"Overheated daydreams about history can be dangerous." I saw this in relation to China's national attachment toward the Indian Ocean, based on a brief foray in the 1400s. Sounds illogical, but I wondered if I have been doing just that in my nostalgia for healthy salmon runs. Even though I'm not native to Southern Oregon, I knocked around innumerable salmon streams in Alaska for almost all of the 50 years I lived up there and have seen LOTS of salmon in-stream. Now, all this has a bearing on an apparent move to peg the 'target' run size for the Rogue at several tens of thousands of chinook LESS than the average run size.

In a quest to see how big the runs in the Rogue River used to be I have journeyed to downtown Medford, to the Historical Society, and perused their 'fisheries folder.' There are articles in there from right after 1900. One article I saw was proclaiming the imminent collapse of the king salmon runs on the Rogue River. A certain Hume, whose brother canned the first salmon ever in a barge on the Sacramento River, had built a cannery at Gold Beach a decade or so earlier. Now, a cannery can put up a lot of fish in a hurry. Cannerymen used to sail up to Alaska with a boiler, a lathe, a sawmill and a bunch of Chinese and sheet tin and clean out a stream in one year. They were known to catch 100,000 salmon in one beach seine set.

Hume bought the local newspaper to report on his own activities, or not, and got himself elected to the State House to further solidify his sole claim to the runs. It worked well until the 1920s. When the runs failed he sent men upstream to get salmon off the spawning beds to stock a hatchery at the mouth. In here somewhere the gold miners dammed up the tributaries to mine the stream bottoms. Or like a couple of brothers on the Applegate did, they dammed up the river by their smokehouse and smoked salmon to their hearts content. No mention was made of taking the dams out.

To add insult to injury, a gold dredge was placed in the middle of the Rogue, until the "river ran red for a year." Which prompted the citizenry to trot up to Salem to put a stop to it. Even the flour mill on Butte Creek would get chinook in the water wheel. And this doesn't include all the folk who found that planting a king salmon in their garden grew one heck of a tall corn stalk.

I worked with a man in Anchorage whose father was the first Chief of Police there and he said he used to make spending money pitch-forking salmon into a horse drawn wagon. I think this was pretty common back then all over the West. I know I heard of it in Idaho from my brother who went to college there. In fact the concept got me thinking of making a YouTube video replicating this practice.

The "Dynamite Hole" on the North Umpqua River isn't the only place the loggers practice their favorite fishing technique. A bunch I knew in Alaska did the same thing and not only blew all the ice out of the hole, but draped the surrounding oldgrowth hemlock and spruce trees with parts of salmon and trout. But usually people just carried a gillnet up a creek, or dumped bluestone up-stream to flush the salmon out to where they could purse seine them.

These practices are over and the dams are coming out at a steady clip. One dam on the Rogue, the Savage Rapids Dam, is being breached as I write this. Another one, the Gold Ray Dam, looks to be on the fast track to coming out in the next few years. These dams are huge baby salmon killers. And now the Obama Administration is adding 1,000 miles in 84 rivers to Wild and Scenic designation. And anything else they can do to restore salmon runs: putting the San Joaquin River and the Klamath River on the fast track to 'salmon friendly' as well.

The San Joaquin restoration could cost up to $800 million. Serious intentions to bring a river from bare gravel an ant could walk across, to thriving king salmon runs again. Serious intentions and large amounts of taxpayer dollars and volunteer help all over the West to restore salmon runs.

Now jump to a Fall Chinook Advisory Committee/Oregon Dept. of Fish and Wildlife 'management plan' that is heading toward the OPPOSITE kind of expectations for the Rogue River. There is another meeting of this august body on April 27th in Grants Pass to work on their 'wish list' run size. The odd thing is that ODFW is proposing a target run size much lower than the 95,000 kings a year they currently get. These things are awfully complicated, but sometimes you just have to try not miss seeing the forest for the trees.

The water levels are good, and consistent, now, with the dams in the upper reaches of the Rogue and the Applegate Rivers. The water is cold enough, the other dams are coming out, stream bank restoration work continues unabated, logging rules have tightened, etc. Why the doom and gloom? The ODFW just says it's a waste of time trying to restore the runs, which one ODFW Biologist I know, said, "the Rogue should support 250,000 returning kings easy." And from the little I've learned in 50 years in the fishing business, and with three others to compare notes with at the last FCAC meeting, I would concur: that expectations should be at 250,000. After all the river gets a run that big now and then, so it's not pie in the sky.

