Salmon Life

When May comes it will charge up the Chilkat like a battle of bands. The fish and their entourage of sea lions, seals, and shorebirds will all soon be singing to the backbeat of the melting streams and rising river, bears black and brown splashing for breakfast, the distant (and not so distant) thunder from avalanches, and the sweet hoo-hooing of the grouse. From May’s hooligan and king salmon tango until early winter’s eagle ball in Klukwan, it’s one big sold-out show after another, the rest of the salmon—sockeye, pinks, chum, and coho—following the kings. The Chilkat concert season ends in late November and early December with a grand finale of the largest gathering of bald eagles in the world. Some three thousand annually descend on the snowy river flats near Klukwan to feed on what’s left of the spawning chums concentrated in naturally occurring warm pools in the otherwise frozen river twenty miles upstream from where I stand.

Everyone and everything is part of this ancient and modern song and dance. The people, the fish, the place. In Klukwan they chant the stories and drum with the spirits of the animals and fish guiding them. We all eat salmon, and some of us make a living catching them. My neighbor Gregg who has gillnetted for salmon for about forty years, bangs on a banjo in a band called the Fishpickers, and he plays bridge with an old gold miner at seven every winter Thursday in the Catholic Church basement. They are great friends, so they avoid talk of a new copper, zinc, silver, and gold mine still in the exploratory phase at the headwaters of the Chilkat. The processes of mining and smelting can’t be good for rivers and salmon.

Once, I thought I might try to write about life and death in the wild and some profound, good lesson I learned after witnessing a cow moose swim and wade toward the island with a relatively newborn calf. A bear had chased them into the river. When she came to a deep channel she tucked the little one underneath her torso, its nose a snorkel poking up between her hind legs. I watched the drama through binoculars from a wheelchair while my family ate pancakes. I had no appetite, thanks to the morphine, which was needed to dull the pain from a smashed pelvis, the result of a truck driver not noticing me pedaling down the quiet street that he drove on every day on his way home for lunch. He even stopped at the intersection and looked both ways before he ran right over me.

I believed that witnessing the cow and calf fight for their lives with so much unknown about my prognosis was a sign that I, too, should not give up.

When my husband said the cow was on the island, we clapped.

Then he said, “I don’t see the calf at all. She keeps looking back.”

I was so sad I couldn’t talk. But there is enough woe in the world already without me making my family feel worse than they already did. Aren’t we all swimming upstream to an unknown fate? Life is too precious to waste it complaining. I asked my daughter to wheel me over to the hospital bed tucked into the front window.

I thanked her and closed my eyes.

Which is a long way of saying that these days the joy I find in walking my dog in this wonderful world is plenty. My good fortune—call it luck or grace—slays me. I certainly don’t deserve this ending any more than that baby moose deserved its. It is a new day and thank God I am in it. That’s why I was humming show tunes in the fog when I totally missed the wolf. It’s not that I wasn’t paying attention. I was celebrating.

News is when things don’t go as planned. News is when a person leaves home on a bike ride and is hit by a truck and doesn’t return for two months.

It is not news when she cycles along the road next to this river twenty-one miles to Klukwan, the Tlingit village that has been there since time immemorial, as the elders say. The mother village of the Chilkat people. One translation of Chilkat is “large basket of fish.” My eggs are all in this basket and, as Mark Twain said, I better be watching it. It holds the two grandchildren next door, two more across town, my children, my husband, my neighbors and favorite fishermen, the beach where the mighty Chilkat meets the sea, and the perfect cookout in July when fresh sockeye is grilled over a driftwood fire and there’s new lettuce and strawberries in a salad from the garden. The children are sunburned, the dogs are all wet, and the run is above average. If that basket spills or is stolen it will be news, but too late to save the precious contents.

Margaret and I decided if nothing else more newsworthy came up that day in our small town, a possibility for sure, the wolf could make the evening report. “Can I call you for a quote?” she asked. I thought, if she does, will I have the courage to say that I think the wolf was trying to tell us to pay attention to the weird weather and to a potential mine of a type that I can’t even pronounce, a mine that straddles a tributary named Klehini, “Mothers’ Water”?

The local stories that endure long past the daily news cycle, thousands of years even, teach that the first people to live in the Chilkat Valley walked from the Interior and came to the backside of these glacier-covered mountains only to be hemmed into an alpine valley by walls of ice. Water from one glacier was backing up, flooding the valley floor. They couldn’t stay there long. There was water running under another glacier down a kind of tunnel. Some of the young men thought they could scale the peaks and climb out, but the families couldn’t, the babies and old people especially could not, and the mothers would not leave their children.

