The Quiet Pools

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  Christopher knew that his father had treasured the privacy that the forest estate assured him, that he had a speculator’s eye for land. But these essays went far beyond that. Embodied in them was a whole world of thought into which Christopher had only had rare glimpses. And, though it was not easy to accept, there was as much emotion in such passages as there had been in his father’s letter. Perhaps more.

  The only way he could make sense of them was to think of them as coming from Jeremiah. But even that was an imperfect answer, because it merely confirmed the fact without explaining it. The man who had written, “These switchback mountain streams tumble through crazy folded hills growing ever wider, ever calmer, as though milked of the energy needed to sustain the conquering fecundity of the forest,” could have written any of Jeremiah’s speeches on the price of the Diaspora.

  Indeed, there were any number of entries that read like sketches for such a speech, echoing the metaphor of desiccation:

  In whose eyes is the butterfly more beautiful than the chrysalis, a glittering jade jewel flecked with gold? The price of the transformation is destruction, the transaction final and absolute. The beauty that was vanishes, consumed as the fuel for flight and freedom. In just this way, an unchecked hunger to expand will drain the life from the Earth, sacrificing this jade and azure jewel for that poor prize.

  But was there a way to marry Dryke’s Jeremiah to Christopher’s father, and make the two merge into a single image?

  He sat back in the chair, hands folded in his lap. “All right, Lila. I give up. What’s the secret?”

  “Excuse me, Christopher?”

  “Five down, a nine-letter word meaning ‘mercy.’ I want a peek at the answers in the back of the book.”

  “I know no such word.”

  “ ‘It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes the throned monarch better than his crown—’ ” His voice trailed away as his memory failed him. “Must be the way you were raised.”

  “I don’t understand, Christopher.”

  “You’re helping him tell this joke. What’s the punch line?”

  “I don’t believe these records constitute a joke, Christopher.”

  “Never mind,” he said with a sigh. “Keep it coming.”

  Fighting fatigue and frustration, Christopher stubbornly persisted in his task as the wee hours of morning slipped by. His eyes burned and blinked, his focus wandered. The words on the display blurred into an extended non sequitur.

  The same world that seems crowded to some seems empty to others… What drives them? The ignorance of men empowered by the arrogance of gods... There is a bloodline of expansionism which can be traced through history, and they are its youngest, most vigorous branch… The return of sexual liberty will blunt the rush and restore the balance. Repression is the engine of ambition… Hysteresis is the enemy. We are forever responding to conditions that no longer obtain… If I can make fear a stronger force than the fantasy of freedom…

  And finally he fell asleep in his father’s chair in his father’s office in his father’s house, leaving one last essay unread on the comsole display.

  They pass by the windows as ghosts in a silted fog: chi-nook, silver, sockeye, steelhead. Their struggle seems to defy all reason. Once a lifetime, they fight their way upstream with a single-minded fervor we would find frightening in our own kind. They suffer the most grievous injuries, but though they may weaken, they do not falter.

  Torn and bleeding, they attack the obstacle again and again, until one or the other is bested. Those which survive fight on, taking no note of those which fail—there is nothing that can be done, and still something yet to do. The next obstacle is just ahead.

  And when they reach the quiet pools and spawn, the fire goes out. The fight has exhausted them. The spirit has passed from them to the eggs. Once the task is accomplished, they are content to swim in aimless circles until they die. Never, ever, do they ask, must it end this way? Such a question is beyond their capacity to conceive. This dimly apprehended call rules their being.

  But I ask the question, because I have no wish to join them—or to live in the world that they will leave behind.

  CHAPTER 27

  —AGU—

  “… I knew no fears…”

  In the Creation time, said a tale Deryn once told, Coyote subdued the monster of the Columbia for the animal people. The wisest and smartest of all animals let Nashlah swallow him and then cut out the monster’s heart.

  “A new race of people are coming, and they will pass up and down the river,” Coyote told the monster. “You may shake their canoes if they pass over you, but you must not kill all of them. This is to be the law always. You are no longer powerful.”

  Thereafter, though the wind still blew unchecked through the river’s winding gorge, Nashlah slumbered in the deep waters. And Eagle and Beaver and Bear and Salmon came to the river without fear.

  The world had changed, and animals no longer spoke like men. But in fulfillment of mythic prophecy, the once-wild Big River had been thoroughly tamed by the new race of people which came to live along its banks. The Army Corps of Engineers had finished what Coyote had begun. The river’s flagstone rapids and net-fishing falls had vanished below the surface of the lakes which formed behind the great dams. Its currents were now shaped by the needs of turbines and barges, rather than by gravity and geology.

  But the salmon, Chief of the Fishes, still ran—over the concrete falls and ladders, under the barge props and jetboat hulls, through the silted, oft-polluted water. And when Christopher woke in the chair, stiff and twisted, his neck and back aching, and found his father’s chilling essay on the comsole display, he knew where he had to go.

  His father had taken him to Bonneville Dam once before, a dozen years ago, to look down into the long generator bay in the north powerhouse, to marvel at the navigation lock slicing through the Oregon shore. They had spent less than an hour in the visitor center on Bradford Island, and a spare few minutes of that on the lowest level, where the fish ladder’s underwater windows and the counting room were located.

