STORIES

Friday, April 27, 2007

Work and Industry on the Fraser River, part 1

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Community: Fraser Valley

The following essay is Part 1 of 3 on work and industry on the lower Fraser River. A photo slideshow accompanies it. Here is Part 2.

We leave the dock at Fort Langley with morning light shining down from the east, following the stream of the river of the Fraser River from the mountains on the horizon. The surface of the water glows, flat and calm, reflecting the trees that line the banks, the boats at rest and the bright snow capping the peaks of Golden Ears to our north.

We’re in that middling season of April, the month that Eliot called the cruelest in his croaking voice. It’s not warm yet except in the bright sun. It’s not cold except in the rushing wind.

The river level is middling too. We’ve had rain that’s run through but we haven’t yet felt the freshet, the big swath of water that rushes through when temperatures rise at elevation and melt the snowpack and send the frigid waters tumbling down rock faces to streams that feed creeks and tributary rivers all the way up from the Fraser to over a quarter of BC—the whole Fraser River watershed.

Four of us are onboard the 26-foot stainless steel work boat: Chad Brealey, the Director of Development of the Pacific Salmon Foundation, Todd Gilchrist, ace cameraman from Oh Boy Productions, Kevin Simonett, our guide, a law student and a Fraser River commercial fisherman, and myself, an extra set of eyes invited along. We’re out on the river to shoot footage for a video.

We slice through the glassy water of the thin channel where we’ve launch and head out. I look closer down through the reflections on the surface of the water, into the Fraser passing by. We’re here for salmon. I’m thinking about salmon, so I look to the water.

I see nothing. Chocolate milk is the first thing that comes to mind. The water is murky, cloudy, heavy with silt. I can’t see into the water at all. Woody debris in all sizes, all the way from wood chips to whole logs, floats and swirls everywhere.

The path Kevin traces through the logs twists and turns to avoid the big floaters but we still hear an occasional thump off the hull. I hold on to steady myself. We pass into the main channel of the Fraser and the depth gauge tells us we’re in over 40 feet of water.

The piles start to appear along both shorelines—great tree trunks driven into the soft bottom of the riverbed to provide stays in the current. Logging companies lease the moorage space they create and every few hundred feet we see the sign of the leaseholder.

Continued in Work and Industry on the Fraser River, Part 2.