Readers,
Recently I was given this scenario to consider: “You’re cooking salmon, but you don’t have an oven. Figure it out.” Easy. Build a camp fire. Get two dozen Herald-branded lighters and a metal box. Fly to Arizona and toss that shit on the pavement. Find a grill, find a Bunsen burner, capture the sun in your hands and cradle that fish like you’ve caught a cricket in your hands. That’s figuring it out.
But before they’re dead, salmon swim upstream. Squint your eyes, say it slowly, and tilt your head: “Sal-mon. Sw-im. Up-stre-am.” Sounds good, doesn’t it? I like the way it rolls off the tongue. I’m not exactly sure what it means, but I do know that if I was a salmon, I’d hate the water. Just imagine how disorienting it would be to have nature telling you you’re going the wrong way while your body instinctually drags you along.
Still, salmon might be one of the only fish who know water exists at all, even if it’s just because of how annoying it is. It must feel pretty good to know you’re smarter than everyone else because you can understand something so elementary. And I just know the old, impotent salmon who can’t make the trek anymore get a real kick out of freaking out the rookies by asking how the water is. In the social hierarchy of marine life, being a salmon is pretty appealing.
Plus, along their upstream journeys—their journeys of hundreds of miles, their journeys rife with fear of bears and high dams and death of exhaustion or age—there are the boons of the well-traveled. Think of the sights salmon see! They swim on past a Joss Stone concert, the Grammy-winning soul singer Will Sussbauer got to interview. They catch sight of billboards with Prince Zuko’s beautiful face that Bipul Soti once wished was his own, they dodge books underlined by the subjects of Diego Del Aguila’s newest column, they stare aghast like Annie Gu at the American flag half-masted for Charlie Kirk. They hear the lies of Lucas Castillo-West, and the howling coyotes he writes about.
Also it’s Fat Bear Week up at Katmai National Park, where all the salmon are getting eaten alive just a few short miles from their breeding grounds and we all root for more to die, because who doesn’t love a cute chunky bear? Salmon don’t, but that’s nature. Tuff.
Figure it out. Salmon experience the world as they swim; our magazine this week is that salmon. Be a fat bear: eat it right up.
Most Daringly,
Oscar and Will
