The salmon run. They run up streams in Michigan and in Indiana and Minnesota. They run up streams in Ohio and New York. They run from salty oceans and up fresh streams in California and Oregon and Washington. These salmon run up streams in Wisconsin, too, and there’s some tangible proof that our Wisconsin salmon runs are as prolific as any salmon run anywhere. Unfortunately for these salmon, they run up the rivers’ Pike and Root, and Milwaukee, and Oak. They run through city parks and back alley parking lots, through golf course fairways choked with chemicals. All the while, they must run through and around the sharp hooks of the fall meat fisherman that line those muddy banks from dawn until dusk, day after day.
The problem with the fall salmon run is that it always happens, but it happens on its own schedule. If you were to plan a fishing trip to catch one of those massive salmon while they’re struggling up those tiny streams, you’d be welcome to do so. Plan away. You could plan that trip for when you know the salmon typically run. Since they run from mid September until late October, you figure you stand a fighting chance at a hook up if you fish for them on October 1st. The fish will be running by then, and the fishing message boards are full of chatter in the days leading up to your trip. The day before your trip the message boards go dark, which is good, because fishersorts only talk when there’s no fish to be caught. Silence speaks with the most clarity.
You arrive to fish, but find only a few scraggly fish, those ones that bear the signs of a difficult struggle upstream, through that dirty urban river. The banks are littered with rotting fish, the smell so pungent that you knew you had missed the primary run from the moment you pulled your car off the side of the road and opened your door. Rotting salmon smells like any other rotting fish, except that rotting salmon are huge and so the smell is, too. The salmon run for six weeks, maybe longer, but the run isn’t marked by a few fish swimming into that river mouth every few hours, it’s marked by an all-out rush upstream on that first day that the river breaks through the beach, pushed higher and stronger by a heavy fall rain. You may have found a salmon or two swimming in circles with a big casting spoon and a few feet of trailing fishing line hanging from their backs, but you missed the peak of that previously glorious run.
It’s no coincidence that this salmon run happens in the fall. Just like the run, the fall is a mysterious creature. It’s summer one day, fall the next. Then it’s summer, then winter, perhaps fall for another day or two, then spring, followed by winter. Fall lasts for quite a long time, but that’s only because November is still fall. The fall we all want, like that salmon rush on the day the river breaks into the great lake, is happening right, precisely, exactly now.
Last weekend was glorious, but the fall colors were yet to make their strongest impression. Today, through these low clouds and this petulant rain, I see colors. I see yellows and oranges and reds and browns. Yes, there are still greens, but those greens have a rapidly approaching expiration date. Once those greens turn to something else, they’re not going to be here forever. In fact, they’re going to be here just long enough for you to catch a glimpse, before the rain returns and the wind tears each and every one of those leaves from their summer homes.
Peak Lake Geneva color will be happening this weekend through the following weekend, barring too much of that wind and rain. Sure, you can wait. You can show up sometime in a few weeks and think that what you see is a Lake Geneva fall. You can also drive up to the Root River today and snag some nasty, rotting salmon.