重塑克拉马斯河 Reuniting a River

Reuniting a River
重塑克拉马斯河


After fighting for years over its water, farmers, Indians, and fishermen are joining forces to let the troubled Klamath River run wild again.



大风车带你看真实的世界


一条条银色的身影自河流深处跃起，彷彿自小河表面迸出的硬币般闪闪发光，照耀在汤玛斯‧威尔森身上。在自己那艘方形船首的铝制小艇抵达沙洲前，他就已经知道今天早上的运气不会很糟，不像以前，拉起骯脏的渔网时什么都没有，只能空手而回。但是当他把身子探过舷缘，从异常温暖的克拉马斯河水中把刺网拉起来时，眼前的景象却让他高兴不起来：刺网里有一条硕大的大鳞鲑鱼，本来应该是这天的战利品，只不过牠的侧腹颜色暗沉，布满发白的伤口。威尔森把手指伸进鱼鳃的鳞甲底下时，化为粉红色黏稠汁液的组织流了出来。威尔森咕哝道：「以前从来没见过这种情形。」然后他以铁饼选手的过肩抛，把这条腐坏的鱼尸扔向河岸。在他的头顶、河谷上方狭窄的加州天空中，有一只鵟正在翱翔。牠很快就能分到这杯羹。
威尔森的表情是愤怒中带着悲伤。对他而言，捕鱼不只是消遣，也不只是职业而已；它是祖传的本业。在代代相传的事业中，威尔森家族的事业绝对在备受推崇之列：自从尤罗克印第安人率先在克拉马斯河定居、并以河里的鲑鱼为食开始，汤玛斯‧威尔森和他的祖先就已经在这条河的这段河道钓大鳞鲑鱼。印第安部落定居克拉马斯河已经超过300代。在这段期间，克拉马斯河从来不曾遭遇近年所发生的问题。这些问题的徵兆随处可见：在他的渔网上，每个缠绕和打结处都附着一束束的藻类；山区河水异常温暖，不到上午10点就高达摄氏23度；头顶上飘着森林火灾造成的烟，而这些火灾已经不再自行烧完就熄灭。还有就是鱼的数量稀少、状况不佳。威尔森知道，归根究柢，问题出在美国西部及全球各地日益严重的资源危机：使用者太多，水却不够多。在这个还不算最糟的早晨，威尔森环视四周，感觉他的这片小小天地绝大部分都处于失衡状态。克拉马斯河发生了问题，而威尔森很确定问题来自上游。

在上游400公里处，史提夫‧坎卓拉的露营车里，富美家小餐桌上溼度计的闹钟在凌晨两点响起。坎卓拉钻出被窝，套上靴子，爬上停放在漆黑苜蓿田里的宝鹿牌曳引机。灌溉这片苜蓿田的水，正是威尔森打渔的克拉马斯河水。坎卓拉在几天前割下苜蓿；今晚他要躲开白天的炙热、并趁着晨露把一切弄溼之前，先把它们捆好。若想在理想状况下耕种，就得过着违反俗谚「晒草趁天晴」的生活：坎卓拉在阳光照耀前把干草处理好。

随着克拉马斯河流域的干旱问题日愈严重，威尔森的鱼群和坎卓拉的农田之间不断相抢水源，造成生活在北加州海岸附近的印第安部落，以及沿奥勒冈州干燥南边州界的上游地区需要河水灌溉的农夫之间，敌对的情况更加恶化。在农夫眼中，争议于1997年达到最高峰；就在这一年，《濒绝物种法》将银鲑纳入联邦保护范围，规定河水的最低流量，以确保牠们的生存。2001年，联邦政府不再提供1400名参与克拉马斯垦殖计画的农民（包括坎卓拉在内）灌溉水时，紧张情势更是急遽升温。农家觉得自己受到不公平的待遇，坎卓拉说：「农夫不习惯受到诋譭。」有些农民以「公民不服从」的方式回应，他们打开灌溉沟渠的部分进水闸，以对抗联邦执法官员，还在奥勒冈州克拉马斯佛斯的街道排成一列象徵性的传递水桶大队……



Reuniting a River
After fighting for years over its water, farmers, Indians,
and fishermen are joining forces to let the troubled
Klamath River run wild again.

By Russ Rymer
Photograph by David McLain
Silver shapes glinted up at Thomas Willson out of the river depths, shining like spilled coins through the surface rills. Before his square-nose aluminum skiff even reached the sandbar, Willson could tell it wouldn't be the worst of mornings, one of those days when he came up with nothing but a soiled net and went home empty-handed. But when he leaned over the gunwales and hauled the gill net up out of the strangely warm Klamath River water, what he found didn't please him: a large chinook salmon that should have been the day's prize, except that its flanks were dull and pocked with whitish sores. When Willson ran his fingers under its gill scutes, the tissue floated out in a viscid pinkish soup. "Never used to see this," Willson grumbled, and with a discus thrower's shoulder spin he heaved the blighted carcass onto the riverbank. Above him a buzzard floated in the river canyon's narrow slice of California sky. It would soon get its commission.

