ABSTRACT
There’s something missing. On this grey rainy November day, as I stare down into the creek that carves its way to the ocean behind my house, I realise that I can’t smell salmon. I know there is nothing wrong with my nose, because I can smell the fallen leaves slowly turning to humus, the new cedar shakes being tacked onto the outer walls of the upcoming bike shop, and even the fresh spruce chips mouldering in my neighbour’s front lawn. But I can’t smell dead salmon. In fact, I haven’t seen a single salmon this entire season. Now, for many, the loss of the putrefying fish smell might not be much, but for me it is a giant absence in my sensory landscape. It is a thread dropped from the weave of my world. What becomes of this rain, which begins gently in October and can fall incessantly for the next six months in this land of the giant cedar, if there are no glistening silver and scarlet bodies to rush up the engorged streams? What have we done in the span of my brief lifetime to cause these beings, that for millennia have moved from fresh to salt water and back, to no longer return to their native waterways?
