Photo: Knepp Timothy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 2018. Salmon coho.
For Mario Wainfeld
I.
She says it’s water,
that the other day she dreamed of giant men descending streams
in canoes shaped like coffins,
rushing into a blue estuary.
“Were they floating in the estuary?”
It’s a dream, she replied, as if that was why the fate of the giants didn’t matter.
“Did they fall all the time from the water in the streams?”
It’s a dream. They were falling all the time until I woke up, after that I don’t know.
She didn’t know if they continued to fall after the dream was over.
Nor if the estuary was filled with corpses. Nor if the corpses were alive.
Not even if it was a delineated space, not too large, so that the coast could be seen on the other side.
We walked dragging our feet through the wet grass, the irrigation ditch on the right and the street on the other side. She says something about the Morada del Señor Kintuante, that the Morada is not here, that it’s in Patagonia on the other side of the range. But it’s also everywhere, something I don’t understand, because I keep staring at her wet fingers, at her serious face.
She says that it’s water, that the shape of the estuary changes depending on the place from where you look at it. And at the end there is a giant river, infinite, without banks, a river that we never see.
I tell her that this happens in dreams of any material. Water and fire, but also the earth, us.
She says that it happens in water, that she is water.
In the tiny shed that descends by the channel, dandelions grow piled up in small groups at a safe distance from the rises. I tell her you can eat them. “It is necessary? That too?”. She says there is enough in food stores, however much more we want to taste, swallow. “How much more do we want to know?” she says.
Beyond, against the current of the water that follows us, you can smell the river, hidden in its own history. How long does it take? How much time does it carry?
There is a shapeless estuary, populated by giant boxed men, descending like sea turtles with the current.
II.
Fishing gear: Gill net, set on the main channel of the Paraná River
Sex: Pregnant female
Weight: 11,760 kg
L: 104.3 cm
LS: 84.6 cm.
Oncorhynchus tshawytscha (Wallbaum, 1792)
“S”, Oncorhynchys tshawytscha, died on November 15, 2022, in Arroyo Seco. The average temperature of the Paraná in that area reached 23.8 degrees. In those days, the rain had returned and the river was recovering its flow and the farmers and tour operators were excited about the season, about the relief after a prolonged drought. “S”, Oncorhynchys tshawytscha, arrived arresting and beyond repair. The waters boiled on her silver scales and exhausted body. She moved in a cloud of clay and mud, coming to know in those last days a strange landscape, deadly vital. She would meet her end on unfamiliar ground. That day, the temperature in Arroyo Seco reached 30 degrees and the fishermen left the island with their rafts early, going back up the main channel in an improbable search for its origin and its end.
The History of “S”
Chinook Salmon: Oncorhynchus tshawytscha
Capture location: Arroyo Seco
Capture date: 11/15/2022
Sample processing:
-Stomach contents and gonads: in formalin: YES (INALI)
-Scales: in paper envelope (for UBA): YES
-Muscle: alcohol and frozen: YES (INALI)
-Alcohol fin: YES (Aquarium Lab)
-Head sectioned and frozen whole to extract otoliths (INALI and Secretary of Fisheries, Sta. Fe): YES
(from the catch record card, Secretary of Fisheries, Sta. Fe.)
Emiliano fished S out along with another salmon after two hours in the river. He took a couple of photos, notified the Ministry of Fisheries and sold it for a handomes amount at a fishmonger’s in Arroyo Seco. S is not from Paraná, where the temperature is more than double what she needs, where the water is not transparent like those she prefers, where she will not find the origins she is looking for. Emiliano goes out fishing every morning advancing his canoe several meters beyond the shore. He doesn’t know what S did to wind up there, although he senses something.
The Chinook are born in the river. After a year they leave fresh water behind and go out to sea. They travel thousands and thousands of kilometers in salt water and at some vast moment, after three or four years, they accumulate food, fat and energy to undertake a return to the original freshwater channel. Some time later, they arrive against the current, exhausted and malnourished, decimated and discolored, with pieces of their own flesh frayed by the water, to the same place where she was spawned by her mother, to spawn and die. But S was not born in Paraná, which means that she does not return but rather tries to return. There are no salmon in the Paraná. The river is another. S does not exist. She was not born there, she did not spawn to die there, she is not there. Some other river is waiting for her, perplexed by her absence. She is not in that river either, it is a search. She is neither dead nor alive, she’s an unknown.