And here the migration tale takes different paths depending on who is telling it, but since I am, I will share the version I imagine. A grandmother volunteers to ride in the canoe down the waterfall under that glacier. She knows she could die, or find a route through the mountains to a new home for her children’s children and beyond. She is old and has nothing—and everything—to lose if she doesn’t try it. She climbs into the canoe. The people sing a song and say a prayer and push her off. She closes her eyes and holds on tight and with an “I love you” is gone. Before she knows that has happened, the canoe skids onto a beach. She is afraid to look. She hears the Chilkat Valley spring symphony of hooligan and salmon. Hope floats her heart higher in her chest, and she opens her eyes and sees a perfect May day—more or less the same as we still do—with sparkling ocean and river, blue sky, tall spruce trees, and the green haze of budding alder, cottonwood, and birch. King salmon leap in the waves, hawks hover over voles scurrying in the grass, goats trip along a cliff. She reckons she has died, but the afterlife is better than she had dreamed. She sneezes. She must be alive if she can’t find her hankie. She is sure it was in her tunic pocket when she left. She sees a young man from her clan looking down from a mountain, so she jumps up and waves with both arms. Her people raft down to join her.

I owe that old woman. Two of my granddaughters are related to those long-ago settlers, maybe even to her directly. I feed them salmon from this river, salmon I’ve smoked in alder the same way she did.

The other day I was walking on the beach with Margaret’s husband, John, who is a salmon gillnetter and a descendent of another tribe who settled farther north. He said that his grandmother was one of three survivors of a Spanish flu epidemic that killed all but three babies in her home village of about two thousand souls. Relatives far from that place reared her.

Even I couldn’t imagine the grief. “I’m just grateful that I inherited her immune system. I never get sick,” John said. On Thanksgiving he eats turkey like the pilgrims who nearly wiped his lineage out. “It’s problematic,” he says, because he does have so much to be thankful for.

When I came from a Seattle nursing home, broken-bodied and afraid I’d never walk again, and my children and mother-in-law helped me into that bed by the window; it was also May. They had remembered to put the screens in, and the sashes were up. You can tell me it was the narcotics talking, but I swear that the music of the river and the salmon swimming up it in that steady, eternal way rafted my spirit to health. The river didn’t bear all my cares away, but made them bearable.

I can climb the stairs to my own room now, and I love waking up here more than ever. But sometimes in December, when the mornings are so dark, I stay under the quilt with Pearl at my feet, listening to the radio news, and feel a weight pressing on my heart. Especially when it’s raining and it should be snowing.

I saw that calf die. I didn’t see the wolf right next to me. I had a truck run me over and was nearly killed because the driver wasn’t paying attention. He meant no harm. Then, I prayed I would live to see grandchildren I didn’t even know I had yearned for. None of my children were even married. Ten years later I have five grandchildren that I love so fiercely it astonishes me. But I missed that wolf in plain sight. What if it had charged Pearl, or worse—if I had been with one of the children and it had rabies or something? What if he decided a howl wasn’t enough to get our attention? What about that mine? I must pay more attention and tell about it.

It is not enough to fall on my knees with my face to the setting sun as a the wild and precious salmon push hard for home, and to pray: O salmon, O river, O air we breathe and water we drink, forgive us for what we have done and what we have left undone, the way my mother taught me, and hand God the helm. I knew a great-grandmother named Belle who crossed out what she called the “royal we” in her prayers replacing it with her name. Heather, what have you done? Heather, what have you left undone? I hear the ghost voice of a dear departed elder, a rosy-cheeked, white-bearded fisherman, a Haines native with a small n, say “Speak for the fish, Heather, and the rest will take care of itself.”

Every year since my mother died, I type and edit my father’s Christmas letter from handwritten faxes sent from his Hudson Valley farm. He is eighty-one and won’t use a computer. In this year’s letter, Dad wrote about how he was the oldest person to complete the annual Hudson River crossing, a two-mile swim sponsored by Pete Seeger to celebrate cleaning up a river that was once too toxic to dip his face in. “You can eat the fish again in some places,” Dad said over the phone. Just before wishing everyone a happy holiday season and joyous New Year, he had me type, “The Earth is on fire and the only strong leader on the world stage is a Russian gangster.” I suggested it was a tad negative for a Christmas card. He was eating his supper and spoke with his mouth full. He calls at dinnertime now that he is alone. He lights a candle, sets the table, heats up some soup, and puts me on speakerphone. He chewed a minute, took a sip of his wine, and said, “Heath, I have to say something and the fuckers are killing us.”

What is a good daughter, mother, and grandmother to do? Sit in her rocker knitting like Madame Defarge, shrieking that the end is near and it’s everyone else’s fault, from Chinese coal plants to Canadian mining companies, swear like a sailor and chug her evening Pinot straight from the bottle, because we are all going to die anyway?