The River Why

by David James Duncan

  Not till the star began to fade and the sky to brighten did it dawn on me that the heavens were mimicking me, or I them: the fog was gone! Vanished in the night without a trace. Old fish-crazed Gus might have scoffed the notion that he was a microcosm mirroring the world, but whoever I now was smiled: it was almost contrived the way the two fogs, inner and outer, had dispersed simultaneously.

  I got dressed, threw fruit in a rucksack, and tore out the door to race the sunlight to the top of Tamanawis Mountain. As I ascended the beams descended, winning the event by a wide enough margin to warm the rock I collapsed on—the same rock Bill Bob used the day he’d drawn maps of the four directions—but I confess I gave north, west, and east only a cursory examination before turning south to the river valley, in case too swift a weaning from my water addiction should bring on a withdrawal delirium. But just looking south and finally seeing something of the place where I lived aroused all the delight I could contain: as the sun went about its business of waking and warming the wooded valley, as its beams crept deeper, rousting lascivious mists from their tree-and-fern bedrooms in the draws, as its warmth spurred thousands of birds to cascades of song or flight, as it finally touched the Tamanawis and set the waters poppling and burning I felt the touch of a Garden World joy, and wondered what would become of my twin if I, instead of he, blazed and diminished into an ecstatic point of light. Letting my eyes flow down the river’s sun-silvered bends, I began humming aloud what seemed to me the pronunciations of the random eroded letters those river bends formed, intoning—in the deepest, wettest voice I could muster—words like “yreeeee… yroooo… yriii… fwoooowrlwrlwrlwrlyryooooo.…” Then a long rapids ending in a pool: “krshrshKRSHKRSHKRSHkrlkrlkrorrkrorrkrorrrrsssshhhhhhhhhhhhrrroooooooo…” Then I stopped, gaped, and burst out laughing as the morning up here with Bill Bob came back to me: he’d said he liked the Tamanawis River—he, the dryest of the dry—and when I asked Why, he laughed and said that was exactly what the river was asking me. Not till now did I catch his drift. There were the letters, there was the word: plain as water, in a flowing, utterly uncrabbed hand, current, erosion, gravity, and chance had written upon the valley floor! Billions of ever-changing, ever-the-same gallons of gurgling sun-and-moon-washed ink, spelling forever, in plain English, . It was incredible. It had to be kidding. Rivers can’t write, let alone ask questions.

  it said. It had a point. What did I know about what rivers could or couldn’t do? But granting it literacy, what did it mean by ? And was it asking me? I didn’t know. I looked upstream and down for a clue, but all I saw were the random scribbled curves of runs and rapids. Yet right below, in quarter-mile letters it had taken centuries to form, water—my favorite element—asked in the only language I could read, .

  The word began to make me nervous. I swiveled to the northeast to escape the sight of it. But today the earth was talkative; today it gave no respite: my newly opened eyes fell upon a smooth almost head-shaped mountain. Within the past year it had been clear-cut on the right, clear-cut on the left, scraped, bulldozed, burned, and 2-4-D-ed to rock and poison soil—but a single-filed swath of mangled, uncut firs had been left to straggle over the summit in a line. It looked like a green-haired Mohican, buried to the neck, beaten, tortured, and left to die. It was hugely pathetic. An entire mountain—not just scalped and maimed but made ridiculous, robbed of all mountain dignity by the absurd surviving swath. “Seed trees,” they’re called by the men who leave them—men who claim they’ll sire forests of the future, men who claim there will be no difference between that future forest and the primordial groves that have been killed. As if an ancient, ever-beautiful, and mysterious virgin is no more desirable than choked rows of “easily harvested” clones. As if devastation, mass murder, and forced mutation, when wrought upon plants and animals, are not crimes but a kind of farming! How could loggers or their employers or whoever the hell was responsible be oblivious to such a sight? The forests gave them incomes, homes, furniture, baseball bats, tool handles—and in return they treated it like an enemy in a bitter war. Granted, trees had to die. But couldn’t men show some shred of gratitude or reverence in the way they killed them? Couldn’t they see the difference between a murder and a sacrifice? I wanted to get a chainsaw and down the swath myself, saving the mountain its shame; I wanted to find who had done this thing, club him cold, give him a Mohican haircut, and bury him to the neck…

