Southern Oregon Cafe

The climbing of Roxy Anne Peak in a wheelchair

2011-12-04T10:14:00.001-08:00

Scaling the mountain in an electric wheelchair, that is. A double deep-cycle battery, mid-wheel drive, high tech wheelchair. In no small measure too, is the drive of a disabled man named Morgan Enge to not be excluded from outdoor activities and challenges. I've taken care of Morgan for almost 20 years as the father of a son with cerebral palsy. Now he is taking care of himself. I hear he is the first disabled person in Jackson County to take over the administration of the budget for his own personal care and community inclusion activities.

That in itself is a challenge and a half. He had to hire eight or so staff to provide him and his sister, who also is a wheelchair user, with 24/7 living support. People that manage a staff of eight and have to fund-raise for transportation and medical equipment know what he is up against.

When we lived in Alaska, we always included Morgan and his sister in outings, even if it meant wheeling their manual chairs down the tide flats to get up close and personal with an iceberg. Or strapping their chair down in a speed boat and tearing around through flocks of seagulls, around icebergs, and up placid estuarys with timid black bears out foraging near the tree line on the beach. In fact Morgan had such a good time up on the bow of a speed-boat once, it brought tears to the eyes of the veteran school boat captain who took him out that day.

The reason for this preface to a mountain climb in a wheelchair is for the encouragement of other wheelchair users and their care-givers. And to explain Morgan's enthusiasm for life, even to the extent that he wants to start a wheelchair company based on my patented chair to ease long-term care for user and care-giver alike. So when I mentioned a bike ride up Roxy Anne Peak to my oldest son and grandson, Morgan was certainly down for it. He had a caregiver follow us to the second gate in his van. Thus started what I think might be a pioneering trip in an electric wheelchair.

From the second gate from the bottom to the flat spot with the park bench, and the big bend in the road, it's fairly easy going. Except biking was no better than walking and we were passed up regularly by a young woman hiker.(A couple of weeks later we found her manning the help window at the Oregon Dept. of Revenue.) I think Morgan could have given us all a run for our money if he had just put his joy stick to the firewall.

When it started to get steeper on the upper slope, with looser gravel, his caregiver had to give him a push to supplement the electrical energy. I did that on a previous attempt at scaling the peak, just the two of us, and I'll guarantee it'll get your heart rate right up there. That time Morgan and I made it to the top gate, period. This time we had a caregiver who was used to two man lifts of Harley-Davidsons into pick-up trucks, and my oldest son, who stays in shape for government work. Since there is no way around that barricade, even for a small boy, that 379 pound wheelchair was going to go over the top. And that it did. I helped by steadying it balanced on the top gate member while Jesse and Spencer climbed over themselves. I was slightly discouraging of the lifting as my back is still smarting from lifting a row-boat on and off a Jeep in Alaska last year. But older brother and dedicated caregiver weren't to be deterred.

Then the pushing started again, with Jesse and Spencer taking turns pushing to assist the wheelchair. All these elements of brute force, and the latest in wheelchair technology, surely were the deciding factors in conquering the massif. When you get on top there is a gaggle of small buildings supporting a forest of communications and media antennae. There is a trail leading to the face of the crag, for a panoramic view of the Rogue Valley. Morgan could only get part way down that path with his wheelchair, even with a push, so we carried him the last seventy feet. We took the seat out of his wheelchair and put it on a rock and that was his aerie perch while we had our picnic snacks and rested.

All of which is why I make the assertion that Morgan might well be the first wheelchair user to drive to the top of Roxy Anne Peak on the edge of the Rogue Valley, just mere miles to the east of the heart of Medford, Oregon. And he certainly has Medicaid to thank for the expensive wheelchair that lets him do these kinds of things. And many other people too that have helped him, like the Jackson County Developmental Disability Services staff, United Seating staff, and others in the social services community. This support network is a huge driver for our attachment to the Rogue Valley. Attachment is what gets people to commit to living and working here and making the economy strong and the community vibrant. Thanks, Medford, this was a success for you too.

Fire and adrenaline on Hwy 101

2011-10-09T14:26:00.000-07:00

How do you write about saving someone's life and make it into a political statement about working together, recommend someone for commendation, and try not beat your own drum? It's natural to shrug off something like helping pull someone out of a fiery car wreck in the nick of time as just "I was there at the right time and place." I remember shrugging when someone called me a hero on Sunday when I came up out of the woods where the car was burning furiously by then. And I told a Oregon State Patrol officer that the other guy with me had saved the guy's life. I have the distinct feeling this minimizing business happens all the time.

My son, Jesse, minimizes his escapades I know. I remember him stating as almost an afterthought that he had been selected to help in the physical capture of the most despotic dictator in the world at the time, Saddam Hussein. So maybe just focusing on the DOING part is in our DNA. I have also spent a lot of time on the ocean commercial fishing, which is a continuous battle to keep something that wants to be on the bottom of the ocean, on top of it, while trying to make money while you're at it. And other action adventure occupations in Alaska where you have to pretty much ignore physical discomfort.

When Terry and I first saw the overturned vehicle just south of Gold Beach on Highway 101 along the coast, we took just a few seconds to decide that we had to do something. That equated to a hundred yards of road travel before I said "let me out." Terry stopped the car for me to get out and she checked her cell phone to call 911, but there wasn't cell coverage there. I took off running back up the highway and she continued driving to find a cell phone signal. She didn't have to drive far to notice a bar on her phone so she called in the accident. She got dropped and called again and gave the dispatcher the location.

In the meantime, I was running along the roadway and getting winded, so I slowed to a walk. Someone else was running up behind me with flip-flops and he stopped too. I remember thinking, "this guy isn't going to be much help if he's winded too and in flip-flops to boot." That's when I knew I had to do it myself. There had been a car across the road from the accident, but those two people were in the high visibility vests of the people controlling traffic for a movie shoot that was going on in the near vicinity. I figured the way they were running around and taking off their vests, that they wouldn't be much help either.

I don't remember the rest of the run or jumping the guard rail or even much of scrambling through the brush to get to the other side of the vehicle. I think when I started running again the adrenaline was starting to kick in. By then the whisp of smoke had turned to tounges of flame rising from the engine area of the underside of the car. I didn't know what kind of car it was when I started looking for a door handle in the brush. One of the film crew traffic people, I think it was, said they had heard voices and sure enough I saw a arm wave inside the smoke filled cab.

Fumbling around for a door knob on an upside down vehicle in the brush took a few seconds, pulling the tree branches away and realizing that everything was not where it should have been. The main thing I remember about trying the door handle was not the struggle with the actual handle, but the vehicle rocking back and forth. That didn't work so I started looking for a back door, because the cab extended on back. The search was a short one, because the rest of the cab was short indeed, just a jump-seat area and definitely no door. So it was back to the drawing boards.

About then the smoke started getting real thick and black in my immediate vicinity, as in going down my lungs. Burning plastic is some nasty stuff and I'd sure have a word with the car manufacturers about how fast a car can catch on fire from just turning over. That slowed me up but it didn't last long.

That's about the time the guy in the white t-shirt showed up. I told him the door wouldn't open, but he tried it anyway. Then he hauled off and kicked in the windshield with a couple of swift kicks. No hard boots, just a lot of muscle. I hadn't had time to think of any other plan Bs before he got there. I did start hollering up to the growing crowd on the road for a rock to break the side window, and a fire extinguisher.

We got a fire extinguisher first, which was about empty. The Delta Force type guy threw it down in disgust and declared it was empty. I picked it up and tried anyway and it shot a jet of contents right past my ear. Not taking any time to smirk at my folly, I directed the business end at the fire in the engine compartment that was sure distracting me, being just four or five feet away. About this time something blew up above us and fire and smoke increased to the degree that my wife, who was on the other side of the road, backed our van up twenty yards or so. I suppose the explosion kept the rescue crew down to just the t-shirt and me. I don't blame them, the vehicle was looking real ugly.

Right after we got the fire extinguisher, we finally got something hard to use on the window in the form of a car jack someone handed to us. The t-shirt took about a second or two to swing on the side window and clear out the remaining glass. Then the guy reached in and found the seat-belt was stuck, and called for a knife, which someone immediately produced. Down went the lap belt. Still stuck. Got to get the chest strap. Where's the knife. Oh, yeah, right where it landed after discarding it from the first go. Chest harness free, drop the knife, take a second to think. It seemed like we were communicating non-verbally. That was another weird part.

Then we both reached in and grabbed part of the guy and hauled. It didn't seem like I had done much before the guy was half-ways out, resting his back on the top of the window frame. I saw that the t-shirt had a grip on the driver's belt. That sure made sense to me, pulling on a natural hand hold in the middle of his body mass. The t-shirt took another tug and the guy was out and on the ground. His leg was on fire so I patted out the flames with my hand. That turned out to be not good for me, but the guy was moaning and he stopped after that.

Then some other guys showed up to help carry the victim up to the road. Besides one of my legs had fallen in a deep hole about then. I picked up a shoe that had fallen off on the way out the truck's window. It was covered with melted plastic and I realized then that the black on my hand was melted plastic too.

When I got up on the road I patted the t-shirt on his back and told him he had saved the man's life. I pointed him out to a Oregon State Police trooper as well. The last I saw of the t-shirted marvel he was leaning over the victim on the side of the road looking into his face. Lots of other people, including a nurse, were there as well. There were dozens of people on the road by then, and the ambulance had just arrived, and I don't know how many patrol cars. Not all that much time had elapsed. Well, I guess just the time it takes an ambulance to drive the about seven miles.

I figured I'd just be in the way at that point so I started back to our van. One guy stopped me and called me a hero. He was parked closest to the wreck, so I figured he saw a lot of the action, or even helped by bringing the jack, fire extinguisher or knife. I thought it a little ironic that as I passed by the flaming wreck, which my now was burning the power lines, that someone shooed me away saying it was too dangerous to be so close. So I jogged by and hopped in with Terry and we headed back to Gold Beach since we couldn't turn back for home.

We wanted some lunch by then anyway, so we stopped in at the Barnacle Bistro. There I had the best mussels I've ever had. They were poached in curry and cider: an old family recipe. By then my hands were blistering pretty good so Terry figured we'd better visit the hospital and get some Silvadine on them. Besides we might find out how the victim of the crash made out. After all, the nurse at the scene said she heard bones crunching together.

We read on a paper on burns they gave us that I had second degree burns, even though the doctor said they were first degree burns. And being that my wife is also a nurse. I was being bandaged while they were checking out the accident victim at the same time in the ER. The doctor said he only had some burns on that one leg I patted out the flames on. It was a good end to the episode for us, knowing the elderly man would live to drive another day. Don't know how he managed to get upside down on the other side of the guard rail. Maybe they won't let him drive for awhile.

For a few days I'd even wake up in the morning seeing the cab of that truck a flaming inferno, just after I had patted out the flames on the guy's leg. I think we got him out well shy of thirty seconds before it would have been too late. The efficiency of the movements, the knowledge of what to do, and muscle power of the man in the white t-shirt was surely the saving grace. We both were the epitome of the irrepressible, I just didn't have the experience in this kind of emergency. And for this I would like to recommend this man for a commendation from the State of Oregon. Besides volunteering for such hazardous work while not on duty, and in the face of significant danger to his own life due to the possibility of a catastrophic explosion, he displayed one of the most technically efficient feats of problem solving/lifesaving that I think is possible. And I would know, I was right at his side the whole time he was working.

There is one amazing aspect of doing something like that together with someone else; communication becomes very efficient so as to minimize energy loss. Maybe I provided some assistance in procuring supplies for him to use to free that man, put out a fire, and helped him pull the guy out of the vehicle. There are a lot of problems to solve in society these days it seems and I'm pretty sure it should be done at least by twos. Like the VERY old saying goes, "a two strand cord is not easily broken."

As it turns out, the man in the white t-shirt, with cuts on his arm from reaching through broken windows, is a Oregon State Police supervisor. I found that out when helping my son with a car insurance matter. The insurance agent calculated that I must have been one of the rescuers, after hearing my story on why I couldn't shake his hand with my bandaged one. He had seen a clip on the accident that Channel 12 in Medford had done on the accident, and who had identified the victim and the Officer. They inserted someone from Gold Beach as the other rescuer, so Terry called the station to correct that. They corrected the written story in their archives, but they couldn't correct the audio of who the rescuers were.

Someone recently asked me and Terry what we were going to for excitement and adventure this winter. As for me, I decided that mellow would be a good way to be for awhile, at least until I stop reliving how close to dying that elderly man was, just feet in front of me.

2011-08-22T11:08:00.000-07:00

School is about to start; are your kids protected?

