The fillet of wild-caught salmon on my dinner plate elicits profound new respect. After attending the FisherPoets Gathering in Astoria, Oregon, this past February, I now know what separates a frozen-at-sea catch on a commercial trawler (bound for fish fingers) from salmon delivered fresh from a small troller. From “Glazing,” an essay that commercial fisherman, writer, and lapsed social worker Tele Aadsen read on opening night, I learned that wild-caught salmon means that someone suited up in insulated gear in a minus-40-degree fishhold, spent hours “hunched over…hand-dipping each individual fish in a trough of sea water.” When you glaze salmon in the fishhold, your nose hairs crisp. Your feet go numb. And still, Aadsen commented, “there’s pride in the work.”
The FisherPoets Gathering, now in its 28th year, draws fisherfolk—men and women—from Oregon, Alaska, and as far away as Maine to the port town of Astoria, at the mouth of the wide Columbia, near where the river flows into the Pacific. It unfolds in seven venues around town across three days. It’s a raucous, joyful celebration, as emcee Doug Rhodes acknowledged on opening night, of “people who put their whole heart into a really hard job.” In addition to commercial fisherfolk, the gathering includes cannery workers, crabbers, oystermen, and, this year, a marine radio officer who is an expert on Coast Salish canoes.
The poets credit Jon Broderick, himself a poet, a former high school teacher, and a longtime commercial fisherman, for making the initial phone calls to convene the gathering. One of the core beliefs behind the festival, Broderick has written, is that “our work wants our creative attention.” The gathering invites anyone “who has earned an hourly wage in a cannery or a share on a fishing boat, whether they worked a single summer or an entire career, to come tell us about it.” This year, some 110 poets, writers, singer-songwriters, and storytellers participated. Though I was able to take in only a fraction of the total, every fishing story I heard carried the ring of authenticity.
Opening night, a Friday, I caught two sets at the Astoria Brewing Company (formerly the Wet Dog Cafe). These readings were my initiation to the stories, the vocabularies of working fishermen and fisherwomen. Jeffrey Kahrs, a former commercial fisherman who worked in Alaska and Washington, sang of drifting in the rainbow of an oil sheen, of lights shifting through phosphorescent waves, of deckhands turning “on floodlights to watch dolphins lunge across the bow.” From John Palmes, who “sings along with the engine” as he trolls for salmon in Alaska, I learned about “hoochies,” a plastic lure, trailing plastic tentacles. “Pink salmon will bite the pink ones—they’ll bite anything pink—but the Cohos like their hoochies chartreuse.” Peter Munro, whose career as a fisheries scientist for more than 40 years supported his ongoing poetry habit, read a Melvillean poem about a rare Pacific sleeper shark who tangled her tail in the long line of a research vessel, which “dragged her gills backwards” till she suffocated. Munro’s personal anguish at the “stealthy iniquitous / killing” of “an ancient” (figuring her age at 800 years old!) flares from the poem’s opening lines: “The eyeball of the sleeper shark filled both palms. / Our lead scientist made me slice it. Bastard / Should have extracted it herself.”
Commercial fishing is necessarily a competitive business, but there’s also a palpable sense of camaraderie among the fisherfolk here. As one longtime attendee commented, “they all wash their clothes in the same laundromat.” In her Substack after the festival, fisher poet Moe Bowstern posted: “I enjoy a rare feeling at FisherPoets, where I am most myself, where I feel safe, seen, and held, where I feel like people want what I have to give, where I connect most deeply with why I’m here on Earth.”
This is the first year the gathering sold out of FisherPoets badges; one of these, for twenty bucks, admits you to all events. Venues quickly filled to capacity. Raincoat zipped up, hood pulled tight around my face in slanting rain, I loved walking the glistening streets between venues, the laughter and bonhomie of strollers undeterred by the elements, stopping to grab a bowl of hot, steaming pho at a restaurant window.
I slipped into the Columbian Theater on Friday just in time to hear poet Geno Leech introduced as “the Tom Waits of Astoria.” Leech began writing poetry while drag fishing off the Oregon coast. In a raspy bass, he incanted “Lucky Is As Lucky Does,” a portrait of old Lucky, a Willapa Bay oysterman whose “heart pumps Willapa brine.” Lucky, who’s been “burned by gasoline, jellyfish, and fish cops,” who’s had “more repairs and replacements than Duck Oman’s dump truck.” On the same night, singer-songwriter Joel Miller spoke about fishing cod out of Kodiak, Alaska. Commercial fishing is hard and undeniably dangerous. There’s good reason the Columbia River Bar at the mouth of the Columbia is nicknamed the Graveyard of the Pacific. Boats can capsize, collide. Crew can slip on wet decks, get tangled in gear, and be dragged overboard. The commercial-fishing industry has a fatality rate nearly 40 times higher than the national average. So if commercial fishing is so difficult, so dangerous, so exhausting—why do the fishermen do it?
