Love and Uncertainty

I lost my first pregnancy to miscarriage.

Finally, after being so careful for so long, waiting for the "right time" to start a family, I was pregnant, and completely thrilled.  I was young and healthy, no family history of reproductive problems, and had no reason to expect that, ten weeks in, I would receive the devastating news that I was not, after all, going to have a new baby in my arms in a few short months.

I found a great deal of solace and support on an internet forum for other women who had experienced pregnancy loss.  Some had faced multiple losses, and every time a new pregnancy was announced there was a collective holding of breath through the first trimester to see if this one would be "sticky."

There was a conversation on that forum about dealing with the uncertainty of another pregnancy that may or may not result in a living baby.  Some women felt like it was easier to try to remain emotionally unattached to the potential baby until they had passed the point in the pregnancy of their previous losses, and then it would be "safe" to start investing in the idea.  But one woman said she loved her babies from the moment she knew she was pregnant, because she knew that she might not see them born, and wanted to love them as much as she could for long as she could while they were alive.

I was reminded of that conversation earlier this week.

One of the passengers on my whale watching boat asked the question, will the drought have any implications for the whales? And the honest answer is, yes, it absolutely will. Baby salmon need a lot of dissolved oxygen in the water for their tiny, inefficient gills to function.  Cold water holds more dissolved oxygen than warm water does. Normally, the heavy snow pack in the mountains around the Salish Sea melts slowly over the summer and keeps the salmon-bearing waters nice and cold.  This past winter, the snow didn't happen, and now the water temperatures in the rivers are higher than ever recorded, and fish are dying in that water because it is too warm for them.  What this means is that the rate of "escapement" for baby salmon this year will probably be very low, which means that, in another five years or so when this generation of Chinook returns to the rivers, the return rate will be very low.  And that means the SRKW will have a hard time finding enough to eat here.

One of the difficulties in managing the salmon population (leaving aside for the moment the supreme arrogance of the assumption that humans actually do know enough to "manage" any natural system appropriately) is that every single salmon-bearing stream has its own genetically distinct population of salmon, and every stream is uniquely vulnerable to circumstances that can have a huge impact on the escapement and eventual return of each generation born in its waters.  Maybe conditions are perfect for high escapement on a given stream in a given year, but a landslide blocks salmon passage on a given year, or heavy rains carry too many toxic substances to the stream from surrounding streets and the salmon of that generation die off or have their reproductive capabilities destroyed.

When something like that happens to an isolated stream or river system, the others can sometimes make up for it. A couple years ago, the Fraser River Chinook return was dismally low, so the SRKW took themselves out to the Washington coast, where Chinook runs were at record highs. It was a tough year for the whale watching boats, but the whales themselves did very well--all the SRKW babies born last winter were conceived that summer amid an abundance of food.  But if climate conditions mean that all of the rivers are experiencing low salmon escapement in a given year, when that generation of salmon is supposed to return, it will be a very low return all around.  And that low return will likely continue in a cycle into the future, until and unless conditions improve significantly, and maybe even with a little nudge from humans to help. This, of course, assumes that conditions to sustain salmon continue to exist at all here in the Salish Sea, which is a real question as climate change accelerates.

At the moment, Washington State and British Columbia are only in the first year of drought.  And hopefully (a wholly inadequate word to express my feelings on the matter) it will only be one isolated year of drought.  But looking south to California, where the drought has been dragging on for years now, it can't be assumed that we aren't heading down the same long, dry road. The SRKW rely on salmon from rivers along the west coast, from about Monterey Bay in California to the Fraser in British Columbia. That's it. That's what they've got.  A long term drought along the west coast could very literally be a death sentence for this population.  Each of the matrilines I know and love could starve to death in the next 5-10 years, easily.  The fish they rely upon are already endangered, with little public will to change behaviors as necessary to restore their populations. And, while I try to stick my fingers in my ears and ignore the evidence, there is more than a little reason to believe that at this point, all the public will in the world won't make a difference if the climate is moving beyond the point of being able to sustain Chinook salmon in the Salish Sea.

Now, the SRKW are remarkably intelligent animals. I believe they are aware of their plight, to some degree, and that they are intelligent enough to try to address it in some ways. Changing their diet is an obvious one; if they didn't insist on eating Chinook salmon nearly to the exclusion of anything else, they could do just fine. And we know they do eat other kinds of fish, although not nearly so regularly. In the past week or so I have seen some reports about some members of Kpod harassing a porpoise, and there have been past reports suggesting that some of the SRKWs may occasionally indulge in some marine mammal hunting, if not eating. There are other food sources available, should the whales choose to use them. But, intelligence and wisdom aren't the same thing. There are plenty of examples in human culture of groups of people doing things that are maladaptive, because that's the tradition. And maybe the whales are bound up in the same kind of thinking.  There is no way to know, we can only observe and see what they do with the situation as it develops.

But every day I spend with my beloved SRKW, in the back of my mind I know that I may outlive them, that there is a very real possibility they will be nothing but stories to my grandchildren, should I be lucky enough to have any. Perhaps one day I will hold one of my daughter's daughters on my knee and tell her about the day J42 Echo waved at the boat, the day L77 Matia brought her tiny baby L119 Joy right up to the bow, and Joy did a headstand and flipped her flukes at the adoring passengers. I will try to explain what it was like to see all of Jpod surfacing together in Rosario Strait against the backdrop of snow-covered Mount Baker in mirror-smooth waters. I will try to describe how thrilled I always feel when I first spot the tall fins from a distance.  As I write this, I hope and even pray with every fiber of my being that those stories will just be the precursor to taking my grandchildren out to meet the grandchildren of Echo, Joy and the others. 

What do you do with your heart when you learn a loved one has been diagnosed with a potentially terminal illness?  How do you guard your emotions when you are newly pregnant for the second, third or sixth time but you have no living children yet to show for it? How do you care for a species that so captivates your heart, soul and imagination when there are only 81 left and their food source is dwindling?  Not questions anyone wants to answer, but questions we are faced with.  Maybe it is easier to disengage, close the emotional connection, and lessen the potential pain.

My choice is to love them as much as I can for as long as I can, while they are still alive.