I have a grand child going into first grade and his success in school means a lot to me. I want to get back to writing about Southern Oregon life, especially after experiencing the specialness of Squaw Lake yesterday. Canoes, bongo drums, great swimming, no motors, isolated camping sites, tall trees. Well, take a look at this article if you like kids.

The Kids Are Not All Right
By JOEL BAKAN
August 22, 2011

WHEN I sit with my two teenagers, and they are a million miles away, absorbed by the titillating roil of online social life, the addictive pull of video games and virtual worlds, as they stare endlessly at video clips and digital pictures of themselves and their friends, it feels like something is wrong.

No doubt my parents felt similarly about the things I did as a kid, as did my grandparents about my parents’ childhood activities. But the issues confronting parents today can’t be dismissed as mere generational prejudices. There is reason to believe that childhood itself is now in crisis.

Throughout history, societies have struggled with how to deal with children and childhood. In the United States and elsewhere, a broad-based “child saving” movement emerged in the late 19th century to combat widespread child abuse in mines, mills and factories. By the early 20th century, the “century of the child,” as a prescient book published in 1909 called it, was in full throttle. Most modern states embraced the general idea that government had a duty to protect the health, education and welfare of children. Child labor was outlawed, as were the sale and marketing of tobacco, alcohol and pornography to children. Consumer protection laws were enacted to regulate product safety and advertising aimed at children.

By the middle of the century, childhood was a robustly protected legal category. In 1959, the United Nations issued its Declaration of the Rights of the Child. Children were now legal persons; the “best interests of the child” became a touchstone for legal reform.

But the 20th century also witnessed another momentous shift, one that would ultimately threaten the welfare of children: the rise of the for-profit corporation. Lawyers, policy makers and business lobbied successfully for various rights and entitlements traditionally connected, legally, with personhood. New laws recognized corporations as legal — albeit artificial — “persons,” granting them many of the same legal rights and privileges as human beings. In an eerie parallel with the child-protective efforts, “the best interests of the corporation” was soon introduced as a legal precept.

A clash between these two newly created legal entities — children and corporations — was, perhaps, inevitable. Century-of-the-child reformers sought to resolve conflicts in favor of children. But over the last 30 years there has been a dramatic reversal: corporate interests now prevail. Deregulation, privatization, weak enforcement of existing regulations and legal and political resistance to new regulations have eroded our ability, as a society, to protect children.

Childhood obesity mounts as junk food purveyors bombard children with advertising, even at school. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation study reports that children spend more hours engaging with various electronic media — TV, games, videos and other online entertainments — than they spend in school. Much of what children watch involves violent, sexual imagery, and yet children’s media remain largely unregulated. Attempts to curb excesses — like California’s ban on the sale or rental of violent video games to minors — have been struck down by courts as free speech violations.

Another area of concern: we medicate increasing numbers of children with potentially harmful psychotropic drugs, a trend fueled in part by questionable and under-regulated pharmaceutical industry practices. In the early 2000s, for example, drug companies withheld data suggesting that such drugs were more dangerous and less effective for children and teenagers than parents had been led to believe. The law now requires “black box” warnings on those drugs’ labels, but regulators have done little more to protect children from sometimes unneeded and dangerous drug treatments.

Children today are also exposed to increasing quantities of toxic chemicals. We know that children, because their biological systems are still developing, are uniquely vulnerable to the dangers posed by many common chemical compounds. We also know that corporations often use such chemicals as key ingredients in children’s products, saturating their environments. Yet these chemicals remain in circulation, as current federal laws demand unreasonably high proof of harm before curbing a chemical’s use.

The challenge before us is to reignite the guiding ethos and practices of the century of the child. As Nelson Mandela has said, “there can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” By that measure, our current failure to provide stronger protection of children in the face of corporate-caused harm reveals a sickness in our societal soul. The good news is that we can — and should — work as citizens, through democratic channels and institutions, to bring about change.

Joel Bakan, a law professor at the University of British Columbia, is the author of "Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children."

2011-03-25T13:47:00.000-07:00

"A total of 13,100 salmon and steelhead were caught with purse seines and 7,900 with beach seines. The trap nets were generally ineffective with a total of 39 fish captured for the season, including 10 chinook, 26 coho and three steelhead."

"All three gear types allow the fish to be encircled while leaving them free-swimming. Fish can be identified and released by type or species with a minimum amount of handling."

The Columbia Basin Bulletin is a treasure trove of information about salmon and steelhead and other fish enhancement efforts. Thank God for their reporting, because I see so much other political and bureaucratic bungling and selfishness that you just want to scream sometimes. Trying to bring sanity to commercial harvesting of salmon on the Columbia River, where there are multiple endangered runs, has taken a citizens group, the CCA, to jumpstart the whole thing.

Nobody wants to get rid of the commercial fishermen and the tribal fishing; the communities want a crack at feeding their bodies this good nutritious food. There is so little good food anymore. The commercial fishermen have been around since the mid 1800s and kicked into high gear on the Columbia River when the "Iron Chink" was invented a hundred years ago to allow high speed canning. The Puget Sound machinists beat the Astoria machinists to the punch in inventing it, but didn't slow the Astoria canneries down in adopting the technology.

Back then they used beach seines predominately, drawn in by draft horses. Very effective. When the runs got knocked down with this very efficient method, and especially when engines became available, the gillnet fleet developed. If you want to use the argument that the oldest historical methods should be gone back to, the choice is obvious. Maybe not to the current small gillnet fleet.

And then are we to look back to any historical practice as having 'rights.' These rights are not in the Constitution I go by. The current harvesters, by any means, whether gillnetter, seiner, barbed hook fisher, or barbless hook fisher, have a responsibility to look out for the needs of fellow harvesters and consumers. Even though it seems to be the norm, Americans necessarily need to work together to solve problems. I think the hundreds of thousands of fry-it-in-a-pan type fishermen would gladly all pitch in to buy a purse seiner for every gillnetter to get them to stop willy-nilly killing everything that swam into a gillnet in the Columbia.

My first job at the age of 15 was on a gillnet boat. I know what the mortality rate is. It isn't pretty for the species you don't want to take back to shore. This method of fishing is a good way to catch herring though. The herring school is all that there is there where you set, and your mesh size can even let the little ones swim through to grow up. And if they are used in deep water, they don't hang up on bottom and end up 'ghost fishing' like what happens all the time on the Columbia.

I don't know why I went on and on about the Columbia gillnetters today. I just wanted to call attention to the CBB as a superb news journal on-line. It's not inflamatory as I've been accused of being. And I want to give credit for good work to save the fish runs where credit is due. Thousands of taxpaying citizens flocked to the banner of the Coastal Conservation Association when they started up in the Pacific Northwest a few years ago, because there was no other banner to flock to to get anything done. The runs were going straight to, well, you know. Now there is a lot of rescue work going on. I bothers me when people who do nothing at all, sit in their arm chairs and bash folk like the almost ten thousand CCA members around the Columbia river.

This is the year 2011. You don't have to do the same old thing over and over again and expect different results. I'm talking about gillnetting salmon and expecting it to all of a sudden become a selective fishing method. You can scam the numbers all you want, but it still does not fit the needs of the state of the Columbia River salmon runs in 2011. I've fished with gillnet, purse seine and beach seine and know of what I speak. Even though the beach seining was on a fish farm in Israel.

And while I'm on a roll, here's information from Food and Water Watch on NOAA's run at pushing ocean aquaculture:

"The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is on track to approve the first factory fish farm in U.S. federal waters by issuing a fishing permit and treating its cages as a type of fishing gear. If approved, this would open up the rest of our federal waters to factory fish farming. This means there will be giant cages crammed full of fish eating, excreting and growing with wastes, excess feed and any chemicals used going straight into the ocean through the cages. This isn't fishing!"

We should hold off a sec to see what the Cohen Commission in Canada comes up with as the reason for the Fraser River sockeye runs declining. The baby sockeye swim through waters infested with sea lice from the fish farm cages and they get the life sucked out of them. Many in Canada think the government there has as little concern for the general welfare of the wild salmon as they did for their Atlantic cod, which was almost extinguished altogether. Everyone should look at the Cohen Commission's proceedings at least as an expample of what it would look like in this country if there were some unforseen environmental disaster with the cage fisheries(?). That should be a red flag right there.

2011-03-23T17:55:00.001-07:00

THIS SENIOR CITIZEN NAILED IT!!!!!

Alan Simpson, Senator from Wyoming , Co-Chair of Obama's deficit
commission, calls senior citizens the Greediest Generation as he
compared "Social Security" to a Milk Cow with 310 million teats.
August, 2010.

Here's a response in a letter from a unknown fellow in Montana ...
I think he is a little ticked off! He also tells it like it is !
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Hey Alan, let's get a few things straight..

1. As a career politician, you have been on the public dole for FIFTY
YEARS.

2. I have been paying Social Security taxes for 48 YEARS (since I was 15
years old. I am now 63).

3 My Social Security payments, and those of millions of other
Americans, were safely tucked away in an interest bearing account for
decades until you political pukes decided to raid the account and give
OUR money to a bunch of zero ambition losers in return for votes, thus
bankrupting the system and turning Social Security into a Ponzi scheme
that would have made Bernie Madoff proud.

4. Recently, just like Lucy & Charlie Brown, you and your ilk pulled the
proverbial football away from millions of American seniors nearing
retirement and moved the goalposts for full retirement from age 65 to
age 67. NOW, you and your shill commission is proposing to move the
goalposts YET AGAIN.

5 I, and millions of other Americans, have been paying into Medicare
from Day One, and now you morons propose to change the rules of the
game. Why? Because you idiots mismanaged other parts of the economy
to such an extent that you need to steal money from Medicare to pay
the bills.

6. I, and millions of other Americans, have been paying income taxes our
entire lives, and now you propose to increase our taxes yet again. Why?
Because you incompetent bastards spent our money so profligately that
you just kept on spending even after you ran out of money. Now, you come
to the American taxpayers and say you need more to pay off YOUR debt.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

To add insult to injury, you label us "greedy" for calling "bullshit" on
your incompetence. Well, Captain Bullshit, I have a few questions for
YOU.

1. How much money have you earned from the American taxpayers during
your pathetic 50-year political career?

2. At what age did you retire from your pathetic political career, and
how much are you receiving in annual retirement benefits from the
American taxpayers?

3. How much do you pay for YOUR government provided health insurance?

4. What cuts in YOUR retirement and healthcare benefits are you
proposing in your disgusting deficit reduction proposal, or, as usual,
have you exempted yourself and your political cronies?

It is you, Captain Bullshit, and your political co-conspirators called
Congress who are the "greedy" ones. It is you and your fellow nutcases
who have bankrupted America and stolen the American dream from
millions of loyal, patriotic taxpayers. And for what? Votes. That's right,
sir. You and yours have bankrupted America for the sole purpose of
advancing your pathetic political careers. You know it, we know it, and
you know that we know it.

And you can take that to the bank, you miserable son of a bitch.

If you like the way things are in America , delete this.

If you agree with what a fellow Montana citizen says,

PASS IT ON!!!!

I just have one thing to add to this story, our first line of defense is our local state representatives. This is where to get things off your chest if nothing else. If you are as old as me, get good gardening equipment ready and start to learn the trade. Growing healthy food (remember, they are axing food inspections too) and getting good light exercise will keep you out of harm's way, I mean the doctor's office.

2011-03-17T10:05:00.000-07:00

All,

Last week we sent a letter asking the city council of Coos Bay asking them to reconsider their vote for a MR.

We sent the letter in support and at the request of local CCA members. (attached)

There was a city council meeting last night with about 100 in attendance. Mostly locals who were anti-MR.

About 10 were Pro-MR. Susan Allen and Bob Rees from Our Oceans were there.

It was pointed out that about half of the pro-MR folks were paid staff, and just about all from out of the area.

The city council reversed their vote.

At the bottom is the letter the CCA sent to the City of Coos Bay. Kudos to the community of Coos Bay for doing the right thing in both standing up to outside carpetbaggers and to the Council for recognizing when they had made a mistake and correcting it. And to CCA members locally and in the CCA Northwest office for their leadership in this..

After watching how the billionaire Koch brothers have squashed union workers rights in Wisconsin using their politicians, I am greatly encouraged that our system of government may have a breath of life left in it. I'm hoping other communities in Oregon and elsewhere ask themselves the basic question, "why on God's green earth would we want marine reserves near our town anyway?" Or anywhere for that matter. Commercial fishing is disallowed in them as well as for eating by the catcher. Where does limiting our ability to catch or grow something to eat end?

