A very kind man asked me accompany him sturgeon fishing the other day. We went to a spot he had only recently learned the existence of. Although he is an avid fisherman and has been a resident of Lillooet for half a decade, this little secret had managed to elude us both. It is a place I pass often, indeed maybe several times a week. I have stood on the Old Bridge over the Fraser River and heard mighty splashes off in the distance without knowing what fish made the noise. Once, I caught a glimpse of a large fish just disappearing under the khaki-coloured water after the sound reached my ears. All I could discern was that it was a very pale colour.
Within an hour of being in place that morning, I saw the mystery revealed. White sturgeon of all sizes leaped, swirled and sounded in a stretch of smooth water just upstream of a large sandbar dividing the main channel from a shallow, gravelly side channel. We were alone there for three or four hours and I watched my friend reel in two specimens of at least three feet each plus a squaw fish. My partner told me to let him take my picture with one of his fish, which I did although I felt silly doing it. I fished for trout for the next while. Later, I put more weight on my leader and began to try for a sturgeon.
Shortly, my friend had hooked into a big fish. He insisted that I take the rod and try to learn how to reel in a fish of substance. I had never caught a fish in excess of four pounds thus far in my life. I took the rod and tried to keep tension on the barb-less hook. It was akin to pulling a water-soaked mattress on a piece of string. Until the beast jumped and rushed forward, I honestly couldn't tell that there was anything alive connected to the line. After a while the sturgeon took off up-river and I lost some yardage on the drag. I strove to make up the paid-out line, tugging until the rod started to creak and reeling with purpose. After one little feint shore-ward, the big fellow, which my friend had estimated as being seven feet long, turned away. I tugged hard and the line parted.
My friend was jolly in spite of this turn of events and immediately began to tie on new tackle as he asked me if I was hooked on the feeling yet. I saw his hands trembling as he worked his knots and didn't know how to tell him that I had felt dead calm and had experienced no adrenaline rush whatsoever during the playing of the sturgeon. I felt that to say so would have been impolite to such a generous person. I tried to explain that if I were catching food to eat, I would be very excited and emotional if it got away. I looked up-river no more than a hundred yards where the traditional fishing rocks of the St'at'imx began. I said something about how we were in reality just annoying a noble, ancient fish.
After several casts with my own gear, I caught a submerged snag and had to part my line again. While I was tying on new tackle, a couple appeared on the beach. The man asked many questions as he set up. I landed a nice squaw fish and released it. The fellow had a very expensive rod and reel and had driven many miles to come to this spot. The Fraser River is home to the largest fish in all of North America in the form of these white sturgeon. The newcomer was using 180 lb. test line.
Your eyes may light upon different elements such as the railroad trestle, the highway or the wooden bridge built to better access the Bralorne Gold Mine back in the day. You may see the fishing shacks and drying racks of the St'at'imx nearby. You also might take note of my clothes, my face, the size of the sturgeon and the quality of the water. Nevertheless, your biggest initial picture is contained within the frame chosen by the photographer. These limits may be superseded to the degree that you possess learning, imagination and local knowledge.
If you saw that picture of me holding that sturgeon or a picture of one of them airborne in that beautiful rugged canyon setting, you would no doubt experience a variety of your own emotions and feelings, which in turn would give impetus to the bent of your thoughts for the time you pondered that picture. In my opinion, the most important aspect of this exercise in terms of your interpretation of it would be that of the frame of the picture. The frame of reference.
Your eyes may light upon different elements such as the railroad trestle, the highway or the wooden bridge built to better access the Bralorne Gold Mine back in the day. You may see the fishing shacks and drying racks of the St'at'imx nearby. You also might take note of my clothes, my face, the size of the sturgeon and the quality of the water. Nevertheless, your dominant initial picture is that which is contained within the frame chosen by the photographer. These limits may be superseded to the degree that you possess learning, imagination and local knowledge.
In my mind's eye I see the Fraser River which has flowed in its present drainage pattern for about 8,900 years. This was after the Cordilleran Ice Sheet separated from the Laurentian Ice Sheet and they both began to melt. The river however, is much older than that. It existed during the last age of dinosaurs and is reckoned to be four million years old, give or take. The relatives of the people who today are called First Nations appeared with the melting of all that ice.
Their arrival and semi-nomadic settlement preceded the Koran, the Old Testament, the New Testament, the pyramids of Egypt, the Sumerian civilization and all the Great Empires. Less than two hundred years ago, came the people who would see the railroads and highways built, although others passed the river mouth in ships at least three hundred years prior to the formation of the Province of B. C. One hundred and forty-seven years ago, gold fever encompassed this entire region.