  until I looked back at the Tamanawis. it asked me, and the question slowed and confused me just enough to let me remember myself down there fishing, maiming, and murdering trout like enemies in wartime, ticking them off in my Log by the thousand, robbing them of all dignity at death by stuffing them, still thrashing, into my creel, or tallying them like downed bowling pins before flinging them back in the water, pierced and bleeding from my hooks, weakened by my clutching hands, stunned by the too-rare air. And never a thought about the suffering they endured for my amusement. Christ, I was nothing but an aquatic logger; Rodney my chainsaw, trout my trees, I had clear-cut many a pool. I hung my head, waiting for some river-god to give me the Mohican.…

  But nothing happened. I guessed the gods didn’t mess with petty vengeance. Not with haircuts anyway. Maybe they’d drown me later. Or maybe the shame twisting in my gut was the brand of vengeance in which they dealt.

  I wanted to make amends. My first impulse was to build ponds and raise fish—like the penitent loggers who spend their twilight years planting trees. I mentioned this plan to the river. You can guess what it replied.… And again the question slowed and confused me: why plant fish only to watch them die at the hands of jokers like myself? Or if they lived, how would new fish undo the damage done to the maimed or dead? And just what was the damage done? I had to understand my crime before I could amend it. Maybe what was needed was participation in that activity Izaak Walton so long ago recommended to fishermen: maybe I ought to contemplate.

  I tried. I’m not sure that what I did was proper “contemplation,” but whatever it was, I did it long and hard. Was it the death of the fish that bothered me? Was killing the crime? If fish-death was the crux of the issue, then I should start telling fishermen to stop killing fish. But I’d watched H2O at this for years, and I’d seen that such sermons were suspect: for him and his friends more fish meant better flyfishing, better stories, prettier color glossies, a greater reading public, hence a greater income. With ham sandwiches and beer in the cooler at camp, how great was their need for the flesh of fish?

  But I’d once watched a kid named after his own diseased breath eating stolen relish from a styrofoam cup because he was hungry and had no money. So here the issue grew complex. Dead fish are food. Live fish aren’t. People have to eat, so fish have to die. At its roots, the matter was that simple. And a moral condemnation of fish killing doesn’t get far before it runs smack up against Jesus himself, who fed fish to the multitudes, and who helped his disciples to the hundred and fifty and three, and who kept fish-breakfast warmed on the seaside fire after the Resurrection. If Christ didn’t know then what a fish was for, who did? And according to him, you caught fish, you cooked them, you ate them, you thanked his Father from your heart, and that heartfelt thanks made the deaths of fish acceptable, made it a sacrament. My father’s arguments against the killing of fish were based on an inability to understand Sacrifice.…

  But what was the difference between need and greed? How many fish could a man kill without his killing becoming wanton? Which fish could he rightfully kill, and when? And what was the extent of each man’s sacrifice on the day he stopped killing? For a lifelong commercial fisherman it meant the end of a way of life, the separation of men from boats and rivers and seas. And even in “sport” fishing, when a no-kill law leads a weekend plunker to stop fishing, it cuts one of the last little links the man had with the natural world and its wonders. It seemed justifiable to censure greed, but it didn’t seem to be greed that was censured when fishermen were flatly condemned for keeping a few honest, hard-won victims. No, it
wasn’t simply the death of fish that bothered me. The thing I found offensive, the thing I hated about Mohican-mountain-makers, gill-netters, poachers, whalehunters, strip-miners, herbicide-spewers, dam-erectors, nuclear-reactor-builders, or anyone who lusted after flesh, meat, mineral, tree, pelt, and dollar—including, first and foremost, myself—was the smug ingratitude, the attitude that assumed the world and its creatures owed us everything we could catch, shoot, tear out, alter, plunder, devour… and we owed the world nothing in return.