These same folks who are spending the money of murky foundations with equally murky goals for our society, are bedeviling the commercial fishing industry in other ways as well. They aren't maritime people and haven't a clue what should be done. They are pushing to privatize the marine resources, so the very rich can buy them up? Remember that just one multi-billionaire, of which there are plenty, could buy up all the fish in the U.S. EEZ and lock out everyone. And I should remind that there are blueprints for megayacht LSVs (Life Support Vessels) with hydroponic farms and trawl gear. Where are the rich going to get fishing rights in a Waterworld or just pitchforks and torches scenario if not in a 'catch shares' scheme?

All the best,
John

To whom it may concern,

CCA is the Northwest’s largest fisheries advocacy group with 10,000 members in the Pacific Northwest and over 100,000 members nationally in 17 coastal states. We have been involved and engaged in the Marine Reserves issue nationally and in Oregon.

CCA has participated in the OPAC process, the Community Team Process and with the legislature and continue to be involved at all levels.

Our members in the Coos Bay area recently alerted us to the City of Coos Bay’s decision to vote for a Marine Reserve at the Cape Arago site.

We ask you to reconsider this decision for the sake of maintaining viable sustainable fisheries that are well managed and used by the sportfishing community.

Sport anglers have an excellent track record of conservation and supporting sustainable fisheries. We should not be arbitrarily denied access to the Cape Arago site, especially with the lack of scientific evidence supporting this marine reserve.

Please consider our position on Marine Reserves while reconsidering your decision that will have far reaching effects on your community and local fisheries. We urge you to vote no on the Cape Arago site.

Sincerely,

Bruce Polley

Vice President

Coastal Conservation Association Oregon

2011-02-27T12:39:00.000-08:00

I get along wish fish fine, but not marijuana, but I feel like I have to comment now, given that the Oregon Legislature seems preoccupied with the subject. I'm not following the subject up in Salem very close, but it seems like the Legislators I've heard speak on the subject lately are trying to play God again. Amidst such crushing other social maladies as illegal home foreclosures, homelessness among Veterans, poisoning of our food supply by big agriculture, and scams of all sorts running rampant, there are over two dozen bills pending on the subject.

All this distraction, from serious problems Oregon has, over a naturally growing plant to North America. And the reason my blood pressure rose today was on reading that the DEA, the main regulator of this substance, is fixing on allowing the big pharmaceutical firms to sell the active ingredient, THC, in their own pills. Legalize THC for them to sell and rachet down the use of THC in it's natural form?

I know how it is though. When you need to be out cutting firewood, or fixing the car, you're in surfing the Internet or on Facebook. Just doing something petty to delay the serious tasks for a while longer. It's OK for me because I'm not paid to cut firewood, but it's not OK for our Legislators to neglect the serious issues facing the State. I'm not sure which is the bigger waste of time: bickering over who should be allowed to ingest THC in it's natural form, or debating whether Chiropractors can or can't use the term 'physical therapy' in their practice instead of 'physiotherapy'. Get a grip.

The fact that our founding fathers used hemp themselves and sold that crappy stuff, tobacco, to the English for cash is a moot point now. Lest Oregon Legislators think they walk on water. On to serious matters, such as FISH.

The biggest problem fish have in the Rogue Valley is that there is a HORSE on top of a downtown business in Central Point. That right there sets the stage for scoundrels dumping and spraying poison in the creeks and the Troopers turning a blind eye. And the Fish and Game Department disallowing any effort to help increase the salmon numbers in the rivers that they didn't think of first or could do themselves, IF they had the manpower. The solution is clear: we need to put up a giant plastic salmon on a building just across the street from the giant plastic horse. Simple as pie.

While I'm trying to figure out how to build a giant plastic salmon, I should mention a sub-problem that has been overlooked for way too long. Actually two problems for now. One, is the problem of little bitty baby salmon and steelhead and trout getting sucked into irrigation ditches and pipes all up and down the Rogue River and pumped out onto farm land in even bittier pieces. I've seen some intake screens to keep things out of the pipes and they could easily suck up a small duck, much less a small salmon. Oregon law states that the intake screens be tinier than the tiniest fish. Which is actually, literally, and factually, smaller than a salmon egg.

Ranchers and farmers may be oblivious to the law, as well as to how small salmonids are, just after gaining swimming ability. But I don't think the salmon have 35 years more for the fisheries managers to do something about it. I'm assured that they are furiously working on the problem. I said 35 years because that's how long the Gold Rey dam sat there killing a good chunk of the outmigrating smolt and fry EVERY YEAR. And one of the intrepid leaders of ODFW never did admit to it being a problem. Wanted to keep the fish killing dam in there so it would be easy to count the last salmon to ever swim up the Rogue I guess.

And how long has the ODFW had to get the agricultural water screened off? I'm sure it's at least a hundred years. And still not done. That's where citizen involvement comes in. If you sport or recreational fish, or subsistence fish, or mercy fish(you can count your vertebrae through the skin of your stomach) then you might want to help out on this. No telling how long it might be to get good numbers of salmon running otherwise. Remember, ODFW still thinks the way God meant for the rivers to be fertilized with the dead salmon is wrong. And to punctuate that belief, they will write you a ticket if you try throw a fish eyeball back in the river.

The kind of screen we're talking about is the kind that's on the fish screen at the Irrigation District dam under the freeway in downtown Medford. Easy to see. The whole filtering operation is great, but the fish ladder is a dismal failure. Looks to me like the ladder was designed to fail. In low water in the fall when kings are coming back, there is too much water going over the board dam and not enough down the ladder, even if a fish could get over a jumble of rocks blocking off the fish ladder. Amazing.

So they ram their heads into the dam until someone sees them, then MAYBE calls the Irrigation District or the ODFW. I was the first one to see them the first year I was here five years ago. It's amazing what you can see when you go poking around fish creeks instead of barreling down the drift boat freeway.

I read an article, that probably Mark Freeman wrote, about a bunch of guys who show up every year from far and wide to a little park near Shady Cove to try for a spring king. The article really stuck with me, part because of Marks style of writing and part because one of them had caught a fish finally after ten years of trying. There is one member of the fish conservation organization I belong to in Medford who used to get a couple of kings in any good spring morning below Gold Rey dam when he was young. One generation later, it took 26 trips to the same spot, using the same gear, to get one king for his son.

It's all about expectations. I'm from Alaska where I'd get bored if I didn't hook something in the first five minutes. We know the Rogue could support runs like one in the '30s that stacked king salmon in solid behind the power dam at Grants Pass for a mile and a half. It was the citizens themselves who had to take some dynamite to the dam and blow it since nobody else would. I won't even talk about the puny run expectations that ODFW is talking about for kings on the Rogue. A guy I know in Alaska caught more fish in one purse seine set than what they are talking about for the larger fall king run.

Just now I was watching a program on wilderness in Tasmania and Gustaf Wiendorfer, their legendary naturalist. We have our own Teddy Roosevelt and Waldo Leopold and John Muir. You never remember 'the 1938 Oregon Department of Fisheries,' or any other government agency. We have found, like the Tasmanians said more eloquently than me, that it's individuals, not government agencies, who are uniquely inspired to preserve our natural heritage for future generations.

2011-02-10T07:03:00.000-08:00

The following was sent to me, as I guess I'm a listed publisher somewhere. I think by a Chicago outfit, but I don't pay much attention to that kind of thing. Not to belabor, but this struck me as worthy of passing on, in this farm and ranch region I'm in, for good reason. One, it's almost Valentine's Day. Just prior to Terry and me meeting, she got speeding tickets two Valentine's Days in a row. I'm hoping I can help make others' V - Day a notch better.

Two, I met my wife of five years through SingleParentMeet.com and can't recommend this approach highly enough. I was a skeptic at the start, but somehow their ad popped up on my AlaskaCafe blog, which usually only gets fishing related ads placed there by Google Ad Sense's intuitive software. Well, I had to pay my $9.95 to e-mail a girl who said something that struck a chord with me, and the rest is history. She lived in Central Point, and I in Dallas, OR, but I moved to the Rogue Valley and never looked back.

My kids joined us one at a time to launch their careers and that has been working exceedingly well. Even my kids in wheelchairs moved to within two blocks of us. Terry is the emotional anchor that we all needed. She seems to be an emotional anchor at the hospital where she works as well. I would go so far as to say it was a miracle. And the last fact on the subject of the internet playing cupid is that one out of five marriages are arranged this way now. I wouldn't doubt the percentage goes higher still.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

This Valentine’s Day there will be Fewer Lonely Farmers

…thanks to FarmersOnly.com

Everybody thought Jerry Miller was crazy when he started an online dating site for farmers: FarmersOnly.com. Because his job entailed working with thousands of farmers throughout the country, he saw there was a big need for this site - not only for farmers, but also their neighbors.

“I heard the same story over and over again,” says Miller. “Living in a small rural town, if you’re not compatible with anybody in your community, what do you do? Go to the next town over to hang out at the feed store all day… and hope?”

So he took a chance and started FarmersOnly.com a few years ago, and it’s working better than he ever imagined! FarmersOnly has had over 150,000 people sign up. Members have formed thousands of friendships and hundreds of couples have already gotten married.

FarmersOnly.com has a section on the site called “The Barnyard Buzz.” This is where members send in their success stories. Here are a few of these stories:

I was told about FarmersOnly by my brother-in-law. About a week after I posted my profile I recieved a flirt from Tim. We had an immediate connection since we had so much in common. Tim & I were married on Oct 2, 2010. We have you to thank for bringing us together. We would never have met without your website. We lived 6 hours apart. Tim is such I wonderful man. We are truly happy & in love. Thank you!
-Janet

John and I signed up within days of each other in early June 2008. I was BlondeIDgirl and he was ModernDay Cowboy! He was the first person to respond to my profile. I knew from the moment I saw his profile and read everything about him that he was someone I wanted to get to know. We talked for 3 weeks and then he flew out to see me in Idaho! From that moment on, we saw each other every month and he proposed on Valentines Day February 2009. I moved to Ohio in June 2009 and left my teaching job and family to be with him, so we could start our life together. We married October 3rd, 2009 and have been happily married for a year now with a son that was born on October 4th, 2010! Everything about our relationship worked out perfectly and I truly feel like it was a God Thing bringing an Idaho girl and an Ohio boy together by using your site! I am forever grateful to you for your site because without it I may have never met my husband. Thank you again for having this amazing site! I am forever grateful to you and your site!

-Lori

I found out about FarmersOnly.com through my next door neighbor. Her dad told her about it and since she was dating someone she told me I should try it since I grew up on a farm. I logged on not ever dreaming I would be married to a guy less than 2 years later. We spoke via instant messager and e-mail for awhile then started talking on the phone and then I invited him to Iowa and the rest is history. I was living in Waukee, a suburb of Des Moines and Daniel lived on a family farm near Lone Elm, Missouri. We just purchased a 30 acre farm with a house. I'm so happy to be living in the country and look forward to raising our kids how I was raised only no hogs or cattle just grain. We got married November 13, 2010 and had a farm themed wedding with lots of great pictures around the farm.
-Angela

“I met my husband, Travis, on FarmersOnly last March, and we were married this July 20th. We started talking, decided to meet, and spent our first 2 days working ground for planting season. We fell in love, and got married! All thanks to FarmersOnly. It was the only dating site either one of us had tried, and loved it because they were country folk just like us.”
Thanks FarmersOnly!

- - Travis and Katie

There are so many more unique stories about members who won’t be lonely this Valentine’s Day! Please email Jerry Miller at JerrMill@msn.com or call him at (216) 407-3783 to set up an interview.

###

2011-01-07T18:36:00.000-08:00

'The Fish Condominium'

This post was going to be about local food production and consumption. We have been hearing almost every day how the big corporations, with the help of the FDA, are compromising our health through genetically modified foods, deceitful labeling, dead food, and junk science. But that's a big subject and needs tackling a bit at a time. Which bit I should elaborate on first is still a mystery to me. So in the meantime, here's something you can really sink your teeth into - a simple way to increase the supply of healthy food. Namely, more salmon.

Go to this web site and watch this couple minute video. You'll be glad you did. In this day of bad news on top of lousy news, it's really uplifting to see someone with such a simple, commonsense solution to a real thorny problem. The problem being, how to rebuild the salmon runs back up to where the whole ecosystem is running on all cylinders. And that takes good runs, not just measley runs that some would have us believe is just all that can be expected.

The Oregon Department of Fish and Game talked the Rogue Advisory Committee into voting to accept a puny expectation of 50,000 fall run kings, when they really wanted to vote to accept an expectation of 100,000 kings. And privately, one state biologist said the Rogue could be supporting runs of 300,000 kings. I think he was talking about spring and fall runs.

But you gotta wonder how many fish the Rogue sustained in the past when Hume built his salmon cannery at the mouth of the Rogue at Gold Beach. They did have the ability in those days to stretch a seine clear across the river by the cannery and pull the fish over to shore. On a much smaller river in Alaska in the same time frame, late 1800s, just one such set yielded 100,000 fish. And when the gold dredge was placed in the Rogue, it is said that 'the river ran red for a year.' You're talking some serious churning up of salmon and steelhead there. Eventually some riders rode their horses to Salem and got a stop to the slaughter. I suspect that a dredge in there now would be hard pressed to get one king salmon.