Poet Will Hornyak, performing at KALA, a storefront cabaret essential to Astoria’s music and spoken-word scene, answered in a poem, two excerpts of which follow:
For the money of course
To make rent, buy groceries
Take a trip somewhere, someday
I did it to know
A weariness in my bones I’d never known
To know the nature and depth
Of my weakness and strength.
Several of the festival poets spoke of fishing as a “calling,” abjuring life spent nine-to-five in a cubicle. Others were born into the family business. Among the second-generation fisher poets in the festival, Lara Messersmith-Glavin—a mesmerizing performer—spent her childhood aboard a salmon seine boat in Alaska. Instead of having human playmates, she writes, “I had direct contact with the wild: salmon and halibut gasping for breath, skittering crabs, the rich scents of jellyfish and seaweed. There were roaming bears, eagles as common as pigeons, and the ocean, always the ocean, tossing and leaping murmuring beneath me.”
Poet and storyteller Ed Edmo (Shoshone–Bannock–Nez Perce) grew up in the 1950s near Celilo Falls on the Columbia. Both diminutive and dignified, Edmo sat erect in his chair as he was wheeled into the hall at the Columbia River Maritime Museum for an event titled “Echo of the Waters: Honoring Native Fishing Traditions.” Setting his brake, he grabbed his cane and jabbed at the air, rousing the standing-room-only crowd with a legend of how Coyote created the Columbia River: “Coyote took a big stick to the top of the mountain and dug and sang a powerful song.” Having been encouraged to join in, the crowd began vigorously digging with imaginary sticks, embodying the story with him.
For centuries, Indigenous fishermen, the Wy'am, dipped ropes and nets into the roiling water, which plunged 40 feet over Celilo Falls. They stood on wooden scaffolds to catch the giant Chinook that struggled upstream to their spawning grounds. The village at Wy-am, one of the oldest continuously inhabited sites in North America, was the center of trade for tribes as far away as the Great Lakes, the Great Basin, and the Great Plains, once “the Wall Street of the river,” as Edmo explained. Every spring at Celilo, “since the beginning of time,” the Wy'am observed one of their most important rituals—the First Salmon Feast. But on March 10, 1957, army engineer H.B. Elder gave the “gates down” signal to 22 employees, who then pressed 22 buttons to close the gates of the Dalles Dam on the mid–Columbia River, permanently submerging Celilo Falls. Many Wy'am villagers stood on the cliffs to witness the drowning of an entire way of life; young Edmo was there among them.
Just weeks before the great inundation, Chief Tommy Tompson granted rare permission to the Oregon Historical Society to record The Last Salmon Feast of the Celilo Indians. We watched the poignant 18-minute black-and-white film together with Edmo: Wy'am women prepared roots, berries, and potatoes; men grilled salmon on dogwood stakes. Inside the longhouse, children sat wide-eyed in mothers’ laps. Before tasting the catch, the assembled offered thanks to the Creator for life-giving water. Dancing followed feasting, and from his wheelchair in the present day, Edmo pointed to his child self among the youths stomping a spirited circle dance.
After the presentations, attendees joined Edmo and other Indigenous poets for a tour of the museum’s new exhibits: Cedar and Sea: The Maritime Culture of the Indigenous People of the Pacific Northwest Coast and ntsayka ilíi ukuk—This Is Our Place. I was admiring a 24-foot Chinook hand-carved canoe when a voice rose in song across the gallery. It was the young poet Cliff Taylor (Ponca tribe). He stood with arms slightly extended from his sides, palms upraised, head bowed as he sang a prayer in a language I did not know but knew I needed to hear. I later asked Taylor what had moved him to sing: “I saw all kinds of ancestors present in those canoes, and I heard my ancestors tell me to sing to them.”•
Join us on April 17 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Ishmael Reed will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Justin Desmangles to discuss Mumbo Jumbo. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
WHY I WRITE
Read Ishmael Reed’s stirring essay on multiculturalism in American literature and becoming a global author. —Alta
PORT CITY
William Deverell reviews Alexis Madrigal’s The Pacific Circuit, calling it a “terrific” social history of Oakland over the past 100 years. —Alta
APRIL RELEASES
Here are the books by authors of the West that we’re excited are publishing this month. —Alta
LOVE LETTER
CBC selection panelist Lynell George has a piece in the recently released book Prose to the People, which honors Black bookstores across the country. —Essence
Alta’s California Book Club email newsletter is published weekly. Sign up for free today.