  Dimly, Christopher remembered dirty water and silver fish which all looked alike to his eyes. But it seemed his father had seen something more.

  To someone traveling upstream from Portland, Bradford Island appeared as a mere sliver of land, flat and forested with red and white transmission towers. It was the sole natural barrier in the string of dams and powerhouses spanning the two-and-a-half-kilometer width of the river; the smaller Cascades Island had been created when a third channel was carved out of the Washington shore.

  The Corps maintained a flight control zone over the site, so Christopher was forced to merge the Avanti into the I-84 flyway and dive down with the wheelies at the Bonneville exit. A few minutes later, he was climbing out of the car in the nearly empty parking lot outside the visitor center.

  “Lila, when do they open?” he said, his DBS band relaying the query.

  “In half an hour, Christopher. Winter hours are ten a.m. to five p.m.”

  He was not well disposed to waiting. “Damn.”

  Even though the building was closed, the courtyards and walkways behind it were not. The walkways paralleled the fish ladder, the surface of which appeared as a staircase of tumbling water, passing beneath a small bridge and curving out of sight. Leaning out over the railing, he tried to peer down through the turbulent water into one of the cells. It was impossible to see anything but swirling silt and a chaos of bubbles.

  His arms crossed and ungloved hands tucked in his armpits for warmth, Christopher settled on a concrete bench and waited for the silver flash, the white-foam splash of a sockeye or coho breaking water for an upstream leap. But in half an hour of watching the ladder, not once was he rewarded with that sight.

  If there was life in the churning cells of the ladder, it was hidden below.

  Finally, a stoop-shouldered brown-clad ranger appeared to unlock the l
ower-level doors behind where Christopher was seated. The ranger seemed surprised to find him waiting there.

  “Morning,” he said, holding the door open as Christopher approached. “I don’t usually have company this early, ’specially not between Winterfest and the New Year. Welcome to Bradford Island—”

  Christopher brushed wordlessly past him.

  The lower level was much as Christopher remembered. The center of the room was filled with museum-style exhibits on the life cycle of genus Oncorhynchus. On the wall by the fish counting room, digital displays cataloged the traffic by species—day, month-to-date, and year-to-date.

  But the focus of the room was the Living Theater—a row of large viewing windows which looked out into the ladder itself. Spaced across the longest wall, each window marked a bend in the ladder’s serpentine underwater path. An electronic map of the maze appeared above, its color-coded tracking lights marking the progress of several shad, three steelhead trout, and one solitary chinook salmon.

  Christopher came to the railing at the window the chinook was approaching. The water rushing by beyond the glass was a soupy yellow-green, as though it were some bilious paniculate stew. A small American shad, a wriggling silver submarine, fought its way around the turn and vanished into the liquid fog. Another, darker fish squirted by, tail fins beating furiously.

  But the solitary chinook in the ladder seemed stuck midway down the last leg of its maze, its bright white marker edging forward and then easing back.

  “Come on, come on,” Christopher said aloud.

  “This is the slow season,” a voice said behind him.

  It was the ranger, come to check on his curious visitor. Christopher turned at the rail to see him standing beside the exhibits in the middle of the room. “What?”

  “Chinook and steelhead pretty much quit running by the end of November, and the king won’t start up again till March, at least. That’s worth seeing. Still fill up the windows at the peak of the run, day and night, like the river’s half quicksilver. Those-uns are stragglers—not likely to get where they’re going, or to make anything of it if they do.”

  Christopher settled his buttocks against the railing, hands grasping the wood to either side. “Sounds like I’d be better off talking to you instead of waiting for the show to begin,” he said. “How long have you worked here?”

  “Twenty-two years next May.”

  “That long? Then you were probably here the last time I was,” Christopher said. “In ’81.”

  Nodding, the ranger said, “Probably was. Hope you picked a better day back then.”

  “I was with my father,” Christopher said. “He just died a few days ago.” He could not understand why he blurted that out to this stranger. But when it was said, there was a sudden tightness in his throat that made it hard to swallow.

  Sage and sympathetic eyes answered him. “That’s hard. I guess you’d like me to leave you be.”

  “No,” Christopher said quickly, suddenly afraid to be alone. “You must know a lot about salmon, working here that long.”

  “I know my piece. Used to work the counting room over there, before they brought in the AIP. Fifty minutes on, ten minutes off, eight hours a day with an eye on the window and a hand on the tally bar. I can tell one fish from the next, I guess.”

  “That sounds incredibly dull.”

  The ranger stepped forward, tucking his hands in his back pockets. “People thought so, but it never seemed so to me. I put in six years as a counter. It was kind of like being plugged into the river, to the whole cycle of things. No two days alike.”

  An impolitic chuckle escaped Christopher. “Really?”

  “Laugh, but it’s true. And when I was done, I was done. Never took my work home to my lady,” he said with a self-amused smile. “Never any complaints about the guys at the office.” The ranger looked past Christopher and nodded toward the window. “There. Looks like she might make it this time.”

