AN ABUNDANCE OF
NOVEL CREATURES
A novel creature arrived in Depoe Bay in March, shortly after the fleet of charter boats halted trips to safeguard their guests from another invader. Shortly after the public boat ramp was barricaded by the city in response to interloping crafts clamoring to launch in record numbers. After a warning that would come from the state capital following a mad dash to coastal areas, urging limited travel to small beach towns ill-equipped to deal with mass hospitalizations. After the statewide stay-at-home order that would follow in its wake. It was only after these steps were taken to prevent the spread of COVID-19 to the rural community that it was inundated with another creature on the move, one the self-proclaimed “World’s Smallest Harbor” was even less prepared for. The fishing village wasn’t ready for the squid.
We first noticed the sea lions and birdlife. Bellers and squawks from bellwethers of baitfish brought a commotion to the waters that would otherwise be bustling with charter boats escorting spring breakers to catch fish by morning and watch whales come afternoon. It wasn’t until a less familiar, more essential fleet interrupted the pandemonium that prey became known to the fishing community quarantined to shore. Specialized seiners arrived towing small skiffs that encircle fish with purse-like nets, the strings of which are pulled tight to secure the catch for delivery to market. Their accompanying lightboats and their luminescence, projected to lure novel creatures upward from the depths for easy capture, was the telltale sign of the invader’s taxonomy. It was local calamari for far off restaurants.
Conversations soon started among my family. Their ears that ring from decades of boat engines were filled with observations from eyes damaged by sunlight reflecting off the water for even longer. Our seafaring stock arrived here by ship 160 years ago, and once ashore, still looked westward. Visions of the squid seiners burned into our pupils from our different vantage points across town; my dad and I with front-row views, uncles from their outposts atop the hill behind the harbor, and aunt from an empty roadside turnout heading to town from her home tucked into the trees. Text threads started with daily counts of the dozen-plus vessels, and video messages recorded the anomaly. This far north! This close to shore! This many of them! We were curious if it was a boom in an existing local population based on warm water conditions the species thrive in, or part of a migratory pattern from where these conditions naturally occur. Collectively entranced, we were also curious how the local fish species that feed on squid would respond to their abundance, especially paired with the dearth of spring break fishing pressure that would otherwise pluck them from these waters if not for COVID-19. These questions quickly became a soothing pacification for the impending threat of the virus to a stoic but high-risk population. The county’s first case would soon be documented.
I had finished the stack of vacuum-packed rockfish and lingcod filets in my freezer. Replenishing these year-round staples through socially-distant family fishing aboard my uncle's unemployed charter boat seemed far more appetizing than joining the maskless, huddled masses in the supermarket one town over. Still, while jars of home-canned salmon and tuna lined my cupboard, meticulously stacked alongside local berries last summer, they were to be savored with careful rationing until their seasonal availability recommenced. Plus, I was famished for the calming sensation of waves beneath my feet after a long winter on land and, even more, to disassociate from the tumult that had engulfed it with viral furor. Luckily, so was my uncle. Much like myself, he wanted a closer look at the squid boats over which we’d been obsessing from shore. Our cravings were for the comfort of something functioning, different as it may, despite the chaos. We were deficient in stability.
My uncle's twin sister, recently furloughed from her position coordinating banquets at a nearby resort, phoned as we readied to shove off from the dock. I peered around the eerily tranquil bay while they chatted; the only disturbance to keep me from eavesdropping was a hose running at the defunct fish plant across the way. Once a hub for the delivery and distribution of a variety of local seafood species, along with three shuttered salmon canneries in the harbor, the plant now exclusively processes slime eels. The curious deepwater fish is, even more peculiarly, delivered to the bayfront processor by boat, but rather by truck from one port. These plants are now responsible for preparation and shipment to Asia where they meet their destiny on dinner plates. With the exception of when these trucks capsize along Highway 101 and spill their live cargo roadside, writhing while excreting an eponymous slime, the species is largely invisible to the Depoe Bay community. Even when seen, their chances to solve our community’s food insecurity or contribute to its ever-centralizing economic growth are opportunities that slip through the fingers of very few individuals who work in the seafood sector. These parts of the story didn’t make the cut when an overturned truck of these creatures became a national news sensation a couple of summers ago. The public only saw the viral video.
I knew my aunt would be joining us as soon as my uncle hung up. While waiting for her to arrive at the harbor, I asked my uncle what his late father, a pioneer in the area's fisheries, would think of the COVID-19 pandemic and the onslaught of squid off our shores. My aunt greeted us at the dock with the exact same question. We collectively agreed that he would be as shocked as we were at the sight of squid boats, but our guesses for his impression of the pandemic were a little less salient. I recounted cleaning out the stockpiled canned goods that I uncovered a year prior while reoccupying his vacant oceanfront home where they were raised. While frustratedly clearing out cupboards of store-bought food that expired long before he did, I was confounded by the thought of someone clinging to perishables entombed by tin. My irritation turned to empathy as my rummaging uncovered two jars of tuna fish from 2012. Still suspended in their juices, rings rusted around their lids, these chunks of quarantined flesh were half-pints of hand-caught and home-canned perseverance. It was something that resonated with me now more than ever. My family nodded, reminded me that properly canned fish never really expires, and praised me for continuing to cling to them. This was my inheritance.
