Ray Troll paints fish: fish swimming, fish being eaten, fish eating each other in a long chain, fish forming a ladder to the heavens, and fish flying through the air.  His wacky shirts, posters, and murals of marine life are known across the country, and in Alaska—well, you’re not a real Alaskan unless you have a Ray Troll t-shirt that says “Spawn Till You Die” or “Fish Hard, Die Free” or “Fish Worship: Is It Wrong?”

Ray became hooked on fish when he came to Ketchikan in the summer of 1983 to sell fish on the dock and help his sister start a seafood store.  “I landed in the middle of this fish culture,” he says, and he has never left it.  “I have not exhausted the subject,” says Ray.  “It’s led me to all aspects of fish and the marine world.  There’s sport fishing, commercial fishing, canneries, Native culture, fish scientists, fish enthusiasts, and fish dorks like myself.  I’m a bona fide fish dork.”

But Ray’s art isn’t just about his passion for creatures that swim.  Because fish are at the heart of nearly all things Southeast Alaskan, Ray’s fish obsession has naturally become linked with an enthusiasm for the local history, Native culture, and ecology of the Tongass.

The Naha watershed near Ketchikan is a veritable playground for people like Ray.  The area is steeped in local lore, having been the site of a skirmish between explorer George Vancouver’s men and local Native Alaskans and, later, of Southeast Alaska’s first large cannery.  Even the name “Naha” means “mother” in Chinook, a jargon composed of French, English, and Pacific Coast native languages used by traders up and down the coast in the nineteenth century.

The Naha also has lots of fantastic fish.  An avid angler of uncertain skill, Ray has fished throughout Southeast Alaska for twenty years, but the Naha River is one of his favorite spots.  The Naha’s many lakes and fishing holes are shaded by ancient trees under which fishermen and bears compete for the river’s bounty.  There, in spring, Ray has often sought the elusive steelhead, a creature that Ray describes as “the holy grail of sport fish.  They’re wily, they’re not as abundant, and they’re sort of the supertrout,” he says, “although if you want to get technical they’re not really a trout, they’re actually a species of salmon.” 

And for Ray, Naha is one of the best places to catch them.  The watershed has long been important habitat for steelhead, as well as sockeye salmon, because both species need lakes to spawn in and, unlike most other rivers in mountainous Southeast, the Naha river leads directly from a lake to the ocean without first going over waterfalls too high for fish to leap.  Partly because of its rich fisheries, Native Alaskans have depended on the Naha for generations. 

In the Naha, the connections between humans, wildlife, history, and ecology are clear, and Ray is conscious of these links whether he’s fishing the river or painting in his studio.  This awareness perhaps explains designs of his like “Stream of Consciousness,” which shows a river overflowing with (among other things) humans, salmon, bears, a Tlingit warrior, a kingfisher, and a television.  His understanding of nature’s intricate links also explains why Ray’s otherwise dreamlike images are more often than not backed by solid science. “Scientists…find isotopes from fish in trees, at the top, several hundred yards away from the streambeds,” Ray says.  “It shows you the connectivity of the whole thing.  The fish are actually in the trees.  I’ve done an image of that, salmon flying through the trees.  So science feeds the art.”