How the Pacific Makes Love to the Rockies

non-fiction

The following is an excerpt from an essay in the current issue of Emergence Magazine, Vol. 6, SEASONS. If you would like to read the entire piece, you can get your copy of this incredible collection of haiku, essays, short fiction, photography, conversations, and poetry, infused with a spectrum of color and light here.

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I. “The Environment” Is Not the Guardian Holiness

Emergence has invited me to explore, in their words, “spiritual traditions tied to the seasons that have been broken and must be remade.” I chose the above title because I’ve spent seven decades immersed in the ways the Pacific Ocean makes love to the Rocky Mountains, and my title is not a poetic flourish. Based on lifelong immersion, I’m here to tell you that most of this lovemaking is a literal, mutual, two-way giving and receiving involving thousands of interwoven species of flora and fauna, and the spiritual traditions tied to that interweaving have been very broken by the quote unquote “free market” delusion that Earth is an “infinite resource” to be exploited for financial gain regardless of the cost to life. My lifelong home ground, the states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana, are a tapestry of extremely varied and vulnerable landscapes, weathery forces, living beings, and wild intricacy to which people from all over the world flock like grateful birds simply to see Earth being Earth; see wildness intact; see the beautiful creations not of Catholicism’s “Holy Ghost,” but of the Divine Female properly known as Sophia dreamt up before our very eyes.

We call these landscapes ours, but the Pacific Northwest and Northern Rockies are a web of life-forms and mysteries we did not create, and cannot regenerate once the wild’s ability to sustain life has been savaged. What we currently call “North America” is pre-American and will be post-American, and is not even vaguely described by the pitiful term “the environment.” If the Bible began with the words “In the beginning God created the environment,” it would be out of print. The lovemaking between the Pacific and the Rockies is a guardian holiness that enables biodiversity to diversify, natural selection to naturally select, and generation after generation of kids to muck around in river shallows playing with frogs, fingerlings, and caddis fly casings, and it is governed not by such creatures as “governors,” but by elemental and celestial harmonies as powerful as Earth’s spinning, yet as delicate as an orb weaver’s dew-bedecked web. These places, forces, and spiritual mysteries, to put it the ancient way, are our Mother; the living terrain her body; the flora her clothes; the lakes, rivers, rills her blood and arteries; the seasons and weathers her moods; the birds, fish, fauna, humans all, equally, her offspring. And every man, woman, and child striving to defend the life and lives she supports—even in poverty and political impotence; even against monstrous power and seemingly hopeless odds—is not only a hero but an integral part of her, hence every bit as holy as she whom they seek to defend.

II. Ceaseless Flow

The Native salmon tribes of the 258,000-square-mile Columbia River Basin did not measure the passing of time with calendars that divide the flow of seasons into linear months, weeks, days, digital minutes, seconds, and nanoseconds. Judging by the tribes’ 12,000-year-old artifacts, surviving languages, and remnant myths and legends, they experienced the flow of seasons by tracking the copious number of fish species that came charging up the rivers of the Basin, affording the tribes and hundreds of other species unsurpassed protein and Omega-3 fatty acids as the vast forests of the same region throve on marine nitrogen distributed over thousands of riparian miles by the salmon-eaters’ scat.

Is it possible for those of us measuring our lives with computer digits and procuring our food at chain supermarkets to track the eternal Now by turning our attention to migratory species arriving by river and sky many miles from our urban and suburban homes? The answer “Not likely” probably goes without saying. So what can we do to deepen connection to a cosmology based on literal and spiritual life-forms?

In his essay “Thoughts in Solitude” the great Trappist contemplative, Thomas Merton, put it like this:

Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. It is only by making our knowledge part of ourselves, through action, that we enter into the reality that is signified by our concepts. . . . Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life and life to thought in such a way that we are always growing, always experiencing new things in the old and old things in the new. Thus life is always new.

This is a way of understanding time’s flow that I can get behind. My favorite way of experiencing new things in the old and old things in the new has been intimately entwined, lifelong, with what began as fishing to catch fish, but long since evolved into friendships with rivers and streams where the main attraction is intimacy with the hosts of birds, fish, aquatic insects, and riparian flora and fauna that thrive along rivers and creeks. Catching fish has become secondary.

In the last stanza of “Cabin Poem,” my friend, the poet Jim Harrison, said he yearned to finish his life “disguised as a creek . . .” I understand why. I’ve had hundreds of strange and wonderful encounters with the denizens of creeks, rivers and riparians over the thousands of days I’ve spent on, and literally in, flowing waters. An uncanny example of the strange and wonderful: Listening to one of Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee’s talks on Emergence last year, he asked his listeners, referring to the Earth, “How would you walk across a lover’s back?” Wild resonations swept through me when his words summoned from memory how, in my late twenties, to reach my favorite high desert Oregon river from Portland, I had to get up in pitch darkness and drive so far that, after half a day spent fly fishing in desert heat, I’d nap to be rested for the evening caddis hatches.

After one such nap I woke in the shade of the towering canyon walls and noticed my back felt oddly cool. Sitting up, I removed my shirt—and burst out laughing. Field mice had tiptoed onto my back and eaten a 12-by-18-inch hole in the flannel! What a reply, nearly fifty years later, to Emmanuel’s uncanny question! I’d given the mice the shirt off my back, passing a gift on to their offspring in the selfless way Earth gifts us all, day and night.

As said, the Northwest tribes who inhabited this region celebrated the flow of seasons by preparing for precisely which anadromous fishes would next arrive in their customary fishing places. There were a plethora of species in the historic Columbia Basin’s dam-free rivers about which we know almost nothing today. My river-brother, the writer and sage Barry Lopez, tapped into a version of tribal attentiveness during the fifty years he spent observing the Chinook salmon on Oregon’s McKenzie River. “The world of variables salmon are alert to, to which they respond, is astonishingly complex,” he wrote. “The closer we look the more we see the individual animal is a reflection of the organization of the energy around it. To try to understand the animal apart from its background—except as an imaginative exercise—is to risk the collapse of both.”

