Singing the salmon home

It's hard to take a photo of a fast-moving salmon – even when you are surrounded by them.

They splash. They skitter. They hit your kayak and soak your shirt. One second they are a tiny ripple in the water and the next they speed past your camera, while you snap pictures of empty water.

On Sunday morning at low tide, 10 of us welcomed chinook salmon back to the Samish River with the Skagit River Poetry Foundation. Our agenda: drift among the salmon, talk about salmon habitat and lifecycles, read some salmon poetry, eat some salmon.

It was a golden ticket to an utterly different world. Northwest...