Sockeye Salmon Opera

Ever since I read "Omnivore's Dilemma" eight years ago, I have mostly avoided eating farm animals--cows, pigs, goats, chickens--mostly because I couldn't eat them without thinking about their sorry lives: In the case of cows, penned up in stalls, standing all day in their own poop, developing hide infections which are only imperfectly controlled with industrial doses of antibiotics, fattened with hormones. Chickens and turkeys have it even worse, penned up in coops so permeated with ammonia from their own urine the smell can knock you off your feet. Pigs are confined, too, but may have it somewhat better, overall; but pigs are very intelligent, unlike chickens. 

There's a free range farm down the road from me, where the animals roam about as they did before agriculture became industrialized, but still, the turkeys are, as one of my insightful neighbors observed, on "death row." They are death row turkeys, unaware of what awaits them in just a few weeks.

So, I decided, I really like cereal and rice and veggies and eggs and no one has to die to put that on my plate, and I live with that.

Two living creatures I don't feel bad about eating, irrationally I know, are lobsters and salmon, the fish.

Lobsters strike me as being simply large aquatic insects. They have no faces and they just scuttle and skulk about.  So I'll eat this "New Hampshire chicken" without feeling too badly. I can't bring myself to throw one in a boiling pot of water and listen to it hiss, however. I know: Irrational.

But salmon, ah, there is one of God's most inspiring creations. 
Seals, otters and dolphins are called "charismatic" mammals by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for reasons which are obvious.  But salmon are, for me at least, beyond charismatic--they are downright inspiring.

Why no opera has been written about this creature, I cannot understand. 
Their lives are the ultimate in dying for love, in the will to return home--Odysseus is a piker in terms of the journey home, compared to the sockeye salmon. 

There is just so much there there.

They start out in a gravel pit in a cold stream of fresh water. Bears love the fertilized eggs and scoop up the caviar unimpeded. Those who survive, grow up in cold, fresh water until they feel the pull of the planet's greatest, most profound, most dangerous and unforgiving environment, the great salty ocean downstream. Talk about taking flight for the great unknown--these creatures head downstream, sometimes thousands of miles. 

In the ocean they swallow water and excrete the salt and they grow silvery and fat and basically lead lives among the sharks and killer whales and those who survive the planet's most fearsome predators, one day, decide, it's time to reproduce. Or maybe they do not exactly decide, but they feel this inexorable pull, back toward home. It's not like they are going home to mother, but they are definitely going home.  Phone home? No. Go home. 

So they seek that beautiful, cold, gravel bedded stream of their birth and swim upstream. As they do, their internal organs disintegrate. Their stomachs fall apart, but that's okay because they do not eat on this last journey home.  
They are focused on just one thing: squirting out sperm or eggs. These are not clubbers, getting drunk on a Friday night and having sex after a night of dancing, drinking and Ecstasy and going into work the next day, saying, "I got so drunk, I just don't even remember what I did." These fish are the embodiment of ecstasy. They don't need no drugs or rock and roll. 

They have only one raison d'etre at this stage: They want to have salmon sex.  Talk about obsessed. They don't want to eat, or to socialize, or to sunbathe, or to hang out at the salmon cafe drinking espresso. They don't try to capture prey and feed. They don't go sight seeing or hang out together,  getting all nostalgic about how great their home stream was.  
These fish, which have turned this really sexy red color are only interested in one thing: Copulation. They want to find that special someone and lay down some sperm and eggs together.

I should say something about the color red. Red is the color of Jessica Rabbit's dress for a reason. Red is bordello red. Red is hot.  Just saying. 

And there is no coyness here. The females are just as hot to trot as the males. They are into it. And once they find that big red male, they are into him. None of this, "I really shouldn't" or "I'm not that kind of girl fish." 

Those who survive the upstream gauntlet and reach the place of their birth are not just red, they are a different shape. The males have developed a hook nose and a big hump on their back, which, presumably, makes them look like the ultimate studly fish to the females. 

There's a brief round of fighting, where the dominant males establish their superiority and select a hot female, who may also have a role in deciding who she thinks is hot, and the two pair off and squirt out their gametes into this little depression the female has made in the gravel stream bed, to contain the sperm and eggs. 

This is the  one part of the story which leaves me just a little dissatisfied: It's  the lack of real contact between the female and male. They wriggle together, side by side, but there is no real entry, coupling. Their tango is the whole act. The one moment human beings most prize is just not a thing with these fish. Squirt it out, wriggle about--that's all folks.  I don't know. Maybe it's just me, but the consummation among the salmon...well, I would have written that part of the script a little differently, but that's just me. I'm just saying.
I know this is very arrogant on my part, like I am trying to play editor to God, but really what does this say? It's like the important thing here is not any connection between the mating pair but the result, which is the production of the next generation, which is, admittedly, key to the survival of the species, but really, what about the individual fish and his and her experience? 

The female hangs around  the young for a few days--you can't really say she "raises them"-- before she dies, exhausted after her act of love (or more accurately, reproduction.) The male may find one more love to repeat his sperm squirting, but his days are numbered and he turns, literally, belly up and dies.

The bodies of these exhausted creatures wash up on the shores of the stream of their birth, their progeny percolating in the same home gravel, and the cycle begins again.

But, here's the thing--since these fish are plunging headlong off the reproductive cliff, once they head up stream, I got no reservations about eating them. They are toast anyway, so to speak.  I mean, I realize they are desperately trying to get upstream for that ultimate squirt, but as I said, it's not like they are going to be denied making that ultimately, climatic connection with the fish they were destined to mate with. They are just going to wriggle about. No big thing.  It's not like Romeo and Juliet or even Roger and Jessica Rabbit. Or  Frederic Henry  and Catherine  Barkley.  It's more like finding someone on the dance floor you think looks great, so you dance, but there's not all that much individual destiny here. So I'm less sympathetic. 
The passion here is for the journey, the devotion to the next generation. It's not "Miss Saigon" or "A Farewell to Arms" or "Dr. Zhivago" or "Gone With the Wind." Well, it's more like, "Gone with the Water."  But the individuals seem so subservient to the tide of history. It would have been a great opera for the Soviet Union--die for the ongoing life of the group. But where is the individual?
Maybe I'm just too American for this fish.
But back to eating the fish: You've had your life, fish. Now it's just a matter of which second of the last few minutes I am going to intrude upon. I'd rather get you before you turn all rank and inedible a few days from now.

So there you have it. A way better story than the spider wasp eating the spider from the inside, leaving a hollow husk. This one's got everything (almost)--the journey home, the mating dance, the great colors, the pairing of dominant players. 
Wow.