in honor of National Fishing Day (June 18), we are sharing this 2004 article about a Umatilla father passing on his love of fishing to his son that appeared in the CRITFC magazine Wana Chinook Tymoo.
Umatilla tribal member Rob Quaempts scans the river, gaff in hand, looking for salmon. ▣ J Modie/CRITFC
Quentin Quaempts can’t sit still. In fact it’s difficult to tell whether the boy’s backseat bouncing in dad’s Ford pickup is thanks to the bumpy gravel road the truck is plodding along or the youngster’s frenzied anticipation.
Just inside the boundary of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Rob Quaempts carefully steers the truck onto a coarse gravel path beside a railroad right-of-way as the Umatilla River comes into view through the thicket. The road narrows and the grade’s incline steepens, forcing the pair to lean to one side as Rob keeps the vehicle moving straight onward.
Spotting a group of whitetail deer only yards away, Quentin launches a count. “There’s three, four – no, five!” he shouts, bracing against the back of dad’s seat to get a better look. The boy’s eyes dart in every direction as he spies for other wildlife.
Through the rearview mirror Rob Quaempts checks on the two 20-foot wood poles protruding from the pickup’s bed. Quentin follows his father’s gaze, warning him the poles could spill onto the bumpy road. Dad assures him the poles are safe.
For Quaempts, there are no worries in this part of Umatilla Indian Country. Most of this day’s journey to the river is spent reminiscing with Quentin about past fishing and hunting adventures, about how his family used to fish these parts and about how the terrain has changed over the years. “It’s a good escape for me from work,” says Quaempts, a building inspector in the tribe’s planning department and a former tribal fisheries technician. “I can come up here, and it’s no hurry. Plus, it’s good for [Quentin] and me. With him, I learn something all the time.”
Quaempts points out a river section he used to fish, where a gravel bar swapped places with the main channel and erased a prime fishing pool. “It’s always changing in its own little ways,” he says. “You’ve just got to allow the river to do that. In some cases, a pool might get filled in. You might have to wait a few years for another spot to open up.”
Father and son are among a group of Umatilla tribal members who fish for salmon using the traditional method of gaffing. Holding a long pole with a 2- to 4-inch gaff hook secured by rope to one end, a fisher hunts for fish, often having to stalk prey much like someone setting sights on deer or elk with bow and arrow or spear.
Gaffers eye the water carefully, quietly approaching a fish from behind and extending the pole over the turbid section of creeks or streams where fish collect. The hook hovers below the surface, just above the bottom, and is passed over the top of a fish. The fisher strikes, jerking the pole back to set the hook into the prey, then walks the pole up the bank to haul the catch ashore.
For gaffers the pleasure lies not in the catch but in the hunt and in the almost personal connection developed with their quarry. Like hoop- or dip-netting, the challenge is nabbing the fish without wielding bait – the next best feat to plucking fish from the river by hand.
Rob shows Quentin how to firmly attach the gaff hook to his pole. Because the hook is expected to bear the weight of a salmon, it is important to make sure the hook is secure. Tribal fishers traditionally made their gaff hooks from bone or wood; however today’s preferred gaff is a modi-fied fish hook. These commercially available hooks are sized to catch swordfish, tuna, or other large ocean fish. A metal sheath is soldered or welded to the hook so it can be placed at the tip of a 12- to 14-foot pole. ▣ J Modie/CRITFC
“Anybody can go out and fish hook-and-line, which we do. We harvest fish for our subsistence,” Quaempts says. “But there’s another aspect to it, of bringing in that more traditional style of fishing, which is gaffing. Your catch rate is nothing compared to hook-and-line. You could go with a group of 10 to 20 people gaffing, fish all day and get maybe six fish, whereas one person with hook and line could get six fish in a couple of hours.” Quaempts says even Quentin gets bored with hook-and-line fishing. “He wants to gaff,” chuckles Quaempts. “We get the gaff hooks out, and it’s a totally different game.”
Gaffers often take the team approach. As many as 20 people, sometimes comprising several families, can work a river section. Younger, apprentice-level gaffers poke their hooks around pools and other fish hangouts to drive them into more shallow areas up- or downstream where veteran fishers wait. “You’re kind of the rookie if you’re the one dogging in the water, poking under the banks and the big rocks,” Quaempts says. “It’s that way with hunting, too. The more seasoned veterans, they’re on the ends of the drives, sitting on the stands. The younger guys, they’re in the brush, dogging the brush, trying to push the animals toward the older guys, getting them out to a spot where if you get one, they’re not so far to pack.
