What about the problem of sea mammals eating up the salmon? I’ve heard you’ve proposed shipping some of them to Norway to be made into sausage.

[Laughs] We’ve had fun offering some tongue-in-cheek solutions. Unfortunately, people took us too seriously, failing to see the humor. I don’t know what the answer is. But I get a bit nervous when I hear people, particularly on the Columbia River, or on the Klamath, saying we don’t get any salmon back because of the sea lions, and my thinking is--maybe if we operate dams differently, or even remove some dams, like on the Snake River, the fish will rebound. At times I think marine mammals do become a convenient scapegoat for bigger problems. On the Columbia, when I hear the Bonneville Power Authority or National Marine Fisheries promoting these takes of marine mammals, I get a little nervous.

Marine mammals were a part of the overall ecosystem before the white man arrived. We never saw rookeries onshore because of predation by mountain lions and bears, and also native hunters. But at the same time I suspect there were probably large populations out on the islands or somewhere they were protected. So we’ve changed their behavior.

The question becomes: are there humane ways of dealing with these populations and doing it in such a way that we don’t lose sight of where the bigger problems are?

Do you see some hope now on the Klamath, in light of the proposed Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement announced January 15? [See www.nccsp.org/files/water-documents for the press release summary.]

This agreement--depending on what PacifiCorp does with it--could help get us to removing the dams. . . . I think there’s some good in the agreement and some things that have to be hashed out. . . . It will take a lot of work.
I told somebody about a year or so ago--they were asking, “When are you going to retire, you’ve been doing this so long?”--and I said, 30 more years. And now this Klamath agreement comes on: 50 years! That’s going to be pushing it. One of my mentors, the old guy in the picture on the wall, who’s cutting fish, retired at 88 or 89, and I might be able to do that, but beyond that it would be really pushing it; even that is going to take a lot of luck.

You obviously are totally committed to what you’re doing.

[Laughs] Mostly, I think, determined. They’re not going to get the better of us.

Did you ever consider doing anything else?

I was in college. I enjoyed it but had no direction of where I was going to go, other than that I had to stay in to get out of the draft, and even that I could only extend for so long. I thought about teaching, and about law. I’d gone to law school, but nothing really excited me. And I got involved in this. You know, I’d been around fishermen all my life, I watched my father and some of the fish politics and had always taken an interest in it, and I enjoyed the fishermen. I still think that as cantankerous as they are they’re probably the best people there are to work for. I felt this was something I could contribute to and something I would probably be better at than anything else where I just wouldn’t have the interest.

Someone told me you considered going into the priesthood.

Oh God, no. I think I jokingly said doing this job is like being in the priesthood--you take vows of poverty and celibacy and everything else. You don’t see your spouse, and when you do they’re angry with you because you’re never home. But my wife has been a good sport. The job takes quite a bit of commitment. But with the commitment comes the enjoyment. I always found that the things I could really get into are the things I really enjoyed. So I can’t complain. It’s been a lot of hard work, but at the same time I’ve loved every bit of it. It’s been very frustrating at times. You see the things that need to be done, and you don’t always have the time or resources to do them. But you just keep fighting.