I have just finished sorting through a bunch of video footage that my wife, daughter and I shot while watching a salmon run at Goldstream Park, which is just outside Victoria along Highway 1. Checking the date stamps of the files, I found that we went there almost exactly on the same day of the year – on November 11 and 12 in 2017 and 2018. It’s a good time of year to see the salmon run. Although the timing of this mysterious natural event varies from year to year, early November gives you a reasonable chance to see a lot of fish while not being nauseated by the smell of their decaying corpses. That would be the unavoidable scene later in the season, typically sometime in December.
I first saw a salmon run at the exact same place, in Goldstream Park, when we moved to Victoria. It had a tremendous affect on me. In fact, the second blog post I’ve ever written was about the salmon run. I felt like I was in the middle of some incredibly important event, and yet, I didn’t know what it was, exactly. It was so significant that thousands of animals were single-mindedly participating in it, paying no attention to the humans with their pathetic efforts to explain what was happening as a purely zoological phenomenon. Biology aside, what these powerful fish demonstrated was an unmistakable and tremendous sense of collective purpose. Perhaps unconscious, but a powerful will nonetheless. And I could only stand there and marvel at it, realizing that I was given a glimpse into something mysterious and so primal that thousands of animals move like a single organism to die for it.
Since then, we try to see the salmon run every year, and every time it moves me emotionally.
Back in 2017, when most of this footage was shot, my then seven-year-old daughter was keen to help with the underwater filming by sticking a GoPro into the shallow stream next to the huge fish fighting for breeding grounds. That was before she discovered that she could talk into the camera, imparting to the world her opinion on every subject that enters her sphere of attention, like any good blogger should. So this is, perhaps, one of the last videos where she is mostly quiet. Enjoy.