Seeking Salmon in Southeast Alaska*
Travel Blog • Joanna Kakissis • 05.01.08 | 10:03 AM ET
Daniel Duane loves to eat wild salmon, which used to live in abundance off the West Coast of the United States and whose numbers are now crisis-level low. His home, the San Francisco Bay area, was once famous for its seafood. But many San Franciscans now get their seafood from elsewhere, like the rest of American supermarket shoppers. It’s an antiseptic setting, and it just won’t do for an outdoorsy foodie like Duane. So he traveled by seaplane to southeast Alaska to glimpse one of the last remaining American paradises and to catch “this beautiful food” in “a web of freshwater, saltwater, and surrounding wildlands healthy enough to generate 5 billion pounds of seafood year after year, without diminishing anything.”
It’s a place where I suspect few foodies go. In the latest issue of Sierra, Duane wrote about his time there in sensual detail, describing a place of calving glaciers and fine-sand beaches, clear bays and estuaries, humpback whales and bald eagles, reddish-orange anemones and Pacific-blue mussels. He also did something else most foodies would never do: He caught his dinner with a penknife and “entered the food chain more or less where an eagle or bear might—by sticking my hand into the middle and pulling out a life.”
Duane is the author of Caught Inside: A Surfer’s Year on the California Coast, among other books.
Update: May 2, 11:41 a.m. ET: “Salmon fishing was banned along the West Coast for the first time in 160 years Thursday,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle.
Related on World Hum:
* ‘Into the Wild’: Has the Truth About Christopher McCandless Been Lost?
Photo by tastybit via Flickr (Creative Commons).
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TambourineMan 05.01.08 | 2:11 PM ET
Oh man, Southeast Alaska…best salmon, halibut and Dungeness crab I’ve ever had.
You’re right, Joanna. I don’t think AK is on most foodie radars. Let’s hope it stays that way.
Doreen Orion 05.03.08 | 6:21 PM ET
We spent the summer of ‘05 in Alaska in our converted bus, much of it in the Southeast. After we got back, I don’t think we could stand eating salmon and halibut for almost an entire year - we just got so spoiled there.
Ireq 05.16.08 | 6:10 PM ET
I can smell fish lovers here. There is nothing like delicious salmon or halibut. My mouth is watering already. I better stop thinking too much.
Canned Salmon Recipe Lover 06.30.08 | 8:30 AM ET
My grandmother is an avid lover of canned salmon recipes. She cooks really delicious salmon dishes. She eats one can each day. All I can say is her skin is quite smooth for a 75 years old lady and her 140 mmHg blood pressure is great for someone of her age.
A truly delicious and healthy food indeed…....