  Christopher turned back just as the thick-bodied shape of a chinook salmon, tail fins thrashing the water, hove into view at the right edge of the window. The upper third of the body was freckled with black spots. Below them, behind the pectoral fin, a triangular tear the size of Christopher’s palm flapped in the current, baring red flesh beneath.

  There were rips and notches in the tail fins and first dorsal as well, and the silver skin seemed pale and flaccid. The chinook hovered for a few seconds before the window, then was swept backward into the maze. The tracking lights marked its retreat, and in less than a minute it flashed past the next downstream window, its body at an odd angle, making only the most feeble effort against the current.

  “Not much longer for that one,” the ranger said, clucking. “Probably failed at The Dalles, upstream, and been kicking around Bonneville Lake with the spring running down. They won’t feed in fresh water, you know, no matter how weak they get. Odd thing is they’ll take a fisherman’s fly, even though they’re fasting, but that’s as far as it goes—say, are you all right?”

  Christopher barely heard the question and could say nothing in answer. While the ranger rattled on and the salmon tumbled past, the tightness in Christopher’s throat had returned, quickly growing into a strangling ache beneath his ribs. His throat was raw, and each breath hurt more than the last. He took his air in little gasps that were chopped off with sounds like sobs.

  Clutching the railing and struggling for air, Christopher blinked away tears in a feeble effort to staunch them, until his cheeks were shining wet and the anguished sobs unmistakable. He sleeved the moisture away, infuriated that he did not know what had triggered his crying, and even more that he could not stop it.

  But fury, like embarrassment, was a feeble weapon against the flood of pain, and his defenses crumbled. Racking, body-wrenching sobs seized him, and aching primal sounds tore free from prisons deep inside him. He slipped down to a seat on the stepped floor, clinging to the railing like an anchor with one arm, tear-blurred eyes hooded behind the wall of his hand—one final, feeble grasp for dignity in the midst of the kind of naked moment that shatters dignity and pretense and self-deception.

  And when Christopher sensed the ranger beside him, felt the uncertain touch on his shoulder, and heard the kind-voiced question “You want to tell me about it?” all he could think to say was I hurt, and that seemed too mean and petty a thing to share.

  It was hard to escape the ranger’s unwelcome solicitude, and harder still to persuade him that he did not want to be left alone. The arrival of other visitors, a family with two children in tow and an infant in arms, was the first wedge, destroying the illusion of privacy and reminding the ranger of his other duties.

  “Look, you want to come upstairs, I can let you sit in the staff workroom awhile,” said the ranger. “Seems like you need to take a little time to pull together.”

  “I’m okay,” Christopher lied, his voice unpersuasively hoarse and thready. “I just got clobbered by an old memory, that’s all. My father used to take me fishing up by The Dalles.”

  The ranger frowned, teetering between resistance and acceptance. “We’ve got a counselor over at the administration center,” he said. “Maybe I should give him a call.”

  “No,” Christopher said, pulling himself to his feet. “I’m all right. Just go back to the desk and be your smiling self.” He turned and looked up, feigning interest in the fish tracker.

  Rudeness did what diplomacy could not. The ranger hesitated, then finally walked off. When he disappeared into the elevator, Christopher hurried to the stairs.

  From the plazalike observation deck atop the center, Christopher could look down four stories into the fish ladder, as well as downstream toward the Beacon Rock monolith and across the island to the dry, quiet spillways of the dam. By the time he had made a slow walking circuit of the deck, he also had a clearer view of what had spilled from him downstairs.

  His father’s death had been remote and somehow sanitary, easily denied, curiously unaffecting. Moreove
r, there had been no one but Lila to talk to, no one to help him catalyze his emotions. Consequently, he had managed to pretend that he was whole, ignoring the growing sac of emotional pus. The sight of the blooded, failing chinook had slashed it open, the two-edged blade of futility and finality doing the damage.

  But other questions, more important questions, remained unanswered. His father’s ruminations on the blind, all-sacrificing drive of the pioneers were unsettling. It was clear to Christopher that his father had meant it as more than metaphor—Jeremiah’s actions were proof of that. He had seen something out there to fight against, something tangible and threatening.

  Which made no sense to Christopher. There were some poetic parallels, to be sure, but there were also fatal—even foolish—incongruities. There were no dissenting chinooks barricading the mouth of Columbia, no coho plotting to destroy the fish ladders. The salmon’s migration was an expression of their being, an uncontested conation pointed toward survival, the sole moral barometer of evolution.

  The human Diaspora, by contrast, was the rough-and-tumble marriage of romance and hubris, blessed by the twin gods of technology and opportunity. Choice was the key variable—a minority’s choice, it was beginning to appear, but choice all the same. In evolutionary terms, Memphis was merely a whim, no more essential a part of the human pattern than the colonization of the Americas by the Asiatics or the subsequent invasion by the Europeans. Economics and natural resources, national and international politics, greed, glory quests, idealistic visions— surely they were enough to explain humanity’s mythical “frontier spirit.”

  Conation on the one hand. Choice on the other. It was ludicrous to think that they could be part of the same thing. And yet his father had believed it, and his father was not a fool. His father had believed it, and that belief had killed him.