The ODFW guy at the Grants Pass meeting of the Rogue FCAC says the Rogue has the ability to grow smolts, ready for the ocean, no problem. This seems to contrast with the ODFW Deputy Director who said there isn't enough food for the smolts in the estuaries. Of course, it doesn't help that the salmon carcasses, from fish coming back to the Lost Creek Hatchery in the upper Rogue, are sold as cat food and not returned to the river to provide the nutrients that a robust ecosystem needs. With increased nutrients in the rivers, you get a more diverse salmon and steelhead stock portfolio. (I've heard ODFW say that the algae bloom in Lost Creek Dam is proof that there is nitrogen in the system. Never mind that the algae is toxic and that nitrogen placed artificially in Karluk Lake on Kodiak Island didn't do a thing to bring back the salmon. They are at catch and release only for kings and sockeye there.)

If you are a conspiracy theorist, you might get the notion that ODFW is promoting and engineering low runs, so they can reject a public call for a hatch-box program, or maybe just make it easy for the Administration. If the 'Management Plan' can be written with a low expectation, that forecloses the notion of putting more fingerlings in the river. In fact ODFW is proposing studies, in lieu of a hatch-box program that lots of people can help with, to find out whether fingerlings can survive on their own. I wonder how they did it for the last million years without ODFW. Well, that's a question for that famous fisherman/philosopher Patrick McManus.

Patrick coined the term, "I fish, therefore I am." He realized that when fishing turns one into a philosopher, the pay isn't conducive to buying tackle. He believed that it would be more convenient for fishing to turn one into a Wall Street banker. I can sure see that, but then I don't make the rules. If you have a poverty mentality like ODFW seems to have, you shouldn't be making the rules either, in my mind.

RURAL FARMING IN SOUTHERN OREGON

When the radio show got to Rush Limbaugh, I just had to find something more like real news, the news junkie that I am. I got a station in Grants Pass and stayed there awhile while I tore into the old vinyl flooring. We'd found a stack of tiles at a flooring place in Central Point and the price was right. All I had to do was 'apprentice' with a friend who was putting in a tile floor for his sister-in-law. Nothing like apprenticing to by-pass all the stacks of how-to books.

On a rainy recent day I found myself wired on coffee and the radio turned up loud and heading for a blister with the floor scraper. In the heat of battle with the floor I heard someone say there was only about 3,000 acres of farmland in all of Josephine County and so just give up on it already. I didn't hear what he was promoting, but it sure wasn't farming. Even if he had known of a plant product selling for $48.95 a pound, I don't think he would have been swayed. Obviously he's the sort that thinks that milk cartons come from trees and that the European settlers on this continent found ready made fields with fences and idling tractors. What about clearing land my mind screamed at this narrator.

Now I'm no farmer, even though I was a loan officer at something called the Alaska Commercial Fishing and Agriculture Bank and worked for a couple of months on a Kibbutz in Israel. I confess I mostly think in terms of restoring salmon runs. But I was reading up on the cultivation of Gogi berries today on the Internet and found a sweet article on rural farming in the AARP e-newsletter.

Seems a former basketball star has been promoting this concept for 30 years. Somebody started an on-line nomination process to 'elect' a gardener for First Lady Michelle Obama's White House garden. 60,000 votes were cast and he won, even though he declined the opportunity to putter around under the watchful eyes of the Secret Service.

And another source told me he heard of a guy getting 6,000 pounds of produce on a fifth of an acre. At that rate, Josephine County could produce 90 million pounds of produce a year. Not a bad GDP for a mostly forested county, and I'm sure the unemployment rate would be right at the level of children with chickenpox and widows with macular degeneration.

The article on Gogi berries on Wikipedia on-line says they are mostly all grown in one province in China, to the tune of $190,000,000 worth a year. That might mean the poundage is a lot higher than that. Not that you could tell from the price of dried Gogi berries over here. One Rogue Valley land owner, or land lessor, is planting olive trees. I always thought if you were going to plant a crop it should be the most valuable one you could manage.

Remember, the government can't give you any advice on what to plant because they don't want you coming back and suing them if the crop doesn't come up. Or if everyone else does it and floods the market. I do see signs of true entrepreneurship in growing products of unusual value for a 21st century marketplace. I just hope the remaining lending folk and zoning folk have more confidence in the free enterprise system than the guy telling everyone to fuggetabat the impact farming in Josephine County.