The weather must cool before salmon leave Lake Michigan to die. In the lingering warmth of late September they lie in wait off Ludington State Park, and fishermen in chest-high waders have to walk out to meet them. Here’s a scene you might see along the Atlantic coast when the bluefish are running–the long, graceful rods, the two-handed casts into the surf, the slow walk back to dry sand where the rod is set into a holder to wait, arched, taut, for a strike hundreds of feet away. This is sport. But then the weather breaks and the fish crowd into the Sable River; what happens now is beyond sport and must be experienced to be appreciated.
What distinguishes the Pacific salmon from other Michigan fish is not so much its origins as the cycle of its life and death. In their native northwest, salmon hatch in the highest reaches of sea-flowing streams where the water is cold, swift, and shallow. As smolts they work their way to the sea; as adults they return once, to spawn, then die. No salmon may live beyond its allotted time. And every salmon must die in the required place. However far they may swim, wherever the water may take them, they must return to the place where first they saw light. Block the stream of the ancestors, you destroy an entire strain of fishes. They will swarm hopelessly, they will uselessly discharge their eggs into silt.
The chinook salmon, also called the king salmon, and its smaller cousin, the coho, remain the principal species stocked in the Great Lakes, although now we also have Atlantic salmon, steelhead trout, brown trout, and something called a splake, which is a hybrid put together by the fishery people. The fishery people are constantly coming up with something new.
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Alas, they will die unfulfilled anyway. Few of the salmon stocked in the Great Lakes successfully propagate their kind. The conditions are almost never right, even in the best of streams. This is certainly true in the Sable River. At the point where it empties into Lake Michigan it is a clean but brownish stream that actually narrows at its sandy mouth. Because this is parkland, the river seems unspoiled, almost natural; you imagine it a thousand years ago, exactly the same, eternally flowing its forest-stained waters into the great blue lake. But, of course, one mile upstream there is that dam. And the dam is what stops the salmon. It is in this little stretch of river, in most places so narrow a fisherman almost casts to the opposite bank, that they will meet their end.
The people who come to snag salmon arrive in pickup trucks, campers, and well-used American passenger sedans, They quickly fill the campgrounds at Ludington State Park, setting up their tents and trailers, looking up friends from last year, praying for bad weather. The out-of-staters come from Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Indiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, and southern Ohio, among other places; they speak in down-home accents, play country music on their radios, and know how to catch fish.
Fortunately this gathering army of snaggers is never turned loose en masse on the little Sable River. Mayhem would surely result; at least that seems to be the view of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. The first time I visited Ludington they operated a lottery at the field house in the state park. The rules of the lottery were simple, and stern. If you were not seriously interested in salmon snagging, they would soon have had you discouraged. You had to be there at six. No, you could not enter the day before; no, you could not enter by mail. You had to arrive in the dead of the night and face the company of several hundred people who by life habit rise early, eat hearty breakfasts, and work hard every day. Four shifts were chosen, 200 persons each shift, each shift good for two hours of snagging, one shift per person per day. On the stage at the field house were four bins, appropriately marked. You chose one, dropped your name in, and waited for the drawing. The first shift, hitting the river at dawn, was every snagger’s first choice, and shift four, which reached the river in midafternoon, was a bit of a joke–good enough for a tourist from Chicago, but not to be seriously considered by a man who had driven all the way from West Virginia. If you went for shift number one and failed, your name automatically moved to the bin for shift number two. Fail again, try for number three. The same for number four. At the height of the run, you could very well be out of bed in the middle of the night and still never reach the river.
It came to this. I would have to go snagging myself.
