Amp'd by Ken Pisani Page A

all be astronauts or movie stars or billionaire industrialists. Not that I see myself being great at any of those…”
    â€œEven the lowest plebe on a ship can do a job. Do you know that on whaling vessels there was a deckhand who was lowered overboard on a ‘monkey line’ into a dead whale’s head to scoop out oil with a bucket?”
    â€œâ€˜Whale Ship Monkey Boy’ isn’t a strong pitch, Mr. Weber.”
    They continue to discuss my limited local options, which in their estimation include telemarketing, customer service (also by phone), social work (really?), any clerical job in local government, and maybe even counselor to the newly disabled. (“He’s not ready,” Dad declares of this last one, and I can’t disagree.)
    I assess my job prospects differently: horror film extra, hollow-armed smuggler, some clerical job that requires only the repetitive use of a handstamp, cleaning the stripper pole between dancers, senator from Hawaii, and, because I have unique experience, crash-test dummy.
    That’s when Mr. Weber mentions that he’s very plugged in to a federally funded local conservation effort to count fish.
    â€œYou’re shitting me,” Dad and I say in unison.
    Â 
    THINGS I KNOW ABOUT FISH AND CONSERVATION

 
    COUNTERINTUITIVE
    The counting of fish has been made necessary by the collapse of the local fish population, the cause of which is debatable: while some blame warmer oceans, overfishing, and pollution, others point to the proliferation of the dams that kill millions of fish as they attempt to swim upriver to spawn, only to bash themselves against a concrete barrier instead. As any hockey player could tell you, it’s harder to score after repeated blows to the head, rendering future offspring unlikely.
    Under the Endangered Species Act, the federal government is required not to allow any species to advance from “endangered” to “extinct” if it can help it. One obvious way to ensure the blue paddle snout’s survival would be to tear down the obstacles to its natural migration, whose turbines shred any fish forced to pass through them like a coleslaw chopper. But because local farmers need the irrigation and business needs the cheap electricity (and politicians need the votes of both), the dams stand, as immovable as a fish-faced Rushmore.
    Instead, the Army Corps of Engineers has created a multibillion-dollar industry whereupon each irrational act is countered by another more insane gambit—an infinite Möbius strip of ultimately pointless activity. They’ve spent half a billion dollars on a labyrinth of pipelines, sluices, and tunnels to divert populations of juvenile sturgeon and other fish species to be loaded onto barges and trucks—even at one time, airplanes—to travel safely downriver. Then they’ve spent millions building “fish ladders” that allow fish to struggle at heart-attack pace back up over the dam, and even utilized cannons to propel them one at a time at speeds upward of twenty-two miles per hour.
    All of which fuck with the natural homing instinct essential to the survival of the species, programmed as they are to return in adulthood to the rivers they came from to spawn. It would be like meeting someone in a bar and excusing yourself to go to the bathroom, only to be kidnapped and whisked three hundred miles away and dumped in the ocean and left to find your way back. You’d arrive well past closing time after all the good fish eggs had been fertilized.
    Another half a billion dollars was spent in an effort to increase the population by building fish hatcheries to produce large numbers of sturgeon that will eventually find their way back to the river—where they’ll likely be killed by the dam. And since hatchery fish are fed by workers scattering food on the surface of their pools, while sturgeon are naturally bottom-feeders, baby sturgeon grow up expecting