Slowing to the Speed of Spawning Salmon
E108: A Canadian Thanksgiving picture essay
Read this edition on your browser as it’s filled with photos, video and text, each lightly edited.
Abundance and Joy in Nature
It’s the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, and Nature is pulling out all the stops. The normally sedate sugar maples lining the highway look like scoops of orange sherbet topped with a raspberry coulis. The wind weaves through the gentle yellow spears of aspen leaves. Purples partner with orange, yellow with red.
In the spirit of Thanksgiving, it gives me pleasure to share the vibrance surrounding me at this moment.
“See how beautiful I am,” Nature whispered on the wind. “How could you not continue to fight for something as majestic as this?” I guess she sensed that I was flagging, my internal struggle questioning whether I have any influence to shift the needle on climate. She was nudging me to share about Climate in a voice as strident as the vibrant red of the local sumac bushes that blanket the hills, setting them ablaze - a different kind of wildfire than the ones Canada has become famous for this past summer.
Slowing Down to the Speed of Spawning Salmon
The Upper Middle Bridge is suspended high over Sixteen Mile Creek in Oakville. Beneath me, the driveways and putting greens on the 100-year-old Glen Abbey Golf Course hug the shape of the creek. My eye followed the creek towards the lake, and I was greeted with an explosion of colour.
I’d only stopped to capture a photo or two, but an unexpected glint in the waters 100 feet below caught my eye. It was a salmon, breaching the tiny rapid as it made its way upstream. The afternoon sunlight peeking behind clouds caught the droplets in that brief second.
Along with the fall colours, the salmon run has been a moment I try to witness each year. The word “run” usually implies speed. But one thing with spawning salmon - they take their time. Watching them is a lesson in slowing down.
Scanning the stream I spied a school of salmon who had made the leap resting in the deeper, still pool under the bridge span. Further downstream I could see a family of around nine salmon gathered in a quiet pool a few feet away from the same rapid, the same bend in the stream. To offer you a sense of scale, each salmon is around 2-3 foot or 0.5-1 meter long. They were preparing to make the same jump. Could I perhaps capture this for you on camera? I settled in.
I watched them gambol, chasing each other around. Were they flexing their muscles? Practising how to leap out of the water? Is this their equivalent of pumping iron? You’d catch some activity. Then they would take a break. Finally, in little groups of two or three, they would approach the next hurdle. I wonder what goes through their head. It must truly be a leap of faith. What looks like a simple collection of ripples to us humans is a complete unknown to them. Living beneath the surface of the water they have no idea if this is going to be an easy jump or a sequence of challenging ones. If the river is running low, that could be as arduous as attempting the upstream jumps right after a heavy rainfall.
Salmon return to the rivers of their own birth to spawn (lay eggs). Some will move from the salty oceans, back to fresh water. Others move from the lakes navigating the streams that feed them. Few streams are as sedate as the one suspended below me. Some - like those in Alaska - have significant sequences of waterfalls. Many will not make it all the way upstream. At the end of their journey, the salmon will spawn. And then, tuckered from the journey, they will die.
I will never look at a salmon steak the same way again. Witnessing this, I have a whole new level of respect for the food placed in front of me and the ecosystems that make it happen.
I am, again, filled with awe at the beauty and science that surrounds us. The correlation between temperatures that trigger migrations, hibernations and the final colourful hurrah in a leaf before it falls to the ground, the internal homing signal that sends birds and fish across the globe. The complexity and inter-relationship between all these species and systems.
In the end, it would take 50 minutes before one solo fish gathered its strength and courage to make that leap.
In that time, I looped the same song, learning the words by heart. And I caught the attention of a worried cop as I stood bent over the railing, so intently focused on the action below.
Finally! Yes, the leap happens in a few seconds. (Backing music is the new track hurtme2 by TEDDE1)
From various local walks, a celebration of colour
Can you spot the Monarch butterflies?
Evening walk along Credit River, our normal haunt for the salmon run:
To offer a sense of scale of these salmon (after the discussion with Rick in the comments below) here is an Instagram reel I made Thanksgiving 2022 on the Credit River. Watch them line up for take off! The last frame shows the same location as the island and mini rapids above.
If you liked this glimpse into a Canadian autumn, please let me know with a comment below.
Some previous Thanksgiving Essays:
When who writes on the Future of Learning joined us this week, our Tribe Tilt officially grew past the 300-person mark. Jen, Maymie Chan (who writes
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See you next week. Stay healthy. From there all else becomes possible.
Karena
My son (stage name TEDDE) dropped his latest song hurtme2 and I used a snippet in this reel. Here is the Spotify link
Karena, you have to show me this place when I come to Canada. The pictures are killer!
Thanks for the shoutout Karena! And also, thank you for giving us a glimpse of the salmon run and canadian autumn - beautiful words matching the beautiful colors of the photos!