A truck overturned a few days ago, neatly delivering 102,000 salmon smolts in the direction of Lookingglass Creek. Salmon are notoriously bad drivers even full-grown, having poor binocular vision, and the smolts can’t reach the pedals at all. Still, it’s not clear whether this was an accident or a slick piscine caper. The truck tipped over on a sharp curve following the river and hopes are high that all the smolts that made it into the river—three-quarters of them—will survive. Initially, anyway.

Well, smolt survival numbers aren’t everything you’d ask for, if you are a smolt. They expect to get about 500 adults out of the 77,000 smolts that hit the creek, and the rest will become fish food and osprey snackage. Fish migration is a whole Battle of Gettysburg thing. Regiment after regiment marching to their doom. And that’s in the best of circumstances.

Upon further investigation the accident was chalked up to a human driver, and there is no evidence he was paid off in salmon steak futures. He just plain took the curve too fast.

If he’s anything like the driver I once witnessed on my route, he was one pissed-off dude. That dude was driving a Culligan water van and got stuck at a four-way stop sign behind a nice Portland citizen, one of four such, all of whom were gesturing to the others to go first. This can last for minutes around here. Meanwhile, the truck driver was beet red in the face and bellowing and slamming his fists into his steering wheel. He was having a very bad day, and had the look of a guy who mostly had bad days, a shitty job, a hangover, and a b-word at home. The very second the car in front of him finally ambled across the intersection, he gunned his van into a left turn, and his roll-top side door rolled up, and one after the other, his entire cargo of five-gallon plastic water jugs bounced out of the van and ping-ponged gracefully down the street like a Mitch Miller singalong until every last one was gone, and as much as I enjoyed the sight, I was certain the driver had just detonated and there would be Culligan-man shrapnel all over the interior of the cab, so I didn’t look.

Anyway that’s the kind of thing that can happen if you take your emotions out on your gas pedal. Giant water bottles and 102,000 salmon smolts, all free to make their own ways downhill.

The smolts had been raised in the Lookingglass Hatchery but were being trucked to the Imnaha River. To my eyes, the creek is a straighter shot to the ocean than the Imnaha, but I’m not in charge. As it is all the same to the fish, they’re going to go to the ocean regardless and survivors will come back to the Lookingglass Creek rather than where the hatchery personnel had hoped. Most of them tipped right into the stream but officials “estimate” that 25,529 perished on the bank. They might have missed one or two.

This particular salmon spillage was pretty tidy, all told, especially compared to the 7500 pounds of live slime eels that blorped out of an overturned truck on the coast seven years ago. These fish produce quantities of slime when they feel threatened. Evidently they felt plenty threatened. That was God’s own sneeze on the road there and dozens of vehicles were overcome with mucus, and their drivers overcome with the willies.

By contrast the recent spill was a win for a number of fish and a bonanza for bears and kingfishers, if available. It’s all—as everything is—a matter of perspective.