Riding in the wake of the coho up the Elwha, this month the guide goes to the river. It's the closest to home of any installment so far. The story on its back page runs through this store, this town and this particular river.
Same idea as always: start where you are.
At the river: Craig MacGowan's laminated, waterproof Mac's Salmon & Trout card, which rides in your pack. Then Susan McDougall's Circled Life, a neighbor writing one essay for each of the seven salmonids of our strait. It's the guide's whole argument in one book.
Curious about salmon: the Pacific Salmon Field Guide by Godwin and Krkosek, every species painted by Joseph Tomelleri (on order), and Mark Kurlansky's Salmon for the whole story.
On the Elwha: Lynda V. Mapes's Elwha: A River Reborn, the restoration in reporting and photographs. To go deeper, Bruce Brown's Mountain in the Clouds, the 1982 book that saw it all coming.
On treaty rights: Trova Heffernan's Where the Salmon Run, the life of Billy Frank Jr. (on order), and Charles Wilkinson's Treaty Justice, on the Boldt Decision and what followed.
If you can only pick one: David R. Montgomery's King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon. Montgomery is a geomorphologist, so he reads a salmon run as something a landscape makes, and something land use can take apart. He has also sat on the state's salmon recovery science panel. His verdict: it isn't too late, but it's close.
The back of the handout keeps going: the Elwha Shelf, treaty rights and sovereignty, salmon science, the dam wars, river fiction, and the river now. Pick one up at the counter, or read the full guide here: Salmon & Rivers, the full guide (PDF).
