Bringing salmon back.

To ward off federal intervention, an unlikely coalition is trying to save Oregon's coastal watershed. But it's slow going. And there are no guarantees.

Chuck Matayo swings the steering wheel of his truck like he's at the helm of a boat on the ocean.

"I hope you're not prone to sea sickness," he says.

"Pickup coming up Marlow Creek," his partner, Mike Lester, squawks into a CB radio. The three of us brace ourselves against each other in the crowded cab.

Matayo pilots the truck up a winding narrow dirt road through dark, heavily forested mountain ravines. He wears a beat-up cowboy hat and chain-smokes as he drives, looking like a Marlboro man at 60. Until a few years ago he skippered his own fishing boat out of Coos Bay, Oregon. For 20 years he chased salmon up and down the Pacific Coast.

But salmon populations have plummeted over the past two decades; Many species have been declared threatened or endangered, and the federal government has clamped down hard on fishing.

"We're both displaced American fishermen," says Lester, a talkative 52-year-old with a salt-and-pepper beard and short ponytail. "We were regulated out of a trade."

The two ex-fishermen spend their days driving logging roads through the steeply corrugated mountain drainages of the Coos River watershed in southwestern Oregon, trying to help save the salmon they once fished.

Matayo and Lester work for the Coos Watershed Association, a nonprofit formed two years ago to improve the "environmental integrity and economic stability" of the 600-square-mile Coos River watershed. This is a long-term project. It would take "years" to survey all the logging roads lacing these drainages, says Matayo. But they don't have much time.

Under the Oregon Coastal Salmon Restoration Initiative, a deal brokered by Gov. John Kitzhaber, the National Marine Fisheries Service is giving the watershed association two years to prove that its efforts can save the coho salmon (see page 19). If they can't, the coho will be declared threatened, and mandatory requirements could force major changes throughout the watershed, from logging in the headwaters and farming along the lower reaches of the river, to shipping in the port of Coos Bay and recreational fishing, a mainstay of tourism along the state's southern coast.

So Matayo and Lester and six other ex-fishermen are out scouring the woods using a triage system. They start at the top of drainages and work their way down, surveying streams where coho are known to spawn.

Today they are surveying logging roads in Elliott State Forest, identifying badly placed or damaged culverts that might block coho salmon from reaching the river's headwaters. This winter the salmon will return there to spawn after circling the Pacific Ocean for two or three years.

Matayo points out where the state forestry department has put valuable logs into the creek to slow water, catch sediment and gravel, and build up spawning beds. This is one of the association's quick fixes to increase spawning habitat.

Farther downstream they meet up with other members of their crew who have found a culvert with a four-foot drop that blocks spawning coho from a tributary. The culvert will go to the top of the list for replacement.

"When they first built these roads they didn't give a damn," says Lester. "That was back when the fish were so thick you could walk across them."

Later we stop to visit Lyle Maguire, whose house sits a hundred yards from Glenn Creek, an important spawning area. Last year the watershed association planted trees - cedar, Douglas-fir, and willow - and fenced a 15-foot-wide strip of Maguire's pasture along the creek to stop erosion. The association paid for the fence and labor; the state forestry department donated the trees. In exchange, Maguire, a retired logger, promised to keep his horses off the streamside for five years - long enough, they hope, for the trees to take hold.

When Maguire first heard the association's offer "it sounded too good to be true," he says. "I kept wondering, what's the catch? So far there hasn't been any. A few people think it's a waste of tax-dollar money. But for the guy getting the work done it's a good thing. And it makes the streams look a lot better."

The Maguire place sits in the transition zone between forest and lowlands, where the influences felt from the tide and the river balance out.

From here on down to the town of Coos Bay, the Coos River is largely confined by dikes and pastures. "All that farmland was a nursery for fish," says Lester. "It was all willows and meanders. They ditched it and put fill and cows on it. That's progress, I guess."

The Coos Watershed Association is trying frantically to patch together the strands of a once-rich but now badly strained ecosystem. When members gather for lunch at a trendy brew pub in Coos Bay, they seem to be on their best guarded behavior. It feels somewhat like a shotgun wedding in a small corner of the great Northwest timber and salmon wars.

Before he talks to me, Bob Laport, the Coos County forester and a founder of the association, looks around to see who might be listening.

"Forestry is taking the heat for everybody's problems," he says. Laport manages 15,000 acres of timberland that earns around $4 million a year for the county, roughly 30 percent of its discretionary general revenue.

He saw a crisis coming and formed the association to try to avert it. "When I realized that the coho would be petitioned for listing," he says, "I felt if we could get a small group together that controls the biggest portion of the land, we had a chance to come up with a plan and strike a deal with the National Marine Fisheries Service."