  I found myself thinking of a man I knew when I was small—a friend of Ma’s; a Warm Springs Indian. He was known as Thomas Bigeater—hardly a promising name. He fished the runs of salmon and steelhead at Sherar’s Rapids on the Deschutes, and at Celilo Falls on the Columbia before it was buried by the Dalles Dam. Ma took me when I was six to watch Thomas fish the last run of chinooks to challenge that falls.…

  Ma is a rabid hater of dams and did her best to instill that hate in me: I remember her carrying me to the control-reservoir dam below Lake Simtustus on the Deschutes, just as the summer steelhead run was waning. She stood me on a rock, pointed, and said, “Watch.” Hundreds of steelhead fought the man-made white water blasting over the spillway. Most were battered and dark, growing weak. I’d seen many Deschutes steelhead in my short life, but none like these; I asked what was wrong, why their mouths gaped, why some had gone blind, why they wore the look of fish with hooks in their gullets. She said the dam was new; the fish couldn’t understand it; they’d been battling that torrent for weeks; she said they’d come 300 miles inland, surmounted Bonneville dam, climbed hundreds of rapids, leapt a dozen falls, but the ill-designed ladder leading to their birthplace and spawning grounds eluded them. So they fought till the blasting water broke them, then drifted back down the river they’d climbed—unable to spawn, unable to return to sea. There was an island not far downstream covered with tall cottonwoods: the trees were black with vultures too stuffed with mouldering steelhead meat to fly.

  … But that day at Celilo the chinooks had only gill-netters and Bonneville to contend with. They still came in good numbers, though they were but a shadow of the runs of Thomas’s boyhood. Ma and I sat on the basalt cliffs, watching the old Indian in the distance, dwarfed by the magnitude of the falls. I’d expected a loin-clothed spearman, so for a time I was bored with this fat, dark man in white-people’s clothing. But when Ma handed me the binoculars I saw that his fishing gear consisted of nothing but a leather thong, a totem club, and a handmade net; and when Ma told me the carved club was ancient, handed down from ancestors; and when he dipped the first chinook with the impossibly long-handled net, my boredom died. Thomas was in his seventies, and he was obese, but he ranged along the rickety platform jutting over the froth with light, sure feet; and when he lunged to take a salmon he was sure-handed, fish-quick, strong. Once he’d captured a chinook he would hoist it up, then kneel over it: as it struggled in the net he would put his face to its face, rub it, speak to it… it would cease to thrash. He would look at the sky, at the falls, toward the sea to the west, then turn back to the salmon. I had no idea why he did this. When it was done he killed the fish with the ancient club, and as he did so his face was solemn—none of the pride or giddy jubilation I’d come to think was inevitable on a successful fisherman’s visage. His corpulent agility, his aged youth, his sad success, his undignified dignity, his ugly beauty, his clothes, his name—all of it baffled and fascinated me.

  While we watched him two young men, muscular and loud, strutted out on a platform just below us. The rocks around were covered with tourists, and whenever one pointed a camera at this pair they would scratch their butts or crotches, take dramatic swigs at a whiskey bottle, or flash their middle fingers. I laughed. Ma didn’t. The water beneath them was churning with chinooks. As the pair thrust barbed spears at them they cursed at each miss and whooped at each hit. The salmon they took they ripped from their spears and stuffed, still writhing, into gunnysacks. The ones they missed were “smart fuckers,” the ones they hit “dumb fuckers.” They missed twenty for every one they hit, and maimed many for every one they caught. Ma said spears were illegal, that the two were drunk, and that she didn’t blame them—but I was six and had little idea what these remarks signified. I was accustomed to obnoxious fishermen. I was more interested in watching Thomas.

  I asked Ma why he was named “Bigeater.” She said it was because he ate big. She said Indians always had names that told you a little something about them, plus another name that was their real name. I asked what Thomas’s real name was. She said we’d never know. I asked what her and my real names were. She said we didn’t have any. I asked what “Gus Orviston” meant in English. She said, “Nuthin’.” I said I wished I was an Indian. She said she used to, but no more. I asked why Thomas knelt so long over every fish when he could be catching more, like the guys below us. She said Thomas was praying for the salmon’s spirit, and that if I counted I would see that the drunks weren’t catching more. But they were wounding more. Thomas wounded none. She said Thomas Bigeater was the greatest fisherman in his tribe. He alone fed five big families. I said, “So do you, Ma.” She smiled, but the smile was odd. Crooked. Maybe embarrassed. I asked what spirits were and why she and H2O didn’t pray for them. She said she didn’t know what they were, which was why she didn’t pray for them, that Hen would have to speak for himself, and that she hoped to hell she didn’t have to listen. I asked if Thomas could tell me what spirits were. She said she thought he could if anyone could. I asked if she’d ask him for me. She said, “You ask him. He’s comin’ this way.”

