I sat down on a log barred in the shore of the river, wrapped all up in three layers of clothes: a tight thermal long sleeve black shirt which was acting as my second skin under an oversize sweatshirt from that time when I was in Toronto, and the brand-new Omni-wind Block Columbia jacket I bought out of necessity and whim, and I watched.
The scarf I was wearing felt like a boa constrictor trying to eat me for dinner, yet it didn’t bother me because it was keeping me insulated from the cold weather. I was entertaining myself with a pretty twisted yet natural scene, I was watching two sockeye salmon males fighting indeed. When suddenly, all those layers became too much; my body raised its temperature as my heart rate started exceeding the normal resting rate and while the adrenaline that the adrenal glands had just spited out to the bloodstream was causing my pupils look as if I had had magic mushrooms. That heat was accompanied by the wind carrying sand from shore of that shallow river, from the ancient arena.
Bites as blows of sword, harsh bright skins as armors and other sockeye salmon as Roman citizens; a few carcasses were lying on the bottom of the river as either defeated or victorious salmon who had ended their cycle. Both warriors knew perfectly their rival’s weakness, as well as Apollo knew about Achilles’ heel. The Roman emperor always used to put a weaker gladiator, the one he wanted to be killed, to fight against another who was likely to win, the one all the bets were on. But who would do that apart from a vile human being? Who would sentence someone to death beforehand? Who would be so cruel? I only came up with one name… Mother Nature.
The movement of their two bodies provoked a sand storm that blurred out all the action. At that precise moment, I really felt like a Roman citizen waiting for the towering cloud of sand of the arena to go away after a hard, maybe fatal, blow. When the image became clear again, there was just one male in the scenario, the defeated one had run off. The applauses and the screaming of the spectators were up next, but I realized, apart from me, no one was applauding, no one was watching them; not even the sockeye female they were fighting for. No one was looking at them because that was not a spectacle to entertain people, as the gladiator shows were. Both, gladiators and salmon males, were fighting for survival, but because of two whole different causes. The first ones were trying to survive to stay alive during 20 or 30 more years, while the others were trying to survive to stay alive enough time to mate, 9 minutes would be more than enough (chromometer in hand). Their proximate goal was the same, yet their ultimate goal was totally different.
I took off the scarf while trying not to lose sight of the scene. One salmonid gladiator and a female mating; I blinked once, and the scene was over. That’s it. That is what he had fought to death for, his ultimate goal. And, after that? Death—waiting in peace, as his flesh gets rotten, his systems shut down slowly and he ends up at the bottom of the river serving as a resource of nutrients for the ecosystem. Both, the gladiator and the salmon, fought to get something in return yet their motives were heads and tails of a coin—one fought to keep his pride untouched, while the other fought to keep his genes down to future generations (this is actually the purpose of what we call salmon run).
I was witnessing the wise, cruel even vile Mother Nature pulling on her transparent marionette strings. I was witnessing the power that innate instincts have and how buried inside humans have them albeit some of us let them free more often. Brutal. That was the word.
“Excuse me, can you take a picture of us, please?” a little wrinkled man with sunglasses and a very expensive phone said to me as he got closer. Immediately, I was brought back to Earth. I nodded my head and as I took the picture, I tried to focus the camera on the river and the sockeye salmon. But the woman with a noticeable hump next to him shouted at me as nicely as possible “make sure we all fit in the picture, dear”. “We”, I knew instantly, meant the eight people standing in front of me, not the hundreds or even thousands of sockeye salmon in the stream. As I clicked the button on the screen I couldn’t help wonder what the difference between this picture and one in another park was, if not for the salmon.
The sockeye salmon was cropped out from the picture and from that place. Are we really that cruel, that self-centered? Two different types of cruelty, I guess; but at least, one type of cruelty was going to serve for more than likes on a social network. Cruelty…
I went back to my spot, the cold made me put the scarf back on around my neck and I let myself bury in my thoughts… Sockeye salmon, as well as other species, lives to procreate; they pass on their genes or at least they try and then, they die. They don’t have any time to spare and if they decide to waste it, it is more than probable that they will die without any offspring, without having contributed to their species, useless. However, sockeye salmon is the species with the most powerful instincts and strength I have ever witnessed, just as Achilles; the way they hang on to their lives until the very last minute, without eating, is heroic. “The Marvel Super Heroes” of under water.
Mother Nature set them up as machines capable of surviving the enough amount of time to make sure a cycle is completed and that another starts. The masterpiece She has created is brilliant—breathtaking. Adams River is the nest for hundreds or maybe thousands of gladiators and other village people of ancient Rome (including adult females, alevins, sockeye fry and smolts and myself), an each one of them live under the rules of the fearsome emperor. Mother Nature. Individuals may die and be replaced by others, the genes manifested within a population may change over generations—yet, She remains the same. No one, not a single living being has had the courage to face that old woman pulling on the strings. Well, not until Homo sapiens sapiens appeared.
Humans have developed the ability to control their instincts and act independently from what She orders. As we well know, the Roman Empire fell a long time ago (at least for human civilizations). Humans don’t live their lives with the same ultimate goal as salmon (to pass on the genes to next generations), not anymore. Nowadays, humanity’s only goal is to live life to the fullest and the longest possible—what Mother Nature put as a top priority has now become a choice.
A 35-year-old woman has no children; therefore, her genes won’t be passed on to the next generation—natural. A 5-year-old sockeye female may lay between 2.000-5.000 eggs before she dies—natural. Have women’s biological clock stopped ticking? What happened to our animal instincts? Why have we stopped contributing to our own species, to our own existence? When did we start running away from her?
Well, I guess the answer to all these questions is that we, humans, believe that we don’t depend on her anymore, rather the opposite; we think her existence depends on us and that’s why we come up every year with new conservation laws and other projects to try save a little tiny piece of her. Our world’s anthropocentric point of view and our arrogance don’t let us trust her, and more important, we don’t let our lives in her hands, we tried to escape from her with all the resources at hand, until the inevitable comes—death. Death is the ending of a life cycle and it’s just as natural as birth. The Romans, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Mayas, and so on… for all these cultures, death was part of the journey of life, part of their nature. And this is applicable for salmon; for salmon, death is just another natural event.
But, Mother Nature, for modern society, has now become more a bad figure like the vile emperor of the Roman Empire, than a good figure like Demeter (from ancient Greek religion) or Ceres (from ancient Roman religion), the goddess of agriculture, harvest, growth, who presided over the fertility of the earth. That’s why the little wrinkled man and the woman with a noticeable hump asked me for a picture of themselves, without the salmon, without the nature…
Despite all that, like it or not, we still play under her rules—she still controls our strings. And, we all know what happens if we pull of the strings very hard—they break; and, if they break… well, if they break, there is nothing holding us back from extinction.
1546 words
Literature cited:
Greek Mythology [Internet]. 2018. Demeter. Greek Mythology: greekmythology.com ; [cited 2018 Oct 21]. Available from: https://www.greekmythology.com/Other_Gods/Demeter/demeter.html
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