Loving the Puget Sound to Death

(Illustration by Tim Robinson)

This article was reported with support from the National Health Journalism Fellowship, a program of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Hidden amid the pleasure boats and cargo ships that roar through the canal in northwest Seattle is one of the oldest fishing economies in North America. From midsummer to October, from early morning until after dusk, fishermen from the Suquamish Tribe zoom up and down the canal in orange waterproof overalls, tending to salmon nets that dangle across the water like strings of pearls. The tribe holds reservation land about ten miles west of the city, on the far side of Puget Sound, the 100-mile-long estuary that extends from Olympia, Washington, north to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The Suquamish are one of more than a dozen tribes that have fishing and shellfish-harvesting rights all across this region, and their fishing traditions, which are thousands of years old, predate all of the oldest shipyard industries here.

The men unload salmon at A Dock, a section of a boatyard reserved for tribal fishing boats. This is where I find longtime fisherman Willy Pratt on a late September morning, at the back of a parking lot on a wooden platform that overlooks the gleaming luxury yachts of the adjacent marina. Pratt has fished in Puget Sound his whole life, and he is here for the peak of coho salmon migration, which pulses through the inner part of the estuary this month. Pratt has marked the nickname Coho Willy in hot pink tape on the side of the giant blue cooler he plans to fill with the fish that his nephews net that day. He holds up a photo of himself as a 6-year-old boy leaning against a boat on the beach. This is me in 1949, he says. This is my grandfathers skiff.

The sale of fish caught here contributes to basic living expenses for the fishermenand some of their catch becomes food for their extended families and circles of friends. According to one survey, the average Suquamish tribal member eats fourteen pounds of fish and shellfish every month (about as much as the average American consumes over a whole year). But this way of life is fragile next to a city like Seattle. The sounds slate blue waters hold one of the most diverse ecosystems in North America; even in the heart of the city there are multitudes of fish and shellfish, which feed resident populations of orcas, seals and sea lions and support a multimillion-dollar commercial fishing industry. But Puget Sound is in critical condition, according to a state agency that monitors ecosystem health. When I ask Pratt how water quality affects people like him, whose lives depend on fish, he narrows his eyes. What water quality? he asks, his face wizened and skeptical. Put your net in, and it comes back covered in sludge, he says. Its like cobwebs, except its brown. Its progressively been getting worse all the timelast thirty, forty years. The fishermen carry tennis rackets with them in the boats; they slap them against the nets to knock the muck offotherwise the salmon will steer clear of the grimy mesh.

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Ringed by the white-capped Cascade and Olympic Mountains, Puget Sound looks pristine. But four decades after the Clean Water Act passed in 1972, regulators havent kept up with the pressures of growing populations near Americas shorelines, here or elsewhere in the country. The sound is choking with the waterborne residue of the urban existence of 4 million peopleengine oil, traces of gasoline and paint, lawn fertilizer, chemical flame retardants from furniture, lead and copper from old roofs, and other kinds of grime wash into the water every time it rainsa problem collectively known as storm-water pollution. Near the canal, the city has been scrambling to reduce spills from a century-old sewer and storm-water system that frequently overruns during stormsfifty-eight spills in 2013 and cumulatively almost 15 million gallons of raw sewage.

All of this contamination becomes part of the stew that fills Puget Sound, the water in which fish swim and shellfish grow. And the people who rely on fish are among the first to feel the impacts. Sometimes the pollution is enough to kill salmon before they can spawn and make shellfish harvests either inedible or unmarketable, putting the fishing economy at risk. Tribal commercial fishing brings tens of millions of dollars of revenue into this state, but more than one fisherman told me its becoming increasingly difficult to make a living from the declining stocks of salmon in Puget Sound. Pollution is one of the many likely reasons that some fish have low survival rates in the sound, along with the destruction of important habitats, such as wetlands. Salmon recovery is failing because habitat is being damaged and destroyed faster than it can be restored and protected, says Tony Meyer, a manager for the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, a tribal natural resources agency that works on fish conservation.

Chemicals from the water also linger in the tissues of some fish, and the people who eat fish most often face risks from toxic pollution. Most species of salmon that live part time in the open ocean are considered safe for heavy consumption. But eat a local chinook salmon, which can spend most of its life cycle in the sound, or a crab, mussel, clam or any creature that spends enough of its days in Puget Sound, and you may be ingesting a bit of that toxic stew, a trace amount of contaminants. Feast on a lot of these fish and you could get a regular dose of chemicals that are tied to liver disease, cancer and neurological disorders. Tribal people may be especially at risk. So are the Latin American and Asian immigrants who frequently cast their lines into city waters and trap crabs in parts of Seattle where there are health advisories against eating shellfish. According to the Washington State Department of Health, American Indians and Alaska natives have higher rates of diseases like colorectal cancerwhich is often linked to exposure to pollutionthan the states white population. Tribal people are put at an unreasonable risk by their consumption [of fish], says Larry Dunn, an expert on tribal health who works as an environmental manager for the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, on the Olympic Peninsula. People are ingesting these chemicals.

But giving up local fish is not a viable choice for any of the people who cast nets and lines, crab pots and clam-digging forks into Puget Sound. American Indians are more likely to live in poverty than most other ethnic groups. To tell them not to eat locally caught fishyoure just basically telling them not to eat protein, Dunn says. The traditional native diet in this region has always been loaded with crabs, clams, oysters and salmon. High in omega-3 fatty acids, fish is an antidote to many of the epidemic health problems, such as diabetes and heart disease, that afflict reservation communities. Tribes would eat even more fish and shellfish if they could, says Meyer.

For communities like this, fish is the most affordable, healthiest thing for dinner.

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Loving the Puget Sound to Death