Next Season
March has come around again. The first count of the new season is four days away. Len has the waders in the back of his truck. I have the notebooks in the front of mine. The binders from last autumn are on my kitchen table, consolidated, data entered, backed up in three places against the machine failures that are the real predators of longitudinal research. I have written most of the season summary. I have not written the conclusion, because I want to walk the reach first.
The funding news came in late February. The mile-seven culvert project was funded in the spring grant cycle, at the priority level my colleague in the Tukwila parking lot had hinted at the previous year. The award was not for the full bottomless box Len has been arguing for. It was for a scaled specification — a concrete box with a simulated natural substrate, wider than the current pipe but narrower than Len's ideal — that represents, on the data I trust, roughly seventy per cent of the fish-passage benefit of the full design at roughly fifty-five per cent of the cost. This is the negotiated compromise that emerged from the November engineering review. The construction is scheduled for summer 2027. The current pipe will see two more spawning seasons.
Len took the news, when I called him, with a silence I have learned to read. Then he said, *it'll pass a coho*. And he said, *it'll pass a coho in a