Sockeye salmon

Three days ago two friends showed up at my door to present me with a huge sockeye salmon. Well, I am a city girl, have no idea what to do with an entire fish. Thankfully, a lot of people around here know what to do, including my friend Heather, whom I phoned and who dropped everything at the prospect of fresh sockeye. She came over and did the dirty work. I will not show that process here, simply photos of the fish beforehand. Suffice it to say I have dinner for quite days.

I am certain I sound very naive about this, but watching Heather gut the fish and remove the innards brought to mind writers I came across as a young student, especially scholars of culture and mythology like Joseph Campbell. As a totally urbanized person, I am very distant from the practices that once characterized the mutual connectedness of humans and the rest of the natural world and from the sensuous understanding that once dominated the human imagination. I am a meat eater and don't foresee that changing in my lifetime, but in visiting this part of the world for the past six years, I have become sensitized to the issue of "farmed salmon," which is basically a process similar to the way poultry is raised for human consumption.