The river as salmon

A dock sits high and dry during the annual summer drawdown of the reservoir behind Brownlee Dam in Hells Canyon. The water is flushed downstream to benefit migrating salmon - but "flow augmentation" has hampered boating and fishing in the once-popular impounded lake and driven away most recreationists.

For fish, it's a matter of life and death

After a short fly-casting lesson on Ira Stutzman's lawn, we turned south along a gravel road to follow the Brownlee Reservoir, then aimed east toward Boise in oppressive heat.

The Brownlee pool - at 58 miles the longest on the Snake - is bordered by a vast gray band of rocks and sand. A handful of docks are stranded on dry lakebed. Most homes look deserted.

Under a 1995 federal mandate, huge volumes of water from behind Brownlee have been used to help salmon travel downstream, wreaking havoc on recreation here. In July, the pool drops by a foot a day until about 30 vertical feet of water is gone.

On the car stereo, U2 sings a fitting tune: "Desert sky/dream beneath the desert sky/The rivers run but soon run dry/We need new dreams tonight."

To the northwest is the Eagle Cap Wilderness, one of several tracts that enjoy strict federal protection along the Snake and its tributaries. Also protected are the Frank Church River of No Return, the Wenaha-Tucannon, Hells Canyon, Selway-Bitterroot, Gospel-Hump and Sawtooth.

Connected by two national recreation areas and vast national forests, the wilderness areas span from La Grande, Ore., to the Canadian border. The federal government manages 63 percent of Idaho. These lands are parted by hundreds of miles of wild and scenic rivers - the Lochsa, the Salmon, the Selway, the Rapid, the Wenaha and the Grande Ronde.

It is supreme salmon habitat. Perhaps the main reason that Snake salmon runs once produced about half the spring-summer chinook and steelhead in the Columbia Basin.

"On your trip," said Boise piano teacher Reed Burkholder, "you can meditate on the 5 million acres of federally protected salmon habitat. These are de facto national salmon refuges."

The damning problem: These lands are almost entirely lacking salmon.

BOISE - Despite withering heat, the air conditioner is off at Reed Burkholder's weathered two-story home. He's just returned from a weekend camping trip with his son and is hanging laundry to dry on the back porch.

His teen-age daughter still uses the electric dryer, saying line-dried clothes are "too crunchy and smell funny." But Burkholder abstains.

"They will be dry in just two hours," he said with a look of satisfaction.

The reduction in electrical devices in his home is Burkholder's token contribution to the regional power system to make up for something he dreams about - breaching the four hydropower dams between Pasco and Lewiston.

"I guess if I want to be in favor of salmon, I better use a little less electricity," he said to himself in the early 1990s. "I have to give them a break somewhere."

Historically, more than 1.5 million spring-summer chinook are thought to have plied the Snake annually. In the late 1960s, there were still more than 120,000 wild salmon and steelhead entering the river each year.

Today, all of Idaho's wild salmon or steelhead are either extinct or threatened with extinction. The litany of failure started in 1986 when coho salmon disappeared. In 1998, only two sockeye made it past Lower Granite Dam.

To make up for the dismal runs, agencies pump out about 20 million salmon and steelhead smolts a year from Idaho "mitigation" hatcheries. Hatchery fish are the vast majority of returning runs - some estimates are as high as 90 percent.

This year - boosted mostly by good water in the late 1990s - the total number of salmon and steelhead expected to make it back to Idaho is stellar by modern standards.

More than 53,000 chinook had been counted at Lower Granite Dam by mid-September, nearly three times the average run in the 1990s. Even 282 sockeye - as opposed to an average of six fish a year at Lower Granite through the 1990s - had made it.

Still, environmental groups argue, the long-term picture is dismal. Population trend lines are almost all going down for wild fish.

Last summer, well-known regional fish biologist Phillip Mundy released his "doomsday clock" for wild Snake River spring-summer chinook. He gave the run 17 years until extinction unless drastic improvements are made.

If Mundy is right, the wild run will die out 25 years after Burkholder, 53, first publicly proposed breaching the dams between Pasco and Lewiston. It was an idea even conservationists initially rejected.

Riding a considerable wave of political power generated by his once-tiny campaign, Burkholder doesn't soft-pedal his opinions.

His take on the Tri-Cities: "Wake up and smell the roses. There is more money in Pasco if we breach the dams."

