Cultural notes

We went to The Attic downtown (we took the car even though it's only a few blocks because it was raining really hard)to see the New Orleans Klezmer All Stars. The show was supposed to start at seven, but the intersection of New Orleans and Santa Cruz cultures was just too much for any sort of schedule to support and the sound check didn't start until 7:30. I guess The Attic's sound system is a little off because there was this low-level white noise until the band decided to do without mics except for the standup bass. That's okay, because klezmer is loud. These guys were lots of fun and the music was really wonderful but nobody seemed to want to dance, least of all the nice fellow. Some young woman led one dance but after that it seemed like I was the only one who wanted to and I can't be the first one on the floor, I really can't, I get like trembly thinking about it. And anyway I got an asthma attack (coughing) just from the first time, which was disappointing. After that I sort of wiggled around and swayed and tapped my feet and fingers because you can't not respond physically to klezmer, even if there's some reason you're not actually dancing. The electric guitarist was in a triumphant mood because he has recently realized that the old argument about whether it is even possible to play klezmer on an electric guitar has become obsolete and he won. He said that he learned his craft from the musicians that the purists hold up as the only true klezmer musicians and they encouraged him to do what he does, so there.

I bought a CD -- "Fresh Out the Past with the tune "Coney Island Whitefish" on it and, well, you know the rest of that sentence. No daddy to play it for, no daddy to introduce to the electric guitarist so they could have a rousing conversation about klezmer and what is folk music and all. I tried to get the sample music links to work but their setup doesn't believe that I have cookies enabled and I just can't get anything to happen. But maybe you can: otherwise, trust me that "Coney Island Whitefish" is a beautiful piece.

Before the band got there we saw our friend Darryl Ferucci who is probably one of his generation's most brilliant artists (he's a half-step younger than us: I knew him as the small stepchild of my film teacher when I was first at the University. Later on, he, like several other guys including his younger brother Aaron, spent a while living in our horrible back shed -- not our idea, but when a guy says "hey, can I make a little room in your back shed?" and he's your friend and he insists he doesn't mind that it's a horrible old shed infested with carpenter bees and ivy, you just don't turn him down. Or we didn't. Anyway, besides being a brilliant artist, Darryl is one of the sweetest guys in the whole world and it's always a pleasure to run into him. What he was doing there was tending to his art exhibit which was up on the walls there (The Attic is a cafe, performance space, and exhibit space -- art wank's paradise, right? I like the place and I think Emma loves it). The show he had going there is "Shot Up" which is a bunch of shot-up car doors he hauled up from the Nevada desert. Actually, he says, he shot some of them up himself to enhance the show. He also stripped the interior parts of the doors so that light can shine through them and did some metalwork on them. They're really very interesting. He says he's in the MFA program at UCSC, but the show isn't related to his MFA work, which all has something to do with gamelan. Gamelan is a popular subject at UCSC. If you go look at his website you'll see a picture of him with guns, looking very Western indeed. (my next post will reference Westernness also, hang on).

"Out West whiskey is to drink . . .

. . . and water is to fight over"

This morning we went up to the Salmon and Trout Project's fish hatchery in Swanton (that's not a town, it's a state of mind a bit past Davenport, north of Santa Cruz). It was really instructive. The volunteer who met us there (we being a group of people associated with the Coastal Watershed Council in various ways) is an engineer and a sport fisherman who's been involved with the project for a very long time and he was just so very sad because it seemed to him that the efforts of the project were not really addressing the problems that the fish have. But he was game to keep at it and to explain everything he could. And, of course, I got more insight about that salmon season issue I mentioned the other day.

