HELLS CANYON, Idaho — On a river filled with troubles, Tom Peutz is a happy man.
He stands on a boulder by the Snake River, fishing rod in hand. For 12 hours, the maintenance worker and weekend farmer has been casting his line into the rushing waters below Hells Canyon Dam, and now this is his reward: a silvery, 15-pound salmon lying in a pool at the river's edge.
"I'm very happy when I get to go fishing," Peutz says, a broad smile on his weathered face. All around him are other contented anglers, enjoying the river's best spring run of chinook salmon in years.
It's a sweet moment of abundance in a season marked by scarcity and conflict. Even in a good year, protecting salmon in the Pacific Northwest is the broadest challenge ever tackled under the federal Endangered Species Act--and this is not a good year.
Salmon advocates were hoping for solid progress by this summer toward recovery of dwindling salmon populations. They are armed with strongly worded new federal rules based on the 1999 listing of nine populations of Northwestern salmon and steelhead under the Endangered Species Act.
On many stretches of river, those rules now put protecting salmon ahead of irrigating farms and producing electricity. But even with the legal reshuffling, nature still holds the highest cards.
Drought is gripping the Snake River and the rest of the Columbia River Basin, making it impossible to satisfy everyone who uses river water. Government biologists want reservoirs lowered immediately to help flush young salmon downstream. Farmers want the reservoirs kept full so they can water their fields later this summer. Utility operators, facing exorbitant electricity costs because of California's power crisis, want a steady flow of water streaming through the basin's hydropower dams.
"It's a touchy subject," says Peutz, who has his own conflicts as both a fisherman and a farmer. But a good day of fishing has put him in an optimistic mood, and he believes balance is possible.
"Everybody's got to give a little bit," he says. "It's called working together."
If only everyone were so sanguine. Lawsuits and protests have become almost daily occurrences as the Northwest gropes its way toward saving salmon without bankrupting those who use the same resources as the fish--which is nearly everyone in the region.
The last time the Endangered Species Act was such big news here, the creature in question was the northern spotted owl, an elusive bird that few Northwesterners have ever seen.
