by Joseph Jackson
Alaska June. The Koyukon people call it Ggaath Noghe’—king salmon month. I’m in the thick of it, somewhere between a Tuesday and a Wednesday, thigh-deep in a river and thinking: You’re not cold, you’re not cold.
The light is low and king salmon slash at the surface, rare like shooting stars. Here’s something: shooting stars aren’t actually shooting stars at all. They’re fist-sized clots of icy space debris, searing through our outer atmosphere at roughly 62,000 miles an hour along with the other hundred metric tons of space “junk” that pelts Earth on the daily. They’re not really that special by the numbers—there can be as many as a hundred per hour on a good night—but they still make you feel like the universe just pulled your lottery ticket when you see one.
King salmon are just a fish but they can make you feel similar.
This river is big enough that swinging flies through a portion of it seems improbable, but it gets a large enough run of king salmon (so you hear) that it doesn’t seem like outright stupidity. I’ve fished it for two years now with my Spey rod—steelhead in the spring and king salmon in the summers like this one. All that time has probably equated to tens of thousands of casts, and all but two of them have strung out lifeless. Neither of those brought a fish to hand. By now I guess that’s not really the point.
Ten hours ago I was sitting in a waiting room next to Emmie. Sunlight had leered at us through the windows as she got pricked for blood tests. While we waited, we read. We stared at the carpet. We tried not to judge the people around us but that’s the first thing anyone does in a place like that.
To my left: the young woman, probably still a teenager, wringing her hands, imploring the guy next to her to get off his phone and talk.
Straight ahead: an inmate from the women’s prison, orange jumpsuit stamped with a barcode and a face stamped with a thousand-yard stare. Cradling her stomach like it was a basket full of bail money. Suddenly I envisioned her child coming into the world, right there in the waiting room, spilling onto the carpet and screaming his head off like he knew exactly what kind of life he’d just been dumped into, and there on his slickened bloodied forehead was stamped a barcode, too—
“What do you think of this one?”
Emmie’s voice pinched me. She was pointing at what she’d written on a sticky note. Baby name. Girl. It was nice, unique, except—
“I don’t know,” I said, testing it on the roof of my mouth. “Does it mean anything?”
But she didn’t answer my question. She took my hand and put it on her swollen belly and I swallowed my gum. The kick against my palm was like getting a phone call from God.
Speaking of names: Tshawytscha. That’s the king salmon’s name. Oncorhynchus tshawytscha is what you’d find on their passport. Oncorhynchus comes, as words often do, from a pair of Greek roots: ónkos, meaning “lump” or “bend,” and rhúnkhos, translating to “snout.” Together: “Hook-snout,” which, if you know your salmon and the magnificent transformations they undergo during spawning, is appropriate. The tshawytscha bit is a Russian enigma that, when pronounced correctly, feels like you’re trying to loose a popcorn kernel from your gums.
During their annual spawning runs, king salmon go from new BMWs to rusted old wagons. Their metabolism sucks them down to ghosts of their former selves and they channel every last calorie to the grand calling of reproduction. The males sprout reptilian fangs and their jaws distort into the grotesquely pugnacious mugs you’d find on Murderers’ Row, like they know what’s ahead, the scrap of it. Here where I’m fishing—6 miles from the Pacific Ocean, an easy day’s trip for a purpose-driven king—they won’t reach that point for a while, but still. It’s the future no salmon escapes.
That’s why we love them, or at least are compelled by them. We know the salmon’s end because it’s our very own—they just show it on a timeline we can gawp at. They’re born in a backwater and they venture off into the great blue yonder only to be called home years later to have sex and die. It’s more or less the same story for half of my high-school graduating class, but they do it with a lot less grace. We all do.