A story of S could only be understood if we turn it upside down. A salmon is a Beatles’ song revealing its last secret played in reverse. How do salmon return from thousands of kilometers out at sea to the very place in the river where they were born? And why? “By instinct” is the automatic (let’s say, instinctive) answer we give to everything we don’t understand about nature, a preemptive attack against any possibility of admitting that certain dimensions of emotional life are not the property of the human species. They return sniffing the path. They return oriented by the magnetic field beneath them.
Why go back to the starting point? Going to die where we began to be born. Upstream, ceaselessly against the current, look for death at the source so there may be more life. Vital. “In the child you can become/new,” says the zamba. Bears wait for that return stationed in the lower estuaries, patient rather than stalking. The salmon do not flee, they return, jump and leave their body exposed to the hunter’s claw.
Except that “S” does not return to anywhere, S has never been to the Paraná, in Santa Fe there are no bears, nor estuaries of cold, transparent water.
A story of S would begin in a laboratory in Paris in late 2023, a year after his death, where a group of biologists cut his otolith with a laser beam. The otolith, the calcareous body of the fish’s inner ear, reveals there, distantly, the life of S, as the cutting of a trunk reveals the life of a tree. It shows the birth of S on the bank of a Patagonian river, her departure to the sea, her attempt to return to a river that changed, and the pilgrimage towards the north, climbing the Argentine coast, searching for one river and another, finding cities and dams, starting over, swimming towards rivers warm and brown.
Paraná is a new world, just when S was looking for known textures, memories. There is a world of newcomers there. Freighters take on ballast water on their voyages, sucking fish from all the oceans and releasing them into fresh waters, against the law and common sense. The Paraná is the unlikely and precarious home of fish transported from the Adriatic, from the East. Lost fish reunited, they kill and they die, fish that the river drags away. S finds fish she’s never seen before, she recognizes in others the strangeness that is her own, the traffic of freighters and the tiny intrusive rafts, the tributaries. She discovers the pungent aroma of wetland water, dragging cattle dung and herbicides from the increasingly cornered coasts. There are warm sounds, those of a nap in the months before summer, those of plants resurrecting after the drought. But S does not want to discover, to know. She wants to die, she needs to die.
Genetic analysis reveals S’s ancestors arrived at the Santa Cruz River from Curaco de Vélez in Chiloé, another place without bears, where a man named Ricardo Rodríguez threw two million fry into the ocean in the hope that 1 percent would return to the coast as salmon. Or they came out of one of the open cages that Ricardo Rodríguez himself brought from Bergen, Norway, and filled with fry raised from eggs from Washington State, United States, from where Jon Lindbergh, the aviator’s son, sent them to Chile, himself turned into a creator God.
Thus is it impossible for S to know where she comes from. Perhaps return is returning home, to our parents, but S’s parents were not born in a river but on an aquaculture farm where S was not S and the parents were not the parents but all biomass. The crowding ratio in an open cage of mature salmon is also an abominable figure.
In Curaco De Vélez, Augusto Pinochet’s boots walk, skirting the wooden shed that allows access to every one of the cages. In a coarse-grained photo from a local newspaper, he can be seen at the center of a delegation, with Rodríguez to the side and the fish jumping behind. This occurred in 1978, seven or eight generations before the arrival of S.
III.
We recently went with Clarita to Rosario. From a barely elevated hut she saw the Paraná for the first time. Below was the bank, full of reeds, grass and damp logs, where the river lost strength, deceiving. Clarita saw it brown, mighty and agitated, she saw the island opposite us, mysterious, imperfect, endless on the other side, more of an enigma than simply the other shore. She saw a cargo ship hundreds of meters long, in its unwavering march, muscular advance, full of grain, crossing unflinching the fury and gale on its way to the sea. She stood firm before the river, unlike the stance of 10-year-old children.
“Is this where they threw Grandpa Elías?”
I said no.
I said it with apparent, unfounded security. But I kept wondering if, perhaps, other plants or fish had taken something from his character, or from his sense of humor, from his unbreakable body. Shads? Pacúes? Which of the two protects the bottom of the river? There must have been some Pacú searching the depths, surprised by the fabrics and the ropes and the meat, and that olive skin now destroyed. So many years later, S may have learned about the fall of a body from the sky, in that strange landscape that will be her own end. We don’t know if she sensed it.
I kept thinking about what the river would look like from a body thrown alive from a plane, tormented to the end. The beginning of something that never belonged to us, that never ended, approaching it perhaps with terror but also calmly. The river as ending and relief.
And there, below, hidden in its brown stream, a world of life waiting for you, waiting for us.
—-
Ernesto Semán is a writer and professor of history at the University of Bergen. His latest book is Breve historia del antipopulismo [A Brief History of Antipopulism] (Buenos Aires, SigloXXI). He currently works on a social and environmental history of salmon farming. He lives in Norway with his wife, his daughter, and his dog Pelusa.
