Our return to the river today was bittersweet. It has been months since E.P. traded home school for his village school and we are used to the new routine. Packing up the old blue backpack for a stolen Wild Child Wednesday adventure felt familiar and extra exciting. We've had unfinished business to attend to and today was the day. Nature waits for no one so school would have to. E.P. broke out into a run as soon as we hit our well worn old homeschool trail.
Last year on one of our weekly visits to the Deschutes River we learned about the fate that the fish face every October when the water level is lowered at Wikiup Dam. We missed the fish salvage that was set to occur the very next day. Still eager to be of help we marked the calendar so that we would be ready this October.
This morning the earth was still frozen when we found a crew at what proved to be the largest and most populated entrapment of water. They were just braving the frigid water and beginning to pull in the net.
It took two and a half hours.
As a team we netted the fish.
We counted them; rainbow Trout, Sculpin, Whitefish, Kokanee. (And something none of us could recognize.)
And then, one volunteer at a time, we headed up the trail with a bucket of fish to reunite with the flowing river. It's a hike that on a day with no pack I'm pleasantly winded. With each five gallon bucket of water and fish I was stopping out of necessity every 5 minutes. My arms were letting me know that they wouldn't cooperate indefinitely. But the beauty and the abundance of the captured fish in transit were breath giving (rather than taking). Staring in the bucket I'd catch enough of my breath and keep going. In just over two hours time we saved over 1200 fish from our first net pull.
I remember last year being worried that it might be upsetting for E.P. to process the fact that it is impossible to save all the fish. At one point a man, the one counting and identifying what we were saving, had made brief mention of needing to pick up our pace, perhaps move to shocking and netting, since fish were suffocating in other pools of water down the river bed. We were a smooth running machine at that point and after his mention I felt a steady uptick in our communal speed. Like a knob being easily turned from level five to seven. No one panicked. I felt insulated from my easily triggered state of overwhelm. I felt clear and focused and engaged. I felt that incredible gift, that wonderful side effect, of being of use. We were part of something bigger than ourselves and together we were making a difference. Together we were keeping one another going. Our pool of trapped fish was a well spring, albeit frigid, of hands on knowing that what we were doing mattered, immediately. He didn't use the word grit but E.P. marveled at his experience of feeling he needed nothing but to keep going with the mission. The boy who seemingly never stops eating had no hunger. The boy who could be labeled inattentive wouldn't break focus until we had the last fish returned to the river.
While I was walking the empty buckets back down the trail to our team I took comfort in my station in our temporary bucket line. A headline that I saw just before we headed out in the morning regarding our climate was still burning in my mind. "The World is On Fire." Walking in silence was helping me process it. With each step that I took I thought of bucket lines of humans, past and future, putting out fires, working against floods, working to save what can be saved together. With each step, for that morning at least, I was one of many doing a small part. I was overriding my own comfort craving body for all the helpless fish enduring our rescue mission. I was acting.
As I placed my empty bucks down back at the netting I looked at every volunteer tending to the negative consequences that we create for other species. They all had, for today, an answer to the question, "What did you do?"
hieroglyphic stairway
--Drew Dellinger© 2017
it’s 3:23 in the morning
and I’m awake
because my great great grandchildren
won’t let me sleep
my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the planet was plundered?
what did you do when the earth was unraveling?
surely you did something
when the seasons started failing?
as the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying?
did you fill the streets with protest
when democracy was stolen?
what did you do
once
you
knew?
I’m riding home on the Colma train
I’ve got the voice of the milky way in my dreams
I have teams of scientists
feeding me data daily
and pleading I immediately
turn it into poetry
I want just this consciousness reached
by people in range of secret frequencies
contained in my speech
I am the desirous earth
equidistant to the underworld
and the flesh of the stars
I am everything already lost
the moment the universe turns transparent
and all the light shoots through the cosmos
I use words to instigate silence
I’m a hieroglyphic stairway
in a buried Mayan city
suddenly exposed by a hurricane
a satellite circling earth
finding dinosaur bones
in the Gobi desert
I am telescopes that see back in time
I am the precession of the equinoxes,
the magnetism of the spiraling sea
I’m riding home on the Colma train
with the voice of the milky way in my dreams
I am myths where violets blossom from blood
like dying and rising gods
I’m the boundary of time
soul encountering soul
and tongues of fire
it’s 3:23 in the morning
and I can’t sleep
because my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the earth was unraveling?
I want just this consciousness reached
by people in range of secret frequencies
contained in my speech
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