B.C. Volunteers Carry Salmon Upstream By Bucket, Completing Nature's Most Humiliating Rescue
In the drought-flattened creeks of southern B.C., volunteers in chest waders are scooping coho out of shrinking puddles and carrying them, by hand, to water that still qualifies as water.
The salmon, a species whose entire brand is heroic self-directed travel against overwhelming odds, is now being couriered upstream in a five-gallon pail by a retired schoolteacher named Ruth. The fish that swim thousands of kilometres from the Pacific to die at their birthplace are being driven the last 400 metres in the back of a Ford Ranger.
Provincial officials describe the effort as a stopgap. Volunteers describe it as a Tuesday. One crew in the Cowichan watershed reported moving 1,200 fish in a weekend, which works out to roughly one salmon per volunteer per twelve minutes, a productivity rate no federal habitat programme has ever matched.
The official framing is that this is a drought response. The more honest framing is that the province has quietly outsourced fisheries management to whoever owns a net and has a free Saturday. There is no line item for Ruth. There is no succession plan for Ruth.
The salmon, for their part, offer no gratitude. They arrive at the spawning gravel, complete the ancient ritual, and die on schedule, having been chauffeured to the finish line by strangers.
Which is, in fairness, the most Canadian possible outcome. An epic journey of instinct and endurance, finished off by a neighbour with a bucket who insisted it was no trouble at all.