Ketchikan, Alaska: It sucks to be a salmon

Last Tuesday, I was relaxing at home.  I had just popped in a yoga dvd and was about to go into downward facing dog, when suddenly the phone rang.  It was work.  They wanted to know if I could be at the airport in an hour and the only info they could provide was that I was going somewhere with the airport code KTN.  It was google that told me I was going to Ketchikan, Alaska. Out went the dvd as I quickly tossed a couple of sweaters into my bag.

By early evening, I was on the ferry that connects the Ketchikan airport to the mainland.  It was dark so I could not fully appreciate the vista before me, but having been here once before, over a decade ago, I knew it was going to be good.

So good, in fact, that I woke up at sunrise to go and take a look at the scene behind my hotel. 

Needless to say, I was not disappointed. As I was gushing to the hotel desk clerk about how beautiful her city is, she made a couple of recommendations, all of which seemed to focus on getting me as far away from her desk as possible.  Her first suggestion was for me to embark upon a self-guided walking tour of the downtown area.

I love walking. I love touring. This seemed like a fine idea.  I rang up a friend, Hugh, grabbed a map and tour brochure and off we went.

It became quickly apparent that Ketchikan'ers are proud of two things.  One is their colorfully seedy past.  As a former logging town,  they had a larger than average population of single men. With all these guys hanging around with disposable income in their pockets, it is not surprising that some entrepreneurial young ladies decided to set up shop in the heart of downtown. All these cutesy buildings which now house souvenir stores (and one museum) aimed at the hordes of cruise ship passengers had a previous incarnation as brothels.  The one museum, the green building on the right side of the photo, is Dolly's.  It is dedicated to the art of prostitution.

Naturally, it was not only the single guys that got in on the act.   Either that or it is just a coincidence that the mostly obscured woodland path that led directly to the red light district got the name that it did.

The other source of pride (and the provenance of the hotel clerk's 2nd recommendation) is their salmon.  Their welcome sign boasts their claim as salmon capitol of the world.  Now, I'll be honest.  I don't know a whole lot about salmon.  I have never eaten one.  I would never think to fish the poor thing.  All I know is that I once walked for over an hour in Anchorage to a creek that promised magical salmon sightings.  I did this with a group in tow, all of whom similarly believed the guide book's promises.  We saw nothing.  Not even a guppy.  Nada.  Suffice it to say, I would not be suckered again.

My plan was to skip the salmon specific portions of the tour, which is precisely what we were doing, hanging out by Dolly's, when we looked in the water and saw a commotion.  There, in the very clear creek water, were hundreds of salmon rushing this way and that way.  The reason for their agitation surfaced shortly.  It was a harbor seal with a hungry look in his eyes.

Holy crap.  There were actually salmon where there were supposed to be salmon.  The salmon portions of the tour were back on.  This led us to something called a salmon ladder, which the free dictionary defines as:

a series of steps in a river designed to enable salmon to bypass a dam and move upstream to their breeding grounds.

It sounds like this would be a great thing if you were a salmon, a nice little shortcut on the way to the funkytown.  But in reality, this is a diabolical contraption with a massive design flaw.  The opening through which the fish has to enter is much too narrow, so for every one that does enter the shoot, there are three more swimming around confused and concussed from banging their little fish heads against the concrete on either side.  There is symphony of thuds as one after another misses this literal eye of a needle.  Why couldn't they just make the opening larger?

Yet remarkably, a lot of them make it upstream.  A lot!!

We continued walking uphill, heading to the next stop, the salmon spawning ground.  Maybe I have watched too much Cinemax, but I imagined that this spawning business was going to be a fun, festive free-for-all.  Salmon gone wild.

I could not have been wronger.  When we got to the shallow cove where the magic was supposedly taking place, all we saw were some lackluster, disinterested salmon, just kind of hanging out.  Maybe they were tired from all that swimming upstream.  Maybe they were all experiencing post-coital ennui.   I could not understand what was going on.  A guy who was standing nearby answering questions, we'll call him Salmon Man, seemed to be pretty knowledgeable so I walked over and asked him what was happening.   He explained that these salmon had all been born in this very spot.  They had gone out to the ocean for 4-5 years and now they had returned to spawn.  Once this was done, they would then die.  What the hell!!!??

These poor things had fought so hard to get to this spot, traversing a fiendish obstacle course and for what?  Sure, the continuation of the species..but for them personally, it amounted to nothing more than a suicide run.  Mother nature has played one horrible trick on the salmon.

I was now over the salmon portion of the tour.

This is a lie.  Both because I am sitting on a gold painted rock and because I like to think of myself as an average size gold nugget.

Another of Ketchikan's claims to fame is the world's largest collection of standing totem poles.  I did not keep a head count but this one seems possible.

All good walking tours must include a bar stop or two to appreciate the local flavor and this one was no different.

At least the picture explains why it is that the bears are so happy.

And if you have enough bars, at some point you are going to need a loo.

I so love that they opted to call this and loo and then realized that they should probably explain what a loo is.

One title that was not mentioned in any of the brochures but that the city seems to have earned in spades is "most seaplanes zipping around all the day long, anywhere, ever."  If you were to stay in your room with the windows drawn, you would be fully justified in believing that there is a mosquito infestation of epic proportions taking places outside. There is a near constant buzzing in the skies above Ketchikan.  Some are sightseeing flights heading over to the Misty Fjords but incredibly enough, I think there may be more seaplanes than tourists, meaning that I have no clue where the rest of these things are going to/ coming from. The only thing I can imagine is that they use these as routine transportation to the get to the further reaches of the peninsula.

A scant four days after receiving that urgent call, I was back home,  hitting play on that yoga dvd grateful for the opportunity to see such a spectacular place, for having cool friends to share it with and mostly for the fact that I, Berti Pozo, am not a salmon.