There’s Ants in My Pants.
There’s Dumb and Dumber.
Lest we think it’s all fun on the river, chapters in author Randy Nelson’s book also include Fraser River Review and The Cohen Commission.
The retired fisheries enforcement officer’s first book, Poachers, Polluters and Politics, is a reflection of his own personality: Funny, affable and down to earth combined with a passion for fish conservation and a desire to catch the people who steal and threaten the resource.
Nelson’s name is most familiar in local newspaper and broadcast stories for his status as a winning long-distance runner — a skill that became more useful than a gun when it came time to make arrests at riverside.
In Bumper Car Bust — one of nearly 100 chapters in the 300-page book released this fall by Harbour Publishing — Nelson recounts the one that got away (perpetrator, not salmon) and then bumping into him months later at Playland while on a bumper-car ride. Nelson had caught his partner earlier illegally fishing at a Burnaby watercourse, but chased him down too quickly.
“I was fairly fit at the time and had started to run three or four times a week,” he wrote.
“I caught him casually, but he started to struggle. This was a lesson I would remember. In future chases (and there were lots of them), I’d never try to catch the poacher right away. Run them until they are tired, then run them some more. Once they were totally exhausted, I’d arrest them without incident.”
Chases and anecdotes about sneaking up on people fishing illegally feature heavily in Poachers, Polluters and Politics — and many of them feature Nelson’s prowess as a long-distance runner.
It was something he said in an interview he started in order to burn off his wife’s cooking and to prepare for peace-officer training at the RCMP’s Regina depot early in his 35-year career with the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO).
Poachers is written in a breezy, folksy style by an author who admits he doesn’t read books.
But, its mix of stories in the bush, intertwined with the politics of fish management, is aimed at anyone who spends time outdoors and is concerned about B.C.’s legacy of rich natural resources.
Nelson makes it sound easy — trotting behind poachers until they drop from exhaustion — but, the reality is fish and game officers in North America are eight times more likely to die on the job than police officers, he said.
The resident of Kamloops since the mid-1990s has been attacked by a grizzly, hit by an oar that broke his shoulder, hit by a truck when someone tried to run him over and stabbed in downtown Kamloops.
In Poachers, he writes about it all.
He retired in 2012 after working five years in Vancouver as a manager with DFO. Armed with notes in a diary he’d kept since he was a kid in Saskatchewan who graduated from a natural-resource technology program, Nelson decided to write a book.
And, while the focus is on stories of catching poachers, several chapters — and Nelson’s ultimate goal — is to change the way government operates the department and conserves salmon.
“The amount of illegal fishing going on in the province is astonishing,” said Nelson, who made a presentation to the Cohen Commission on Fraser River salmon four years ago — to the chagrin of his bosses.
“What the federal government has done to the DFO is appalling.”
Nelson said he has gradually seen DFO staff rendered silent by management, politicians and public-relations staff. In its place, government has adopted the same professional reliance found in forestry, for example — the poachers running the river, so to speak.
At the same time, DFO enforcement and habitat conservation field staff have been drastically cut back. During a year like this one, when more than 20-million sockeye are expected to return to the Fraser, it doesn’t much matter. But, there are years and rivers where spawners number in the hundreds and poaching can kill a natural history that’s existed for hundreds or thousands of years.
Nelson said he hopes Poachers makes politicians and senior bureaucrats squirm.
And, just like he did with reporters and commissions of inquiry for most his career, he’ll keep talking.
Randy Nelson will be at Chapters tomorrow (Oct. 4) at 1 p.m. for a book-signing event.
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