—-
Originally published December 4, 2023 in Humanidades Ambientales:
Una plataforma latinoamericana para repensar las redes de vida (Environmental Humanities: a Latin American platform to rethink the networks of life),
https://www.humanidadesambientales.com/signatura/120423-v2-seman
We walked shuffling through the wet grass, with the ditch on the right and the street on the other side. She says something about the Abode of Lord Kintuante, that the abode is not here, that it is in Patagonia on the other side of the mountain range. But it’s also everywhere, something I don’t understand, because I keep staring at his wet fingers, at his serious face.
She says that it is water, that the shape of the estuary changes depending on where you look at it from. And at the end there is a giant river, infinite, without coasts, that we never see.
I tell him that this happens in dreams with any material. Water and fire, but also the earth, us.
She says that happens in water, that she is water.
In the tiny hut that goes down to the ditch, dandelions grow piled up in small groups at a safe distance from the climbs. I tell him they can be eaten. “It is necessary? That too?”. She says there is enough in food stores, how much more we want to taste, swallow. “How much more do we want to know?” she says.
Beyond, against the current of the water that follows us, you can smell the river, hidden in its own history. How long it takes?
There is a shapeless estuary, populated by giant boxed-up men, descending like sea turtles with the current.
II.
Fishing gear: Gill net, set on the main channel of the Paraná River
Sex: Gravid female
Weight: 11.760 kg
LT: 104.3 cm
LS: 84.6 cm.
Oncorhynchus tshawytscha (Wallbaum, 1792)
“S”, Oncorhynchys tshawytscha, died on November 15, 2022 in Arroyo Seco. The average temperature of Paraná in that area reached 23.8 degrees. In those days the rain had returned and the river was recovering its flow and the producers and tourist agents were excited about the season, about the relief after a prolonged drought. “S”, Oncorhynchys tshawytscha, arrived imposing and hopeless. The waters boiled on her silver scales and her exhausted body. She moved in a cloud of clay and mud, she knew in those last days a strange landscape, mortally vital. She would meet her end on unfamiliar ground. That day, the temperature in Arroyo Seco reached 30 degrees and the fishermen left the island with their rafts early, going up the main channel in an improbable search for its origin and its end.
The History of “S”
Chinook Salmon: Oncorhynchus tshawytscha
Capture location: Arroyo Seco
Capture date: 11/15/2022
Sample processing:
-Stomach contents and gonads: in formalin: YES (INALI)
-Scale: in paper envelope (for UBA): YES
-Muscle: alcohol and frozen: YES (INALI)
-Alcohol fin: YES (Aquarium Lab)
-Head sectioned and frozen whole to extract otoliths (INALI and Secretary of Fisheries, Sta. Fe): YES
(from the catch sheet, Secretary of Fisheries, Sta. Fe.)
Emiliano took S out with another salmon when he had been in the river for two hours. He took a couple of photos, notified the Ministry of Fisheries and sold it for a significant amount to a fishmonger in Arroyo Seco. S is not from Paraná, where the temperature is more than double what he needs, where the water is not transparent like the one he prefers, where he will not find the origins he is looking for. Emiliano goes out fishing every morning and sticks his canoe several meters outside the thing. He doesn’t know how S managed to be there, although he senses something.
Chinook salmon are born in the river. After a year the salmon leaves the fresh water behind and goes out to sea. It travels thousands and thousands of kilometers in salt water and at some enormous moment, after three or four years, it accumulates food, fat and energy to undertake a return to the original freshwater channel. Some time later it arrives against the current, exhausted and malnourished, decimated and discolored, with pieces of his own flesh frayed by the water, to the same place where he was spawned by his mother, to spawn and die. But S was not born in Paraná, which means that he does not return but rather tries to return. There are no salmon in the Paraná. The river is another. Yes it does not exist. He was not born there, he did not spawn to die there, he is not there. Some other river is waiting for him, perplexed by his absence. He is not in that river either, it is a search. He is neither dead nor alive, it is an unknown.
A story of S could only be understood if we turned it upside down. A Salmon is a song by the Beatles that reveals their last secret in reverse. How do salmon return from thousands of kilometers out to sea to the very place in the river where they were born? And because? “By instinct” is the automatic (let’s say, instinctive) response we give to everything we don’t understand about nature, a preemptive attack against any possibility of admitting that certain dimensions of emotional life are not the property of the human species. They return sniffing the road. They return oriented by the magnetic field beneath them.