The hatchery handles Coho (Silver) salmon and steelhead. Chinook don't naturally spawn in the streams that flow into Monterey Bay, so no chinook in the project. The deal is, they trap a bunch of wild fish every year, taking care to avoid getting hatchery fish because the idea is to breed as many different fish as possible to encourage a healthy genetic diversity in the population. They do a very delicate dance with harvesting eggs and sperm, and introducing them together, and incubating them, and raising them up till they're at smolting age, and then they let them go in local streams at various upstream locations, hoping that in the swim downstream they learn to think of the stream they're released in as their home.

Hatchery fish seem to survive well, but Morrow the volunteer seemed to say that they don't seem to produce many offspring themselves (or many generations? Or maybe just that they stray more than wild fish?). He said also he thinks, but does not have the data to prove it, that hatchery fish swim farther upstream than wild-born fish, because while they recognize the stream that they were released in, they keep thinking that if they swam just a little farther they would find their real childhood home, the hatchery.

Here's some further information about the salmon situation. The problem that will be addressed Monday is a Klamath River problem. Salmon who return to other streams are not in such desperate straits, though their condition is fragile. The Klamath River fish are in trouble because the Klamath River is in trouble. Its waters are shallow, turbid, and worst of all, too warm (because of being shallow). The reason the river is in this shape is that its water gets diverted for agricultural use. However, just shutting off the water to the farmers isn't a simple benefit, and not just because we all need to eat.

After the water is diverted to the fields, there is a great deal of runoff, and the runoff ends up re-creating marshland like what dominated the Central Valley before it was drained and built up for farmland. And this is good for waterfowl. He also mentioned rice farming in this context. Rice farming is incredibly water-intensive, since the fields are flooded for a large part of the year. But waterfowl love flooded rice fields. There are, of course, other problems with rice farming: for example, the fall burning of waste from the farms creates a lot of pollution (so that if you get up on Mount Diablo and look across the Central Valley, even if you can see the Sierras like you're supposed to, they're wreathed in yellow mist). Then, rice farmers except for Lundberg's and their ilk tend to use tons, literally, of artificial fertilizer and pesticides, which are problematic too.

So the issue is this -- fishing is not the cause of the Klamath River salmon decline. But, if you're running 30% below a sustainable level in the fish population, can you with good conscience allow the fish to be taken? On the other hand, if you restrict fishing draconianly, what happens to fishing as a livelihood, the fishing culture, what happens to the role of fish in the diet?

The Sacramento River has a yearly goal of about 130,000 returning fish, and it's getting (estimated) 300,000. But a lot of those are hatchery fish. The point of the hatchery programs is to produce enough fish that the p[opulation grows enough not to need hatcheries to keep them going. And then, there's three runs of fish: fall, winter, and spring, each with its own problems.

To complicate things further, the Bodega Bay region has already started their salmon season -- another reason why Monterey Bay fishermen feel that the possibility of closing their season is unfair. The northern range actually has most of the Klamath fish, and the Monterey Bay has only a few Klamath fish. But the question is: would it significantly help the Klamath population to shut down the Bodega season midway through, and to limit the Monterey catch?

I don't know. Apparently Fish and Game doesn't know either, as of the last time Morrow heard anything from them.

On another front in the same battle, the Coho salmon are just a mess. First of all, the northern Monterey Bay is the very southernmost edge of their range. More of them swim around up north -- Washington, BC, Alaska, like that. And of course Oregon and Northern California. What this means is that there aren't a whole lot of local Coho to begin with. Fish and Game, or maybe some other regulating entity, says that the hatcheries have to deal with fish from their own stream system, both for catching and releasing. Which means that more northern Cohos can't be brought in to the Monterey Bay. Not that they could anyway, since the yearly schedule is different for northern fish and southern fish, and fish from out of town would try to go up the rivers before the rivers are ready for them.

At every step of the way Coho are much harder to handle than steelhead. They have fewer eggs. The eggs are harder to impregnate. The sperm is viable for a short time. Their breeding cycle is more rigid. Their life cycle is more rigid. If things aren't just right you've lost the eason.

Crap. I will edit this in the future when my eyes are not closing as I type.