The Myth of the Breeze

Broderick Boat Ramp

Act­ing in part to ful­fill my new year’s res­o­lu­tion of becom­ing a morn­ing per­son, I have begun to rise early in the day to search for fish­ers. I enjoy start­ing the day trav­el­ing along levee roads look­ing for cars pre­car­i­ously parked along the shoul­der. Some morn­ings I see few cars. And as a gen­eral prin­ci­ple, I assume that fish­ers who are well hid­den along the river bank are not par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in talking–especially to a researcher at 8am. The same applies to fish­ers with head­phones. I usu­ally pass them by.

This morn­ing I was luck­ier in my search when I came across the park­ing lot of the Sacra­mento River Walk. The lot was filled with cars, all of which I knew belonged to fish­ers. The Sacra­mento River Walks reminds me very much of the Los Ange­les River. It is not paved, but is sim­i­larly used. What I assumed would be a sin­gle, paved path stretch­ing along the river was in fact an intri­cate series of well-worn foot­paths, all of which seemed to inter­sect and loop around one another. They are a sort of impromptu grid of streets, worn in through­out the year. Though I didn’t notice them at first, my eyes soon focused in on the tents that scat­tered the land­scape, tucked amongst the chap­ar­ral and slightly out of view. I wasn’t par­tic­u­larly star­tled by the tents. But hav­ing had an exten­sive con­ver­sa­tion last night about dog attacks, the bark­ing dogs (also slightly out of view) cer­tainly freaked me out.

Below the paths, though, is a long stretch of river beach that is scat­tered with bro­ken slabs of con­crete (from where, I’m not sure), and lined with fish­ers. There must have been sixty there this morn­ing, all lined up along the water’s edge. My pres­ence, of course, was noticed pretty quickly. While inter­view­ing one fisher, the next would eaves­drop a bit and maybe even get involved in the con­ver­sa­tion. The next per­son down the line inevitably saw me com­ing and had already decided whether or not he was will­ing to talk.

Some­times the most skep­ti­cal fisher is the one most likely to talk with me for a while, as was the case with one fish­er­man today. I’ll write more about him soon, but I thought his greet­ing was par­tic­u­larly funny.

“Research,” he says. “Research is the rea­son why were are not allowed to catch any salmon.”