Country diary: homecoming salmon leap to attention
It leaps from the churning water a few minutes after I arrive, startling me midsentence. Red-tinged, hook-mouthed, and huge, the returning traveller from the Atlantic rises clean of the maelstrom by several feet, hangs tantalisingly in the air, then falls back down into the curtain of the waterfall – a heroic effort, but not quite enough to clear the lip of Stainforth Force.
“Got it!” exclaims the photographer I was talking to, another picture of a leaping Atlantic salmon(Salmo salar) in the bag. “I came this time last year and it was like those Alaskan nature documentaries. They were almost jumping into my feet.”
These fish were born in the Ribble and are on their way “home”. After surviving as many as four winters feeding and growing in the expanses of the North Atlantic, they have navigated back to the mouth of the river, near Blackpool, made their way up through Lancashire and are attempting to reach the exact place they were born to spawn, recognising their home stream by its specific smell. Now, to get to the higher reaches of the river, they must overcome these falls, which are regionally famous for the salmon run display. Each leap prompts gasps and clicking shutters from the gathered spectators – then a return to watchful silence.
A small percentage of the salmon will return to the sea and spawn again, but the return migration exerts a huge physiological toll on the fish and, for most, the cost of making life will be the loss of their own.
It is tempting to see an anthropomorphic nobility or doggedness in this, but that implies an unlikely level of individual agency; more probable is that the salmon’s instinct to reproduce is a force of nature almost as blind as the waters they drive up against. But it makes me think about the instinctual undertows in our own lives, and the degree of freedom we have to swim against them. Walt Whitman comes to mind: “Urge and urge and urge / Always the procreant urge of the world.”
Finally, a fish leaps up and, somehow, just about flops over the top. We all cheer.
mingly sending mixed messages: condemning Garrett’s behavior, but also blaming Rudolph. “I never said anything like that,” he said. “I did not insinuate anything. I was asked for a comment, and I was not making a comment on it. I just asked if you saw the tape, so form your own conclusion. I have my conclusion that I did not say. There is no excuse for that to happen on a football field. I know that, Myles knows that, and all of the players in the locker room know that.”
Kitchens met with Garrett on Saturday, and plans to continue doing so. Garrett, the top overall pick in the 2017 draft, is not allowed to be at the team’s facility during his suspension. “Myles Garrett’s a good person,” Kitchens said. “We’re not going to pile on Myles. He had a bad lapse in judgment and that’s it. I’m still a Myles fan and I’m going to support him . ... Myles is part of our family.”