I rode along on my son’s middle school science field trip last week. Because I’m a great mom, of course, and I wanted to do my little bit for the schools before my work schedule ramped back up, and because you learn something about your kids and their lives if you spend some time seeing them in context with their peers.
And because I was really curious about the trip itself.
In the early sixties (dates not exact; I’m paraphrasing the volunteer guides), when a dam on the McKenzie River cut off access to salmon spawning grounds upstream, a new spawning channel was built below the dam as a kind of replacement. Our goal was to see the salmon building their redds, fighting one another off, and to learn something about riparian habitat and wildlife. My goal was to check out that reconstruction.
I expected something quite artificial looking–something built–on the order of a canal, maybe. Salmon breeding in outdoor captivity.
Yet except for the remnants of water gates near the channel entrance at the main river, and a certain regularity to the falls–straight lines that crossed at right angles to the stream, as if laid out with a ruler–it looked fairly natural. After fifty years or so, the banks are overgrown. And maybe not too many people know it’s there. But the fish use it, at least a few. It’s functional, even if it’s also pretend. But is it useful enough?
It rained–sometimes drizzle, sometimes steadily–the whole time we were out. There were three or four umbrellas across the group; most of the kids had raincoats, but not all. We picnicked outside, standing up, eating our sandwiches in the rain. There was some grumbling, but no big deal. These kids are used to rain.
Replica-building is only a partial remedy. It doesn’t make up for the severity of habitat and spawning-stream loss. Mitigation, by definition, alleviates some of the pain or seriousness of an illness or crime; it doesn’t make it go away. Like raingear, it can only do so much.
But the idea of rebuilding a natural space as nature intended. . . what does that mean? Free admission to a life-sized diorama of a forest stream. Salmon simulacrum. Can you see the edges of the picture? It matters, because this isn’t strictly a theoretical exercise, an aesthetic experiment. There are fish in that stream.
And kids in boots, collecting macro invertebrates. Teachers riding herd. Moss and mud and sloppiness and mist.