Remember that when Captain Cook tried to sail into the Amur River in Siberia for the first time, they "were stopped by a shoal of salmon." And when they first started fishing cod in Eastern Canada(which was several hundred years before Columbus) you might not be able to row to shore for the density of the schools of cod.

But if you buy into settling for farm raised salmon, which the FDA wants to allow to be genetically modified and not even marked as such, then maybe this simple device for improving our food supply won't interest you. I know the video will ring true with your charitable side though, so enjoy.

2010-12-08T06:43:00.000-08:00

A lot of my grey matter has been boiling over the issue of 'our food supply' lately. It's not a pretty picture, but some bright spots. The good news right away is that the two salmon smolt killing dams on the Rogue River are out and king salmon are spawning where their reservoirs once were. And Arnold Schwarzenegger is set to leave office and stop sucking out all the water from the salmon streams in California and sending it to farms and developers in the south of the state.

What got me started was a numbness that began creeping over my skin, starting with matching spots on my big toes, and ending with my scalp going numb. Turns out it's peripheral neuropathy and 20 million people have it. It started getting worse while doing shipyard work in Alaska last winter for a couple of months anchored out off the map in a forlorn bay with howling winds and who knows what kind of a wind chill factor. But when I got back to sunny Central Point the numbness had spread.

My doctor said I was intolerant of wheat and caffeine, two substances we consumed a lot of on the ship. We made our own bread and who doesn't drink copious quantities of coffee in Alaska. And that's only because a steady IV drip of Espresso is just too hard to manage up there, especially on a ship rocking and rolling. Well, I got off the gluten and coffee and the worst of the numbness has gone away. But my research has led to further worries that might make gluten intolerance look like a mosquito bite compared to a grizzly attack.

For starters, when you Google search this stuff, you find lots of articles on Genetically Modified Organisms, aka, GM crops. Recently, there has been a push by the Obama administration to allow the import of GM salmon. Since I'm such a salmon guy, this one really caught my attention, and I read the articles. Very scary when combined with the evidence already there of liver damage and worse from eating GM crops: soy, corn, sugar beets, some squash, etc. There goes my corn chips too.

Let me start over. Turns out 'gluten' in wheat isn't the problem so much as the lectin in the gluten. It attaches to the sugar molecules in the stomach lining, such as mannose, and disables it. Your food in turn just sits there and rots. And lectin is in the night shade family of plants as well: tomatoes, potatoes, etc. We've already heard how dangerous some members of this family are, like in deadly poison. You really have to peel the onion, so to speak, to see all that is going on with the whole toxic food thing.

I just don't get why anybody thinks it's all right to mess with the food supply on purpose, except it's corporate greed gone to seed. And of course, now these food corporations can donate any amount of money they want to influence Congress. They only had to snap their fingers and the FDA was willing to not require labeling of GM salmon as such. After all they didn't have to do it with corn and soy products. But food from animal sources is different, just way out there in front of public opinion and probably always will be.

It's shenanigans like this that give outfits like the California Department of Environmental Quality the encouragement, and 'license' to follow suit. Like the recent case where they ignored four Nobel Laureate scientists and the State's own experts and approved a known neurotoxin to be sprayed on the State's strawberry crop. This stuff is used to purposely cause cancer in rats in experiments. Of course it will cause cancer in bugs too, if they didn't die off first. They don't have any information on it killing people, so I guess it all right?

Just like the GM salmon, the company did a couple of tests that were hardly statistically significant, and on top of that, they maintain "people ought to do fine with it." What if it's like the drug that women took that caused so many birth defects. It's already known that GM corn causes still-born births in animals. Heck, you throw down GM corn to pigs and they won't touch it. Neither will squirrels, rats, cows, etc. They fatten cows up on GM corn only for a month, because after that too many of them start to die.

You can Google all this yourself, and you should. Don't take my word for it. This kind of information just doesn't jump out of the funny pages of the local newspaper. I did see in the Ag papers that GM grass of some sort got out of a test plot in Eastern Oregon and spread quite a ways via bird droppings. Aggies, as I remember the students being called who frequented the agriculture Hall at Oregon State when I went there, take exception to GM weeds going virial. Apparently it's a real revelation to them about the side effects of GM crops they produce. It's not like OSU or Monsanto are going to divulge the dark side of the movement to make more money from highly industrialized food production. Eat Local!!!

The chefs of America are hip to the problem and have 'grown local produce and meat' as one of their top concerns for the coming year. The use of sustainable and wild local seafood is a top priority as well. But, what does the National Fisheries Institute or Monsanto care for the chefs? If they can dominate the supply then the chefs have no choice. Right? I don't think so. As Americans wake up to these dastardly deeds, and worry about being a statistic instead of a grandparent. I think you'll see more food co-ops and restaurants start up that carry the good stuff. Nobody wants to die early if it's just a matter of where you park to do your shopping. Ashland Food Co-op proved that.

So, hope that Jerry Brown of California rescinds their renegade DEQ's order to allow the poisoning of 80% of all the strawberries sold in this country. And hope that the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife doesn't find some other way to kill salmon smolts just so they can count fish easier. Yeah, it gets real easy to count fish when there are only one or two coming back to spawn. Freedom of the press is a wonderful thing. Thomas Jefferson said if it were a choice between having government or a free press, he'd choose freedom of the press. Someone should tell that to Nancy Pelosi too, by the way.

In any event, don't eat the corn chips. Maybe not even corn bread. And get tested for intolerance to gluten. I know that my knees feel like they have greased ball bearings in the mornings now, as opposed to my previous hobbling around first thing. They say glucosamine is good for joints. Turns out it attaches to lectin in the stomach so the lectin can't attach to the sugars on the stomach wall. That in turn greatly reduces the pollution in the blood stream from bad digestion which was causing inflammation in the joints.

I know I can't eat pizza without having dire consequences; something about the gene pool being altered after the Great Plague in Europe in the middle ages. I've never tried taking glucosamine for dessert after pizza. The ball bearings and the reduced numbness and headaches is all I need to back off wheat though. Lots of good alternatives to cook with anyway. You can make flour out of a fence post if you have half a mind to.

Seriously, my new flour formula for baking stuff is two cups each of sweet white rice flour and brown rice flour, one cup each of almond meal and tapioca starch. An Alaska correspondent swears by his sourdough pancakes, in fact practically lives off them. I'd have to research some more on how the culture affects the lectin content of the little wheat flour he does use in his mix of flours.

And on the positive side of local fish production, there were 54 king salmon spawning pairs spotted in the Rogue River where the Savage Rapids Dam reservoir was two years ago. And there were 28 spawning pairs counted in the new Rogue River channel above where the Gold Rey dam was just this summer. Meaning that shortly a guy might not have to go ten years without catching a king on the upper Rogue like I read in the Medford Mail Tribune.

Eating local has it's challenges for sure. You can grow your own pretty well, except there aren't any community gardens, especially not to the extent they have them just outside of town in Europe. And it's hard to get your wife to eat bear meat, especially if she grew up in that sea of concrete they call Los Angeles. It makes life interesting, not a challenge at all. And it certainly is fun poking the likes of Monsanto and Pacific Seafoods.

2010-10-14T05:48:00.000-07:00

This may have been the worst year for pears in the Rogue Valley in the 33 years an OSU extension agent can remember, but the crabapple crop was the best I've seen. Although I've only been here five years, the weight of the crop broke the neighbor's tree in pieces and most of them fell in our yard. We did have to pile up the branches and now have to dispose of them, but I got a laundry basket and a six gallon bucket full of the best looking crabapples I've seen to date.

I may have mentioned it before, that the American Chemical Society said that there are great value added opportunities with this lowly apple. That's due to the fact that they are loaded with antioxidants and anti-inflammatory compounds. The last being very important. Most of our diseases apparently can be traced to inflammation, either on a overall cellular basis, or in some specific location in our bodies. I'm no doctor, but my wife is a nurse, who says that they can do a test for inflammation. I already think I'm prone to cellular level inflammation as little blood vessels in the back of one eye started to hemorrhage.

One thing my doctor found was that I need to avoid caffeine and wheat like the plague. (There is a gluten-free beer thankfully.) Also, I've been experimenting with mixing crabapple juice, a la Jack LaLane's juicing machine, with apple, grape and now carrot juice, whichever is most handy. This year it sure wasn't my grape crop. A very lousy year for two of my three vines, and I'm not the only one who noticed. Don't know how the big growers did; it will be interesting to see. Anyway, throw in a little stevia to sweeten a glass and you have a great drink, and VERY good for you. (And yes, the FDA now allows stevia to be put in food. They still won't allow it to be marketed as a 'sweetener' alone though. Has any of them every tasted it?)

On another note, we took a four day break from looking after the 'lost boys' as I call Terry and my kids. Mine cycle through here until they get their footing and off they go on some great adventure. My oldest is here with his little five year old, just starting kindergarden at Jewett Elementary. Jesse put in two tours of duty in Iraq and now is hunting as much as he can and trying to get on with the Sheriff's department. I told him the other day I could really see him as the County Sheriff someday. The work suits him. The score so far is one bear in the bag.

Getting back to the interlude at the coast, we rented a vacation house from a nurse friend of Terry's and spent four days just goofing off in Gold Beach and Brookings. The pinnacle of the trip for me was going to a small chunk of virgin forest up the Rogue River. It's named after a woman, who I assume chained herself to one of those big six hundred year old Douglas firs about a hundred years ago. Well, maybe not, but there are a few acres in there that you can get an idea of what it used to be like before all the logging started. Is what struck me most, being a fish guy, was the amount of clear, cold water in the numerous streams running through the old growth.

We crossed two streams in about an acre or more. Compare that to the small streams you see in a clearcut or second growth - hardly any at all. I suppose logging reduced the flooding in the rivers at times due to lack of stored water in the soil, but sure dried up a lot of fish creeks. And I guess, reduced the flows to places like Bear Creek in the Rogue Valley to the point where a salmon would be half out of water in most of the creek. And in many places in the Country, especially California, that creek would be called a river. Well, it will be a long time before the mountains around here start acting anywhere near like the spongy, water-retaining nature of an old growth forest, if ever. Hence a good chunk of the reason for the loss of five thousand miles of salmon habitat in Oregon.

A local politician was recently querying folk as to how to plug the three billion dollar budget gap Oregon has. The question was posed in terms of looking for a pot of gold under some tree or other. The problem is that there just aren't any pots of gold around. In Alaska I introduce to state government the idea of regional development associations to look after, in that case, the regional commercial fisheries. And that took fifteen years for the legislature to get the drift before any enabling legislation was written. Now the resistance by the 'Pygmy monopolists' are at the local level. (I use that term because the cannery owner at Gold Beach long ago got that handle for hanging on to sole use of the salmon runs in the Rogue River. He may have been a short man, I don't know.) The term fits industrialists of all stripes who just want it their way to the ruin of anyone; they don't really care. It's a small-mind-set, hence the term 'pygmy monopolist.'

As much as the grasping are getting more fervent, there are movements springing up all over to engage folk on the local level in local problem solving. I think for too long we have just relied on casting a vote for a President who we insanely believed would solve our problems. What was that definition of insanity I heard? Something about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results every time? The mistake Alaska government is making, and maybe it's the same all over, is in not supporting a mechanism for local involvement. It's not going to work to just pass on suggestions to a politician. Been there, done that. And it needs to be done industry by industry.

Didn't I hear our Governor here in Oregon say Oregon is ungovernable. Oh, it's governerable all right. It's being governed by lobbyists just like the rest of the country. But since nobody has the guts to stop the practice, there really isn't much protection from the pygmy monopolists. The real question is how are regular folk going to really have a say, and I don't mean someone just giving them lip service.

P.S. This (below) is the saddest thing I've ever seen. You can figure there will be even less of the few scrap fish left available to the other 99.9% of Oregonians, with no hope to turn it around. This is one of your problems, Dennis R.

16:39/10. NMFS PACIFIC COAST GROUNDFISH TRAWL FISHERY SOCIAL STUDY: The U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) Northwest Regional Science Center is launching "The Pacific Coast Groundfish Trawl Fishery Social Study." Several researchers from NMFS' Human Dimensions Program will be traveling along the west coast during the next few months to collect social/cultural information on fishermen and fishing communities in order to establish baseline data on communities that will be affected by the new groundfish trawl IFQ program. It will be repeated later (no timeline specified) to measure changes that have occurred as a result of the program.