He doesn't stop there, citing a plethora of salmon protection laws - from the Clean Water Act to the verbiage that created the Frank Church Wilderness.

"What's a law-abiding citizen supposed to do except blow up dams?" he asks innocently, making an implicit reference to Edward Abbey's environmental classic The Monkey Wrench Gang, which sits on his living room end table across from his grand piano.

The Boise-raised Burkholder isn't the subject of a famous novel, but he is already part of American Indian lore.

Earlier in the summer, tribal fish official Don Sampson stood on the banks of the Columbia River near The Dalles Dam and relayed an old story about how a giant fish-blocking dam was breached in a prior world, a world where animals ruled.

At the time, animal-people living up and down the river were shorted salmon when the swallow sisters built a dam to capture all the fish.

Coyote - the crafty bumbler of Indian lore - volunteered to go reckon with the swallows, even though he lacked a plan to topple the dam. Along the way, he turned himself into a baby and floated downriver to the dam. The sisters adopted him.

But when the swallows weren't looking, Coyote changed back to his usual form and dug out the dam. When the dam finally breached, salmon were waiting to swim upriver.

"He didn't have a plan," said Sampson. "But he had the heart."

The Coyote of the Columbia-Snake, he said, is Burkholder.

To understand how the mild-mannered Mennonite music man came to be Coyote, it's necessary to go back to 1991, three years after Burkholder returned from graduate school in Kentucky.

Coincidentally, it was same year the federal government first protected a Snake River fish species, listing sockeye under the Endangered Species Act.

That summer, Burkholder took his family camping on the south fork of the Salmon River. He hadn't been there since a fishing trip in 1962 - the same year Ice Harbor Dam was completed - and hadn't thought much about salmon since.

"I'd never had an environmental thought in my life," he said, noting that until that point, music was his consuming passion.

"But when I heard about four dams that screwed up one of the most exciting things about my childhood, ... I was incensed and outraged. ... I still am."

Near Burkholder's campground, Idaho Department of Fish and Game biologists were netting, measuring and tagging fish. Burkholder asked why.

He discerned the fish weren't thriving any longer. The agent said the problem was downstream. Burkholder began wondering.

"I wanted to know what happened to the salmon runs in my absence," he said. "I went to college in 1965 and we were fishing for salmon all over this freaking Salmon River country.

"Then I turn my back, live a normal life, get married, have a couple of kids and I come back to my home state and said, 'What's happened to the salmon?'"

His answer: "They had slipped four dams in on Idaho salmon runs and I had never even heard of them. ... I was shocked."

Burkholder sips bottled water in his back yard, pausing every few minutes as a plane ascends from the nearby airport. He is animated. He wants to make a point to his first Tri-City audience. It's clear his story is a practiced art.

The lack of fish intrigued Burkholder. He started asking about it in the spring of 1992.

"One day my Dad said, 'You can have dams or you can have salmon.' ... He's a man of few words and we didn't discuss it. But I think I know what he meant - he meant you sacrifice the salmon and you get the benefits of the dams."

If that was the tradeoff, Burkholder wanted to know what Idaho was getting for the fat salmon he caught as a kid? He soon was immersed in fish lingo - federal studies, electricity values, port statistics and environmental verbiage.

Here's what he found: Despite popular belief, the lower Snake Dams were not authorized by Congress for flood control and only provide limited flood management options.

The 13 large irrigators on the Ice Harbor pool near Pasco could alter their pumps to draw water from a natural river, he figured. In Idaho, it's not uncommon for farmers to pump water from the Snake for much farther than what's facing Ice Harbor farmers.

As for electricity, the lower Snake Dams provide about 5 percent of the region's total and just a sliver of Idaho's power. "My state can kiss the dams goodbye because economically they are meaningless."

The big benefit of the dams, he determined, was for "a few wheat farmers" and the Potlatch lumber mill in Lewiston that barge goods to and from Portland. Farmers and loggers have two other shipping options - rail and road.

"We're supposed to kill off the salmon runs ... so a handful of farmers in Colfax ... can cease to worry about their freight rates?" he asked incredulously.

The cost side of Burkholder's ledger filled up.

For instance, a new Washington study that he didn't mention shows 137 species depend on Pacific salmon for part of their diet. The carcasses of the fish inject substantial amounts of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorous into their environment.

