The Existence of Fish to Be Taken

Washington may have to buy a motel in Port Angeles and demolish it to reach a pipe underneath, at roughly $100 million. That's the logical endpoint of one sentence Judge Boldt wrote in 1974. Nearly $4 billion has gone into replacing fish-blocking culverts, with $5 billion more requested — and the official measure of success isn't returning salmon, it's whether the pipe stays passable. This episode holds two questions apart: whether the state owes this obligation, and whether it's discharging it competently.

Go look at: a culvert near you. Could a fish swim up through that? Is there a drop at the outlet? Once you start seeing them, the scale stops being an abstraction.