Netmaking OHS Folklife Program Photograph P 13-4.19

If one activity could define the folklife of a region, for the Oregon Coast, it would be fishing. Even nonfishers partake of the larger symbolic world of fishing as occupation and recreation. In the pre-contact period, Native Americans used basket traps, nets, and weirs to catch salmon and crab; fish were smoked over an open fire or in a small metal shack. These practices persisted until the late nineteenth century, when government regulation of the fishing industry disrupted Native practices. Euro Americans brought new technologies as well as different philosophies about the natural world. Nature was separate from culture as a force to be controlled.
 
Harnessing nature’s bounty became the linchpin of Oregon’s economy through the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Today, however, fishing, logging, farming, and other extractive industries account for a decreasing portion of the economy, dominated now by tourism and high-tech industries. Oregon’s coastal forests form part of one of the largest remaining temperate rain forests in the world.
 
From Astoria to Gold Beach, the fishing world is a contradictory cultural mix of the local and the global, of tradition and modernity. Wooden dories float alongside steel trawlers in boat basins. Fish processing plants and fishermen’s associations line the waterfront, competing for space with restaurants, shops, and tourist destinations like the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport. Yet traditions persist. Talk to people mending nets in the harbors of any coastal town and you are likely to hear pieces of maritime lore in folk speech as when they refer to a salmon too small to keep as a “shaker.” You will witness the passing down of maritime knowledge in the naming and blessing of vessels. You will taste the expertise of Karla Steinhauser at her fishhouse in Rockaway Beach, where she fillets, salts, cuts, and smokes the fish herself.

Ask Stan Kahn, an Astoria paper millworker and fisherman, about how to find salmon and his answer will reflect traditional knowledge in the flux of change. He will relate lore about knot tying and net-mending that he learned from older fishermen in Alaska; he will also talk about radar and other technologies. Recreational fishermen like Kahn form a folk community of their own drawn together by passion more than occupation. For others who spend their weekends at the water’s edge, painstakingly hand-tied fishing flies created to approximate real insects express attachment to and appreciation of the environment.

Sometimes, tensions surface between recreation and occupation, tradition and modernity. In Pacific City, sport fishermen in rubber chest-waders line the Nestucca River. A resort hotel and microbrewery now edge the beach at Cape Kiwanda. Vacation homes rise each year above the single blinking traffic light in town.  In contrast, locals who clean the hotels and draw draught beer at the brewery often live in modest houses or trailers. Outsiders and some locals argue for preservation of landscapes that offer restorative quiet; others argue for more of everything—hotels, luxury homes, and tourist industries. Alongside these changes, fishing traditions carry on the town’s identity. The annual Dory Days Festival celebrates the region’s hand-rowed, double-ended boats—pointed at both the bow and the stern. Developed to navigate the contours of Cape Kiwanda, the boats have now morphed to motorized, square-sterned versions, but in keeping with local tradition, the modern dory is still launched from shore. At Dory Days, second-generation doryman Bill Beck recalls the time when dorymen wove their way home through fog by listening for the birds on Haystack Rock. A salmon bake follows the launch, with young surfers and jet-skiers mingling with their elders, reading displays set up by the Traditional Dorymen’s Association.

© Joanne B. Mulcahy, 2005.

Themes:

Regions: Oregon Country

Date: Present

Author: Joanne B. Mulcahy

Summary:
 On Oregon’s coast, the fishing world is a contradictory cultural mix of the local and the global, of tradition and modernity.