John, while scouting lovely Charlottesville this week, keep in mind your 16 little fluffy ones at home who aren’t accustomed to migration. I feel like we’re traveling up fish ladders and there be big teeth ahoy.

Salmon migration, like the long-distance migration of birds, is one of the great miracles of the natural world. Tens of thousands of these fish are spawned in the Columbia and its tributaries. They travel all the way down the main stem to live several years, and then find their way back to their natal stream. Now dams block their movement along what was the greatest salmon highway in the United States. To see the Army Corps of Engineers help the fish along by shipping them in barges struck me as bizarre. They’re channeled around the dams, shot through pipes into barges, and shipped past the last dams, where they are dumped out into the river. They’re basically FedExed down the Columbia. Watching the barging of salmon on the Columbia, you realize how we have turned this wondrous natural process into a complicated, highly engineered procedure of questionable value.~ Fen Montaigne, National Geographic

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