39—Swimming Upstream

I stood in the middle of the living room looking at the bird standing waif-like in the middle of the tar roof—no emergency kit, nothing to save him from the hazards of his world but the feathers on his back. 
“Where do you go at night?” I wondered aloud. 

“kwik,” he said and waddled to the window. 

The cats hopped up on the sofa, more to participate in the exchange than protest it.

Even in this peaceful moment, I could feel down through my feet and the apartment below, down through the dune on which the drafty old beach house stood, the minuscule movement of that massive oceanic plate pushing its way under the continental plate on which I was now living this strange little life—the friction, the tension building silently, slowly toward some in determinant but inevitable moment of cataclysm.

“How do you survive those terrible winter storms?” I asked the bird.

“kwawk,” he said with a tilt of his head, then abruptly fluttered off at the sound of his frenzied flock. The cats and I went to the window and watched the big flap over a free lunch that was being tossed out just beyond the motel deck by a gaggle of vacationers enjoying some beers around a big steamer pot. 

•••

In the days that followed, the bird began showing up less and less, then not at all. 

Relieved, I busied myself: Signing up at the local Y. Taking kayak lessons. Thinking about buying a kayak. Walking along the beach, exploring nearby forest trails, telling myself that the inertia I called writers block would be transformed into clarity and purpose when my furniture arrived. 

Then, one day in mid June the furniture did arrive. Before the dawn of the next day, I’d emptied all the boxes and by the following afternoon had taken the boxes to recycling and had everything in its place.

As the final point of order, I hooked up my TV, turned it on, and kicked back in my recliner to enjoy the rush-hour traffic report. Yep, I was living the dream of thousands trapped in similar jams from coast to coast—I was in good health, had no debts or obligations, was living in a house by the sea for less than most urban apartments cost, and could do whatever I wanted, which in my case was to write that book about why we can't solve the problems in our schools. 

However, in the days that followed, every time I stopped being busy and sat down at the computer, anxiety overwhelmed me. Freedom was not “just another word for nothing left to lose.” It was a void in which I had to create my own meaning, find my own confidence. Maybe I should give myself a few weeks to relax, give the ideas time in this new environment to percolate. 

With the 2000 election season approaching, I decided to read up on on local issues and began looking through books and articles I'd collected for a place to start—timber, dairy, salmon—yes, salmon. Back junior, I’d seen a film strip showing young salmon making their way down cold clear rivers to the sea, then several years later as adults finding their way back from the ocean, leaping up cascading rivers to the calm streams where they were born. Having been battered nearly to death by their journey, they would spawn and then die, their decaying remains becoming nutrients to perpetuate life. 

Fishing at Celilo Falls, www.ohs.org

For 15,000 years, native people had fished the wild rivers of the Pacific Northwest for salmon. Pictures showed how some had fished with nets from wooden platforms built into basalt and extending out over the Columbia River at place called Celilo Falls. But then in the early fifties, when I was watching that film strip about salmon, the Army Corps of Engineers was building a dam on the Columbia River at Celilo Falls. This dam was part of a series of hydroelectric dams. By 1957, the dam had silenced the falls, ending the tradition that had gone on for millennia. 

Dams along the Columbia had also changed the lives of the salmon as they traveled up and down the river. According to an August 24, 1993 article in The Seattle Times: “Baby salmon shoot down a pipe and into the hatches of a Columbia River barge. Riding in a dark hold, they will be transported hundreds of miles until they are past Bonneville Dam, where they are released for their journey to the Pacific Ocean. The accommodations are definitely steerage class. But that is better than getting lost in a slack water reservoir, being eaten by a bird, or crushed against a turbine.”

Fish Barge, www.themilitarybarge.com

Eight hundred thousand fish sloshing around in a barge. It was smell that guided salmon instinctively back to the river where they were born. What would their instinct tell them about this?

Salmon Boy, as the ancient myths tell us, did not respect the salmon which brought life to his people. When playing at the beach with his friends, the thoughtless swam out too far and drowned. The salmon people took him to their underwater village, which as it turned out was much like his own with villagers seeking food and children playing. When the boy got hungry, he was told to go fishing for a real child, but with the condition that after eating he threw back the bones and other remains to the place where he’d gotten his food. He did this but found that his eye began to hurt and at length discovered an eye he hadn’t thrown back. Disposing properly of the eye, his own eye recovered. And he was eventually was reincarnated as a shaman who taught people to respect the salmon and the ocean.

It's easy, I thought, to lose ourselves between myth and busyness.

Miraculously, those fish in the barges found their way back home. 
Have we kept our children so busy achieving and acquiring for so long that we have forgotten to teach them the wisdom in disposing of that which doesn't nurture them? 

Click here for a YouTube adventure with salmon.