MAYBE YOU’VE HAD one of those days. You wake up in the morning and everything hurts. None of your body parts seem to work.
You feel like the frantic pace of the world is just too fast and you’re being swept downstream, tail first, no matter how hard you’re trying to swim up the river.
You could be spawned out.
That’s what we call salmon that have come up the river and laid their eggs in a gravel nest in the river they were born in.
Then they die.
While that may sound depressing to some, being a spawn-out isn’t something to be ashamed of anymore.
Finally, the best available science has figured out that the biomass represented by the spawned-out salmon carcasses is the single most important element in our Pacific Northwest ecosystem besides water.
This is the time of year to look for spawned-out salmon on our rivers.
Locating the rotting carcasses of spawn-outs is not difficult, if there are any.
Just follow your nose. If the pure forest air suddenly smells like my raincoat, you’re close to a spawned-out salmon.
Observing spawning salmon can be a nature experience not unlike birdwatching, only you’re looking in the water. Duh.
That’s when it is possible to see the fish that got away. These are the big salmon that everyone dreamed of catching in the saltwater last summer, but they didn’t.
These fish have gone through an amazing transformation.
When they came into the river from the ocean, they had perfectly snow-white bellies and deep blue backs.
It’s a color scheme that makes them very hard to see in the ocean from above or below.
Upon entering the river, they stop feeding.
The large silver scales the salmon wore in the ocean fall off in freshwater.
The fish goes through a weird transformation from silver, blue and white to shades of green, red, black and brown.
These spawning colors serve to camouflage the salmon among the rocks on the bed of the river and attract a mate, and that’s the whole point of the exercise.
Once the salmon pair up, they dig a nest in the gravel, called a redd. These can be huge, as large as the bed of a pickup truck for a pair of big king salmon.
Once the salmon have spawned, one might hang around the redd to guard it and that is usually a male.
By now, the salmon is really ugly. The fins are rotting off. Fungus grows on open sores and over blind eyes.
Still the fish keeps swimming aimlessly until a certain moment when they just turn belly up.
Their job is done, but their life goes on.
There’s a hundred and some odd bugs, birds, animals and plants that feed on spawned-out salmon carcasses.
Bears usually get the first pick.
Native Americans called the bear the mother of all creatures because they caught way more salmon than they could eat so everyone shared in the catch.
High water washed spawned-out carcasses all through the woods along the river bottoms.
The early pioneers used spawned-out salmon to fertilize their gardens.
That’s illegal now.
We need every spawned-out salmon we can get back on our rivers to get them to stink again like the good old days.
Spawning salmon represent an exchange of energy and nutrients from the ocean to the mountains and back since the ice age.
It is a cycle we destroyed before we even understood it.
Maybe we can all learn something from spawn-outs and their gift to future generations.
Sometimes it’s OK to be spawned out.
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Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist” whose column appears here every Wednesday.
He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.