"As we recover salmon populations and their habitats, we will likely see measurable impacts in the health of these wildlife species and in the overall health and functioning of these ecosystems," said David Johnson, who conducted the research for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

For Burkholder, the cost of the dams is in lost opportunity for fish. He pulls out a map and points to Idaho's untrammeled wilderness and pristine rivers that flow into the Snake above Lower Granite Dam.

Only half of the Columbia Basin waters that once produced salmon is still accessible to them - and about three-quarters of that is above eight Corps dams in Idaho and Northeast Oregon, according to the Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association.

Snake Dam removal would halve the number of concrete obstacles to historic salmon tributaries such as the Clearwater, the Salmon, the Imnaha, the Grande Ronde, the Selway and others - about 3,700 miles of waterways in Idaho, largely going through federal wilderness areas and national forests.

"Unlike most other basins in the Columbia, key rearing tributaries to the Snake have some of the lowest development pressure, federal protection and recent history of productive salmon and steelhead runs," the sportsfishing industry said in a July 6 letter to the White House. "We will only realize this hope for the salmon by freeing this river."

Burkholder is aghast that anyone would suggest that Idaho Power Co.'s Hells Canyon Complex - three dams that block about 83 percent of Idaho's fall chinook spawning habitat- are the more logical dams to remove for endangered fish.

"Anyone who thinks that has a very low IQ and has never thought it through," he said.

His justification for keeping Idaho's main power project is that most major upstream Snake tributaries such as the Boise, Owyhee and Payette rivers also have been dammed - making them of little use for spawning fish.

Given all that, Burkholder's conclusion is clear: "Society made a meritless trade when they traded away the fish runs" for four lower Snake dams.

In June 1992, Burkholder presented his case before the Northwest Power Planning Council. Then he started going to salmon advocate meetings in Boise, almost always with new data about fish or dams.

Kindred spirits were hard to find. "Environmental groups were not at all interested," he said. "Deaf ears. It just went right past these guys.

"This went on for years."

So Burkholder took his show on the road to social and service clubs, delivering 80 slide-show speeches on the rubber-chicken circuit. "All the time, I was ... making converts," he said.

Among them was an Idaho Fish and Game agent who started setting Burkholder up with conservation and tribal groups. That led to a personal meeting in 1996 with Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber, the only major Northwest politician publicly supporting dam breaching.

"He's the only governor I've talked to," Burkholder said. "Notice which one is on board."

But Burkholder never made it to the Tri-Cities, something he now views as a major oversight. With a little coaching early on, the Tri-Cities might not be so adamantly opposed to dam breaching, he said.

"You guys were never cultivated. ... Nobody carefully did the letters to the editor and op-eds in your newspaper saying, 'Richland's going to win. Pasco's going to win. Not such a bad idea. The fish really need it.' It hit them like a ton of bricks and folks in your neighborhood are just a little bit different from everybody else - about the only place in the planet that likes nuclear power."

By 1995, the Army Corps of Engineers had officially made dam breaching an option for restoring Lower Snake salmon. Boise's newspaper, the Idaho Statesman, gave additional credibility to the idea with a lengthy editorial section in favor of dam breaching in 1997.

Burkholder said eventually environmental groups were forced into a pro-dam breaching position, something several of them have taken seriously for at least three years.

With a well-organized push, breaching advocates have amassed substantial national publicity, ads in The New York Times, vocal turnouts at federal hearings, letter-writing campaigns to politicians and relentless talk about how dam breaching doesn't have to cost the region's farmers and small towns.

Among their prominent proposals in the last year or so has been to figure out ways to compensate farmers for their losses from dam breaching. It's an idea Burkholder supports. "What I would really like to do is sit down and gently say, 'What can I do? How can I help? Because I will lobby for the best package I can get for you,' " he said. "If you want a check in the mail on a monthly basis to make up the difference in your transportation costs, ... let's get the (government) to write that check."

To date, however, Burkholder said he can't find a reasonable farmer to negotiate with, an indication of the deep suspicion that rural communities hold of environmentalists and federal officials.

"All I have heard is hysteria out of Pasco, garbage out of Potlatch and wheat farmers on the bandstand to save their dams," he said. "When a wheat farmer in Colfax makes an argument (to save the dams), it's just like a tobacco executive saying cigarettes don't cause cancer. They just don't make sense."