Sea run Coho salmon, also known as Silvers, are making their way back to South Puget Sound after a year or more of unimaginable adventure in the wide, deep, and dark Pacific Ocean.  They will swim about in our bays and inlets through the spring and summer.  Well, perhaps from their point of view, they will swim about in their bays and inlets through the spring and summer.  In the fall, when the rains begin again in earnest, the Coho, and all their fellow salmon adventurers, will find their way back into the streams of their birth where they will begin another cycle of salmon history and lore.

    To my way of thinking, the South Sound seems a safe haven for our returning adventurers.  Oh, we still have our spring storms where the winds whip the waters into a foam streaked tither -- especially when the wind blows against the current as the waters run in and out of our many passages and narrows rising and falling over a range of more than eighteen feet some days, but compared to the Pacific Ocean, we live and work around pretty tame waters.  As to what a Coho thinks about the Sound, I cannot say.  For all, I know, the ocean may be the place of comfort and Puget Sound may be the harbor of all its fears.

    To imagine this possibility, you need only spend the briefest day wading around the edges of that great deep our fishy friends call home.  Because in the shallowest of the waters of Puget Sound you may now see the fruit of the labor of last year’s run of Coho; the tiny salmon fry who have left their streams to test and try their lives of adventure.  These little fry, not much bigger than pieces of broken pencil lead are, and will continue to be, pray to every kind of terrible sea going carnivore you could imagine; and many that come from above.  The terrors they remember from a youth spent in Puget Sound might infect their courage for the rest of their lives.  

    When I look at these tiny fish swimming in the shallows, I can’t help but wonder how many of them will survive long enough to even think about leaving Puget Sound and making their way in the Great Pacific.  When they get out into the ocean, they must avoid all the denizens of the deep to grow and mature.  Then, on the way back home, they must find a way past the trawlers and trollers that wait for them along the shores of Alaska, British Columbia, and at the entrance to the Straits of Juan De Fuca through which they must pass to enter Puget Sound.  From there, they come down Admiralty Inlet, past Seattle, Vashion Island, through the Tacoma Narrows, past the Nisqually Flats, through Dana Passage, past Hope Island, and into Totten and Little Skookum Inlets where I get excited to see them again.  

    All through this Puget Sound adventure, the noble Coho are prey to harbor seals whose hunger is never satiated and fishermen who forgo no expense or trouble to catch a meal.  The sport fishermen lay siege on the Coho from all the points and the docks and piers that jut out into the stream.  They patrol in boats outfitted with GPS, sonar, fish finders, kicker motors, and beer coolers while tribal fishermen stretch their nets out from along every shore the Coho are known to pass.  What a gauntlet those fish struggle through.  

    Yet some come home.  Some return to our bays and Inlets where they wait, and wait, sometimes till well into October, for the rains that will swell the creeks so that they can swim back to where they were hatched.  It is this last part of life, the spawn, that I think most impresses me.  Perhaps because it is the only part I can see for myself.

    By the time the spawn gets into swing, the Coho have stopped eating.  The silver sides have turned red on the males.  The jaws have become so hooked that they only meet at the tip of the nose.  And their teeth are large enough to make a puppy dog proud.  When a big storm comes in from the Southwest, they head up their streams in mass.  It is almost as if the whole of the sound has been evacuated.  Within a couple of weeks, some seals will be desperate enough to take a careless duck or seabird for a meal.

    Up the streams the Coho swim.  First into the big streams, then off into the small feeder streams, and finally into water so shallow only the very lowest part of the fish are wet.  Their fins are in shreds and they are covered with lacerations from one end to the other.  The males fight for the females and the females are overwhelmed by the males whose courtship is nearly as violent as the fights they fought  to earn the right to court at all.  At just the right spot, and not one meter downstream of it, the female flushes out a depression in the gravel with the last bit of her fins.  She lays her eggs and allows the male to spread his sperm upon them.  The eggs are then covered with gravel and the salmon die.  They die in uncountable numbers.  You discover streams by the smell of decomposing fish as you ride around the Sound during the spawn.  

    It is this relentless drive of these noble fish to finish their life’s work, to lay the foundation of the next generation, that impressed me enough to name my bicycles after them: Coho.

    On a night last winter, between Christmas and New Year, and well past midnight, I saw the last salmon I would see of that generation of fish.  As I stood in Little Skookum Inlet, in water just above my knees, and loaded my boat with the sacks of clams I’d dug that tide, I felt a bump on my leg, and then another.  By the light of my headlamp, I looked into the waters and saw the ghost of a salmon between my legs.  As I looked at that grey fish, all its color washed away by the struggles it had fought, its flesh peeling off its sides and hanging in shreds around its mouth, and its fins little more than memories, I thought, that poor fish is already dead but so dedicated to its work it won’t stop swimming.  I can’t help but think that that salmon bumped me to be near to something that still lived.  

    I knew on that cold night that Coho was the right name for my bicycles.  I build them with the hope that they will devote themselves to their riders with the same kind of devotion the sea going Coho devote themselves to their obligation to re-create.