It leaps from the churning water a few minutes after I arrive, startling me mid-sentence. Red-tinged, hook-mouthed, and huge, the returning traveller from the Atlantic rises clean of the maelstrom by several feet, hangs tantalisingly in the air, then falls back down into the curtain of the waterfall – a heroic effort, but not quite enough to clear the lip of Stainforth Force.
“Got it!” exclaims the photographer I was talking to, another picture of a leaping Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) in the bag. “I came this time last year and it was like those Alaskan nature documentaries. They were almost jumping into my feet.”
These fish were born in the Ribble and are on their way “home”. After surviving as many as four winters feeding and growing in the expanses of the North Atlantic, they have navigated back to the mouth of the river, near Blackpool, made their way up through Lancashire and are attempting to reach the exact place they were born to spawn, recognising their home stream by its specific smell. Now, to get to the higher reaches of the river, they must overcome these falls, which are regionally famous for the salmon run display. Each leap prompts gasps and clicking shutters from the gathered spectators – then a return to watchful silence.
A small percentage of the salmon will return to the sea and spawn again, but the return migration exerts a huge physiological toll on the fish and, for most, the cost of making life will be the loss of their own.
It is tempting to see an anthropomorphic nobility or doggedness in this, but that implies an unlikely level of individual agency; more probable is that the salmon’s instinct to reproduce is a force of nature almost as blind as the waters they drive up against. But it makes me think about the instinctual undertows in our own lives, and the degree of freedom we have to swim against them. Walt Whitman comes to mind: “Urge and urge and urge / Always the procreant urge of the world.”
Finally, a fish leaps up and, somehow, just about flops over the top. We all cheer.
