Follow the current. It will take you home, home to a cool mountain stream with clear water trickling and bubbling over a rocky bed. You are surrounded by others of your kind, all driven by the same desire. There is no need to feed now. Eggs must be laid in shallow redds created by writhing forms. Milky milt will complete the mix for ew life to begin. New life to replace that which is fading. The body decomposes lowly from within. Death offers food so the young will survive.
Alevins hatch, huge eyes with yolk sacs attached. Time passes and tiny fry, miniatures of your self tentatively peek from between the stones. Three months or more go by. Finger sized now, a new generation is caught by the current. Tumbling backwards, past mountains and rivers to ever deeper shores. Tasting or smelling or maybe both, an imprinted memory will tell the way home. Washed in salinity the body changes. Slowly it grows until that wordless command demands a return once more to the river of birth.
Where have all the salmon gone? Muddy sediment smothers the streams, escaping from lands denuded of roots. Murderous molecules invade the aqueous world; pesticides, herbicides and more. There is no current now. Like the windless doldrums, lakes lie behind dams, bringing travel for smolts to a standstill. Hungry mouths of birds and fish await. Fish hooks and nets are the tools of another threat. Turbines catapult young against metallic walls and spillways confuse. The route home? No longer rapids and falls but a handicap ramp, a series of steps with a gate at each level, for the few who survive the years in the sea. We meet face to face at a window at Bonneville Dam. What do those eyes say?