Men advertised in China for cheap labourers and the workers came in droves. They scratched out roads, railways, tunnels and built bridges. When the major pay dirt was exhausted some of the Chinese stayed behind to rework the tailings around here, particularly on Cayoosh Creek before returning to China or setting off for other work places. The rocks they piled neatly beside the watercourse are still gathering lichens, mostly undisturbed and they are featured in local tourist brochures.
There is a small graveyard just at the southern extremity of the Lillooet Cemetery that was recently discovered by a man with a dowsing rod. It was researched and proved to be a Chinese only burial site. The town wanted to construct a rest stop picnic area on this ground and were subsequently quashed by protests from a Chinese Heritage Organization in Vancouver. The heritage people suggested the making of a raised platform of decking over the small site so that the remains wouldn't have to be disinterred but I cannot imagine anyone wanting to knowingly have a picnic on top of unmarked graves, which is tantamount to a picnic with ghosts. I know for sure that the First Nations people would not attempt such a thing. I can't think of many Chinese who would want that either. The debate smoulders on.
When I first became aware of the site and spoke to various people about it, all the dialogue was studded with the racial issues. Chinese were upset why the graveyard was sequestered in the first place back when it was being used. One possible answer to this could be the traditional Chinese practice of disinterring bones and sending them home to be buried, as it doesn't sit well with your other graveyard neighbours from other cultural backgrounds.
Caucasians were wondering why it was unmarked and untended by the very race of people who were trying to protect it now. I wasn't there and I do not know the answer to that interesting and valid point of inquiry. To complicate the matter further, the property has been owned by the railroad and by private owners since the Gold Rush Days yet it sits on land today disputed to be Traditional St'at'imx Land. I remember when I first saw the sequestered Chinese and Jewish sections in a big cemetery in Vancouver off 41st Ave. I mused that perhaps people behaved no better in the hereafter than they do in the here and now.
If we walk a few kilometres from the sturgeon beach to take a picture of the Chinese Graveyard and we framed our picture properly, we could encompass an area that used to house born Canadians of Japanese descent who had been detained in concentration camps during World War II after their property had been confiscated and their families broken up. This was shortly before my birth and the time-line back to those days is measured in only in decades. Some stayed behind after the war was over and a few of these became rich lumbermen.
Back on the sturgeon beach, I see an invisible line that runs across the rocks, the sand, the gravel, the water and clear up the far bank. It is a dividing line put in place by the Queen to isolate the land reserved for the St'at'imx fishers. A few hundred yards from there, upriver I see a young St'at'imx man reading a Stephen King novel and glancing into binoculars once in awhile before writing on a clipboard. He is collecting data and enforcing rules that are now being applied to his own people after the model of the Queen's way.
He speaks of friction among his people. It strikes me as strange that his people's ancient salmon management program worked for close to ten thousand years and now is being replaced with one designed by people with a proven malicious track record. The non-native gentlemen back on the sturgeon beach speak of friction also. They speak of salmon turned into units of illicit currency for the purchase of alcohol, contravening the rules laid down by Royalty, while it is their own non-fishing relatives who purchase this fish.
Those men are sport fishermen. I am not a sport fisherman. Not long ago, neither were their European ancestors, be they German, French, Italian, Polish, Greek or Swedish. The sport of fishing could only have come about in a time and place of domination, subjugation and the ensuing surplus and wastage by those dominant. To hunt is in every man's DNA. To take a life is sanctioned in two clear cases all throughout man's sojourn on earth as far as I see. One is to feed oneself and ones family. The other is to protect the life of oneself and ones family.
In the historical record, I don't recall hearing about recreational or trophy hunting except in thoroughly civilized environments where such pursuits were restricted to the local Elite Class. To catch an edible fish of an appropriate size and age for consumption and then release that animal can only be of the most modern coinage as far as human practices go. Further, it could only then be practised by thoroughly domesticated men with very full stomachs and very strong bosses, in my considered opinion.
Practice is a valid excuse for sport fishing but the techniques in the taking of fish for food were perfected all over the world long, long ago and are not hard to learn and to practice even with home-made tools. I can see black and white photos pass before my mind's eye of acres of rotting salmon in Burrard Inlet where there was a fish fertilizer trade for awhile. I see the fish bucket-wheels at the New Westminster Docks scooping tons of salmon for commercial purposes. I see the clay tablet fragments from Sumer where city dwellers complained about all the fees, licenses and taxes to be rendered to the government for each basket of fish a man caught, bought or sold.
I see many sportsmen inculcated with mandatory politically correct conservation rhetoric and philosophy which they have learned from Institutions that are operated by men who have exploited every resource with iron fists and an unquenchable thirst for profit and control. In the not too distant future, perhaps in decades, I see fish with antennas, transponders, implants and eventually bar codes tattooed to their foreheads.