“The more experienced guys, they’ve paid their dues. They’ve been in the brush, so now it’s their turn. It’s kind of an ongoing cycle – like fishing.” But when it’s a father-son team, both get a shot at catching the big one. Quaempts recalls a 2002 fishing trip when Quentin first gaffed a Umatilla River Chinook salmon. “We’d pushed some fish up into a shallow area of the stream and saw one that didn’t go all the way up,” he says. “There was a tree it must have been hiding under. So we snuck up to it in water about a foot deep. I could see the fish in there and Quentin finally saw it. He wanted to catch it, and I thought it was a good opportunity to give him his first chance at it, so we inched the pole over the water and got it down over the fish’s back. Quentin was in front of me, and he had a hold of the pole. So with one hand I helped him reach over the fish and I pulled it, and once the hook set into the fish, I let go of the pole. And the fight was on.”
After a mighty struggle in which then-6-year-old Quentin was nearly dragged into the water, the 16-pounder yielded. “He about got tugged in there,” Quaempts recalls, laughing. “Then he had to drag it up the bank because you don’t just flip the fish out of the water. You need to grab it and try to run it up the bank as quickly as you can because there’s a chance it could come off the hook since it’s thrashing so much. I was telling Quentin to run up the bank as fast as he could, and he was giving me the darnedest look but he finally got it up there.”
Four years ago Quaempts’s father, Buzz, caught his first Umatilla River Chinook. That same year, little Quentin hooked his, too.
“The efforts that have been going on over the last couple of decades to bring fish back to the Umatilla River is just significant,” he says. “Now that the salmon are here, we’ve got to keep them here and keep those restoration efforts going. I don’t want to think we’re at this plateau. I want to think we’ve still got a lot of work to do. We are being successful, but we need to keep being successful. We need to move the bar up for ourselves. We’re looking toward generations in front of us and doing things today to protect them tomorrow.”
Quaempts hopes to share with his son and future grandchildren the lessons passed to him by grandfather Eli Quaempts. Eli, who charged horseback into river pools until his steed settled belly-deep in the water, fished from his horse’s back. The fish “were used to the animals being in the water, so they’d get relaxed and start swimming around them,” Quaempts says. “After [the fish] calmed down, that’s when my grandfather would reach in and try to gaff them.”
Finding a good fishing spot takes practice and good shoes. Many prime fishing locations are far from road access, so a fishing trip calls for a hike to the location, and (hopefully) a hike back carrying several salmon. ▣ J Modie/CRITFC
Eli’s family would travel between two homes depending on the season, spending part of the year at Husom just north of White Salmon, Washington, and the rest of the time at Gibbon, Oregon, on the Umatilla Reservation. The family posed a resilient bunch, abandoning the relatively modern hook-and-line fishing method for more imaginative means. “They always improvised,” says Quaempts. “They didn’t have fishing poles, so they had to be creative. By being creative, they kind of dealt with their limitations. There were other times where they had makeshift weirs where they’d divert the fish down into the shallow ends of the water and grab them out. A lot of it was common sense and being able to figure stuff out.”
And everything in those days had a purpose. Every road, every trail, even the tiniest paths were meant for accessing a fishing spot, a good hunting area, a place for gathering roots and berries. “I used to take [my grandfather] into the mountains, and he’d show me where all the old trails were, the routes that people used to take,” remembers Quaempts.
Of equal importance with continuing traditional ways is passing the elders’ stories and legends to future generations, Quaempts says. He embraces the honor and privilege of learning those stories and wants to instill that respect and appreciation in his son. “You just pass those stories on,” Quaempts says. “Every story my grandpa told me, I did everything I could to remember them.”
Suddenly, Quentin chimes in from the backseat, recalling a past hunting trip with his father in which his luck ran dry in a hurry. “I almost got a shot at a turkey once!” the boy exclaims, beaming while bouncing his legs on the backseat. “But it flew off.”
Rob Quaempts is struck by his son’s memory. “I like to hear that – that he remembers those kinds of stories. I think about my grandpa telling me those stories when I was that age. Maybe someday Quentin will remember that story he was just telling so he can tell his grandson.”