Sunday 23 September 2018

Fifty Shades of Salmon


It's late September, a time when a youthful Rod Stewart tells an aging Maggie May, that he "really should be back at school".  It's late September, and schools of fish are swimming for all their lives, up rivers which had taken them out to sea four years before.  

While skipping class, Stewart may have missed this science fact:  salmon have a four year life cycle, spending their first year in lakes and streams, before swimming out to sea until the fourth year, when they return to their spawning grounds to breed - and die.  It's a spectacular natural phenomenon which occurs every year.  Every fourth year, there's a super big "graduating class", or what is properly called, a "dominant year run".  This year - a dominant year run - British Columbia expects seven to 14-million salmon will make their way from the Salish Sea, back to their hatching grounds. 

The Adams River Run, in the BC Interior, is one of the world's biggest salmon runs.  The Sockeye returning home to the Adams River, on Shuswap Lake attracts thousands of tourists from all over the world, who come to see the "sea" of red coloured salmon.  Their ruby red skin is a sign of aging and near death (at least Maggie May only got wrinkled).  School groups gather on embankments to watch the salmon spawn...that is to say, millions of male sockeye salmon fertilizing the eggs of millions of female sockeye.  They sort of have sex and die, making it a powerful subliminal message in favour of abstinence.  


There must be fifty shades of salmon!  It is a colour midway between pink and orange, with a lot of white tone in it.  You may call it light peach, apricot, or frosted orange.  If you lived through the '80s you may have painted a wall in salmon, worn a dress or sported a golf shirt that was salmon coloured.  

Salmon is still a popular colour in flower gardens and floral bouquets...especially in Summer and early Fall.  On the colour wheel, the orange shades are opposite purples.  So it is, that in a garden, or bouquet, salmon colours pop alongside purples and lavenders.  At this time of year in the Northern Hemisphere, salmon colours are complimented by silver greys, golden pear, and plum colours, while readers in the Southern Hemisphere may use creams, pale yellows and lavenders.  


The next three weeks, are the peak time to see the sockeye run on the Adams River - more specifically, September 28th to October 21st.

It's also a great time to visit the McMichael Gallery in Kleinburg, Ontario, about an hour North of Toronto.  There, you'll see Mary Pratt's sublime painting of salmon fillets.  Sadly, my phone's camera does not begin to capture the transluscence of this work.  The Newfoundland Photorealist painter, who died earlier this year, is famous for making the everyday come to life in paint.  Her work is luminous.

The painting, Split Grilse (1979) depicts salmon fillets, from a young salmon caught and filleted by her daughter.  Pratt, the stay-at-home mother of four, used her camera to capture the light reflecting from, or enveloping food or objects in her kitchen, and later painted the highly realistic images onto canvas.

The McMichael holds the world's largest collection of Canadian art, and is a must-see for tourists, and Canadians, who, like salmon, make an annual run to the gallery to take in the art, and the surrounding colourful Fall leaves.  The leaves are beginning to turn yellow, orange...and sockeye red!



Photographs Copyright of:  Ruth Adams, Widow's Endorphins Photographic Images Incorporated.

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