PRETEND YOU ARE A RIVER
Years ago, I was in northern California, and saw a huge bird on a fence. I heard the bird say, “We all used to speak the same language, but you’ve forgotten that we really are all one being. That’s why you can’t understand our language anymore.”
Jane Caputi131
 
A human being, too, is many things. Whatever makes up the air, the earth, the herbs, the stones is also part of our bodies. We must learn to be different, to feel and taste the manifold things that are us.
Lame Deer132
PRETEND YOU ARE A RIVER. PRETEND YOU ARE THE MIST WHO FALLS so fine—so gentle—that nothing separates water and air. You are the rain who falls in sheets, explodes onto the ground to leave pocks and puddles. You are the ground who receives this water, soaking it up, taking it in, carrying it deep inside. You are the cracks and fissures where the waters accumulate, flow, fall to join more water, and more, in pools and rivers who move slowly through cavities, crevices, pores. You are the sounds and silence of water seeping or staying still. You are the meeting of wet and dry, the union of liquid and solid, where solids dissolve and liquids solidify. You are the pressure who pushes water through seams. You are the rushing water who bubbles from the earth.
You are a tiny pool between rocks. You overflow, find your way to join others who like you are moving, moving. You are the air at the surface of the water, the joining of substantial and insubstantial, the union of under and over, weight and not-weight. You are the riffle, the rapid, the tiny waterfall who turns water to air and air to water. You are the mist who settles on the soil. You are the plants who drink the mist, and you are the sun who warms and feeds them.
You are the fish who feed on insects who feed on plants who feed on soils who feed on fish. You are the fish who become soils who become plants who become insects who become fish who flow down the river.
You are the river who joins other rivers to become a new river who is all of the rivers and something else.
You are the river. You do not stop at the banks, where liquid turns to solid. You reach into the sky and into the soil. Water moves through rocks, comes up to form pools far from the fast flow where the rivers move together, seeps down to join still waters deep below the surface, waters who sleep and wake and sleep and mingle with the stones who are the river, too.
You are the river, who is married to the mountains you have known since they were young, who have given themselves to you as you have given yourself to them. You are the canyons you nestle into, each year deeper than the year before. You are the forests who give you their fallen trees, and the meadows you flood and feed and who feed you back their fruits and fine insects who fly to your surface to be taken in by the fish who with their own bodies again feed the meadows.
You are the river who feeds the ocean, who feels the tides pushing and pulling against your mouth, the waves mixing fresh and salt. You are that intermingling. That is who you are. That is who you have always been.
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You are the river. You have lived with volcanoes and glaciers. You have been dammed by lava and ice. You have carried log jams so large and so old they grow their own forests, with you running beneath. You have lived through droughts and floods.
You are the river. You miss the salmon. You miss the sturgeon. You miss the ocean. You miss the meadows. You miss the forests. You miss the beavers and otters and grizzly bears. You miss the human beings.
You are the river. You want them back. You want to feel the tickling of the sturgeon, the thrusting of the salmon. You want to carry food and soil to the ocean. You want to cover the meadows as you used to, and you want to give yourself to them and you want them to give themselves to you, as you have done forever, and as they have too.
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Now, pretend you are a forest. You are the bark of trees, and the hairy moss who hangs from them. You are the duff who becomes soil who becomes trees who become seeds who become squirrels who become owls who become slugs who become shrews who become soil.
You are the trees who cannot live without the fungi who cannot live without the voles who cannot live without the trees. You are the fire who cannot live without the trees who cannot live without the woodpeckers who cannot live without the beetles who cannot live without the fire.
You are the wind who speaks through the trees and the trees who speak through the wind. You are the birds who sing, and the birds who do not.
You are the salamanders. The ferns. The millipedes. The bumblebees who sleep on flowers, waiting for the morning to warm you up so you can eat and fly on home.
You, too, have lived through drought and flood, hot and cold. And you, too, miss the salmon. You miss the owls, the grizzly bears. You miss the rivers. You miss the human beings. You want them all back. You need them back, or you will die.
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When I talk about taking out dams, I’m not “just” talking about liberating rivers, and I’m not “just” talking about saving salmon. I’m talking about forests and meadows and aquifers and everyone else whose home this was long before the arrival of civilization. I’m talking about those whose home this is. You cannot separate rivers from forests from meadows, and it’s foolish to think you can. If you kill rivers, you kill forests and meadows and everyone else. The same holds true for all parts of these relationships, in all directions.