Participation is voluntary, and it's important that as many people participate as possible. The study will be targeting anyone working within the trawl fishery, but also others who "feel they are part of the industry and may be affected by fishery management changes," and that includes other gear sectors. It will be important for the fixed gear fleet to fully participate in this study so that it can more accurately take into account the impacts this program will have on other gear sectors within the groundfish fishery. An email for inquiries is: NWFSC.Study@noaa.gov. To download the survey, go to: www.nwfsc.noaa.gov/research/divisions/cbd/groundfish-survey-tool.cfm. The main webpage is:

www.nwfsc.noaa.gov/research/divisions/cbd/groundfish-study.cfm.

2010-09-18T08:32:00.000-07:00

The Rogue Valley was still here, and thankfully cooler, when we got back from our Alaska trip. I was looking forward to the cooler weather. Not that it had been that hot: only a few days of triple digits all summer. My main interest was the fall harvest. Early September is great for visiting the Farmer's Markets and the farms. The sweet corn, strawberries, etc. are to die for.

Although, having just been in Alaska and seeing their bounty of seafood coming in as well, you'd think a simple exchange of the surplus on both ends would be doable. After all, my great-grandfather accomplished it in the 1800s between Norway and Spain. The surplus of smoked black cod is something I'm definitely interested in.

If folk here in the Rogue Valley knew what they were missing regarding the smoked black cod, I could accomplish the trade. Then fund the missing couple grand to get my patented labor saving wheelchair made, and live happily ever after. Well, when you're behind the eight ball, seems like everything is a fairy tale. But on the other hand, hope is one of the 'Big Three' we live by, as in "faith, hope and love."

At least that's how we should live. It's hard to see much of it in a Mid-term Election season. Jet-setters have nothing on candidates: the bull flies regularly. Not that I keep up on Oregon politics much, just as it concerns fish, and that hasn't been good.

In a nutshell, the legislators representing the Columbia salmon stranglers, I mean gillnetters, team up with the Eastern Oregon legislators representing free range cattle folk. The gillnetters have the backing to keep snagging everything that moves in 'the River' and the ranchers can turn their cows loose on all of creation. The collateral damage is collosal: the elk habitat, the endangered salmon and steelhead, and welfare of all the folk who could use these other resources.

I won't give any current politicians much credit for recent dam removal to help the fish stocks. Those efforts have taken twenty years. It still isn't clear to me why the ODFW would be happy with LESS king salmon in the Rogue River, but nevertheless, they do. I've heard it from them with my own ears. Wow! But then why is the FDA given a mandate to help out the genetically modified industry when 95% of the public is ag'in it?

Well, you can't catch any fish around here cuz the bureaucrats don't want the bother, as long as they can keep skimming the public for their paychecks and pensions and health care. And now the farmed salmon in the store might not be full-blooded salmon at all. To be technical, farmed Atlantic salmon aren't salmon in the first place. Only the Pacific salmons are real salmons. The Atlantics, which they are fixing to gene splice with ocean pout or arctic char, are really steelhead trout. They would have had grey flesh if they didn't feed them shrimp meal to dye the meat. And they are skipping the shrimp meal and just going for a red dye.

Anyway, there isn't any plan to require a label warning the public that their salmon is only part salmon. What if the ocean pout has some appendage that starts to grow on people eating the new 'fish.' And the FDA is terming the new fish a 'drug.' Don't that beat all. We are being used as a real-life, mass laboratory experiment. Good luck to whoever is eating the stuff.

Me, I'm trying to figure out a way to get good Alaska seafood down here to eat. And I don't mean from the usual suspects, the processors who pay the fishermen too little, and charge the stores too much. You know, an Alaska hook and line fisherman only gets about thirty cents a pound for a beautiful big Pacific cod. I think they paid thirty eight cents a pound for Pink salmon this summer in Alaska, and they were a record large size. They would have been beautiful if taken care of properly. But the obsolescence of seafood processing and marketing is another subject altogether.

I don't know why I get so hung up on fish. Is it because I have Viking blood in my veins? Well, only three quarters at most. Are my other projects, like the breakthrough in home caregiving, the transfer wheelchair, being forsaken for a Don Quixote kind of cause? As far as the wheelchair goes though, I just found a master tool and die maker who is supremely capable of making my production model. One that can be quickly duplicated and done en-mass. Exciting times.

So, I'll forget about the political pandering thunderclouds and forge ahead with what I wanted to do to begin with. I'd suggest the same for you too. The bad news all around us is almost paralyzing. Don't fall into the trap.

I saw a good quote in a National Geographic 'Traveler' magazine. It went like this: "Now it isn't about finding a plot of land, but about finding our own village." I've recently made some long overdue calls to some guys I went to college with . They sounded just the same and weren't really all that surprised at my call. That's where we live the best: in our connectedness to others. I'm growing my village in an honest a way as I can. That might sound like I'm becoming a recluse. No, just slowing down to take a breath for a minute.

The Rogue Valley is a good location to have a house. Lots of things I want to do with the kids. If I can call my oldest a kid. But me and Jesse and little Connor try to get out in the hills as often as we can. Jesse sent in his application for volunteer work with the Jackson County Sheriffs Office based on his two hitches in Iraq in recon. They couldn't get any better. I told him he should show them how to start and run a UAV program, and only for the price of a patrol car.

The funny thing is, I had a flash of inspiration that Jesse would make a dynamite Jackson County Sheriff someday. I'll never forget the first sign of where his heart is at: he was only about six years old and he passed a downcast looking lady in a parking lot and simply said, "Cheer up lady." I see no-nonsense mixed with a servant's heart in everything he does(except in turning off every light when he's done with it). Keep it up, Jesse.

2010-08-14T12:01:00.000-07:00

OK, troops, here's my latest research.

My eye problem is really inflamation and leaking of little blood vessels in the back of the eye. Turns out that sugar, (alcohol, pop, candy, sweetened boxed cereal, junk food, etc), tomatos and the night-shade family of plants (potatoes, et al.) are the worst. I started a garden with lots of tomatoes here, started drinking beer, etc., and overexerted once while drinking beer (that was the coup de gras for my eye.)

Check out this article on anti-inflamatory foods.

From what I can find out, the skin numbness can be from a combination of toxins I've breathed or consumed, the use of alcohol, some insult to the nerves of the skin like getting really cold, nobody really knows. Well, I'm screwed if I continue to do booze. Dang. Well things could be worse. John Finley gave up the libations so I guess I can too.

But I've heard that inflamation can be in all cells of the body and cause tiredness, (as well as slow degeneration of lots of things.) I saw in the above mentioned article that 'white foods' are culprits (potatoes, a night-shade plant, flour and white rice). I gave up wheat along with caffeine after Dr. Popp said I was allergic to it, and feel ten years younger. Daniel, I strolled right up Crater Lake Mt. with Jesse, totally unlike trudging up it with you. Giving up wheat flour has been huge. My sinuses, and Jesse's too, have dried up. I heard just recently, and much belatedly, that an alergic reaction to food can wreak severe havoc with your sinuses. We go to Great Harvest Bread Co. in Medford on Wednesdays to get fresh bread on spelt-bread-baking day. (R.J. has been eating spelt bread and doesn't know the difference, but knows it's good tasting. Don't tell him.)

Well, eat the grits down South there instead of the mashed potatoes, Elias. This is serious for you military fitness nuts. Jesse is starting to see that this muscle testing business may not be bogus after all. A video I saw on YouTube on peripheral neruopothy that I have now said that 20 million people in the U.S. have it. Toxins cause it, and I used weed killer in our back yard a few years ago, on a calm day with that high fence to keep in the fumes. I should be on Dumb and Dumbest. Everyone uses Roundup though. Daniel, if you get P.N. with your cemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear specialty in the Marines, it can be treated with light therapy. John Finley used a Rife Machine successfully on it too. But you gotta stop doing what caused it, if you can find out.

Have a nice day. lol

Dad
P.S. John Finley sends this additional information on making sourdough bread and pancakes. He says the process of it going 'sour' is akin to germinating the grain and then making little baked-in-the-sun wafers. He says you really gotta grind your own grain at home. John used to be a farmer in Montana and knows about these things.

"That's a cool blog, looks like everybody has got soy figured out. It's cattlefeed only and has to be fermented for humans (soy sauce, tofu etc). And the same is true for "white flour". There's no grains I know of that don't benefit from a sourdough process. Most "white flour" in the US is "Hard red winter wheat", and I still make 1/4 of my bread out of it, adding it towards the end of the project to the buckwheat, barley and oats where it can help the rising in the pan process, the other grains don't seem to have much rise. There's nothing at all in the bread but flour and water. Wrapped right it will improve over time, keeping for weeks at room temp or virtually forever in the frig. Never had any get stale on me unless I added something to it, which I haven't done for a long time. My intestinal tract health goes to hell every time I stop eating it for awhile.

The bread has to be just flour and water, but the pancakes get lots of egg, buttermilk, and any sort of berry just before they're cooked. The bread is a lot of work but well worth it. The pancakes are a breeze.

All the best"

John

The reason John says his sourdough is just different now and the crust of his bread crumbles may lie in this article on genetically modified crops.

And I add: Jesse and I drove his Jeep Liberty to the Rogue River access road and watched three big excavators dig up the Gold Rey Dam. Here's some comments from Facebook: Me: "Amen to that brother. We were out watching the demise of the Gold Rey Dam on the Rogue today though. ODFW maintained to the end that they wanted it there to use the fish counting window. Not the kind of scientists we're looking for." John Stec "That reminds me of the ODFW biologist who wrote a paper way back in the '80's in which he emphatically concluded that the upper Klamath watershed could never again sustain salmon. That became the mantra that drove policy and essentially became a self-fulfilling prophecy."

2010-07-16T14:29:00.000-07:00

SPEAKING OF TOXINS, I sure wouldn't want to be a Gulf of Mexico oil clean-up worker. But the most toxic stuff to things marine I ever saw in Alaska is being sold here in the Rogue Valley to dump down your sewer pipes. And we all know where that ends up. Right in the Rogue River.

I'm speaking of copper sulfate, often called 'blue-stone' from the way it got to Alaska, in gunny sacks of the blue rocks. I remember big thousand gallon tanks of it dissolved in water on floats at the fuel dock in Petersburg, Alaska for the salmon seiners to dip their seines in after the season was over. It killed any organism, now matter what kind, still in the cotton web.

When nylon fishing nets came to town the bags of bluestone became a relic of the past. But it was used for sinister purposes too. It was highly toxic to salmon and some disreputable fishermen would set their seine at the bottom of a salmon spawning stream, have some crew dump bluestone way up the creek to flush out all the salmon, then close the seine on them when they all came pouring out to get away from the irritation to their gills.

So it was with some surprise that I found bluestone for sale locally. I had heard that it was used to kill tree roots that grow into and choke sewer pipes. In discussing toxins over coffee this morning with a pontoon boating buddy, his conclusion is that the EPA is just overwhelmed. I immediately had a vision of the vast array of chemicals in the stores to make gardening easier. Where do you start weeding out the bad ones, to pardon the expression.

Heck, I used Roundup on our back yard once on a calm day with our high fence and my scalp and feet have been going numb ever since. What is toxic and what is not. What is the difinition of toxic. The EPA says that if an organism stays alive while exposed to the toxin for a couple of days then it wasn't poisoned. They don't care if the animal or human dies a week later or their extremities fall off.

Monsanto developed Roundup to kill anything except their genetically engineered wheat, I think it was. Does that stuff ever stop killing cells? Does it ever disintegrate? They are still getting DDT in shellfish in California fourty years after it was banned.

Oil spill workers in Alaska have had illnesses for twenty years after working with crude oil. The average age at time of death of Alaska oil spill workers is 51 years old. Thanks to Dr. Riki Ott of Cordova, Alaska, the Gulf workers at least know what they are getting themselves into. For the most part. I applaud men who knowingly work in that environment to help their families. Although I think their families will later wish they had just moved to Canada, or anyplace, and had their menfolk for another 20 years.

2010-06-06T07:47:00.000-07:00

For the record, I like timers on irrigation systems: lets my grape vines survive my horticultural blunders. I like hiking up the Table Rock mesas and Crater Lake rim trails. I like pontoon boating on Fish Lake with a batch of Mojitos. I like hiking in the mountains in the fall with a rifle, secretly hoping I won't have to shoot anything and consequently kill myself getting the carcass to the car. I like to see king salmon in the rivers and creeks, especially Bear Creek in Medford, where I saw my first Southern Oregon chinook.

Things I don't like? The king salmon in Bear Creek ramming their heads against the board dam under the freeway in downtown Medford. The Gold Rey Dam remaining in place to slow down anadromous salmon migration up and down, just to count the adults as they swim by the counting window. I don't like plumbers who sign on to roter-root your drain pipe and then when they get the snake stuck, just cut it off and walk away. I don't like it when some young people in Central Point shoot out 60 car windows and only get a slap on the wrist. I don't like Fish and Wildlife Department bureaucrats undermining a perfectly good plan to restore salmon runs in Southern Oregon because it means more work for them.