I positioned my sunglasses over my eyes as we left the channel, not to protect my eyes from the reflecting rays of sunlight off the water, but rather my pride from the swell of emotion caused by reunion with the swell of the ocean. Tears streamed as the boat cut its wake along a short run to the fishing grounds, their salt joining the marine mist as they seeped through my mustache to create a familiar taste. My uncle called me to his wheelhouse and showed me how to set up on the reef structure below using nearby landmarks on the shoreline. This positioning was corroborated by the contours of the ocean that appeared in his fishfinder; a practice passed onto him from his father who learned to fish these waters before technological advances. I would inherit this knowledge, too.
Squid boats surveyed the waters around us for their next catch. We admired the skiffs’ unfamiliar silhouettes, reading their catchy names and distant home ports painted across their sterns. The vessels arrived from California and Alaska, where their specialized nets rotate seasonally to capture masses of schooling species like salmon and herring. The species exist here, too, only in the numbers that support what’s considered an artisanal commercial practice of using hooks and lines. From the deck of our hometown vessel, we hooked into lingcod and black rockfish, mouths of which spewed with gelatinous squid bits in a form of barotrauma-induced bulimia as we reeled them to the surface. These local species were as excited as we were by the abundance of cephalopods, though one of us capitalized more on their presence than the other. A single squid snagged on a hook, and my family took turns to huddle around the perfect appetizer for one as it squirted ink in distress. I tossed it into my bucket.
We quickly caught our quota of two lingcod apiece. I retained a limit of five of the less savory black rockfish, a species my grandfather never intentionally targeted, while my aunt and uncle heritably released theirs. These schooling rockfish became a staple for the area’s recreational fishery as lingcod stocks shrank through the 1980s and 1990s. In the three years that followed lingcod earning a distinction of overfished in 1999, more similar species were demoted to this status that legally requires fishing closures. It resulted in a collapse of the collective groundfish fishery that accounted for 40 percent of the state’s total landed value in the mid-1990s. The declaration of a federal disaster that followed along the entire West Coast was the fatal blow to the already shrinking fleet of commercial boats in Depoe Bay, and would mark a reliance upon chartering tourists to keep us afloat. In Oregon, rockfish would be replaced by Dungeness crab as the economic mainstay of the state’s commercial fisheries. I caught just one in the three crab pots we hoisted on board after catching our personal, self-imposed limits of fish.
I delivered one lingcod to a hill-bound uncle who was thankful for the fish and for the recap of the squid boats in action. As was my father, the recipient of another lingcod filet who was equally enthusiastic about the squid report as I delivered my catch to his doorstep. I walked home, up the street we both grew up on, passing a string of normally empty vacation homes that housed local families in our youth. These homes were now functioning as quarantine headquarters for urban retirees escaping their metropolitan confines and their higher rates of COVID-19. The retreat of full-timers from the shoreline is not lost on me, nor is the privilege of being of the few with an oceanfront home. One of the oldest in town and showing its wear, it’s still well beyond my means, preserved by familial fortitude and careful estate planning. A cedar-sided act of local sovereignty.
I savored a few fish tacos that evening. My singular calamari was downed in the company of the lone crab I caught and let crawl around my dinner table. I wanted to remember what it felt like to share not just the ingredients of a meal, but also the experience. I watched the squid boats cruising the waters through my drafty single-pane window and reflected on the day, the almost month of quasi confinement, the years, the decades, and the century and a half. We’ve always been confined here, whether by choice or by circumstance.
The state’s fish and wildlife department later called an emergency meeting, triggered by the squid fishery reaching a threshold of landed weight of 4.5 million pounds. The meeting serves to create a management plan for the explosive fishery, one that is characterized by cycles of booms and busts. It was the third time in the same number of years this meeting has happened, though the first time fisheries managers have noticed such numbers this far north. Around this time, I rifled through a trove of family relics and found clues to answer the question of what my grandad thought about these novel creatures and their appearance in this time of distress. A photo of my 9-year-old uncle, now the family charter boat captain, fileting a tuna fish on the docks accompanied the story of the fish and my grandad’s outlook on the opportunity to replace struggling salmon stocks. “A relatively unknown sport fish that may “one day provide our main fishery” brought excitement - if only for a short time - to Depoe Bay last week.” It was only for a short time.
Albacore tuna would become a recreational and commercial staple in the 48 more years he lived here, but the warm water species never served as the savior he had hoped for. Much to his dismay, the salmon they were to replace never rebounded either. The man learned to know the place from the baselines of the water’s unfished stocks and virgin timber on the hills that surround them. He rode the booms and busts of these resources that followed, while always maintaining hope they’d return to the normal he came to know them by. When that never came, and the curves of their stock abundance flattened, he persevered not just by preserving abundance for times of inevitable dearth, but by desperately clinging to its fortunes. It’s the legacy we inherit.
But, as with other rural communities also struggling to deal with COVID-19, even those without hordes of squid off their shores, we’ve seen an abundance of novel creatures here before. They appeared in great numbers before the slime eels slipped along our roads and through our fingertips. Before our attention turned solely to tourists and serving as non-essential ambassadors to them and the creatures that swim within these waters. Before the groundfish collapsed. Before tuna never replaced the struggling salmon. The abundance is why we came here to begin within, but anymore, we’re just not equipped to deal with it.