The Memory of Fish is a documentary portrait of one man, the wild salmon he loves, and his fight to free a river. | dG1fdlJ3TTNJZF81SDg
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Short filmTranscript
00:00If you've never seen a river, a live river, you've really missed something.
00:09In a corner of the Pacific Northwest, on the edge of the Olympic Peninsula, is a frontier
00:14of giants.
00:16Giant mountains, giant trees, and miles and miles of rivers.
00:23Of all these rivers, it's the Elwha that Dick Gowen remembers.
00:29The Elwha was one of the greatest, and a river came to life only when the salmon were in.
00:35They were giants in the waters in those days.
00:40I still look at it like what it was, even though that's only in my mind's eye.
00:52As soon as they put the dams in, many things started to go right there.
00:59Dams and fish just can't work together at all.
01:04This effort to take the dams out, in the beginning, there weren't a lot of people that supported
01:10it.
01:11From decades of memories and data-filled notebooks, he incited a groundswell of voices against
01:16dam special interests.
01:18Tribal fishing rights were being violated.
01:20The upper dam's license had long expired.
01:23Pacific-run salmon were going extinct.
01:27Some people never think of everything as connected, they just don't recognize it, particularly
01:32when it means a sacrifice.
01:37I believe that when we turn this thing loose, it's going to instantly be a hundred years
01:44back.
01:45It will.