Which brings me to a larger illness going around society today as demonstrated by the paragraph in quotes. There is a lot of momentum for such craziness and I'm not convinced sharing information widely is smarter than physically doing something. The 18% of our population who run these rackets don't share, share, share, they go get what they want. Generally it's at the expense of the rest of us.

Take for example privatizing the fish stocks. Next time you go ocean fishing you might find a 'Pacific Seafoods Property, Release Immediately' sticker on that fish you just landed. If you can find any remnant of your share after the Oregon Trawl Commission has scraped the whole bottom with trawls so effectively.

"The EU experiment with a carbon trade system has been soundly declared a failure. Over-allocation of permits, free permit giveaways, overblown estimates of baseline emissions, cheating, and the passing of permit costs to ratepayers have all contributed to the failure. According to a Citigroup report, it failed to reduce emissions and resulted in huge profits to polluters at the expense of consumers."

I wouldn't object so much to being bilked out of my birthright on fish, clean air and water if they didn't look down their noses at the rest of us so much. I had a real lesson in this psychopathy recently. Namely, a young guy gets in a position of power through no merits of his own and suddenly declares wrong is right simply by virtue of his position. It's interesting to watch one of these guys' face when you declare the truth and explain why. They just blink like a lizard in the bright sun with uncomprehending eyes, (also called the 'racoon in the headlights' look). They don't intend to try understand reasoning.

Should we roll over for these folks? One person CAN make a difference. I saw where it was a retired Canadian Mounted Policeman who bought a couple of surplus deuce and a halfs and started the Ice Road Trucking long ago. But I resent these politicians saying they believe in society's ability to step up and solve the new problems, while taking campaign contributions from the privatizers who are causing the problems. I've heard it said, and I saw it in action, where enough people stand together, speaking the same truth, the psychopaths will take their toys and go home.

2010-04-26T07:48:00.000-07:00

Seafood retailers don't want to mess with someone who just returned from several months in a remote bay in Alaska fixing up a fish processing ship. Such were my circumstances recently. I'm a little wild from growing up on an island in the Alexander Archipaligo anyway, but having parked myself among seas otters and sea eagles in the dead of winter boosted my moxie factor. So, you can imagine my chagrin on seeing farm raised Atlantic salmon being hawked in a local grocery chain as 'wild.'

Maybe my comments to the sales lady were a little blunt, and I appologize for that, but she sure tried to tell the wrong person that fish are wild simply if they grew up in a saltwater bay. That's the same as saying broccoli is 'wild harvested' because it used the same air and sun that forest do.

There was no reconciling our differences on the spot, so I went home and called the manager of the store. And as managers are a little more sensitive to customer attitudes, she pledged to set things right. Especially after I invoked the name of the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute, and the fact that they would take a dim view of their practice. Managers know how much money trade associations spend to promote the truth about their goods, and how ornery they can get about deceptive sales schemes.

I haven't gone back to check whether they took the 'wild' label off those pigs. I'm getting not-so-wild myself by the day. I actually should feel some kinship to fish who lived in a cage in a fjord in Norway, having lived in a steel box in a fjord in Alaska.

Not to mention the fact that raising salmonoids in net pens is now proven to extinguish all the wild runs of salmonoids within a several hundred mile radius. And is why Norway is now banning fish farms from 100 of it's own fjords. Which is why the Norwegian fish farmers are so bent on putting fish farms in other countries like Western Canada. Which is wiping out not only the coastal stocks, but the iconic run of sockeye salmon in the mighty Fraser River.

Labling Atlantic salmon as 'wild' is not only fraud, but it is helping put wild harvest salmon fishermen in all countries out of business. Just because the public doesn't know the ingredients of this witches cauldron, doesn't mean good, honest folk won't come along and stamp out the practice.

In England now, they have caught 80 chippies hawking some mysterious white fish as cod and haddock. That gets them a thousand pound fine. Incidences of enforcement of fraud laws in fish mongering are increasing rapidly. Why? Because the good fish are running out. The EU said they were going to cut the N. Atlantic cod quota 25% this winter, and the boats were already switching to other fisheries with so few cod left.

The market is starved for cod for one thing, and fish mongers are happy to replace it with cheap substitutes like pollock and whiting, which have very little protien. Fish and chips in the U.S. started using these species long ago, as in the U.K., because it was always advertised as simply 'fish.' As opposed to duck and chips, for example. But calling pollock, saithe, whiting, etc., 'cod' is another thing entirely. Cod has about 15% protien and pollock only has about three at the most.

God knows where pollock is being sold these days as a substitute for haddock and cod, whether Atlantic cod or Pacific cod. Market reports have it that traditional bacalau is just being sold as salt cod, with no reference to what kind of cod. But it was always assumed it was a good, healthy cod, not a kind of pelagic cod down the food chain somewhere from the 'good stuff.'

In fact, the Portugese have a name for their salt cod that translates to 'my faithful friend.' That's because throughout the last thousand years, the Portugese have been huge consumers of salt cod, and even put some spiritual significance to it, requiring it on Christmas eve dinner plates like we require turkey on ours at Thanksgiving. Huge cultural significance, so I wonder what the Portugese-speaking countries would say if they knew a lot of the bacalau is not a faithful muscle building friend anymore, but an impostor with little health-giving properties.

And to add insult to injury, the pollock and whiting trawlers in the U.S. are wiping out the king salmon (and herring, and squid, etc.) who are feeding on small pollock and whiting. We could be having nice big king salmon steaks with lots of omega-3 instead of worthless 'fish food.' Government management!

It reminds me of a movie I saw yesterday on young Queen Victoria. Prince Albert was astonished that the palace windows were always dirty, because the outside window washing operations never coincided with the inside window washing operations. Not to mention that they were also setting a table daily for a king who had been dead for years. Do we have progress here? You be the judge.

2009-10-01T10:39:00.000-07:00

Oregonians are much like North Carolinians I suspect. Similarities include a fondness for McDonalds' burgers, a common language, albiet, slightly skewed. But we won't hold that against them. They also place value on time spent outdoors by their youth. And that was my goal for this weekend as I saw this article, reprinted here so I don't short-change you passing on the idea.

“Take A Child Outside” week is an international event that encourages people to help reconnect children with nature. Parents, teachers and other caregivers are asked to make a pledge to take a child outside, and then to post a description of what they did or where they went on the Web site (www.takeachildoutside.org). In addition they can find hundreds of partnering organizations offering unique opportunities from across the United States and in four foreign countries.

This event was created in response to the fact that today’s generation of children does not spend significant time outdoors exploring the natural world. As adults, people who have a strong connection to a special place in the environment are more likely to support conservation efforts. Children who feel alienated from the environment can experience increased feelings of stress, have trouble paying attention and have a sense of being disconnected from the world. Studies also link the lack of time outside to increased childhood obesity and increased attention-deficit disorder behaviors.

For more information about the week or becoming a partner, please contact Liz Baird at liz.baird@ncdenr.gov.

Now about some of my own wanderings around the fish creeks: The Upper Applegate that runs into the Applegate Reservoir is clear as glass and low at this time of year. Some trout were being caught while I chatted up a couple of worm fishermen. This is the area the ODFW wants to put in one of three 'hatchboxes' to test their beneficial effect on the survival of salmon eggs/fry. How the fry are going to get to the ocean and back to that creek must have to do with newly evolved salmon behavior/attributes the ODFW will somehow instill in them, ie., leaping tall dams and speeding away from snaggers in the clear creek like speeding bullets.

Another wonderment to my way of thinking is how a ten inch in diameter irrigation intake can help but suck up fingerlings on the Rogue River. And just how many of these intakes are there on the Rogue? The screen I saw around the inlet of this pipe might possibly keep out a 12 inch trout, but nothing smaller. Not to mention the irrigation canal starting at Butte Creek dam in Eagle Point. I didn't see a screen on that at all. I might have missed something though.

But I know that salmonids have been going out into farm fields for over a hundred years instead of up their natal streams. Salmon protection and enhancement can only be described as bumbling toward improvement from total ignorance: from the days of blocking off the entire rivers to get the salmon to put in a can. And when ODFW says they would like to shoot for a salmon run size half of current numbers, you can only conclude that low expectations are designed to save their own jobs.

Oregon may not be different than other states, but there has been a perception of progressiveness in environmental issues. This little fact might burst your bubble however. There is a prohibition against placing any dead fish parts in the Rogue River, contrary to how God intended the River ecosystem to be fed primarily. Instead, the Coastal Conservation Association has had to make trips on the river to fish out all the beer cans and other litter that is put in the river. Maybe a little help from the government in educating the public on what is natural to put in the river would help the fish runs and the litter problem as well.

Maybe some folks can never be educated, but it's clear that the government agencies have more influence on fish abundance than everyone else put together. And since water runs downhill, we need a Governor who will stand up for what is right. Looking at the problem from the very bottom where a lot of arm twisting comes from, everyone will want the right thing done for them at some point. There's no argument against doing the right thing for the fish. All the glossy Oregon state publications on fish conservation just doesn't match current state policy.

And I might as well comment on my ocean fishing trip: Those glossy color posters of all the public bottom-fish and salmon of ours that are out there for the catching are being given away as we speak. Oh, we'll get a few as a consolation, but like now, you'll have to throw back most of them even if the stocks do rebuild. The reason is that those citizen fish managers among us have been persuaded to give the bulk of the bottom species complex to a relatively few non-selective fisher men/companies. The new policy awaits signing to become law forever. Since the Oregon Legislature can't even do anything about it, it would take a lawsuit like the CCA has launched in the Gulf of Mexico over similar shenanigans there.

2009-09-17T08:43:00.000-07:00

When I saw the Associated Press article on 'catch shares' in the Mail Tribune, and especially after someone called me to get me to respond to it, I thought I'd shine some light on it. Some background; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, under the leadership of Jane Lubchenko, is pushing the give-away of public fish resources. Ms. Lubchenko worked for an organization funded by Sun Oil Company wealth and specialized in media manipulation. And it is a given that corporate interests, especially large trawl companies, want to get the ocean's fish for free, forever, without competing for it.

This is how you get a AP reporter telling everyone that a proposal to take the fish on Oregon's continental shelf away from the public and give it to a few ecologically 'dirty' fishermen is a done deal. Far from the truth. That is if current owners of the fish defend their rights before about March. But the P.R. won't stop on stealing the fish any more than the health insurance industry will stop their P.R. campaign. Here's a quote by a former CIGNA official regarding the health care reform attempts that is analogous to NOAA's current campaign:

"During my 20 years in corporate communications and public affairs, I participated in the steady growth and influence of largely invisible persuasion -- and at a time when newsrooms are shrinking and investigative journalism seems to be vanishing. The number of P.R. people long ago surpassed the number of working journalists in this country. And that ratio of P.R. people to reporters will continue to grow. The clear winners as this shift occurs are big, rich corporations and other special interests. The losers are average (fishermen), most of whom are completely unaware how their thoughts and actions are being manipulated to achieve corporate goals on Capitol Hill."

Check out AnonymousBloggers.WordPress.com for some ticked off folks about trawl by-catch of king salmon. They now have United Nations recognition. They are not 'unaware' like I see in Oregon. Heck, around here, folks still think the foreign trawlers are out there. And as long as they think that, they will think the State Department should stop the king salmon by-catch off Oregon and not go to the regular PFMC public meetings along the West coast.

While I'm harping on inaction, and still in the fishing vein, a local manufacturer of a fishing aid keeps giving and gets nothing back. I'm referring to the owner of the BankEz Planer. There's a website for it. For example, Robyn gave a half dozen Planers to a guide in Alaska to try, and the results were amazing. The pink salmon were swarming the banks and the kings were out in the middle of the river. They used the Planers to get their bait out beyond the pinks and ended up getting over 140 kings that way.

Did the guide pay the Gold Hill manufacturer for the product, or even thank him? Surprisingly, no. Same thing happened when Robyn sent a bunch to a lake trolling competition on Lake Ontario. Fantastic results, but again no appreciation whatsoever. I just can't wrap my mind around that kind of conduct is all. But then I can't conceive of roadside bombing either.

Well, Robyn's Planers will be at the Coastal Conservation Association banquet Sept. 25 at the Red Lion in Medford. Come at six PM and give him a little appreciation, and the many dozens of other local CCA members who work to restore the fish stocks in Southern Oregon.

