Someday one of them may become the next Herman. Herman has a Facebook page, a line of Herman memorabilia, recently starred in a National Geographic documentary, made a music video with a famous rap musician, and for nearly 50 years was the undisputed star attraction at the Oregon State Fair. In fact, Herman and his friends have been assaulted on multiple occasions. She teaches English and Gender Studies at Pratt Institute, and is working on a book about American women prophets and spiritual icons.

He sometimes wore ODFW’s sturgeon costume at the state fair and fielded many a Herman-related question. Herman, at 10 ft. long and nearly 500 lbs., is not only one of Oregon’s most distinctive aquatic characters; some even consider him the unofficial state fish. The Bonneville Gift Shop is open year round and is owned and operated by Oregon Wildlife, a non-profit organization. In 1987, one washed up on the shores of Lake Washington where a monster had been rumored to live for many years. It’s a great place to bring the family for a day’s outing. In the spring of 1159, the abbess went down to the docks to survey what the fisherman had caught.

The Rhine River in Germany is home to the oldest European sturgeon stories. Oregon Wildlife, formerly known as the Oregon Wildlife Heritage Foundation, spearheaded a fund-raising campaign and raised more than $350,000 toward the construction of what is now known as the Sturgeon Viewing and Interpretive Center, located at Bonneville Hatchery next to Bonneville Dam. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get there,” she said. The sisters were furious with the cook, and began to berate him when the old fisherman burst into the banquet hall. The summer before the theft, my mother and I roadtripped across the Oregon in honor of my high school graduation. Some of the world’s largest, oldest fish live in Oregon. I live just down the river from all this, very tense indeed. The larger male would always allow himself to be caught, but the female’s freedom guaranteed the fisher’s continued productivity.

He doesn’t have to hunt or scavenge for food in the bottom of the Columbia River anymore because hatchery technicians bring him a steady diet of fresh salmon. As soon as reports of the theft came in, an online enthusiast’s forum at iFish.net flooded with a barrage of deeply impassioned comments, about the (as one user flagged it) “stomach turning” news: “something has to be done to people like that”; “Scum bags!”; “What is the world coming to?”; “That is terrible, those fish are so great to look at”; “I don’t understand what would make a person do something like this.” One hopeful user speculated that the culprits might have been radical environmentalists standing against animal captivity. What had we thought we might find? Maybe they weren’t thieves, but mercenaries, restoring the river to its rightful order, or maybe the Chief of the Sturgeon came and subsumed them into its mouth, like he’d done with the Indian boy, and whisked them away. The Museum, situated at the barren edge of Washington and Oregon’s high desert and miles from nowhere, houses the largest Rodin collection west of the Mississippi. There are 23 species of sturgeon worldwide, seven of which that are found in North America with only two species (the white sturgeon, like Herman, and his green sturgeon cousin) found on the West Coast. An old German folktale presents a woman who, revolting against her own vanity, rows out into the Rhine and cuts off her hand, which is fetched secretly by a sturgeon and returned to her boat-side several years later when she’s learned her lesson. I’ll warrant me they will eat delightfully.” And while the fisherman was wary, he went ahead and filleted the female the same as the male, and the sisters prepared for their feast. Courtesy the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. It was outdoors, set apart from the facilities, and surrounded in the deep shadowy green of Douglas firs. A Tournament of Books featuring 16 champions, presented by Bookshop. Was there some mystical reason for this tradition of poaching from the hatcheries?

Just as the prairies were fabled to be once black with bison, almost every American river mythologizes that, prior to the 19th century, sturgeon were so thick you could “walk from one shore to the other on their backs.” The white settlers of the Pacific Northwest had no desire to eat them. Most of the buildings were vacant, their Western facades still intact: a stagecoach, a package store, a defunct curiosity shop called “Whole in the Wall.” And then half way down the length of Main Street, in the middle of the road, we came across a cage holding a sleeping black bear. http://www.opb.org/news/article/oregon-wildfire-gorge-eagle-creek-sturgeon-herman/. Thanks to those efforts, Herman is now resting comfortably in the two-acre pond, feeding on fresh salmon, and doing swim-bys for tourists from all over the world who stop in by the tens of thousands to eagerly snap selfies with him to send to friends. Williams is the former number two man at ODFW’s fish division. It would have been a grand facility. After many years of taking Herman to the fair, ODFW managers decided the ordeal was causing too much stress on him so the practice was stopped. A government official walked us through the turbines, the spawning beds, and the windows looking onto the fish ladder where we’d watch Chinook and steelhead leaping against the current to get back home. ODFW engineers designed the Sturgeon Center so it would preserve the historical architecture found at Bonneville Hatchery, mostly native stone and vegetation. Toward the end of Herman’s state fair days there was a concerted discussion in Salem at the time about building a permanent aquarium for him at the state fairgrounds. The abbess’s intentions were benign, but the road to ecological hell is paved with good intentions. The prehistoric nature of the sturgeon recently captured the attention of rap music star Aesop Rock, who came to the Sturgeon Center at Bonneville to film a music video with Herman. The Attica prison uprising lasted five days.

Before we’d set out, my mother had collected vintage travel guides, history pamphlets, a set of maps from the 1900s tied together with twine. We screamed. Nearly every time I visit Oregon, trips that have become fewer and far between, my mother and I make a point of going out to Bonneville Dam to see the sturgeon. The Sturgeon Center is one of Oregon’s top visitor attractions. A covered kiosk just a few steps away has a large viewing window below the water’s surface that lets visitors get nose-to-nose with Herman.

Just getting Herman onto a fish tanker was a big job. Sturgeon have often been mistaken for monsters of various kinds. What if those rogue sturgeon thieves in Oregon were doing just that—letting the girl go free? In 1983, Herman I, thought to be over 100 years old, was abducted from the Roaring River hatchery where a decade earlier five smaller sturgeon were found “vandalized,” and in other accounts, stabbed. In light of these attacks, hatchery workers responsible for taking care of Herman are guarded about any attempts to disturb him anymore.

Why anyone would want to vandalize them, even abduct them, takes explaining. (A combination of both would be most interesting, though unlikely.) A paved path partway around the pond provides easy access to a viewing platform where people can get a bird’s eye view of Herman and his companions – smaller sturgeon and some oversized trout. Contact ODFW's Public Service Representative at: [email protected] Herman is 79 years old. We were surprised to find that the toilets in the pool house still flushed, and that the spring was still bubbling in its concrete pool, and that there was a cordless phone receiver plugged in and apparently powered on the floor behind a decimated lunch counter. My mother sat next to me in her sunglasses and Columbia Sportswear gear, quiet and smiling. He is an Oregon icon – Herman, the sturgeon, the state’s most famous fish. In an excerpt from the forthcoming Wolf Nation, a journalist follows the release of a single family into the wild. And yet their form is so tough and adaptable it has withstood warmings and coolings of all kinds, the dinosaurs, the meteors, and so, understandably, us. How did they manage such perspective? The next day we drove sleepily toward Portland. Granddad. We drove and drove and didn’t know where we were going. While the investigation was underway, the stolen sturgeon were replaced with new ones, and this time ODFW put small tracking devices in them called PIT tags which provided at least a chance of recovering them, said White Sturgeon Project Leader Tucker Jones, “should they be poached again.”. White sturgeon are the largest freshwater fish in North America, and Oregon’s Columbia River Valley lays claim to one of the last self-sustaining populations on earth. So they called on a brave demigod who volunteered to be swallowed whole in an effort to prevent more widows.