The Man Who Tried to Catch the 100-Pound Salmon

STRONGHOLD
One Man’s Quest to Save the World’s Wild Salmon
By Tucker Malarkey

On his first trip to Kamchatka, in the Russian Far East, the American conservationist Guido Rahr rafted down the Bolshaya River, the first of many adventures in what would become a lifelong obsession with exploring and protecting the region’s innumerable untamed rivers and their incomparable salmon habitat. Born and raised in Oregon, Rahr spent his boyhood summers chasing salmon migrating up the Deschutes River to the sandy beds where they were born. By adulthood he had become one of the world’s most accomplished fly fishermen, but his beloved salmon — beset by logging, dams and fish hatcheries — were in trouble.

As he is about to embark on his dayslong fishing trip down the desolate, heavily forested Bolshaya, Rahr gets his first good look at the rafts his Russian guide, Misha, has procured — cheaply made, with dinky plastic paddles, bad oarlocks and no life jackets. “We should be more concerned about bears,” Misha says. Was there bear spray in that case, or a gun? There was not. “Maybe there won’t be so many bears,” Misha shrugs. “I don’t know. I’ve never floated this river.” Not the sort of thing you want to hear from a river guide, but Rahr learns to appreciate the Russian way of embracing fate, if not their way of catching salmon.

Near the end of the trip, the paddlers come upon a gaggle of off-duty submarine sailors fishing Russian-style, which is to say with heavy tackle and lots of vodka. They don’t know what to make of the Americanski with his laughably light fly rod and his menagerie of lures tied from feathers and bits of animal fur. To the submariners’ amazement, Rahr promptly lands a large salmon, at which point there is a burst of applause, followed by singing, toasting and rounds of vodka for everyone, even though it is 9:30 in the morning.

The Russians have never seen fly-fishing because it is a lousy way to fish, at least if you are primarily fishing for food, and in the Russian Far East — especially after the economic collapse that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union — procuring food is how most people spend the bulk of their time. The relatively weightless line on a fly rod is notoriously difficult to cast, the hook has no barb to hold the fish once it bites, and the tackle is so fragile that the angler has to chase after her catch as she reels it in, in order to avoid breaking her gear. But rich people love it, which proves to be Rahr’s ace in the hole. Concerned by incipient development and overfishing in Kamchatka, he helps form a nonprofit to protect the world’s last best salmon rivers (“strongholds,” he calls them) and begins raising money by persuading wealthy patrons to come fly-fish with him, so they can see the miracle of a healthy river for themselves.

Though Rahr himself lives modestly, he is from a well-connected family. His catches included friend-of-a-friend Tom Brokaw, the media mogul and philanthropist Ted Turner, Sandra Day O’Connor and, finally, his most prized trophy of all — Alexander Abramov, an ultra-wealthy Russian oligarch and fishing aficionado who has the power to make or break Rahr’s Kamchatkan dreams. Abramov is obsessed with a near-mythic river fish, the Siberian taimen, a monstrous salmonid that can exceed 100 pounds. He issues his young suitor a challenge: “Catch me a world-record taimen on a fly, and we will have something to talk about.”

The Melvillian showdown between this extraordinary man and his equally extraordinary quarry forms the climax of “Stronghold,” Tucker Malarkey’s finely observed profile of Rahr and his life’s work. As a biographer, Malarkey has her own ace in the hole: She is Rahr’s first cousin. She spent her childhood summers following her subject up and down the banks of the Deschutes, enthralled by his odd fixation with wildlife and his concomitant lack of interest in people, which extended to Malarkey herself, who, like all good sidekicks, kept quiet and out of the way.

Rahr’s passion for salmon is contagious, and Malarkey channels it well in informative chapters about the intimate connection between salmon and the rivers they inhabit. Few fish are so valuable to the world food supply, and few have been so thoroughly studied. Yet salmon remain inscrutable. Consider the strange case of the rainbow trout, which, unlike true salmon, has a life cycle that does not require it to migrate to the sea and back, but which does so anyway under certain circumstances, for reasons that remain a mystery. By the time a seafaring rainbow returns home, the ocean has transmuted it into an altogether different fish — a longer, broader, salmonlike creature with silver sides known as a steelhead.

Salmon don’t just benefit from healthy ecosystems, they create them. The mass migration of salmon from the sea to their spawning grounds is in essence an enormous conveyor belt that draws protein and life-sustaining nutrients from the sea far into the interior, where the fish breed and then immediately die by the millions, their remains fueling flora and fauna up and down the food chain. It’s a cycle that has been completely destroyed on our Atlantic coast, and one that is increasingly imperiled on the Pacific, but is still unbroken in Kamchatka, one of the world’s last truly wild places.

Malarkey is a novelist by trade, and it shows in the book’s many finely drawn scenes, especially those set in Russia. She doesn’t quite sustain the narrative tension for the book’s duration, however, and there is a good deal of digression into Rahr’s decades-long organizing efforts at home and abroad. Some editors would have asked an author to trim this material to keep the story moving, but Malarkey’s apparently didn’t, and in the end I was glad. Nature lovers looking for an easier read might prefer a travelogue like last year’s “Kings of the Yukon,” Adam Weymouth’s well-received account of paddling across Alaska in search of king salmon. But those who choose Malarkey’s more ambitious approach will be rewarded with insights into how activism and organizing shape public policy, into how things change.

In the book’s strongest chapter, Malarkey follows her cousin into his world, joining an expedition in search of the legendary taimen. The river is completely obstructed in places by driftwood logjams that threaten to pull rafts — and rafters — under, and heavily populated by some of the world’s largest grizzlies. It dawns on Malarkey that floating down this river with her cousin and a handful of strangers might be the most dangerous thing she has ever done. But there is no turning back, even after she injures her hand so severely that she can’t tie her own shoelaces, a predicament that her cousin doesn’t seem to notice. Malarkey understands for the first time what it must be like to be Rahr’s wife, to depend on somebody whose mind is always elsewhere, who is always pursuing his passion.

Yet Rahr really does care for his cousin, in his way. In the book’s poignant final scene, he takes her to a secret spot on Oregon’s Columbia River to look for “springers,” the first migrating chinook of the season, which appear as no more than shadows moving against the rocks on the river bottom. She studies the sun-dappled blue water endlessly, but sees nothing. The fish are there, Rahr explains; her brain just doesn’t know what to look for, because she has never seen one. “It’s like learning a new language,” he says. “It takes time.”

Finally she gives a triumphant shout. “Good,” he says. “Now you have it.”