And I didn't know we had such a premier fishing rod manufacturing plant here in the Rogue Valley. Named, what else but, Rogue Rods. I took a tour through the plant and I'll say, if you are going after Moby Dick or Nemo or anything in-between, these are the guys that can whip out the perfectly suited rod for you. I've seem my share of rods, but these ones are the cat's meow. Now we just need to seriously jump-start the salmon runs around here. More on that later.

2009-09-02T17:58:00.000-07:00

HR 2749 that passed in Congress on July 30 will create burdensome hurdles for small farmers and community gardens. A similar bill in Poland wiped out 60% of small farmers. And this kind of regulation is blamed for 60 suicides among small farmers in the U.K. Granted, not as many people want to be a small farmer in America anymore. But there soon may come a time when we might all want to grow something to sell, like in Cuba after the Russians pulled out.

It took a crisis in Cuba,(they were getting awful skinny) for the government to condone private initiatives in agriculture(truck gardens on rooftops etc. I guess you'd call that 'elevator gardens.') I don't understand why our Congressional delegations can't wake up and smell the coffee and realize the consolidation they are favoring in agriculture and fisheries is promoting economic stagnation and societal malaise. Which adds to the health care crisis as well, as people can't afford as much health insurance. But God forbid they would add up the true costs of their decisions.

Monsanto and the rest of big agri-business didn't have to break a sweat to get HR 2749 passed. They had been greasing the skids all along. This kind of stuff always reminds me of a one-man fishing, processing and marketing business in Alaska. He was very successful but needed 18 permits. He was the best small operator, but couldn't go long term. I'd sure like to hear what our Congressional delegation has to say about this bill.

And at the same time, maybe they could explain how giving the 80 + species complex of groundfish in Oregon away to a few rogue fishermen is going to help. They have been using completely unselective fishing gear for decades and fished the continental shelf to practically nothing.

I've heard lame attempts at apologizing for nefarious fisheries management by retired fish managers. Like you can somehow wipe the slate clean before you die. The stocks are hammered, period. You can't say anything to make it alright again.

There are similar practices going on at this time, such as the horrendous by-catch and dumping of king salmon by trawlers on the West Coast(not to mention Alaska). It brings to mind a story told of a State Trooper who caught a woman rolling through a red light. She said, "I was almost stopped." Whereas the Trooper responded, "Mame, if I was hitting you with a baseball bat, would you want me to slow down, or come to to a complete stop."

The point is, when you're talking about natural systems, the systems themselves are crying out for a complete halt, not a partial halt. Just thought I'd mention that for the benefit of those who think compromising is a one-size-fits-all approach to everything.

But all is not lost to corporate interests. The public can make decisions on a local level and shut out the influence peddlers. If local governments got a mandate from the people, maybe they could just say "no" to Washington and their bought and paid for mandates.

I had high hopes for the farmer with the little truck farm and road-side stand in Rusch. I don't know what all is in HR 2749, but over one million people from just one movement have written in asking "what on earth are you guys doing?" So, it can't be good. And it might put a kink in my plans to make a health product, to help keep me and my friends out of the clutches of our health care system.

All the best.

2009-08-15T10:14:00.000-07:00

The health care debate's misinformation campaigns reminds me of the tactics used in the fish 'privatization' efforts by NOAA. It's cavalier and dishonest on the part of journalists and is arguably an abuse of power by officials getting salaries from the public coffers. In the first case, my example is the TV journalist Glenn Beck, who had continuously and vociferously had derided the U.S. health care system for years, especially when his own surgery went badly.

Then Glenn Beck joined the conservative news network, FOX News. Now he suddenly maintains that the U.S. has the best health care system in the world. Without citing any support for this new-found religion, of course. Now the Brits are pissed about being dissed in the propaganda wars, because they, and even Cuba it seems, can prove they provide better health care, cheaper.

Then you have the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has suddenly developed a penchant for manipulating the public. Now we have a Sustainable Fisheries sector in NOAA dedicated to forwarding the 'catch share'/privatization model of fisheries management.

Why call the new office, "Sustainable Fisheries ...." Isn't that what NOAA and it's National Marine Fisheries Service has always been about? I don't think there is any confusion in the public's mind about that. What is confusing, and downright dishonest and reckless, is linking the term 'sustainable fisheries' to privatization like this. It just doesn't follow and never has. Just look at the state of the Canadian fisheries. They are all but defunct, which is why they jumped into net cage fish farming in such a big way. Same thing in Norway, etc, etc.

The only problem fisheries management has is the lack of courage to do the right thing. Throw in a measure of inhumanity toward man, and a sprinkle of personal greedy grasping, and you have a recipe for run failure. Giving the fish away to a few, and locking out the many won't change the recipe. The stocks still cook up bad.

Open range vs all fenced in hasn't been the issue in sustainability - it's mostly been fishing practices; huge by-catches, destructive gear types, mortalities of all kinds, DOGFISH SHARKS, and pesticide and fertilizer run-off to name a few. Check it out: two thirds of the fish killed by fishermen in U.S. waters are dumped over as unwanted, at least by that fisherman at that moment, and dogfish eat the same amount of fish that fishermen catch on the East coast, yet are protected. Absolute madness, but no reason to panic and give the title to the farm to the Cossacks in a bid for appeasement.

Now, I'm not heaping all the blame on the head of NOAA by any means. The big players in the commercial fish business and their very well paid lobbyists, who have dominated the fisheries management councils, are no better. It's one happy mutual protection society, and the small family fishing operation owner, the crews, and the communities, are left holding the bag in all instances under a 'privatization' regime. I wouldn't want to be projecting this image to the rest of the world if I were Obama.

I'm sure I've beaten that dead horse to death by now. Like Glen Beck and a whole lot of Republican politicians, the fish 'privatizers' and 'Maritime Mad Men" use whatever tactic they can to win the brass ring of fish ownership and exclusivity. If that means pushing everyone else off their saddle, so be it. They have the reins of power and they just don't want to use alternative fisheries management tools to manage the fish, of which there are plenty, because that won't yield them the deed to the fish stocks.

The problem has been, to a large degree, that privatization yields mega-trawlers that vacuum up the seas indiscriminately. These things should be kicked off the high seas, not put in line to own the rest of the swimming fish they don't already own. When these factory vessels clean out their own bank accounts and go bust, then it's an easy squeezy deal to use taxpayer money to buy the boats, and with a few more laws, wha-la, now the federal government owns the fish that the public used to own. How's that for a conspiracy theory.

Seriously, the real issue is one of a polluted soul, not a polluted ocean. The rationale behind ocean reserves has to do with the system's inability to stop overfishing - the inability to get people to do the right thing. Then as the communities collapse, the family guys with boats and a sense of community will end up doing what the locals did on the Yukon River. They went fishing in closed waters "for the disabled, the old, the widows, and the orphans among us."

The tie-in to Southern Oregon is obvious. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has equally conspired to reduce the king salmon stocks in the rivers, especially the Rogue River. Of course they will argue that point, but the proof is in the pudding. There is a group of avid bank fishermen up by Shady Cove who fish for a couple of weeks or a month each year during the spring king run. Well, according to the Mail Tribune, and Mark Freeman who went there, the 'king of the camp' finally caught a salmon after three years of trying. How many casts is that?

An avid drift boat fisherman I know tried on 27 trips to the stretch below the Gold Rey dam before he caught a king. Another friend who had grown up fishing elsewhere, decided to take up fishing again on the Rogue. He tried for two years to catch something, to no avail, and hasn't fished since.

How bad does the fishing have to get before nobody shows up? Does it make any difference if there are any fish in the river? When you have a propaganda machine like the State tourism people, you just keep calling the Rogue River that 'famous king salmon stream.' The people will come and buy stuff and thrash around and think they just had bad luck. Their propaganda machine is bigger than the free press, so guess who wins? And why do we have to pay for their PR if it isn't true?

But another friend showed me a secret spot. I think if I go this November and get there before daylight, scan the neighborhood with infrared binoculars for the guy who says he owns the steps down the bank of the river, then call on my cell phone to wake up a fisheries biologist and also my lawyer, to see if I'm using the right gear. Barbless or barbs? What kind of scent is legal? Sinkers or no sinkers? Artificial or real bait? Any restrictions on line weight and leader length? Was there an emergency closure? Can you keep fin clipped fish? Non-fin clipped? How many? Which kind of fish can you keep? How long do they have to be? How short? Do you need a separate endorsement for each specie of fish on your license?

Naw, I think I'll just stay home and reminisce about the good fishing of my youth. I'll pretend I got cold and wet and have a hot toddy in the safety of my back porch and save myself the aggravation of getting yelled at by some stairway cop who you can't cuss out because your son is with you. Or some fish cop with a badge making sure you don't keep something a quarter of an inch too small, when hundreds of miles away, trawlers throw tens of thousands of king salmon of all sizes overboard dead.

A person can only take so much aggravation. You either use up your patience bucking city hall like I do, or you use up your patience trying to catch fish. Most people are in the latter category, whether they still get their line (or longlines) wet or have totally given up. And the ones who still fish fight each other for a bigger share. And discounting all the fish fighters who draw a salary from some special interest group, it's pretty lonely in the category of trying to get more fish, period. In fact, I think the Coastal Conservation Association has a monopoly on that.

Well, the good news is that they didn't find any serious contaminants in the mud behind Gold Rey dam. So just blowing the thing sky high seems likely. Those thirty pound carp will have to try survive without eating all those salmon fry. And it looks like the PNW Regional office of NMFS is moving out of the seat of fisheries consolidation, Seattle, and moving to hardscrabble Newport, OR. I look forward to making it harder on the big Seattle fish CEOs to twist arms in the NMFS offices from afar. And I hear the 'privatization candidate' to head up NMFS has chucked it in. We just hope the postponement of action to fill this slot is to find someone who knows the science of fish, and isn't the proverbial Lion in the Wizard of Oz. Having a heart AND mind in a candidate would be ideal, and is surely what is needed to get us and fish to where we want it all to go.

I wanted to make one more point about fish advocates and fishermen (recreational or commercial) being mainly mutually exclusive. Take my wife for example. She's a nurse in a critical care setting (Rogue Valley Hospital NICU) and focuses so much on others that she, and her co-workers, have health problems from not taking care of themselves. Or the old adage about plumbers having the worst plumbing in town. So you can see why someone with a little power in fish circles, with an agenda, can flummox everyone, because hardly anybody who knows the subject speaks up, and the rest don't have a clue what happened.

2009-07-02T22:45:00.000-07:00

Sayonara, Gold Rey Dam. It's been nice knowing you, but you haven't been kind to us. Maybe you haven't been for decades, since you quit making electricity. Now you have a chance to redeem yourself by creating fifty jobs to end your reign of obstructionism. A real win-win situation.

I'm sure happy to see that last barrier to fish passage go on the Rogue River. Except the Lost Creek Dam higher up. But that one is very useful and nobody wants it out. But Gold Rey has just been beating up returning adult king salmon, coho, and steelhead, and making it taxing and risky for out-migrating juveniles.

The project is one of fifty chosen by the Obama Administration, out of a pool of 814 proposed marine related restoration projects. The vetting process was ferocious: "More than 200 technical reviewers from across NOAA worked in groups to review all the applications and the top 109 were chosen for panel review." Oregon's Congressional delegation is thrilled with the prospect as is at least one County Commissioner that got interviewed in the Medford Mail Tribune.

More jobs, more recreation, and more fish. The dam is above where gold mining was going on in the early days around here, so the sediment wouldn't have that problem either. Nevertheless, the County Parks and Recreation staffer cautions that there are some who don't want it to go; like a couple of people could hold up the whole thing and miss the window of opportunity?

The only public access is through the private property of the one guy who has a house on the impoundment. And he limits access to a certain few. I bicycle out there all the time and I only see a boat on the water once in a while. I have seen boats run down the river from a vantage point on top of the Lower Table Rock mountain and and seen them turn around at the impoundment. The drift boats don't even try. Those are the guys who will be flooding down the river with a free flowing Rogue. Along with kayakers, rafters, tubers and anything else that floats.

Every time I see an article about the dam coming out, the Parks and Rec guy is throwing a wet blanket on it. What is this guy's problem? Unless someone has been dumping heavy metals en mass in the river that none of us are aware of except him.

What else is new around here? I went bottom fishing a couple of days out of Brookings, in the Bannana Belt of the Southern Oregon coast. The bottom fishing was great, and after the first day, our fishing buddies on another boat shared their secret to success with us. Artificial bait from Berkley. Or was it the last couple of hours of the last day they shared some of their bait? The guide who took my son and other Veterans fishing out of Newport used belly bait, and they did real good.

It's a good fruit year by all indications in the Rogue Valley. My grape vine is going nuts, and so were the birds until I threw a net over it. The tweety birds in our bird house had just flown the coup and it appeared they invited all the neighbors for dinner, using my grapes as the main course. Talk about gratitude toward the landlord. We had a stuffed zucchini last nite for dinner, compliments of my garden.

