Up the River Without a Salmon:
Hearst Lodge Ain’t What it Used to Be
by C.D. Stelzer
In the shadows of a late summer’s afternoon, the rocky trail struggles to follow the stream past a series of rapids and pools, cutting a narrow swath through the deepening woods. Wintergreen, laurel and cranberry hem the path. Dappled sunlight punches holes in the forest canopy, highlighting assorted ferns and lichens. Black spruce cling to the cliffs above the rushing waters of the Big Salmon River.
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The beauty of this New Brunswick setting overwhelms the senses. But nature is treacherous, too. Tangled roots of the ubiquitous spruce can snare a hiker’s boot with one false step. Ken Bennett had to help evacuate a woman who fell and broke her leg on the trail last year.
Rescue work is part of his job. Like his father before him, the stoic north woodsman, is the caretaker at Hearst Lodge, which is now a part of the Fundy Trail Parkway. Before the nine-mile scenic drive opened several years ago, the Pejebscot Paper Co. owned much of the remote coastal land along the Bay of Fundy near the hamlet of St. Martins. After World War II, the Hearst newspaper chain acquired the company and its vast property holdings to help supply its unceasing demand for newsprint. The parkway ends near the mouth of the Big Salmon River, where logs once were sluiced to a sawmill.
As its name denotes, the river once teemed with wild Atlantic salmon. In 1968, local laborers built a rustic fishing lodge for Hearst corporate executives a couple miles upstream from the site of the now-defunct sawmill. For the next 20 years, Bennett’s late father acted as a fishing guide for visitors to the lodge, including celebrities such as actor Donald Sutherland, a Saint John native. Later, employees of J.D. Irving Ltd., another paper and pulp manufacturer, leased the cabin.
In those halcyon days, anglers could practically walk across pools of fish, recalls the younger Bennett. Even a novice almost always caught his limit. Those times are gone. This year, Bennett says less than a dozen salmon swam upstream from the ocean to spawn. Unfortunately, the Big Salmon River is not unique in this respect. The tragic, spiraling decline in salmon populations continues to be repeated each year in the streams of New Brunswick and Maine, where the fish is listed as an endangered species.
For more than three decades, the governments of Canada and the United States have spent millions of dollars to reverse the trend, but efforts to stem the tide have thus far failed. Reasons for the Atlantic salmon’s plunge toward extinction remain uncertain. There are, however, many suspected causes - all of them related to human activities.
Environmentalists and government officials not long ago hailed the latest threat as a solution. To curb overfishing in the ocean by commercial fishermen, guardians of the dwindling species supported the growth of salmon farms. But now cage-raised fish are spawning more grief for their wild cousins. The crowded fish pens favored by the aquaculture industry can breed viral diseases and parasites, including sea lice, which potentially can spread to free-swimming salmons. Moreover, when the European strains used in fish farming escape their confines, they interbreed with their feral counterparts, creating a hybrid less adapted to survival. Arguments over whether the salmon in Maine’s waters are a genetically distinct species on the brink of extinction have led to vicious squabbles, with the corporate fish farms and the state of Maine opposing sanctions leveled by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service.
The debate is a class-book example of how politics, business and science, working at a glacial pace, serve to confound rather than clarify an issue. While interested parties on all sides of the debate cast aspersions on one another, the numbers of wild Atlantic salmon are dropping to next to nothing on both sides of Passmaquoddy Bay. It doesn’t matter whether the Canadian and American fish are genetically distinct. What matters most is an entire species is on the verge of extinction.
Meanwhile, other longstanding problems effecting wild salmon along the North American coast persist. Sea temperatures continue to rise. Dams continue to thwart the ability of salmon to migrate upstream to reproduce. Industrial pollution continues to wreak havoc on their immune systems. Clearcutting timber in upland forests continues to destroy habitat by choking spawning grounds with deadly sediments.
The spoiling of the Big Salmon River is sadly ironic. By the time the workers hauled the stones out of the river to build Hearst Lodge, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst had been dead for well over a decade. The successors to his newspaper empire commissioned the building of a modest, pine cabin. The backwoods retreat was the polar opposite of San Simeon, the California mansion of the founder of the newspaper chain. Instead, the rich and famous came here simply to fish for the once plentiful salmon. Nature itself was spectacle enough. But felling the forests around the fishing stream for tomorrow’s newspaper contributed to the eventual decline of the salmon.
Bennett carries on his father’s work. Nowadays, though, he tends to act more as a museum curator and less a fishing guide. In the dining room of the pine-paneled lodge, Bennett keeps a loose-leaf binder with a history of the place in a bureau drawer; a history which tells the stories of the people who lived and worked and visited here, when the salmon swam free. Bennett, a man of view words, never heard of Orson Welles’ movie Citizen Kane, inspired by William Randolph Hearst’s life. Still he wonders how the worldly ambitions of men inevitably work against them to the detriment of all.
- – C.D. Stelzer
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C.D. Stelzer is the North American editor of Blue.
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