The Legacy of Eve

by Angier Brock Caudle

December, 1991. At the end of a year that started with war in the Garden, there came this news: someone had tracked the last known female sockeye salmon to survive a 970-mile manmade obstacle course of nets and dams to spawn in the Snake River spawning grounds near Idaho's Redfish Lake. Had tracked her, collected and counted her eggs, and gotten them fertilized. Someone had named her Eve and sent her to a taxidermist to be stuffed and mounted. Now she hangs on display in the state capitol building at Boise.

December 22. The Legacy of Eve: Fourteen Thousand Salmon Eggs. The headline in the back of Section B announced a story my local east coast paper picked up from the Seattle Times. In that story, Eve's eggs - fertilized, divided, watched over - were expected to hatch sometime in the next week, a genetic remnant so precious that half were being kept at a secret Seattle location while the other half were exiled to a former trout farm at Eagle, Idaho, where the ponds were watered by artesian wells and protected (From whom? From what?) by barbed wire.

I called The Seattle Times to find out who wrote the story. Bill Dietrich, city desk. When I phoned him a few days later to ask if the eggs had hatched, he was on vacation until after the first of the year. I scanned the Richmond papers for a few weeks, in search of a follow up-story, but saw no further news.

Quite an elaborate plan was sketched in the original article, however - a $300,000 a year plan, in addition to the half million dollars it took to ready the trout farm. The hope was that ultimately the spawn from Eve's eggs would themselves spawn. That next generation of young would be taken to the Snake River to imprint its smell before being released to the ocean. If all went well, in a few more years, full grown, they would return to the Snake, the river of their grandmother Eve, and flourish.

One June my family and I fished for salmon in Alaska's Copper River. We camped high on a bluff crowded with Sitka spruce trees and wild roses. We grilled meals over an open fire. We dug pit privies. We hiked the ridge that parallels the river. We scuttled down the cliff from our campsite to the riverbank, and, loaded with gear, we groped and slid across smooth, slippery rocks into the water to fish.

While our trip lasted only three days, it was long enough for me to be impressed by the cold, fast-moving waters. In heavy rubber waders, I stood waist-deep in the river and felt, even through the insulation, how cold and strong are the currents that the migrating fish leap and swim against with fortitude and grace to reach their spawning grounds. I tried to imagine their single-minded devotion to their task, the sense of urgency that kept them climbing. I wondered what they knew of their own raw power.

And it was good to eat the rich salmon flesh caught fresh, steaked, and then grilled in the open over crackling flames. We'd bought our licenses to fish, and using okies, pink plastic lures shaped and colored to resemble clusters of salmon eggs, we could fish all night. In June, it never got dark.

Perhaps it was the very endlessness of the summer days that gave us such a sense of abundance at that campsite on the Copper River. Like all people on vacation, we lived briefly but deliberately under the illusion that our holiday would also be, like the daylight, never-ending. For a while, this was Eden, where all our needs were met.

Although we knew all along that our three days would last only three days, it never crossed our minds that someday there might be an end to the salmon themselves. However, salmon in the Pacific Northwest have been so aggressively fished by commercial fishing companies that their presence at spawning grounds, which we took for granted, is often threatened. Although salmon conservation regulates both commercial and sport salmon fishing through limits and license fees, salmon conservationists have more than just lusty fishing to overcome. Other manmade complications - dams, irrigation ditches, pollution-also threaten salmon populations throughout much of the Pacific Northwest.

This is especially and immediately true of the Snake River sockeye, a unique population of salmon that has returned each year to spawn near Redfish Lake, a spawning ground farther south and at a higher elevation than that of any its salmon cousins.

Salmon spawn in the summer or fall after swimming upstream from the ocean, a journey that may take several months. The female lays eggs in the gravel of streambeds. While the male stands guard, she uses her tail to dig a saucer-shaped nest where she deposits the eggs to be fertilized by the male. The pebbles and gravel she dug to form the nest wash back to cover the eggs and hold them in place. If any clusters of eggs float away, the salmon, both male and female, take them in their mouths and re-lay them. That's why the pink okies work as lures.

When the salmon first hatch, they lie hidden for several weeks, fed by a yolk sac attached to their stomachs. Sooner or later -- some right away, some in three or four years -- they leave the fresh water for the ocean. Only a small percentage make it. The successful ones live in the ocean for anywhere from six months to up to five years before returning to the streams where they were hatched.

How do they "remember"? Probably they navigate the seas by sensing the earth's magnetic field and the ocean currents. When it's time, this ability enables them to find the coast. Beyond that, they navigate by smell, remembering the odor of their birthplace and following that scent home.

All Pacific salmon spawn only once and die soon afterwards.

Sockeye, the favorite Pacific salmon for eating, turn bright red as they swim upstream.

Saint Mary Magdalene is copyrighted by Robert Lentz. It is available through Bridge Building Images.

I keep on my desk a small icon of Mary Magdalene. Dark-haired, copper skinned, robed in red, she points with the fingers of her right hand at an egg she holds in her left. It's the gesture of a bishop giving a blessing: this icon was commissioned by Grace Cathedral in San Francisco to commemorate the election in 1988 of the first woman bishop in the Anglican communion.

A story from an Eastern tradition tells how, after the ascension of Jesus, Mary of Magdala traveled to Rome where, because of her high social standing, she was admitted to the court of Tiberius Caesar. She described to Caesar how inequitably justice was administered under Pontius Pilate. Then she told him about the resurrection, picking up an egg from the dinner table to help make her point. Caesar scoffed at her story, saying no one could rise from the dead - not any more than the egg she held could turn red in her hand. According to the story, the egg promptly flushed a brilliant crimson, which is why, in the Byzantine East, believers have for centuries exchanged red eggs at Easter.