I’ve long known that salmon feed forests, but I did not know how dependent forests are on these fish until I read a luminous essay called The Gift of Salmon by Kathleen Dean Moore and her son Jonathan. The essay begins with part of a letter Jonathan wrote to his mother from Alaska, where salmon have not yet been destroyed by civilization: “The creek is so full of sockeye, it’s a challenge just to walk upstream. I stumble and skid on dead salmon washed up on the gravel bars. It’s like stepping on human legs. When I accidentally trip over a carcass, it moans, releasing trapped gas. In shallow water, fish slam into my boots. Spawned-out salmon, moldy and dying, drift down the current and nudge against my ankles. Glaucous-winged gulls swarm and scream upstream, a sign the grizzlies are fishing. The creek stinks of death.”133
The next summer, Kathleen went to visit the spot, now clean of salmon, and asked, “Where did the piles of dead salmon he witnessed go? What difference does their living and dying make to the health of the entire ecosystem?”134
As you know, salmon provide a tremendous influx of nutrients into the forest. They put on about 95 percent of their weight in the ocean, and carry this weight into the forest and die. Prior to the arrival of civilization—and dams—the amount of nutrients that flowed into forests this way was nearly unimaginable. Salmon, steelhead, shad, herring, striped bass, lamprey, eels, and many other fish ran the rivers to bring their bodies home. Researchers estimate that about five hundred million pounds of salmon (not including steelhead, lampreys, and so on) swam up the rivers of the Pacific Northwest (with some streams averaging more than three salmon per square yard over the whole stream). That’s hundreds of thousands of pounds of nitrogen and phosphorous each year.135
When the salmon come in, it’s time for a feast. Bears eat salmon. Eagles eat salmon. Gulls eat what the bears and eagles leave behind. Maggots eat what the gulls leave behind. Spiders eat the maggots-turned-flies. Caddisflies eat dead salmon. Baby salmon eat living caddisflies. In the Pacific Northwest, sixty-six different vertebrates eat salmon. That includes salmon themselves: up to 78 percent of the stomach contents of young coho and steelhead consist of salmon carcasses and eggs. Between 33 and 90 percent of the nitrogen in grizzly bears comes from salmon, or at least it did when there were salmon for them to eat. This was true as far inland as Idaho. As go the salmon, so go the bears. Phosphorous from pink salmon makes its way into mountain goats. Trees next to streams filled with salmon grow three times faster than those next to otherwise identical streams. Three times. David Montgomery, in King of Fish, writes, “For Sitka spruce along streams in southeast Alaska this shortens the time needed to grow a tree big enough to create a pool, should it fall into the stream, from over three hundred years to less than a century. Salmon fertilize not only their streams but the huge trees that create salmon habitat when they fall into the water.”136
As go salmon, so go lakes. Kathleen Dean Moore notes that “the cycles of salmon are mirrored by the growth of plankton, the foundation of the food chain that nourishes life in a lake. The more salmon, the more zooplankton, and the more algae flourish in the lake. . . . [Studies] show the precipitous drop in plankton levels and lake productivity that mark the start of large-scale fishing in the late 1800s. Over the last 100 years, fishing has diverted up to two-thirds of the annual upstream movement of salmon-derived nutrients from the local ecosystem to human beings.”137 Add in dams, industrial forestry, and the other ways the civilized torment and destroy salmon, and rivers in the Northwest starve: they only receive about 6 percent of the nutrients they did a century ago.138
The forests need salmon. We need salmon. And salmon need us. As Bill Frank Jr., Chair of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission stated, “If the salmon could speak, he would ask us to help him survive. This is something we must tackle together.”139
I think they are speaking, if only we would listen. Here is what Jonathan Moore wrote to his mother: “I have seen sockeye salmon swimming upstream to spawn even with their eyes pecked out. Even as they are dying, as their flesh is falling away from their spines, I have seen salmon fighting to protect their nests. I have seen them push up creeks so small that they rammed themselves across the gravel. I have seen them swim upstream with huge chunks bitten out of their bodies by bears. Salmon are incredibly driven to spawn. They will not give up.”140
They are speaking. We must listen.