Willson's expression fell on the sorrow side of anger. Fishing was more than a pastime for him and more than a vocation; it was a patrimony. In the annals of father-to-son enterprises, the Willson family franchise surely ranks among the venerable: Thomas Willson and his ancestors have been fishing this very species in this very stretch of this very stream without interruption since Yurok Indians first made their home on the Klamath River and fed themselves on its salmon. Indian tribes have resided alongside the Klamath for more than 300 generations. In all that time, the river had never suffered the troubles of its recent years. The signs were everywhere: in the tresses of algae clinging to every twist and tie of his net; in the warmth of the mountain river water, which would reach 74 degrees F before midmorning; in the smoke floating overhead from forest fires that no longer burned themselves out. And in the paucity and poor condition of the fish. The underlying source of the problems, Willson knew, was a resource crisis of growing magnitude in the western United States and globally: too many users for not enough water. Looking around him on this not worst of mornings, Willson had the feeling there wasn't much about his little patch of Earth that wasn't out of balance. The Klamath River was in trouble, and Willson was certain where the trouble came from: upstream.

Two hundred and fifty miles upstream, at two in the morning, the alarm blared on the humidity meter on the Formica snack table in Steve Kandra's RV, and Kandra slid out of his berth and into his boots and climbed aboard the John Deere tractor awaiting him in his pitch-dark alfalfa field, a field irrigated by the same Klamath waters that Thomas Willson fishes. Kandra had mowed the alfalfa several days before; tonight he would bale it while the cut crop was safe from the parching daytime heat and before the morning dew turned everything too wet. Farming by ideal conditions meant living on the wrong side of adage: Kandra makes hay till the sun shines.

As drought years have become more problematic in the Klamath region, the competing water needs for Thomas Willson's fish and for Steve Kandra's fields have aggravated the rivalry between the Indian tribes living near the northern California coast and the irrigating farmers upstream along Oregon's arid southern border. The trouble, as farmers see it, came to a boiling point in 1997. That's the year coho salmon were accorded federal protection under the Endangered Species Act, which would entitle them to minimum flows of water. In 2001 tensions came to a dramatic head when the federal government shut off irrigation water to some 1,400 Klamath Reclamation Project farmers, including Kandra. The families felt singled out—"Farmers aren't used to being vilified," Kandra notes—and some responded with civil disobedience. They partially opened the irrigation canals' headgates in defiance of federal marshals and queued up for a symbolic bucket brigade through the streets of Klamath Falls, Oregon.

That summer the upper basin was a dry Dust Bowl flashback to The Grapes of Wrath. But by the following spring, reportedly thanks to Vice President Dick Cheney's behind-the-scenes inter­vention, the situation had reversed. In March 2002, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman and Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton flew to Klamath Falls to open the valve into the main diversion canal and assure farmers they would have the water they needed. Matter settled.

Then came the sequel.
As Thomas Willson recounts, in September 2002, a vanguard of the fall salmon migration passed the coastal sandbar at Requa, California, and entered the mouth of the Klamath. The fish swam as far upstream as Blue Creek, a popular deep-pool gathering ground for their run up the river. Then, perhaps because the water in the slack river was so warm, they retreated back to the estuary. Rain in the Siskiyou Mountains cooled the river enough to encourage the fish to head back upstream, but when the weather turned sunny and hot, the fish, wearied by the false start and weakened by infections, didn't get far: At least 30,000 chinook salmon died in the lower 40 miles. Their carcasses carpeted the Klamath's banks in one of the largest adult fish die-offs in U.S. history.

The root causes of the massive fish kill remain disputed—there had been warmer temperatures and lower water levels, without disaster—but it certainly seemed to fulfill the dire prophesy of those who had opposed the opening of the floodgates and the constriction of river flows. Indian tribes and farmers and commercial ocean fishermen (who can have their seasons curtailed when salmon are scarce) confronted each other over flow rates and toxic algae, environmentalists insisted that farmers be evicted from leased land on Klamath wildlife refuges, and almost everyone squared off against Pacific Power, the company that owned the hydroelectric dams controlling the flow of the water. An epic American free-for-all erupted.

In the annals of father-to-son enterprises, the three-generation Kandra franchise may not boast the longevity of Willson & Co., but it can still be expressed in epic terms: Kandras have cultivated Klamath land ever since it became land. The two stretches of open field and farmyard homesteaded by Steve Kandra's grandfather and father look as solid as slab granite, but they bear liquid names: Lower Klamath Lake to the west, and Tule Lake to the east. A little over a century ago, they were just that: expansive lakes.

Beginning in the early 1900s, in a mammoth engineering endeavor christened the Klamath Reclamation Project, much of the lake water was drained by the U.S. Reclamation Service to create new farms, more than 100,000 acres of them, and the new land was irrigated to make it arable. Hundreds of miles of canals and tunnels were built, and massive pumps installed to sluice water in and out. The "reclaimed" land in Tule Lake Basin was homesteaded, much of it by returning veterans of both World Wars whose names were drawn from a pickle jar; the farmers planted alfalfa, grain, potatoes, and onions on some of the most fertile soil in the West. Fertile because, as Kandra noted, shouting over the roar of his baler as he traced windrows of alfalfa in the headlights of his John Deere, "down below us is a thousand feet of goose poop. It's old lake bottom. We're farming the top of a custard—you know how custard has a skin on it? We're on top of the skin."















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