In the East, Mary of Magdala is regarded as a wealthy woman of significant social standing. This is borne out by Luke's gospel where she is named as one of several women who financed the ministry of Jesus. On the other hand, the western church has commonly regarded her as a whore, although there is no biblical basis for giving her that reputation.

What we know from the gospels is that Jesus drove seven demons out of her, whatever that means. Presumably, he effected some healing in her, but whether it was physical, psychological, or spiritual healing, we have no way of telling. However, nowhere do the gospels suggest that the demons were of a sexual nature, and in no story where a man is rid of demons has the church's traditional reading of that story assumed that the demons involved his sexual behavior.

Everything we DO know about the Mary Magdalene of the scriptures makes her seem quite a strong woman, well-loved and well-trusted by Jesus, an intimate, active in supporting him. John's gospel paints a tender scene in which Mary, weeping at the tomb, recognizes the risen Jesus only when he speaks to her--and commissions her as an apostle to the apostles. "Go and tell the others," he says to this first witness to the resurrection.

After that, the scriptural Mary of Magdala disappears; she is not mentioned in biblical accounts of the post-resurrection church.

Perhaps the legend of the Byzantine East--that Mary went to Rome after the ascension--is correct. However, in spite of its kinder treatment of her story, the Eastern branch of Christendom hasn't had a better response to the official ministry of women in the church. And still I wonder why the Roman branch, the one to which I trace my roots as a Christian, had to taint her reputation. Why couldn't it accept her as a strong, independent woman?

I have the same questions about Eve. Not the salmon, but the biblical one.

For me, hers is a story about growing up, about not being on perpetual vacation. God created a man and a woman and put them in a garden where all their needs were met. They didn't even have to worry about getting dressed in the morning: they were both naked, and unashamed.

And then she broke a rule. And he did, too. Consequences followed. The serpent would spend all its days on its belly. The woman would know pain in childbirth. The man would have to struggle to bring forth food from the land.

This story intends to explain to ancient people why snakes crawl and why both bringing forth life and sustaining it are frequently difficult and painful. It says that life isn't one long, endless summer of camping and fishing in nightless Alaska.

It's also a wonderful, archetypal story, about the psychology of growing up. About doing what we all must do sooner or later, rebelling and breaking away from our dependent attachment to parents. About taking responsibility for our own consciousness and actions. About becoming adults.

For centuries the church has labeled this "the fall," derived from it the doctrine of "original sin," and used it to blame all kinds of things on women, especially things that have to do with the body and with sexuality.

But look at what the New Revised Standard Version says: "So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took some of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate."

Nourishment, beauty, wisdom: they hardly seem such terrible things to want. And it's not as though she forced those things on the man. She offered; he received. Like the male and female salmon, the man and the woman are in this together. The Bible never mentions "original sin."

The old story suggests for me not that Eve was some dumb broad poking around where she didn't belong, or some sexy siren with only lascivious things on her mind, or some megalomaniac trying to usurp God's power. Rather it suggests that she was sensitive, appreciative, and courageous--a thoughtful woman who threw off her total naivete and dependence to be an active participant in this new thing, this world that had just been created, even though that meant knowing struggle and pain as well as blessing and pleasure. It suggests that she was willing to grow up, to assume knowledge and responsibility--and to share that knowledge and responsibility with the man.

But I sure have to cut through centuries of other ways of seeing her to get that picture, just as I have to cut through centuries of assumptions that Mary Magdalene was a disreputable woman - a "fallen" woman - to get a clearer picture of her.

In The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell writes, "There can be no doubt that in the very earliest ages of human history the magical force and wonder of the female was no less a marvel than the universe itself; and this gave to woman a prodigious power, which it has been one of the chief concerns of the masculine part of the population to break, control and employ to its own ends."

Is casting the stories of biblical women into an unsavory light one way the "masculine part of the population" has attempted to do this? For me, what has happened to the stories of Mary Magdalene and the biblical Eve render Campbell's claim credible. And the obsessive way in which man has struggled to force his will on the earth--mother earth, we often call it--at nearly any cost: does this also bear it out?

Perhaps this is where Eve the salmon comes in. Certainly, hers is a story related to the use of the feminine--the use of the earth, the exploitation of the goodness and apparent abundance of its gifts. It is a story about the way we force our wills on the earth by building dams, the way we pollute rivers. And it is a story about the way we then go to great lengths and great expense attempting to undo the damage we've done.

I wonder if there's another connection - a more subtle and unlikely one. I wonder if the story of Eve the salmon hints that the time is coming - and in some ways now is - when the phenomenon Campbell describes is beginning to reverse itself.

If so, the story of Eve the salmon also offers a tiny seed of hope, and not just that the sockeye salmon will be restored to Snake River.

It's that headline again. The Legacy of Eve: 14,000 Eggs. Not sin. Not a fall. But the possibility of life.

Eve. The name comes from the Hebrew word for life. In fact, Genesis 3:20 refers to her at the "mother of all living." To call the salmon Eve - not in the sense of a woman who had fallen from the grace of God, but in the sense of a first mother, a woman full of grace - to appreciate her strength, her energy, her willingness to say yes to life, for life; to honor all that by protecting her eggs, even by the awkward, garish move to stuff her for display - is it too hopeful to wonder if that signals a shift, a slip into human collective consciousness of a sense of the goodness of Eve? Of possibility, rather than loss? A ray of hope? A seed star?

A year later, I called Bill Dietrich again. That time I reached him. The offspring of Eve did hatch. The project to restore them to the Snake River was fully underway.

Angier Brock Caudle lives with her husband in Richmond VA where she teaches writing at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Saint Mary Magdalene is copyright image of Robert Lentz. It is available through Bridge Building Images.