Free Four Fish by Paul Greenberg Page A

young person. While I was out at the Waskas’ salmon-smoking camp, a pickup truck in the Yupik town of St. Mary’s drove off the road and killed two of the teenagers inside.
    “Now there’s gonna be eight suicides,” Jac Gadwill said.
    He looked as if he hadn’t slept. It was unclear whether it was the deaths that had kept him up or the Arctic summer sun, pouring in the windows of the Kwik’pak Fisheries bunkhouse all night long.
    “It’s true,” Jac said to me. “You’ll see.”
    A little while later, we crammed ourselves aboard a single-engine airplane and took off into the fog. The Yupik nation is an archipelago of settlements strung up and down the width and breadth of the Yukon Delta—an area about the size of the state of Oregon. Some of the encampments disappear when the river shifts—a wily river that can freely slip its banks is always a sign of good salmon country. Other settlements grow into villages and begin the slow creep toward a kind of modernization. And though the different outposts are separated by vast amounts of space and time, crises are somehow shared. It therefore behooved Jac Gadwill to fly to St. Mary’s and comfort the families of the victims, to help stem the loss in some way.
    Jac’s long legs doubled up against his body. The readout on the navigation system in the plane said NO USABLE POSITION. DEAD RECKONING ON. The moment the plane left the ground, Jac broke off our conversation and fell asleep on the shoulder of his companion, Chong Cha (Ci Ci for short). Ci Ci owns a chain of nail salons in Olympia, Washington, and has an elaborate white pattern painted on each of her very long fake fingernails. She was only up for a visit and seemed anxious to leave again. She prefers it when the fishing season is over and Jac takes his winter vacation from Kwik’pak and lives with her in Olympia.
    En route to St. Mary’s, we stopped in the village of Kotlik, one of Kwik’pak’s satellite fishing stations. Because salmon are always on the move, Kwik’pak must maintain several different harvest and shipping operations—a logistical nightmare in country that barely has any infrastructure at all. Jac had just installed an electronic time-card system for the employees in Kotlik, and he was eager to get it up and running. The moment we landed, he awoke, and we sprinted out of the plane. We quickly hopped aboard two waiting ATVs and trundled along a warped, slick boardwalk. Soon we had pulled up to a new loading dock at the side of the river. Jac pointed to an older, dilapidated dock just next door.
    “I built that dock out of scraps that floated down the river a few years ago. Got weathered in for three days while I was doing it. Slept on the floor of that trailer. No food.”
    He looked around and squinted toward a field in the distance. “Now we got it so we can fly a Herc in here and fly it out to Seattle with twenty thousand pounds of fresh salmon. Get it to New York in a day.”
    Back when Jac Gadwill first began working in the Alaskan seafood business, the idea that anyone in New York would want a fresh Yukon king salmon on his or her plate would have seemed preposterous. The thought of building an airport to accommodate such a difficult logistical feat would have seemed outright crazy.
    But thanks to the taste for fresh salmon that farmed salmon developed and also thanks to the fear of PCBs in farmed salmon that the Hites-Carpenter study propagated, there is today an ever-growing market for fresh wild salmon. A market large enough to make flying a Hercules C-130 transport plane to a remote dirt runway at the top of the world twice a week seem both reasonable and potentially profitable. Seven-odd years after the Hites-Carpenter study came out, the debate about PCBs and salmon has gradually faded into a gauzy haze, and farmed-salmon consumption, as well as salmon farming in general, which both dipped after the study was published, have continued to grow again. But so, too, has demand