Darkness moves in and the cold clasps at my hands. It’s not proper dark at this latitude, but it’s enough to serve the functions of night, quieting one world and waking another to riot in two hours’ worth of shadows. Terns hover like drones but soon vanish; other fishermen wander wraithlike back to the campground, into the trees, into oblivion for all I know. My mind ribbons through the casts, which turn to statistics, which turn to clippings of dismal king salmon news—another fishery closed, another escapement goal lowered to give the fish biologists a false sense of accomplishment—all the while Alaskan king salmon numbers plummeting like a bad stock, every year since 2007, a decline.
The potential headline I can’t shake: DAUGHTER GROWS UP IN A WORLD WITHOUT KING SALMON.
I lay new casts and the flies sizzle like bottle rockets on the way by. Me: hoping it’s the sound of hope. I’m looking at an impossible flow of water, quartered downstream, trying to imagine my fly and how it swings but seeing nothing but the afterimage of the sticky note from Emmie’s finger in the doctor’s office. Would it work as a name, I wonder. Would it work as a name as Tuesday officially becomes Wednesday, and what would it mean and when I said it, would I think of colors or trees or dead family members or something more substantial? Man. You don’t really consider the heft of a name until you’ve got to assign it.
It was something we’d been hung up on for a while. Our little girl had peeped into the world back in January in the form of an extra stripe on a pregnancy test. Ever since, we’d tried to imagine her on the outside: what she’d look like, what she’d be like.
We had a handful of names picked out, all of them scrawled on sticky notes scattered throughout the house, but whenever we sat down at the dining table to examine our list, or muttered them under our breath to see how they tasted, they felt trite and puny. The time around us shriveled and we both knew that September was going to grab us by the shoulders soon and pull us close enough to smell its breath. The kick in Emmie’s belly would turn to an earthside beauty with all kinds of weight to her. Life wouldn’t ever be the same, not even close.
That night, I cast until it felt like there was cement in my shoulder, and I finally called it quits and set up a tent in the dark around 3 a.m. I knew I wanted a king and I thought I wanted some clarity but I didn’t have either. I guess the truth of it was that fatherhood scared the hell right out of me, and the only place I could touch the thought was here, in a shadow world, falling asleep with my waders on.
I sleep late and rise blinking like an owl. Last night, the campground was dead like a town hit by influenza. Now it’s alive. An old man pulls on waders straight ahead. To my left, a pair of sports smoke cigarettes on the picnic bench, each face creased like a baseball mitt.
Do king salmon exist? they seem to be asking. Neither offers the hope of an answer, but then I guess the answer is them sitting there in the first place.
I make coffee on the tailgate and read some Cormac McCarthy. No kidding, he died that morning. Maybe while I was reading what he wrote. I chew on that for a while but there’s not much to chew on. He was an old man and old men die. What he left was a great big life of words to think about: hard words, awful words, moving words, but most of all, honest words. He’d never in the whole of eternity write another one.
Emmie calls and I learn that she didn’t sleep much at all. There was either a celebration or a protest taking place in her uterus most of the night.
“Did you catch any fish?” she asks.
“Nope.”
“Did you pick a name yet?”
I swirl the dregs of my coffee cup. “Nope.”
“Well, don’t come home until you’ve done one or the other.”
She didn’t actually say that.
I manage to while away the day, napping here, tying and retying leaders there. I take a few walks down to the water to watch the festivities and to remind myself why I fish when I do. The afternoon river is taken up by the inebriated and the obnoxious and the desperate. Night fishing is like being in an amusement park after hours; this is like going to Disneyland on a Saturday. There’s not even enough room to Spey cast.
I think about names but I try to do it offhandedly. It doesn’t work. I’m staring at the hordes of people, wondering what their names could be, and if their parents had as much trouble coming up with one as I am. You want to be able to say that you gave it as much thought as you could, that you made it as honest as you could, but surely most of the people out there in the water were just random pages of baby-naming books, a pile of last ditches because, “Hell, we gotta call ’em somethin’.” Then I think about the pregnant woman at the doctor’s office, the one from the prison, and I think about her little barcoded baby and what he or she would be called. You can talk about honesty all you want, but that kid is gonna grow up punching their name into a sign-in whenever they want to visit their mother. Best to make it something easy.