If you catch one, there is an App for that and your fees will be automatically deducted from your digital account. The App will tell you who caught it before you and take you to their Facebook pages to join a Group of all those souls who shared the magic of catching that particular water beastie. At home you can then follow your fish in real time (for a fee) and see it feeding, mating or being caught again.
The Chinese coolies who probably fished on this beach after work in the 1860s eventually returned home with stories of Gam San or Gold Mountain. There, with the guidance and patronage of certain especially groomed local leaders in Cathay who had been educated and groomed by Europeans, particularly by the English, they were led to a glorious revolution which liberated them from local tyrants. That is when the real troubles began for many of them. After the murder of multiple millions had taken place and the survivors had been thoroughly re-educated, the population was coaxed into producing high numbers of males over the next five decades.
Today I can see the rails they built carrying off raw materials down the Fraser River to be shipped to factories in China. I see money undulate between East and West. I see those same rails bringing in Chinese manufactured sturgeon rods, reels, cell phones, cameras, thermoses, backpacks and folding chairs. I see the newly enriched Chinese descendants of the coolies paying money laundry prices for Vancouver Real Estate and the money yet sloshing back and forth. It puts me in mind of the exchange of British gold for Chinese tea and the subsequent remedial and corrective exchange of British Indian opium for Chinese gold. Hmm.
The game is old indeed. Any part of this essay that seems to be a point of racial contention, I assure you, is not. It is this illusion that is manipulated with care and precision by men who make sport of their fellow men in order to move old plans along their corduroy roads. We are all played like fish across the planet yet we persist just as the sturgeon has.
Men figured out long ago how to frame pictures to elicit a particular response from the same basic background. Your body is a frame as are your convictions and beliefs. Both draw attention away from your mind itself and your spirit at large. As I have pointed out in another essay, the frames of Chess, for example, are the rules of play and without them the game couldn't be played. Every man is a uniquely framed tiny portion of the God which he worships.
Finally, I regard the sturgeon. A fish called the “Royal Fish” in Wales and legally considered to be the sole property of the Crown. A fish also highly esteemed in Ancient Rome. An extremely slow growing and long lived fish. An animal that can reach twelve feet in length and weigh in excess of a thousand pounds. A fish unchanged in its present form for the last one hundred million years. These life forms are twenty-five times older than the river of their current refuge
The largest fresh-water fish on the continent of North America. A seemingly listless bottom feeder prone to aerial displays for reasons not yet fully understood. For me, at this point in my life, a perfect symbol of the ennui I endure as the glaciers within me slowly melt to reveal the true landscape of this dream which I have lived. I was honoured to meet the sturgeons but I feel no call to disturb them any further. I may go in future to watch them jump and splash now that we have been introduced.
Just before writing this essay I came across a picture of a town called Nysa in present day Turkey. It caught my eye because my wife's nickname is Nisa. Nysa used to be in the Roman Province of Phrygia. It is situated near the Meander River and if one meanders upriver not very far from town one will come to the ancient city of Laodicea. That place is mentioned in Revelation and was chided for being lukewarm. The inhabitants were strongly advised to be either hot or cold as most Christians will probably recall.
Scripture aside, it was a real nice little town in its days and residents loved it so much that when it was damaged by an earthquake in the time of Nero, they refused any outside financial help and raised their own fund to fix things up. Nysa had a beautiful library and theatre. The mountains behind that library look very much like Fountain Ridge behind our library here in Lillooet. Just swap the chokecherry trees for olive trees and keep the pines.
Nysa resonates with me as I too feel lukewarm of late. I am not convinced that this is a bad thing for my stage in life. A stage, I have dubbed the “Great Inbetweenium.” The sixth decade, the fifth turn of the Chinese Zodiac. The time in a man's life when he is neither hot nor cold.
To me being hot means being either angry or dissatisfied. Being cold means being aloof and uncaring. I was hot all my life and it only served me good during those few times I harnessed it and used the energy to drive me where I needed to go. I have never been a cold person and although I am a solitary man, I feel for all my fellows even if I don't seek their physical company.
I have read accounts of ancient rich men who were unhappy at the tedium they experienced as a symptom of their luxury. I have read accounts of the barbarians who came in to ruin them at their height of excess. Conversely, I have read very little written by the men and women of history who were satisfied with their lot. They were definitely there, all through history. They are the ones on their front porches driving everyone else crazy by minding their own business and knowing that every moment of peace was an anomaly and a blessing.
I am not rich enough to suffer the malaise of a Classic Roman or Greek citizen nor am I poor enough to burn with the anger of their slaves. Nor yet am I a skin-clad barbarian attracted to the smell of their decadence. Nay, I am a retiree from the Queen's Postal Service and just able to pay all my bills on time if I don't live in a wasteful manner and chop my own firewood for heat. In the big picture, I am probably a creature as ubiquitous as the sturgeon. You could call me homo saturabiter.
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