Designing a stream

...Beneath the surface is complexity, irony, and contradiction: teams of specialists, special interest groups, government bureaucracies, the profit-motive, contested history...

...Stage five: throw the dead chinook onto a growing pile of carcasses in large, plastic-lined wooden boxes...

...And even if the projects failed for fish or the arrogant came away unchanged, there would still be some P-5 pools with the alder leaves shining like pennies...

...At the bottom of one deep pool—a "P 5" Scott labeled it—alder leaves shone like pennies...

...The replication of the stream is exceedingly complex, each piece in the system delicately balanced against the others...

...There would still be the riffles and glides, and the sound of water, the endless rushing and flowing and eddying of water, beneath trees...

...That's what drives most everything the Bureau of Fisheries and Wildlife does, as I realized earlier that day at the Oakridge Hatchery, watching the spring chinook "spawn...

...It involves looking at the rocks, seeing the leaves fall, trying to understand how the water moves...

...Sill logs and other kinds of logs dam up silt and gravel, too, which provide necessary spawning habitat...

...I realize that the government's motives are not aesthetic or distinterested (neither are Cristo's...

...Both the designing of the stream and the spawning of the chinook are unnatural, human activities, involving plans and at some points heavy equipment...

...They have to be cabled to boulders, artificially fixed, to keep them from being washing away in the spring run-off: random debris replicated only through precise measurement, deliberate placement...

...He is the author of Free/Style: A Direct Approach to Writing (Houghton Mifflin...

...The designing of the stream is admirable because it's trying to put things right, to put things back the way they were before the dams and the fishermen and the four-wheel drives...

...And that's why I want to praise it...

...Five men in rubber overalls stood in water up to their waists in a fenced-in holding pond, the water alive with chinook, seething...

...My images of salmon in rivers were images of the natural and spontaneous, the nonhuman...

...Old-growth forest stretches away on either side of us, part of a Spotted Owl Habitat Conservation Area set aside in the Willamette National Forest outside of Eugene...

...Each log is itself a small dam, the water shooting off it into tiny pools, pouring over silt in shallows...

...It's hard not to admire something so apparently crazy...

...It seems to me there's a kind of necessary humility in that, a necessary reverence...

...It's a mass-production process, generating huge inventory...

...Decades ago and further upstream, Scott explains, loggers finished up a large harvesting operation by removing all the logs and woody debris from the water—standard practice for the timber industry then...

...Ripe bucks go through the same cycle, except that in the last stage their sperm is milked into the buckets, squirting out when their flanks are squeezed...

...A couple of Forest Service supervisors stand around on the bank, scribbling on clipboards...

...It couldn't make things worse—could even divert us from more damaging pursuits...

...At intervals he returns to see if each installation has met its "objectives," though eventually, if the project works, many of the logs will be buried by the silt and gravel they've built up...

...The same assembly-line system produces the fish—trout and salmon—for every major water system in Oregon...

...he makes a small fortune marketing swatches of his fabrics...

...These eventually become the fish in the holding ponds, then the larger fish, and so on, until they are released into whatever river or lake...

...The scarred logs are placed at carefully determined angles every few feet, some pointing upstream, some perpendicular...

...It all looks like some sort of odd playground equipment...

...Equipment and crews of men were jumbled up everywhere, the creek-bed like a big-city construction site, full of shouting and exhaust fumes...

...I think the government should try designing as many streams as possible, improving the technology as best it can...

...Trying to design a stream involves the contemplation of water, the observation of its endless flow, of the bending of the alder and willow, of the sky overhead...

...And, of course, that effort must ultimately fail...

...The Commonweal eggs and sperm in the five-gallon buckets are later placed in oxygen-enriched trays where the fry emerge...

...It builds "structure...

...I hadn't given fish much thought...

...CHRIS ANDERSON Chris Anderson, a frequent Commonweal contributor, teaches at Oregon State University in Corvallis...

...That's the point...

...cott and I are splashing up Portland Creek in hip-waders looking at logs the Forest Service has cabled to boulders all up and down the stream, as far as the eye can see...

...Two other men and a young woman with a clipboard waited on the dock, the end of the assembly line...

...Stage one: feel the bellies to see if the hens are green or ripe...

...Cables bristle from their ends...