The monsoons seem to be over, so the dishwashers at McDonalds can breath a sigh of relief that they won't get electrocuted again. We're going into the hot part of the year, where if you need to do roof work like I did yesterday, you need to get going on it at 6:00 am, not 11:00 am. Take my word for it. It was 100 degrees when I went out for parts, according to the car thermometer. Reminds me of working on the Kibbutz in Israel; the Kibbutzniks started work at 4:15 and knocked off at 11:00.

Oh, and the Hatchbox Bill that Senator Jason Atkinson introduced, and we in the CCA promoted, got through the process. Growing fingerlings in sunken plastic boxes was in wide use 15 years ago, but Fish and Wildlife pulled the plug on the program. Back by popular demand, ODFW is willing to experiment with them around the Rogue Valley. This would be a pilot project for the whole state. There are around 5,000 miles of former salmon habitat in Oregon that this program could be used in if successful.

ODFW isn't keen on the idea of every fifth grade class in the state just plopping one in their favorite creek to see what happens. That was the problem before, not much oversight, mixed results, and who knows what all happened in the woods out of sight of the Principal.

And the announcement is out now, that we are going to hold our first annual Rogue Valley Chapter, Coastal Conservation Association, banquet on September 25. It will be at the Red Lion Motel in Medford at 5:30 PM and the public is invited, encouraged, welcome, and urged to come and have a bunch of fun and support the fish. We have about 80 members here now in just over a year of existence and sure could use more help, even with just membership dues. However the organization has been around in other places for 37 years, restoring fish runs and having a blast in general.

Anything else of note? The economy here sucks. We're afraid to check if we are upside down on our mortgage. No jobs. I met a truck farmer in Rusch at his roadside vegetable garden and retail stand who knows his stuff. He started farming at nine years old behind two mules. He was looking for a hand-crank ice cream maker that he could use to make and sell good homemade ice cream with on the Fourth of July. I, for one, will be going up there to collect interest on the loan of a hand-cranker I found at an antique store for him and his son. Actually, I gave it to his son to work on the fundamentals of entrepreneurship with. I'll get my eight bucks back in fresh veggies from his dad, I'm promised.

Just fuggetabat looking for a job; there aren't any. This is where entrepreneurship shines and ushers in a whole new array of products and services adapted to the times. This farmer I mentioned is being swamped with offers from landowners to farm their land. I won't get into all the reasons why, but suffice to say that there are more jobs in this field (no pun intended) than available people to do the work. It may not seem like sexy work, but it's honest work and it pays. What's wrong with that? Besides, you develop a rapport for what you do after awhile, no matter what you feel about it going in.

In fact, you could feed certain crops, in a particular blend, to fish in tanks with closed systems, in a warehouse. A professor at the University of Mass. has been doing just that, and now is planning to produce 200 tons of fish a year. That's the best way to value-add a crop. Tilapia have been raised on potato skins in Idaho for a long time now. One farmer in the Willamette valley I talked to was trying to think of a way to raise fish or shrimp on his land about four years ago. This closed system approach is totally green agriculture and reduces the destruction of the marine flora and fauna complex.

With ocean acidification and no end in sight to trawling, our seafood supply is in serious trouble. Investors just don't know enough about the seafood realm to get them to jump in this pool at the moment. Factory trawlers seemed to be a good investment, but little did the investors know, (or care?) that the boats would be eating themselves out of house and home. Not so, filtered, closed system, aquaculture on land, using plant proteins in their food, instead of just other fish.

There is one other thing, and that is, the Pacific Fisheries Management Council just voted to issue IFQs to about 120 trawlers. Well, with Trident and Pacific Seafoods connected by marriage now, I suppose the 800 pound gorilla gets whatever he wants. After they voted to give themselves the fish, this Council of experts, (read that fish company lobbyists) will be holding the Coast Guard's feet to the fire to run the rest of us off the ocean. Just like they did in Alaska with the halibut charter guys.

Richard Gaines has been covering the 'catch share' issue at GloucesterTimes.com/fishing. The media over here has shied away from this giant give-away of public resources. It's like the Old West all over again: divvying up the resources among the club members just because they can. (The Inspector General's Office did call it a club in essence.) At this rate, Oregonians will never be able to keep the bigger rock fish, find plentiful halibut, stop the by-catch and waste of thousands of king salmon a year. Not to mention trawlers extinguish 30% of the species complex on the bottom: the food for everything.

These trawlers really can say with all honesty that they don't fish down the food chain as they have been accused of. They actually fish the whole food chain at once, with nets with a maw as big as a football field. The only thing that gets through the nets alive is the krill, the food for whales, salmon, etc, but they tried to get a fishery going on them too.

2009-04-20T11:32:00.000-07:00

"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.

2009-04-10T17:19:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-03-12T09:42:00.000-07:00

Voluntary borrowing ratios by the big banks and other financial houses got us in the fix we are in. Voluntary by-catch limits on king salmon, chum salmon, herring, squid, etc, have the marine ecosystem in the collapse it is undergoing. And I need to start repeating, it is not 'foreign fishing.' Unless you consider Seattle a foreign nation. That's where the West Coast and Alaska trawl fleet is based out of for the most part. By volume of harvest that is. There are smaller trawlers based out of places like Newport, OR and Kodiak, AK.

The collapse of our marine ecosystems, which includes ten thousand miles of anadromous streams in Oregon and Washington alone, are the result of unsustainable fishing practices. And of course using gold dredges in the middle of some big spawning rivers, building dams galore, and cutting down the shade trees didn't help. Like the financial industry which spent billions of dollars influencing our very own representatives to stab us in the back, the big trawl companies spend scores of millions doing the same thing. The spending continues unabated, at least in the fishing industry.

Some people are flabbergasted as to how the salmon runs could get so poor, all the way from the Sacramento River to Norton Sound in the Bering Straits. A bunch of people are mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore, and are joining conservation groups by the truck load. But what can you do when the Deputy muckety-muck of the Oregon Dept. of Fish and Wildlife says that the estuaries won't support any more smolt?

Are the runs now even close to what they were a hundred years ago, or 150 years ago? Not by a long shot; maybe at about 5%. So why is ODFW saying in effect "don't bother building up the runs"? Is it because one astute Legislator wants the public involved by way of a hatch-box program, because you can't wait on bureaucrats? Gosh, if the runs came back, it might make them look foolish!

I've not heard of such a good notion as the hatch-box idea in a long time. The contraption is only about a foot long, made of hard plastic with a lot of little holes. Holes too small for the chinook eggs to go through, buy big enough for the little alevins to wiggle through once hatched. Get eggs from someone who knows what they are doing, fill up the trays, bolt the box back together, tie an anchor on it and chuck it in a creek. You have no lack of creeks and rivers to put them in; places that used to have spawning salmon, but don't now.

The beauty of it is that Mrs. Higgins' fifth grade class can adopt a hole on some creek to restore the run in, and henceforth take an interest in the ecology of that creek. Maybe those kids would even learn to not be afraid of walking in the woods. How else are you going to create a sensitivity for stream, river, and marine ecosystem health?

What you get without some sort of education is highway departments putting in steel culverts that block salmon passage, fishermen who troll in the summer and drive a Cat up fish creeks in the winter, County Commissioners who allow gold dredging in the middle of salmon streams and rivers(STILL!!!), non-selective commercial fishing methods where not appropriate.(Not that any non-selective methods are appropriate, but I'm being politically correct here because I have relatives who are commercial fishermen in Alaska. Alaska also has many fisheries where there is no by-catch to speak of.)

Lets put some numbers on chinook by-catch in the trawl fisheries. In the whiting mid-water trawl fishery and the bottom-trawl fishery on the West Coast the by-catch has reached almost 20,000 king salmon in one year. That was a couple of years ago. The reported by-catch about the same time in the Bering Sea was 122,000 king salmon. These are REPORTED numbers. An ex-Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game employee confirmed what a Greenpeace campaigner told me, that the total salmon by-catch for the year was nearly 400,000, of all species.

Is it any wonder the runs are failing along the entire Pacific Rim. If there is any justice, the trawlers are fishing out their target species too. Does this sound 'sustainable'? Not by the original definition when the World Health Organization coined the term. The government might as well call gold mining and putting arsnic in the salmon streams 'sustainable', because it sustains a few miners and jewelers for a short time.

Fifth-graders in Oregon used to be able to hatch salmon, but the Oregon Dept. of Fish and Game put a stop to it. The runs kept falling. Looks to me like somebody in this picture thinks they are smarter than a fifth-grader.

2006-10-10T13:57:00.000-07:00

KOCKING AROUND THE FISH CREEK:

I remember bumping into a retired doctor in the city park in Dallas, OR and him still apologizing for a deceased friend who had been in charge of Oregon Fish and Wildlife. It was during his time that the logging companies did so much damage to the wild runs of salmon in Oregon, during the post WWII boom in logging.

Eagles were blamed by the big canneries in Alaska for eating too many salmon in the creeks, and hence the old bounty system. Didn't the Feds see their giant fish traps.

I saw a map on the wall of Oregon Trout yesterday, that showed the vast loss of range of Pacific salmon in the Northwest. An area almost the size of the whole state of Oregon.

Then the Alaska Fish and Game Department failed to forsee the bad run of pinks in S.E. last year. Probably goes to show that the ADF&G was underfunded by both the Legislature and the Governor. Unless the ADF&G was just not doing their jobs. Icicle Seafoods would appear to have known ahead of time. They bought a cannery on Kodiak Island last spring, and lo and behold, S.E. was way down and Kodiak was way up. Makes you wonder doesn't it. Do only Icicle employees walk the streams making counts, or does ADF&G and then just not tell anyone.

I found out that you can drive up Highway 62 out of Medford and get to a bridge where it crosses the Upper Rogue River and see the kings spawning.(Actually some were spawning around our feet fishing for steelhead one day.)

I got curious about a certain spot on Bear Creek, right in the middle of Medford. I had to walk across this pesky park, LOL, and then under the Interstate. Where, lo and behold, king salmon were ramming into a small dam, with the bottom of the fish ladder a foot and a half out of water. They had a lot more room to butt their heads out in the middle of the creek I guess.

I noticed another funny thing, that when you grow up running up and down creeks chasing salmon in the summers, you tend to go looking for salmon from then on. Once in a while you can help to restore a run in small or big ways. Somehow caring for creeks get to be part of your DNA I think.

But one thing is for sure, get Oregon Trout or someone to show you where you can see some salmon around here before they are the last ones that anyone will see in that stream or other. Robin Moulder, of Moulder Inc., was my guide one day last fall. He took me out one evening to the Rogue to show me his patented Planer. The Planer takes your line out to the middle of the stream and lets your bait or luhr just bob along right where you want it to. No better system has come along to simplify stream and river fishing. Should make it easy for anyone to go out and catch something. The ocean planer will spread your lines out for a lot better footprint trolling out on the lake or in salt water too.

Robin also came to my rescue and graciously cooked all the (Kodiak) salmon for 100 people at our wedding on the banks of the Rogue. But the real story was us standing on that bank, actually on a front lawn, in the late evening. The mists were starting to form, and a summer steelie jumped near the far shore. It looked almost like a vision through that light mist. No wonder steelheaders get so psyched up over fishing for them; the places they go are some of the coolest places on earth in my opinion. I'm sure though that if there weren't any fish in the stream anymore, I'd have a different outlook.

Governor Schwartzenegger has even taken an interest in things salmon. "In light of PacifiCorp’s characterization of the value, it seems only appropriate that dam removal be explored as part of the discussion and quite frankly, as part of the eventual solution to restore Klamath River health.” The key it seems is that when the electrical power is needed, there is no water in the river to make it, and when the water is high, consumers don't need it all. So, get rid of them already!

It breaks my heart to see those kings butting heads with the dam on Bear Creek in Medford. Then someone goes and puts these little fish signs by the gutters so you won't dump engine oil down them. Why don't the sign putter-uppers just go across town and let those king salmon through so they can spawn at the same time.

Clips from a conversation at Savage Rapids Dam boat ramp: "Now sweetie, you know you can't swim in the creek because you got a rash all over last time from all the chemical runoff." "I don't know why they built this dam in the first place."

Turns out that people are finding little concrete dams on lots of little tributaries, from when settlers got water for all kinds of uses. Alaskans are finding that culverts under roads are stopping fish runs all over the place. And don't forget the joys of snorkeling in these rivers and creeks, when you can find a hole big enough and the water clear enough. Bring a cheap underwater camera, you'll have a blast. I recommend taking your date to Umpqua Falls in the summer and snorkeling about 75 yards below the fish ladder. And there's always sliding over the falls like everyone else.