Why go back to the starting point? Go to die where we began to be born. Upstream, against the current, look for death at the source so that there is more life. Vital. “In the son you can become/new,” says the zamba. The bears wait for that return, stationed in the lower estuaries, more patient than stalking. The salmon do not flee, rather they return, jump and leave their body exposed to the hunter’s enormous claw.
Except that “S” does not return anywhere, S has never been to the Paraná, in Santa Fe there are no bears, nor estuaries of cold, transparent water.
A story of S would begin in a laboratory in Paris in late 2023, a year after his death, where a group of biologists cut his otolith with a laser beam. The otolith, the calcareous body of the inner ear of fish, reveals there, distantly, the life of S, as the cutting of a trunk reveals the life of a tree. It shows the birth of S on the side of a Patagonian river, his departure to the sea, his attempt to return to a river that changed, and the pilgrimage towards the north, climbing the Argentine coast, searching for one river and another, finding cities and dams, starting over, swimming towards the warm brown rivers.
Paraná is a new world, just when S was looking for known textures, memories. There is a world of newcomers there. Freighters accumulate ballast water on their voyages, sucking fish from all oceans and releasing them into fresh waters, against the law and common sense. The Paraná is the unlikely and precarious home of fish transported from the Adriatic, from the East. Lost fish that are reunited, kill and die, that the river drags away. S he finds fish that he has never seen before, he recognizes in others the strangeness that is his own, the traffic of freighters and the intrusive tiny rafts, the tributaries. He discovers the pungent aroma of wetland water, dragging cattle dung and herbicides from the increasingly cornered coasts. There are warm sounds, those of a nap in the months before summer, those of plants resurrecting after the drought. But S does not want to discover, know. He wants to die, he needs to die.
Genetic analysis reveals that S’s ancestors arrived at the Santa Cruz River from Curaco de Vélez in Chiloé, another place without bears, where a man named Ricardo Rodríguez threw two million fry into the ocean in the hope that 1 percent will return to the coast like salmon. Or they came out of one of the open cages that Ricardo Rodríguez himself brought from Bergen, Norway, and filled with fry raised from eggs from the State of Washington, United States, from where Jon Lindbergh, the aviator’s son, sent them to Chile converted in a creator God.
Thus it is impossible for S to know where he comes from. Perhaps returning is returning to home, to our parents, but S’s parents were not born in a river but on an aquaculture farm where S was not S and the parents were not the parents but all biomass. The crowding ratio in an open cage of mature salmon is also an abominable figure.
In Curaco De Vélez, Augusto Pinochet’s boots walk along the wooden shed that allows us to reach each of the cages. In a coarse-grained photo from a local newspaper, he can be seen in the center of a procession, with Rodríguez to the side and the fish jumping behind. This occurred in 1978, seven or eight generations before the arrival of S.
III.
We recently went with Clarita to Rosario. From a barely elevated hut, he saw the Paraná for the first time. Below was the bank, full of reeds, grass and damp logs, where the river lost strength, deceived. Clarita saw it brown, flowing and agitated, she saw the island in front, mysterious, imperfect, endless on the other side, more of an enigma than simply the other shore. She saw a cargo ship hundreds of meters long, in an unwavering march, advancing robustly, full of grain, crossing without flinching the bravery and the gale, on its way to the sea. She stood firm in front of the river, as 10-year-old children do not stand.
“Did they throw Grandpa Elías here?”
I said no.
I said it with apparent, unfounded security. But I kept wondering if perhaps other plants or fish had taken something from his character, or from his sense of humor, from his unbreakable body. Shads? Pacúes? Which of the two protects the bottom of the river? There must have been some Pacú searching the depths, being surprised by the fabrics and the ropes and the meat, and that olive skin now destroyed. So many years later, S may have learned about the fall of a body from the sky, in that strange landscape that will be her own end. We don’t know if she sensed it.
I kept thinking about what the river would look like from a body thrown alive from a plane, martyred until the end. Beginning of something that never belonged to us and that never ended, approaching it perhaps with terror but also calmly. The river as ending and relief.
And there below, hidden in its brown flow, a world of life waiting for you, waiting for us.
—-
Ernesto Semán is a writer and professor of history at the University of Bergen. His latest book is Brief history of antipopulism (Buenos Aires, SigloXXI). He currently works on the social and environmental history of salmon farming. He lives in Norway with his wife, his daughter, and his dog Pelusa.
Originally published December 4, 2023 in Humanidades Ambientales:
Una plataforma latinoamericana para repensar las redes de vida (Environmental Humanities: a Latin American platform to rethink the networks of life),
https://www.humanidadesambientales.com/signatura/120423-v2-seman