...The conceptual artist Cristo ringed a Florida island with sheets of pink fabric and later stretched a cloth fence twenty miles long across the fields of Northern California...

...And the sill logs trap leaves and other organic matter which feed the insects that feed the fish...

...We can never get it entirely right...

...Earlier in the summer, giant excavators and rubber-tired skid-ders had powered up and down the stream, bringing in logs from other parts of the forest and boulders dynamited from a distant quarry...

...Nature will exceed us...

...I'm all for it...

...As I reflect on that day, what I keep thinking about is how different the two operations felt, how different their effects were on me...

...The irony on Portland Creek is that it's against the law to cut trees in a Spotted Owl Habitat Conservation Zone, even for stream restoration...

...It would give jobs to the unemployed millworkers...

...The water is low, exposing the surface of the streambed...

...Whatever else you might say about the designing of the stream, however, it works against the cause of efficiency...

...He had spent the summer working as a designated "stream designer" out of the Lowell Ranger Station, first counting the fish in the stream (shocking pools with an electro-shocker and counting the fish that floated up), then directing the "installation" of the logs according to a complex computer-generated map, then tagging and marking each log, carefully recording its position and purpose...

...Behind us, a dozen men in red hardhats are standing in the stream drilling holes in boulders to anchor the log cables, the racket of the large drills filling the air...

...Stage three: whack the ripe hens in the head with a wooden club (sometimes two or three times for good measure) then buck them up onto the dock and into a slot on a row of plastic trays where the tails are clipped with garden shears and the blood is drained away...

...But scientists have discovered now that woody debris creates pools, "riffles," and "glides" that fish and other wildlife need to keep from being swept away...

...It has for two human generations, ever since the building of the major dams...

...The dams are huge, with far-reaching effects, but the sill logs on Portland Creek, with the boulders and the anchoring cables, are small, their effects local...

...And yet I came away from Portland Creek calmed, heartened...

...This happens over and over, hundreds of times a day, thousands of times a week during the fall season—the thrashing of the fish, the slippery-suited men, the shouting and laughing, the growing rhythm of tossing, whacking, bleeding...

...Stage two: toss the green hens over the fence into a small canal (heads bobbing off into the distance, like a herd of fording cattle...

...The designing of the stream is not an effort to impose a convenient structure on the natural world but an effort to understand the complexity and chaos and randomness of what was already there, before us...

...Wood creates "resistance," adds "roughness...

...The designing of the stream is part of a "Salmon Enhancement Program," driven by the pressures of game fishermen to have more fish to catch...

...Without that system there would be no fish in the rivers above the dams, no fishermen buying fancy reels, potato chips, Budweiser, and four-wheel drives, voting for their favorite congressmen...

...The dams disrupt the spawning cycle so that it must be artificially recreated, season after season...

...Scott is a "co-op" student with the Forest Service, studying for a master's in Fisheries and Wildlife at Oregon State, a good-looking man in his early thirties, quiet and considered...

...Reinventing glides and riffles, building in overhangs and hollows and backups at fifty-yard intervals are not the most cost-effective way to generate units offish (the hatchery is...

...The spawning of the salmon is a simplification too, serving the ends of efficiency...

...the glassy eyes of the fish, the thump of bodies in the carcass box...

...Unlike the huge dams, the stream project is not a grand simplification of a single system, its logic easy to understand...

...As I unstrapped my hipwaders by the side of the jeep it seemed to me for a moment that the cabling of the logs and the designing of the stream was no less a kind of "environmental art," improbable, even absurd—and wonderful, too...

...But the logs and their cables will disappear in a few years, hidden by gravel and cobble and the flow of deepening water...

...But I can't help thinking of the designing of the stream as a better thing to try to do...

...It was September as we walked up the stream, early fall leaves swirling over the structures Scott helped engineer...

...What impresses me is both the incongruity of the sight—the ugly lashings beneath the huge alder and fir—and the scale of it, the sheer numbers of logs angled and tagged...

...I wasn't disgusted by the spawning so much as surprised...

...But here, too, more is happening than meets the eye...

...The idea was to leave things clean...

...The logs have to be hauled in like steel girders...

...Stage four: whip the drained hens around from the trays and, almost in the same movement, slit them open from tail to gullet to release cascades of bright orange eggs, hundreds in each fish, pouring out into five-gallon buckets...