Before I know it, the light is low enough again to tell me it’s time. I saddle up and lope to the river, Spey rod dancing pirouettes behind me. The shores are being vacated in a mass exodus of the empty-handed. I assume the position—thigh-deep, you’re not cold—and cast.
What’s fatherhood but a bunch of little hopes like this: a cast, a swing, a string of prayers one after the other. Not knowing what you’re doing. Doing it anyway. The sizzle of hope.
Now dusk: I stop tasting names. I stop tasting why I’m here. Pretty soon the casts puddle up and so do the shadows and bugs drift through it all like Chinese lanterns. Ggaath Noghe’ blows wind toward me from the north. Somewhere out there is my house, with a freshly painted room and a new crib, all of it darkened but for one yellow light in the kitchen window. Somewhere out there is Emmie, sleeping, carrying our future, my world within a world.
Now darkness: a gull dozing on the rock across the river. The first stars coining overhead. A swallow appears as if out of a portal and bobbles in the air—I snap to. No, not a swallow. That’s a bat. “A black glove thrown up at the light,” if you’re D. H. Lawrence. A bat. In Alaska.
That little bat, we’ll call him a he, it’s like he’s heralding the lottery because I’m about to pull my line in for another cast when something jumps on my fly, feisty as a boxer. Another phone call from upstairs. The reel unzips and whatever’s doing the unzipping tows me toward the ocean.
The rod throbs in my hands, electric with the last two years of effort and the improbable exception that I’m trying to steer into the shallows now. I would call these the fish of ten thousand casts, but that’s just a quantity. And ten thousand is a little conservative, anyway.
Here’s another quantity: Oncorhynchus tshawytscha can lay up to 17,000 eggs, but only about 1 percent of them will survive to adulthood, if that. Add some oceanic climate change and the indiscriminate vacuums of factory trawlers and you’re calculating fractions of percentages. Luckily, the Oncorhynchus genus doesn’t breed for the good odds of passing on genes. They’re not all messy with self-importance. If they were, they’d have given up a long time ago. The fish would be extinct.
I get the king into calm water and wrangle the leader and then his tail. It’s a small buck, maybe 32 inches and 12 pounds, the Pacific Ocean splashed all over him. MAN CONTEMPLATES NAMING DAUGHTER AFTER FISH. Then I hold that fish upright and let him tell me when he’s ready and off he goes into the night.
Godspeed, my friend. Pardon the interruption. I just had to prove you were real.
He swims into memory.
Pretty soon that memory turns to epiphany. The name from Emmie’s sticky note, the same name I’ve been looking at for months, a name that bursts open with new meaning.
For a lot of my life these fish took just about everything I had to give. Now it’ll be a little girl—Cora, we’ll call her. She and the Oncorhynchus genus will share a syllable.
They’ll share resilience, too. An inability to quit. And every last drop of my wonder.
I thunk back to the truck and make coffee on the tailgate and sit there imagining a night, say ten years on, that the little one and I will watch, same as this one: the same dimness with bats looping through it, the same fathomless quiet but for the hiss of a propane burner, the same feeling that you could reach up and poke a hole into space with your finger. I bet she’ll try and I bet I will, too. We’ll prod the sky and say that’s how stars are made.
Joseph Jackson is a social studies teacher and outdoor writer in Alaska. He is the author of two fly-fishing books, It’s Only Fishing (2023) and Chasing the Dark (2024). His work has appeared in Gray’s Sporting Journal, Fly Fisherman, The Drake, Alaska Magazine, and others, where his wife, Emmie, also features much of her photography. When he’s not getting up early to chase rainbow trout or hunt ptarmigan, he’s learning how to be a father to the world’s next greatest fly fisherwoman.