Driving north on Highway 96 along the Klamath River as it cuts through the rugged Klamath-Siskiyou Mountains of far northwestern California, Ron Reed catches the eye of a driver in a silver truck heading in the opposite direction.

With an exuberant shout, Reed slams on the brakes, wheels around, and parks at a pullout. We step out. Trees at the gravel’s edge shade an almost invisible snippet of road winding down the hillside to a tiny waterfall. The other truck has stopped too. It’s like Reed’s, with the Karuk Tribe’s seal on the side.

Three men get out. One pulls a large fish from the back of their truck: the first salmon caught this season at nearby Ishi Pishi Falls, the center of the world to the Karuk people.

“This is Ken Brink, we call him Binx,” Reed tells me, introducing a young man in blue shorts.

“This is Earl Aubrey, we call him Scrub.” The lithe older man nods in acknowledgement.

“This is Gene White, we call him Cheetoh.” The third man, red baseball cap on backwards, offers his hand.

Aubrey, assisted by Brink and White, caught the spring chinook salmon in the old way: reaching far out over the whitewater and running a long-armed dipnet into deep holes where the fish rest on their way upstream. They then carried that first salmon through the riverside willows to the car and drove here to clean it.

Reed, the tribe’s cultural biologist, speaks for the traditional tribal fishermen to the rest of the world. He participates in tribal and other salmon-recovery efforts, works with government agencies, and talks with the press. His background is traditional, not academic. For thousands of years, the Karuk have passed on to individuals or families the right to fish at certain places along the river. Reed has an ancestral right at Ishi Pishi Falls, where he, like Aubrey, fishes in the old way.

Brink cleans the three-foot chinook with practiced efficiency. Using a small knife, he slits the belly and removes the guts, moving the fish from slow water to fast and back again in the pool at the base of the little waterfall, washing away the blood and innards.

In the past few days a pulse of water has been released from Iron Gate Dam upstream, the farthest downriver of six PacifiCorp hydroelectric dams that cut across the Klamath. The dams block all oceangoing fish—including salmon and steelhead—from crossing the Cascades to traditional spawning grounds as far from the sea as Klamath Falls, Oregon, more than 250 miles upriver.

It takes a day and a half for the water from Iron Gate to make it the 100-plus miles to Karuk country. When it arrives, the water is dirty with farm runoff and hot—as far as fish are concerned—from the unrelenting summer sun. The pulse drastically changes the shape and speed of the water moving over the rocks at Ishi Pishi Falls, creating a surge of whitewater and eddying side-pools the fish follow—in the case of this particular salmon, straight into Aubrey’s dipnet.

Aubrey says the first fish of the year must go to someone who needs it. It’s the tradition, and it’s the way things should be. This one will go into the cooler in Reed’s pickup with smaller fall chinook to feed the people attending a war dance the next night, a dance in which Reed’s family and others will pray for a solution to the seemingly intractable political problems that keep the Karuks from the fish their culture has always relied on.

Not a Simple Story

Reed, Brink, Aubrey, and all the Karuks are unsung but integral actors in the now famous battle over water in the Klamath Basin. In the black-and-white world of political debate, the region’s problems boil down to a fight between fish and farmers, both of which need water to survive. The reality, of course, is not nearly that simple.

A complex of upstream wildlife refuges depends on water to protect the largest breeding population of bald eagles in the Lower 48. Flocks of tourists come to watch the massive migration of ducks, geese, and other eagle prey. Four tribes—the Klamath Tribes upstream, the Karuk, Yurok, and Hoopa downstream—have varying levels of rights to fish guaranteed under treaties, and the oldest water rights in the system. And finally, there is the coastal and river economy, which has long depended on commercial and sport fishing of salmon from the Klamath River, an economy that has largely collapsed as fish runs plummeted.

The fight in which the Karuks are engaged is not just a regional one. The powerful California water lobby, which relies on federally subsidized water in the Central Valley, also holds sway. Even Karl Rove, top advisor to President George W. Bush, has gotten into the act. According to the Wall Street Journal, Rove in 2002 pressured the U.S. Department of the Interior to divert more water to the farmers, thereby helping to boost the political fortunes of Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon and other Republican officeholders in agricultural regions.

It may be most accurate to portray the conflict in the Klamath River watershed as a struggle between those who rely on water diversions upstream and those whose livelihood depends on seeing that the water stays in the streams. As that struggle continues, everyone on the river is losing.

• • •

Restoration—A New Economy

While conflicts of interests between upriver and coastal people have made news, a bigger, more hopeful story has gotten little media attention.

Public money has been flowing into the region to restore the natural economy—to repair years of damage to streams and watersheds for the sake of the salmon and steelhead—and in the process has created new jobs. The flow of dollars began during President Bill Clinton’s administration, after protections for the threatened northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet put much forest land off limits to logging. The federal funds were intended as an investment to help the region make the transition from dependence on the timber industry to something else. Local people went to work decommissioning roads, replanting eroded stream banks, and taking out failing culverts. Many were retrained in high-value skills they can use for their livelihoods in a new restoration economy.

According to a 2004 report by Forest Community Research, based in Taylorsville, California, public agencies and private entities ranging from the National Park Service and Bureau of Indian Affairs to Humboldt County Public Works spent $4.6 million for restoration in Humboldt County in 1995; by 2002 they had invested a total of $14.5 million.

“Half of my fisheries techs are ex-loggers,” says Toz Soto, a fisheries biologist with the Karuk tribe. “They were loggers or fishermen.”

Earle Crosby, watershed restoration coordinator for the Karuks, is a part of that new restoration economy. Starting in 1998, the tribe hired 18 tribal members through a program that trains heavy equipment operators. They began decommissioning roads in the national forest that might collapse in winter rains and destroy salmon spawning grounds.

During the training, laborers and operators made between $10 and $16 an hour—a decent living wage for the remote, rural area—with unemployment benefits kicking in during the off-season. For those who found jobs after training, the pay rose to the prevailing wage—$31.42 to $47.51 an hour.

The tribe’s two restoration projects along Steinacher and Irving Creeks have a combined budget of nearly $4 million over six years, from a variety of federal sources. Crosby says nearly 75 percent of that money stays in the local community or the region. Other Klamath Basin tribes have undertaken similar restoration initiatives.

Blythe Reis, owner of Sandy Bar Ranch in Orleans, has seen her fishing-related business plummet along with fish stocks. She’s a big fan of restoration: “I would like to see my taxes going to do restoration work in this area—or restoration work anywhere.” However, she says, the federal money may now be drying up, along with prospects for fish recovery.

ORNA IZAKSON is a freelance natural resource reporter in Portland, Oregon, and associate editor of Tidepool.org.