Eels slip into trouble

Four men, a young woman and two boys walk soaking wet from a small boat on an Oregon City boat launch on a sunny Friday morning.

Most are in sneakers and socks, shorts and T-shirts, the fabric plastered to their skin. A few have short hair, which is mostly dry. Others drip water from black braids and ponytails. They are old and young. One boy is barely taller than 5 feet.

The boy is Clayton Anderson, 15, a member of the Yakima Nation and the grandson of Ron Suppah, chairman of the Warm Springs tribe, who’s also just stepped off the boat. Suppah walks to the driver’s side of his pickup truck, shaking off the water.

The two tribes are close, they often intermarry, and they share in rituals such as this lamprey harvest at Willamette Falls in Oregon City, which the group tackled with nothing more than nets.

Scaling rocks in tennis shoes, sometimes grasping hands, the tribal members weathered strong currents, the pounding water of the falls and slippery terrain to gather lampreys where they cling to the rocks.

Lampreys are a staple food of the six tribes with interests in the Willamette River, but these annual harvests, though a long tradition, now occur in fewer and fewer places.

The last viable harvesting place in the Columbia River basin is at Willamette Falls. Like salmon, lampreys are in decline, dropping off rapidly in the last 40 to 50 years, harmed chiefly by dams and commercial fishing.

Scientists now are investigating whether decades of pollution in the Portland Harbor also may be harming the lampreys.
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