Nostalgia

has certain smell

The docks of Friday Harbor used to be covered in gill-nets, webbing and corks. It’s not that way anymore. The salmon cannery was torn down and condos were built on the same real estate. They call the condominiums Cannery Landing, but it insults the idea of a real cannery. Last year, I explored near Port Angeles and found a campground. There, hauled out and propped up in a field was an old salmon seiner, the Margaret J. The boat was once the Queen of the Friday Harbor fleet, a highly productive boat that fished on the salmon banks off San Juan Island. It was shocking to see it transformed into a playground toy. A metal spiral staircase, something out of a tacky 1970’s house, connected the deck to the top of the wheelhouse. I am sure it is fun for kids to run up and down the spiral staircase, but it just felt wrong. Paint was peeling off the hull. The boat was never going back in the water. In shipyards, boats are sitting up on blocks, the seams are drying out to the point daylight can be seen. Owners have given up. I have seen more than one boat crushed by an excavator and piled into a dumpster, or sunk at the dock in its slip. Fisheries have been regulated out of existence. River are polluted, fish size is small, gloom and doom. It hard not to reminiscence about the old days.

This week I saw a couple of jumpers, whole salmon leaping completely out of the water as if in training to go up the white water rapids of a fast moving stream. The real nostalgia comes when the flying ants hatch in mid-August. When I step outside, I can smell the scent of salmon in the air, huge schools of sockeye salmon are swimming by San Juan Island on their way to the Fraser River. The air carries the smell of salmon and it transports me to memories of seeing gillnet boats stretched across the Straits of Juan de Fuca. Or, to watching the seine boats set off the Westside, or to seeing boats anchored up at Fish Creek, not fancy yachts, but boats with their deck lights on delivering to a packer that later in the evening will motor by on its way to the cannery. Not the condos, the real cannery. But, it’s not like that anymore in my little gentrified town whose core was once salmon fishing.