  I looked up. Thomas was crossing a frail wooden trestle, lugging his net, club, and five chinooks threaded on a thong and slung over his shoulder. The load must have weighed 160 pounds. The trestle jounced and swayed with each step and he’d no free hand to hold the rope railing. The river below him was a stone-crushing, blinding mass of white. I said, “Thomas is brave.” Ma shook her head the way that meant yes.

  When he spotted us, Thomas Bigeater smiled and came up; I felt honored and eyed the tourists to be sure they noticed. They noticed the fish and that was all. I too ogled the fish, overcome with admiration; but when I looked at Ma’s and Thomas’s eyes meeting, there was a sadness in his and an anger in hers that I didn’t understand. He laid the catch down carefully, sat beside me with a loud grunt, saw my confusion, and smiled again, but so sadly. He said, “These are the last.”

  “AAEeii! A big fucker!” screamed one of the drunks.

  “God damn dams,” muttered Ma.

  But Thomas had turned to the two men below, his expression as heavy and dark as his body. He said, “It is not the dam. It is they who are to blame!”

  Ma’s face twisted. “Come on, Thomas. I’d get shitfaced too if some three-faced white bureaucrat broke treaty an’ sunk my fishin’ an’ burial grounds ferever!”

  Thomas shook his head. “This is not forever. Dams break. Rivers never do. Two salmon can spawn a thousand. The salmon are an old and patient people.”

  “Well you an’ me sure as hell won’t be ’round t’see ’em returnin’,” said Ma.

  “Fuck! Missed the fucker!” bellowed a drunk.

  Thomas’s face terrified me. Emphatic, he repeated, “It is they who are to blame.”

  Now Ma shook her head. “I just don’t get ya, Thomas. You mean they’re the ones ’at let the white bureaucrats buy ’em out?”

  Thomas said, “Who pays money, who accepts money, this means nothing.” He pointed to the drunks. “It is for their actions that the people must suffer. So it has always been.”

  “But you didn’t want no money!” Ma argued. “An’ no white power company’s got the right to swagger out here wavin’ greenbacks in poor folks’ faces! Nobody’s got the right to wreck a way of life!”

  Thomas regarded Ma’s pinched expression through one cocked eye, then he looked at the ground for a while. Finally he said, “You are angry, little sister. You want to fight. But who is there to f
ight? What weapons would you use?” Ma pursed her lips and frowned, and it was odd to me how powerless and petulant she seemed—like a coyote pup growling at an old Kodiak bear. “I used to fight for the old ways,” he said. “I used to try to defend them with my fists, and my strength. But the old ways of my tribe were not the ways my people wanted.”

  Ma looked confused. I looked at Thomas’s fists, disbelieving that they would fail to defend anything they chose to defend. He said, “Finally I saw that most of my brothers were dark-skinned whites. Old cavalry men come back to suffer as Indians, maybe!” He laughed, then fell solemn: “I stopped fighting. I stopped because I saw that the old ways needed no defending. I stopped because the old ways are never killed, never lost. They are only forgotten, sometimes.”

  Ma’s face was bitter. “I don’t get ya at all, Thomas.”

  He said, “It is not white against Indian that causes suffering. It is the Spirit Father who sends down suffering when the old ways are forgotten. To remember this is the old way. Once I remembered this, I remembered that suffering had been sent down many times before—long before the whites came among my people, hopping like fleas in a drought…”

  “Haii! Got ’im… Agh! stupid little fucker.…” One of the drunks had speared a jack and, seeing its smallness, kicked it from his spear; he watched with contempt as it flopped into the river to bleed to death.

  “You see!” Thomas growled. “That is what I am saying. He kicks himself! He kicks our people! He brings down the anger of the Spirit Father. He helps build the great white dam.”