To closely witness the Chinooks’ epic migration, arduous spawning, and total self-sacrifice to create tiny silver offspring is to experience salvific wisdom alive and well in running water; it’s the Pacific making love to mountains before our eyes. Barry felt this so strongly he couldn’t sleep during the McKenzie’s fragile fall salmon run if he didn’t first check on the adult Chinook that reproduced in the side channel closest to his home.

Because I’ve known my favorite eight or ten rivers so intimately, I too know what has gone missing from them. Essential Indigenous food traditions have been devastated globally in a multi-century disaster larger than any mind can track. This might be the place to admit that educating one’s wild heart teaches, in the words of William of Saint-Thierry, that “Amor ipse intellectus est, love in itself is already the beginning of knowledge.” But it’s also the place to admit that love for Chinook salmon and orcas in the Columbia River’s compassion-stripped corridor teaches, as the American poet laureate Stanley Kunitz wrote, that “in a murderous time / the heart breaks and breaks / and lives by breaking.”

III. Streams Cascading Empty Toward Human Realms

So many beautiful things happen in even the smaller streams blessed with runs of salmon and steelhead. In November on the creek I lived on near the Oregon coast, I’ve sat up to my ribs in neoprene waders, watching two otters not twenty feet away share an adult coho’s entire body, discussing its complex flavors in urbane otter chitter. I once fished the headwaters of a coastal salmon and steelhead stream so fog-bound and so seldom visited by humans that a blacktail doe stepped out of the gray a few feet from me, stepped even closer to sniff the tip of my fly rod as if to find out whether I was real, strolled fifty feet upstream, gave the same sniff to my fishing partner’s rod, then melted back into the gray. I’ve watched water ouzels stroll the massive, rotting backs of still-living still-spawning Chinooks, singing blithely as they danced upon the salmons’ very death. I’ve watched scores of coho salmon arrive in my home river, spawn for long, exhausting days, then weaken, drifting downstream as they die; I’ve watched their carcasses hang from branches or flutter from the torn metal of drowned cars; watched them lie inert in the quietest water, turning black for days, white for a few more, before sending out pale clouds of a ghostly green growth that let me see decomposition as a kind of blossoming. I’ve watched swarms of the ghost cohos’ two-inch offspring nibble those blossoms the way the faithful nibble the body of Christ. Like all who worship on salmon rivers, I’ve witnessed in water the death, the resurrection, and the life.

When I moved to Montana in 1993 I became intimate with the longest wild salmon migration route on Earth, and caught and released Idaho salmon and steelhead that had come six hundred miles inland and six thousand feet above the Pacific, climbing the most powerful river of its size in North America with no help from legs or feet.

A dozen years into that fishing I began losing sleep over the spring and summer Chinook that should have been coming home to their high-elevation birth houses on the Montana border, but whose young were being slaughtered annually by a migratory passage chopped into 450 miles of overheated desert reservoirs by eight gigantic dams. For millennia Idaho’s Chinook salmon born in Columbia and Snake River headwaters traveled as far as 900 miles downriver, then turned north at the Columbia’s mouth, becoming the main food source of Puget Sound orcas’ living fifteen hundred or more miles from their mountain birth houses. Those orcas still teach their young an ancient word for this largest of salmon species. Orcas literally leap for what a child would call joy as the Interior West’s last few Chinook reach the Sound. But a feeble remnant of formerly abundant salmon is not enough. Extinction now speeds toward the Sound’s dwindling orca pods. If you have not made a study of the grief-shattered orca mother, Tahlequah, who with the help of her pod carried her dead and disintegrating calf a thousand miles through the Salish Sea for seventeen days as millions of people tracked her sorrow globally, you have missed a tragedy as searing as any by the ancient Greeks or Shakespeare.

How to bear the emptiness of the Interior West’s headwaters as they flow all those miles to the starving orcas of Puget Sound? Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, ends with a staggeringly beautiful description of wild brook trout in a post-apocalypse world that could no longer sustain trout. If Cormac had lived in wild Idaho, his famed final paragraph may have read more like this:

Once wild salmon defined these mountains. You could see them holding in the strong, clear currents, the edges of their fins trembling in the flow. They were wounded silver, massive, muscular, torsional, their ancestral wildness blessing every high-elevation stream. They smelled of ocean in your hands. On their sides gleamed maps of the Pacific in its becoming. On their backs, mazes of the ways by which they’d come. Maps and mazes of things that could not be put back. Not be made whole again. In the birth houses where, for eons, they’d sacrificed their lives that their kind might live, all things hummed of mysteries older than man. Today, their streams cascade, empty, toward human realms.

How to part with creatures so perfectly self-giving? What to pray for as I wander tributaries stripped of their keystone species in just two purblind human generations?

I pray thanks to salmon and steelhead for the treasure it’s been to know their impossible strength via a rod that carried me across the species barrier as I played them. I pray thanks to have loved and released each one. I pray thanks that their lovemaking has for millennia wed mountains to ocean as no other creature has, or can, or shall. I pray that, like the speaker of the Gospel words “It is finished,” crucified salmon will one day rise from the dead. I pray their spirits, lifted by tree roots from the riparians, migrate up the trees’ torsos to keep company with owls in the canopies, and with higher mysteries in the canopy of stars. I pray their beauty and self-sacrifice remain so alive in my heart and hands that, even now, spirit salmon will guide me on the shores of what remains.