[Text: Tomas Borsa. Photos: Jean-Philippe Marquis.]
After sixty-five kilometres of touch-and-go driving down a slick logging road, Jean-Philippe, myself, and Len Vanderstar – our fly-fishing, bow-hunting, Rambo of the Northwest river-guide – have arrived at a bridge with a large barricade across it. This is the put-in point for the raft which will carry us 15 kilometres down the Morice River, one of BC’s most productive river systems, as we attempt to find late-season Coho and Steelhead salmon. But mid-November is not an ideal time to go fly-fishing. Wisps of cool steam rise from the water’s surface where it meets the air, and icicles cling to branches along the shore. At rest, the air is still, but on the water, it quickly transforms into a piercing, frigid jet. Len describes it in the least dramatic terms as “the last weekend of the season”; my toes and I see it in more stark terms.
If constructed, the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline would run along the Morice and its tributaries for roughly 60 kilometres, before crossing the Morice about 50 km southwest of the town of Houston – the exact location where we’ve come to fish. “This is where I come to re-energize. My identity is part of the rivers, the landscape. Northwestern British Columbia kind of breeds that,” Len tells us as he guides the raft with two large, sturdy oars. Jean-Philippe and I are each given a small paddle, ostensibly to maintain the illusion that in a worst case scenario we’d have some chance of delaying our fate. Len rows against the current and brings the raft to a stop against the shore. A school of Coho dart underneath the boat. The older fish, whose tails are white and weathered from years of digging out gravel to create spawning redds, trail at the rear. Three Steelhead swim by, followed by two dozen Coho. Len senses that this is a good spot to cast in, and wades out in his drysuit. A few minutes later, he’s caught a female Steelhead. After climbing back into the boat, he tells us, “Here in the Northwest, we have healthy, sustainable stocks. There’s not much in the lower forty-eight anymore – they’ve dammed too many rivers. You might find some areas in Kamchatka, Russia, that have similar stocks, but their river systems are much shorter than ours. In terms of productivity and availability of indigenous salmon, there’s no place on earth like what we have here in Alaska and Northwestern British Columbia. Nowhere.”
Owing to the lack of silt, the clarity of the water is remarkable. As we meander down the Morice, Len points out pockets of water favoured by each species of fish. As someone who draws many of his staple food sources from this river, it’s understandable when he lets out a sigh and says, “it’s beyond me why you’d put at risk an ecosystem like this. You are what you eat, after all.” As the light begins to fade, the snow picks up. Shouting above the wind as we pass through a mild white-water section, Len tells us, “People here in the Northwest like to see development. Everyone wants to make a living. But what we don’t like to see is irresponsible development. Corporations like Enbridge are coming and treating this land as if it’s their own. But they don’t have the social license of the people – and if you don’t have the social license of the people, they’re going to revolt. We’re passionate about rivers, we’re passionate our lakes, we’re passionate about our salmon. You have to be careful when you start playing around with people’s passions.”