, and social importance of salmon. And it limits our imagination as to what can be done to save them, and gives permission to those that would sacrifice them.”
“You are coming with me,” he said.
I wanted to say no, but who, or what, would I say no to?
I found myself at the 2026 Return of the Salmon Festival in Tsútswecw Park, formerly Roderick Haig-Brown Park, alongside the Adams River. I stood amid the many visitors that attend this miracle each day through the spawning season.
My ghostly escort rumbled in my ear, “In 1990 almost five million sockeye spawned here. This year there may be as few as 300,000 or 400,000. But it will be this year that these people will measure future years against.”
In a blink, I found myself outside a busy Save-On-Foods. Looking around, wondering what I was doing here, it dawned on me that I was back in Prince Rupert. Looking closer still, I realized my vantage point was near where I slept all summer above the noise and chaos of the salmon processing lines at the Royal Plant. A variation of Joni Mitchell’s lyrics from “Big Yellow Taxi” came to mind: “They paved over memories and histories…”
Suddenly, we were beside the George Massey Tunnel where the cannery I started at, Cassiar’s Rice Mill, had been flattened to allow for an actual parking lot to store equipment and materials for the construction of a replacement tunnel.
Then, I was standing over a rotting corpse. I wanted to look away but could not. I was compelled to look at it.
“It’s me!” I choked out in horror.
“Who cares about you?” the ghost tiredly asked. “That’s only a bag of skin and bones. What died is the stories you told. You are the last of the generations who experienced salmon abundance and the people, communities, and cultures they supported. You were one of the last few small brakes on that speeding train of shifting baselines.”
“But we can invest in recovery and resilience,” I stammered.
Back on the boat, the cabin flared red.
“Recover to what existed in 1990? Recover to what is left today? Recover what? Where? For what purpose? Who decides what to recover?’ He demanded. “The same with resilience. It is like deciding that a person who was struck by the train that just tore through your boat needs painkillers. Of course they are going to require damned painkillers!” He snarled, “But painkillers cannot make them whole again or even save him.”
“What can we do?” I pleaded.
The anger in his voice changed to disgust, “Haven’t you been paying attention at all? You cannot have your cake and eat it too. You cannot build ports over estuaries, construct and operate toxic mines next to salmon streams, clear-cut hillsides, place fisheries over fish, choose water for agriculture and industry over spawning salmon, allow fish farms, pump more heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere and say you want to restore or preserve salmon.”
Then I was back in my bunk, feeling depleted, full of loss and despair, when I was revisited by the ghost of salmon present. As I finally fell into a deep slumber, she gently whispered in my ear:
“For those who say making such a choice is impossible, or that the politics of the day demand difficult choices, remember Roderick Haig-Brown. Haig-Brown fought, and won, back in 1972, the battle against all the political and industrial interests of the day who told us that the Fraser River had to be dammed to secure B.C.’s future prosperity.”
“Both the ‘invincible’ industrial and political interests behind the dam, and Haig-Brown and his colleagues, promised us legacies,” she continued, “the legacy promised by the dam’s promoters was always a sham. The Province grew and prospered without the dam as everyone knew it would. Haig-Brown’s legacy is the wild salmon that still course through the Fraser Watershed’s streams and creeks.”
The next morning I threw myself out of the bunk—immediately regretting it as my body now takes much longer to wake up and catch up to my energy— determined to honour Haig-Brown’s legacy.
Maybe the Pacific Ocean can’t nurture wild salmon as it once did and maybe their estuarine and freshwater habitats have been compromised by climate change and development. But salmon found ways to survive the last ice age and they can survive our age.
So damn to hell those that tell us we can dam the rivers; destroy the last of the Fraser estuary, drive development through watersheds; desecrate salmon by discarding them to die as and call it recreation; replace wild fish with hatchery clones; drive roads, pipelines, and clear cuts through streams and creeks because if we don’t; we will sacrifice growth and prosperity. It is the chicanery employed by corporations and their politicians to get their way. To convince us we can have our cake and eat it too.
Convening people to talk about salmon is always a good thing as long as we remember that talk of recovery and resilience feeds the chicanery employed by those whose legacy is stock values. We first need to guard salmon by recalling what Haig-Brown said our legacy must be:
‘It seems clear beyond possibility of argument that any given generation of men can have only a lease, not ownership, of the earth; and one essential term of the lease is that the earth be handed down on to the next generation with unimpaired potentialities. This is the conservationist’s concern.’ Measure of the Year, 1950
Which legacy are you going to fight for when you get up tomorrow? Which legacy will you be remembered for? I know Roderick Haig-Brown, John Fraser, Brian Riddell, David Suzuki, David James Duncan’s names. I couldn’t begin to tell you the names of the US and Canadian proponents of the Moran Dam.
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