STEVESTON.
_Boom! Um-mmm-m!..._
Every Sunday evening at six o’clock during the salmon-run, the signal
gun that marks the beginning of another fishing-week rings out upon the
evening air of Steveston the capital of the British Columbia salmon
fisheries at the mouth of the great Fraser River. Not a net passes over
any gunwale of the hundred odd motorboats that for the past hour have
been jockeying up-and-down picking up the great river’s signals-of-fish
and the way they “set”, until the crack of the official gun rings out
over the water. The moment, however, that this is heard, over go the
great seines, imported here from Old Scotland for just this dramatic
instant, entrants in the great race, boat against boat, and _all_ in
league, against salmon.
Of all the stories of animal-life, none is more wonderful or pathetic,
than the story which the salmon of the Fraser have given to Canada. From
out the deep-sea they come by tens of thousands, crowding, pushing,
over-leaping each other, a silvery mass of fighting-mad mothers, trying
to start their off-spring on the perilous road of fish-life, somewhere
in a pool, high up in the mountains out of harm’s way; and here across
the river, near its mouth, is this line of boats and their submerged
nets lying in wait, while on the river’s bank in league with the boats
are the huge canning factories, like so many Molochs open-mouthed,
waiting to swallow to-day’s catch and to-morrow’s, as they have snapped
up those of the years gone by.
One has not spent an hour on this waterfront before story and romance
have flitted across the stage in almost confusing numbers. Each figure
in the vaudeville of fish, a flashing mosaic, stepped out of the Far
East to serve this river of the Far West. For the Japs are the servitors
of Salmon at Steveston. Out of the Islands of Nippon have come these
fishermen, to serve in the ranks of Fraser salmon-fishing, men with
wives and little families, caught in the net of circumstance and landed
far from home, to work here where the snow-capped Mount McKinley, over
in the State of Washington, gleams an intermittent nimbus of light above
the foggy head-veil of distance, suggesting, like a lighted candle on
the altar of remembrance, all the sweet associations and memories
clinging to the snow-capped brow of Fujiyama.
Here in the boats are the nets, all the way from the hand of the old
net-maker in Scotland, and here the hands handling the nets come from
the other side of the world to bring Canadian salmon to the tables of
the home-land and to carry the overflow to the tables of the world. For
when one comes to think of it, there must indeed be few, if any lands,
that do not know Canadian salmon, and few undertakings calling for a
ration of canned-food which do not depend on canned-salmon to hold up
the fish-end.
These up-to-date motorboats, so broad in the waist to hold the net and
the fish-cargo, bear in their rounded bows striking psychological
resemblance in quaint twist of line to the old Saint Malo fishboats
riding in the anchorage sentried off Cape Barrie at Percé, while at the
same moment in that blunt blow, there is suggestion both of the tripping
old canal-barge of the Richelieu and of the craft of the Yang-tse, so
that one involuntarily murmurs “Sampans of Salmon”. So too, in the lower
river-silt bank platformed by rough planks and water-soaked piles, there
is both touch of Fundy and whiff of Asiatic Deltas.
The little wooden shack homes of these Japanese fisher folk of Steveston
are raised above flood-danger on wooden platforms and set about with
wooden yards, fronted by clear-running canals crossed by foot bridges of
wide plank.
Who can screen a picture of Japan without a bridge, or of a Japanese
home, however homely, but its poverty is beatified by masses of flowers?
So, here against the unpainted walls, set about on the floor of the
wooden yard, are buckets and tubs of Chrysanthemums a-bloom,
Japan-transplanted. And do the flowers stop at the bucket or the box?
Not at all. Marigolds and cornflowers and candytuft and many others
under the loving hand of the Jap-mother, are coaxed out of every crevice
of river-silt staved-up by any old bit of wood. Vines set near the edge
of the tiny canals trail tendril fingers to touch the water. And the
little bridges are so invaded by pots of bloom that the man of the
family must surely object to the narrow gangway allowed him to and from
his boats, did he not love flowers as keenly as his little
Flower-of-Japan wife.
Passing to and fro here and in the salmon-factories one begins to
realize that the Japanese women share the work on the fish with the men.
One might even call these little women “the ’longshoremen of Salmon” as
they stand at the tables,--groaning under the weight of sockeye and its
lesser brethren--their babies tied to their backs with a soft shawl, in
the same way that the Cree mother carries her baby in a tikanagan. Many
a lullaby is crooned while the skilful brown fingers place the juicy
steaks in the little flat tins. The gentle rocking of the mother’s
swaying figure sends the baby to sleep more effectively than any cradle.
And the mother and her baby are together through the long day of toil.
As one steps along the factory-floors between the long rows of women,
figures just made by Nature for the kimona and the smooth shiny
ebon-elegance of the Japanese coiffure, these plump little women with
their brown-eyed babies on their backs are indeed a picturesque
contribution to the _genre_ appearing on the vast stage from Atlantic to
Pacific that is--the Dominion. Nor is canning the fish the limit of the
Japanese woman’s usefulness. Not all of them work in the factories.
Figures of the wharf-side and of the platform-yards by the flowering
banks of the canals are the great seines a-drying. And while one sees
men, sitting about in the sun, netting-needle in hand, mending these
nets, just as frequently one happens on some strong Japanese woman, long
knife in hand, cutting away the large wooden floats, against the net’s
being laid away at the close of the season, her baby, released from the
back cradle-perambulator, playing at her side.