Salmon spawn show about wildlife threats

Storyteller and educator Peter Donaldson performs the one-man show “Salmonpeople.” (Judy Slepyan)

Salmon have been swimming the waters of the Pacific Northwest for nearly 50 million years. They have long lived in harmony with people, but that’s changing.

Fish habitat in this region has degraded rapidly during the past century, with the Oregon Trail population boom combining with the damming of the rivers and other human-induced factors. With these changes, Northwest salmon have shifted from a bountiful species to an endangered one.

Storyteller and educator Peter Donaldson views the salmon as a metaphor and an indicator for the vast ecological concerns of our time. After presenting a series of related workshops at local schools, he will cap the outreach with performances of his one-man show “Salmonpeople” on Oct. 10 and 11 in Skyview High School’s auditorium.

“It’s not necessarily just about the environment,” said presenter Mike Kerbs, co-founder of the Salmon Creek Watershed Council, which organized this series. “It really isn’t all about salmon, either. There are a lot of agencies that offer environmental programs and education, but there’s really nothing like this, that’s good theater, professional theater, too.”

Donaldson, son of Jack Donaldson, the former director of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, worked in Alaska as a 20-year-old, gathering brood stock for hatcheries. He once came across a river, rushing toward the Prince William Sound, that was so full of churning salmon that the fish were thicker than water. A week later, he returned to the same place. It was eerily quiet, filled with the decomposing remnants of the spawn. He saw one skeleton, with a drop of fish oil still in its eye socket, that represented to him the entire ecosystem, in particular the nearly 140 species that rely on the nutrients that the salmon bring back from the ocean and deposit in the rivers when they die after spawning.

“There is this whole web of life,” reflected Donaldson, now 51, during a recent telephone interview. “Where do we really belong? What’s the value of being curious?”

Those sorts of questions inspired him to create a character, Cyrus Jackson, who isn’t college-educated but still wants to know what’s happening to the world. Jackson explores science, legends, history and cartography, mixing heavy lessons with light comedy. In one scene, he draws by hand a map of this bioregion from memory that includes the names and basic shapes of more than 140 rivers.

Salmon Creek, an unincorporated yet heavily populated area just north of Vancouver’s city limits, gets its name from one of the small tributaries in this area that essentially has become bare, as Jackson laments.

Kerbs, of the Salmon Creek Watershed Council, said he has heard stories of the local creek being so full of the fish a couple of decades ago that people could just walk up and spear them with pitchforks.

The co-founder of the council — which covers sections of Vancouver but also parts of Battle Ground, Hockinson and Felida — spends a lot of time walking the banks now, and he said it’s so rare to spot a salmon in Salmon Creek today that people excitedly contact him with detailed reports when it happens.

Donaldson, who lives in Seattle, said, “My job is to ask the big questions about what we mean by ‘sustainable prosperity’ and how that looks in your watershed. Our next generation really can’t afford linear thinking. We need to teach and practice systemic thinking, and question things like, just because we can make plastic and we can bottle water, doesn’t mean we necessarily have thought through all of the unintended consequences.”

He added, “Salmon are the metaphor, and they are the icon. They really represent the first cluster economy of the Pacific Northwest. Because they have such a heroic mythological story, we strongly identify with them. But they have been in decline, and they are continuing to decline. I take that to heart.”