Laport talked to Mike Graybill, who manages the South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve in Coos Bay. Together, the logger and the environmentalist spoke to people at Weyerhaeuser and Manasha, the two largest commercial timber companies in the area. With the county, state, the Bureau of Land Management, and the companies on board, the association has representatives who control close to 80 percent of the watershed.

Laport says the association has been useful for "getting to know each other and how we affect each other's businesses. And it has lessened distrust between agencies and landowners," he says. "But we have not seriously tested ourselves as an organization. Everybody thinks we can change the way we do business and still do business. We have a long way to go."

"We do things we're happy to do," says Laport. "We find a culvert with a four-foot drop barrier. We can tear it out and put in a more expensive one, and open half a mile of habitat. That's a no-brainer."The true test will come, he says, when the association makes a decision that "requires giving up financial gain or opportunity for financial gain."

So far that hasn't happened, he adds.

Tom Hoesly represents the Manasha Corporation, which owns 40,000 acres of timberland in the Coos River watershed. When Laport first approached the company about joining the association, "I was kind of skeptical of how you could get landowners to cooperate," Hoesly says. "A lot of people just say no, they don't want anyone on their property. The biggest hurdle we have are the areas close to the estuaries - ranchland, rural individuals, fishing industry, cargo, shippers, and residents around the bay."

Timber companies have already felt the pain of having spotted owl nest sites on their lands, Hoesly says, adding that it may take an endangered species listing to wake others up.

Rancher Joan Mahaffy hopes the association can help avoid that pain. She likes the philosophy that "we could control our destiny by recognizing the problem and deciding what to do to fix it, instead of having the federal government tell us what to do." But she bristles at talk of giving up any use of her own family's land along the river.

So far the association has persuaded only smaller land owners, such as Lyle Maguire, to let it use their land.

"Nobody with productive land has given it up yet," says Mahaffy.

Allan Rumbaugh looks over this disputatious watershed with practiced patience.

Rumbaugh is president of the Coos Watershed Association. He is also director of the Port of Coos Bay. While his office affords a calm view of the waterfront, Rumbaugh acknowledges that conflict is an essential element of the watershed association. "The fact that we exist is already a success," he says. "But we needed to have a gun pointed at our head."

As director of the port, Rumbaugh has an economic interest in the health of the watershed. "We're interested in a healthy watershed because we want a healthy economy," he says. "But the threat of an endangered species listing was the number one motivation. The fear is that business as we know it will be shut down."

Coos Bay bills itself as "the world's largest lumber port." With 25,000 residents here and in neighboring North Bend, the Bay Area has the largest population concentration on the Oregon coast.

So far, the actions being taken in the woods haven't had a significant effect on the port. Capturing more sediment will probably require buying some of the farms along the river, breaching the dikes, and restoring the salt marshes that once grew there and served as refuge for fish during their journeys from mountain to sea and back again. "That's doable," says Rumbaugh, "but we haven't got to that stage yet."

The association is just in its early stages. There is much yet to do, and it will take more money. "We like to pat ourselves on the back," says Rumbaugh, "but only over a course of years will we really know if we were successful."

The Coos Watershed Association's coordinator, Anne Donnelly, works out of a cramped office on the second floor of the harbor master's building at the mouth of the river in nearby Charleston. She is a hard person to catch up with.

She is constantly on the run. And now more so than ever.

The summer work season is coming to an end. Her crews have to be out of the rivers and creeks before the rains begin and the salmon return. Congress has not funded the Hire the Fishermen program, which paid the association's crews for the past two years.

Yet the whole watershed restoration effort - and now the Oregon Coastal Salmon Restoration Initiative - is resting on their work. Not only do they need to show immediate results, they need to overcome decades of deep distrust built up during the salmon and timber wars in the Northwest.

So although Donnelly is frantic, she is also careful and diplomatic when we sit down to talk about the association.

In the beginning, she says, "people were not sure what they were bring asked to join. There was some apprehension this would be a socialist land-management group. We're more like a Red Cross for the watershed. We're not telling anybody what to do. We don't have enforcement powers. We don't want any power or authority. Nobody is forcing anybody to do anything. We're making it easier for those who want to do the right thing.

"What makes an issue hard is when someone has something to lose. If somebody is asked to give up financial gain it won't be the watershed association that does it. It'll be the federal government.

"There's a lot of anxiety about the future," she says. "The state has never tried this. Nobody knows what it may all mean. There is hope but because of the underlying uncertainty, it is cautious hope."