Why not traipse back this week to that old, familiar topic of salmon?

Yes, salmon, specifically Connecticut River Atlantic salmon, which I once spent a lot of time and energy on before wandering off to other subjects that tickled my fancy. But now, briefly back to the fish fit for kings and noblemen. Who knows how long before I’ll revisit it again, if ever? For that matter, who cares?

The impetus for this step back in time is twofold 1.) a recent rereading of Catherine Carroll Carlson’s 1992 UMass doctoral dissertation based on archaeological record and titled “The Atlantic Salmon in New England Prehistory and History: Social and Environmental Implications” and 2.) a surprise press release that found its way to me from Oswego County, N.Y., promoting what may prove to be just another pie-in-the-sky Atlantic salmon-restoration fantasy.

More than anything else, what leads me to suspect a fruitless scheme in the making is the press release’s lead paragraph stating with bold bravado that, “Back in the early years of the 19th century, Lake Ontario had the greatest population of landlocked Atlantic salmon in the world. So many ran the tributaries each fall to spawn that men could drive horse-drawn wagons into the streams and spear or net a loadful. Housewives would wade in up to their knees and catch salmon dinners in their aprons.”

Oh boy! Here we go again, fellas. Talk about hyperbole? Haven’t we been through this before? Remember the stories about walking across shallow Connecticut River constrictions on the backs of large, bottlenecked salmon? Yeah, right!

All I can say is thank the heavens I made it a habit way back when of taking rhetoric classes each semester during an erratic but not totally wasted college adventure. What that subject taught me was to avoid one-source stories and be suspicious of all messengers and authoritative filters. When you understand who the messenger is, and why he or she’s trying to sell whatever it is they’re pushing, you learn to be skeptical, which I truly am. In fact, by now I may even be a proud and committed cynic.

But isn’t it interesting that such a press release would, by chance, at this time, arrive in my inbox right on the heels of rereading Carlson’s scholarly treatment of a topic that should have been vetted before the infamous Connecticut River Salmon-Restoration Program was ever kicked into high gear some 50 years ago and ultimately failed miserably?

What most folks probably don’t realize is that there were indeed insiders who were skeptical from the start of the altruistic salmon program. We’re talking about trained, card-carrying fisheries biologists, no less, men who warned true-believer colleagues that their pet project was a long shot at best, that in their humble opinions, Atlantic salmon never populated our Connecticut River in great numbers. And if ever salmon were plentiful, it was just a temporary southern range shift triggered by the Little Ice Age, which New England rivers just so happened to be benefiting from during colonial times.

The problem was that the people in charge wouldn’t listen to reason or alternative hypotheses, and in fact went so far as to rudely ignore voices of reason and caution during what should have been open and honest information exchanges. Well, there was none of that, just nasty looks and threatening gestures. Oppositional feedback was unwelcome. It was a recipe for disaster, which eventually came to fruition this millenium, forcing the plug to be forever pulled on the program in 2012. Turn out the lights, the party’s over. Yet, still, a total of 123 salmon stragglers have migrated upriver the past two years, down to 31 this year.

UMass student anthropologist Carlson delivered her bad news in 1992 to a chorus of boos and catcalls from true-believers chasing an impossible dream of a establishing a viable Connecticut River salmon sport fishery. Yes, it seems Ms. Carlson took it upon herself to investigate some 75 known Northeastern prehistoric Native American fishing sites and, go figure, found almost no archaeological evidence of salmon. The great salmon myth had finally been debunked.

But no. Whoa! Hold your horses, Dude. That was not what stubborn proponents wanted to hear. In fact, they refused to listen and went into their finest damage-control mode, choosing instead to mount a public-relations campaign discrediting Ms. Carlson’s work, and anyone with the audacity to cast light upon her findings. Included were the four advisors who supervised and signed off on the validity of Carlson’s study: Dena F. Dincauze, Boyd E. Kynard, H. Martin Wobst, and Alan Swedlund — all bona-fide experts with the papers to prove it — not to mention any scribe diligent enough to find it and inappropriate enough to report the troubling conclusions.

Now, in a different place called the Lake Ontario watershed — where industrialists had by the Sixties literally killed the lake, polluting it to the level of fire hazard before a clean-up efforts improved water quality — they’re trying to restore landlocked Atlantic salmon as a new component to a viable trout and salmon sport-fishery that pulls in mega tourist bucks. The targeted tributaries are the Salmon and Oak rivers, where the initiative seems from afar to be a long shot given the results of other Atlantic salmon-restoration attempts over the past 25 years. Who knows? It may work. But the odds seem weighted against it.

So don’t hold your breath waiting for a rare success story to unfold on Lake Ontario, and don’t buy the propaganda about 19th century housewives scooping salmon supper from feeder streams with their aprons, either. It’s a tawdry sales job that most who read it will swallow hook, line and sinker without questions.

Which reminds me … I have in recent years polled students attending elite colleges and have concluded that rhetoric is not generally offered these days. Why? Well, I can only speculate, employing my alternative world view. My guess is that it has something to do with the fact that marketplace skeptics and cynics don’t buy sales pitches cranked out by clever spinmeisters earning big money in our consumerist culture, where everything from toilet paper to presidents is sold to a dazed, indebted public that prefers its news from tweets and texts and 15-second sound bites.

Orwell sounded the alarm long ago, when few listened. Even fewer want to hear it today. I find myself pondering whether it’s already too late to take heed?