Dreams of a Portland Watershed

Dreams of a Portland Watershed

Through gullies we made a wilderness of, Arnold Creek raised us with its thickets. There were gutted, flipped-over cars. Mildew-coated homes abandoned mid-build. Fern-roofed sheds spilling rotten shakes and ceramic shards. Coyotes and barred owls commuted down the canyon, often waking us with their pre-dawn songs and arguments, cries and laughter. On hot summer mornings, loosened from lawn-mowing duties, our gang of neighborhood kids would pack bread and cheese and hit the path the water took. Each culvert was a threshold, a portal: my brother, the oldest, always went first, stooping into the rusty eye under the road, belly-crawling towards light.

A few times a year, I dream this: wading ankle-deep around a bend, we notice our creek has changed shape. Where it used to run thin over gravel, it’s wide, clear as a trout stream. Short falls plunge into blue-green pools, perfect for dapping a fly. My brother points out an osprey nest, my father fiddles with the aperture on his Olympus, my hand instinctively goes to my heart. We’re always together when we see them: ox-shouldered, half-liquid, wavering, the salmon appear. Maybe I’ll hook one, I think, Maybe I’ll bring one home. Bucks dart and spar on the bed, their flanks flashing metallic light. A hen lifts easily from the gravel. She vanishes like mist in my hands.

*

When I mention salmon in roadside conversations, only two neighbors have much to say: Douglas and “Nana” Claire. Douglas was a Swede who built his house fifty years before my father built ours, back when the neighborhood was a patchwork of orchards, pastures, and Christmas tree farms. Confidently, he said, “We used to catch bluebacks up here in the fall. Big ones, too. But no salmon whatsoever.” For one, he explained, it was the culverts, which impeded upstream migration. And two, it was the creek itself: too skinny and shallow, save for those winter storms, when it blasted runoff like an aqueduct.

My mother, though, fed us lore that “Nana Claire,” who’d also lived on the creek for a half century, used to sit on her slippery plank bridge in October “to watch the kings spawn.” She was “100 percent cotton,” my mother said, but she wasn’t without quirky threads. Nana Claire was known to wait in a lawn chair with a shotgun, her eyes and oiled barrel trained on a molehill, waiting for a twitch. And once, in the late nineties, she called my mother to say “a tornado just touched down” in her backyard. True enough, my mother said, there was a zigzag scoured in the lawn, lifting away when it reached the edge of the woods.

*

A decade ago, off work and in the neighborhood, I went down to the creek to take photos. Where it spilled out from the second-to-last culvert, there was a steep drop-off, a fall of three to four feet– not too high for coho to leap, but too pressurized, too foreign. Following a hunch that there might be a trout or two in the plunge pool, I wanted to study the hole, to watch the surface for the subtle rise and sip of fish taking midges. If the dreams held true– that this urban creek was once, or could be, a fishable place– this would have been the place to start.

All I had was a camera. No lunch, water, or fishing rod. At the upstream end of the culvert was a steel cage installed to filter debris. On that day, it was jammed with fir limbs and cottonwood leaves, barely any water trickling through. Nothing to see. To reach the honey-hole on the other side, I had to cross a major thoroughfare with only short windows between speeding cars. Gunning for the guardrail, I leapt over and side-hilled down the infill.

Before the earth stopped my slide, before I could steady myself for a photo, down in the outfall pool, a huge fin breached. I skidded, grabbed an alder, and dropped to a crouch. The current was slow, fanning a foam line out from the culvert. My eyes locked on where the fin arced. Hands pressed to bark, I forgot the camera around my neck. Across the pool, opposite from the pipe, the silver dorsal sliced up again. Then the whole brilliant spectrum: bronze to chrome, a blade of steelhead curved kipe to tail. I held my breath, waiting for the giant to turn again. It did not.

*

After that sighting, I tried to write poems about the creek, about pioneer steelhead and dream salmon. That summer, I moved to Missoula to finish an undergraduate degree and be closer to my mother’s side of the family. Over those years, I taught myself to cast, drift, and dap flies for finicky trout. I flew to San Francisco to meet my brother in his new, vibrant, foreign home. Up until her last days, my grandmother would call to inquire about the status of Montana’s highways: “Are they still repairing I-90? Well, I’ll be darned. They’ve been at it since the 60s.” My mother and father drove hours each summer across the black rock desert to visit my grandfather’s cemetery, to leave him little bits of licorice and elk-hair caddis flies, provisions for his adventures in the afterlife. High up at the beginning of the Columbia watershed, I dreamt of bronze chinook and rusty coho, nosing into the mountains, not far from the Continental Divide, almost to the Great Plains.

*

To learn that all but one culvert on our creek had been dismantled while I was away felt like Christmas in the mystic sense. It became possible to imagine that soon, in a handful of autumns, my brother and I might bushwhack down the canyon and smell the carcass of an immaculately returned salmon. On that day, we might also spy the lexical tracks of otters and raccoons punching down the clay banks. If we’re lucky, we might spot the first spawning pair, scales pocked with the drab veils of what-comes-next, tailing in the swirl below a downed trunk.

If not close to home, it’s feasible elsewhere. Across the Northwest, culverts are being torn out in lieu of overhead bridges and open-bottomed tunnels. Determining the efficacy of these projects poses quirks, though. In order to detect the presence of salmon, which might die well out of a wader-clad intern’s sight, researchers have turned to surveying a creek’s surrounding landscapes for the chemical imprints of ocean-going fish. Old riparian trees such as cottonwoods and cedars act like county museums, storing history in their rings; some scientists have begun to read core samples for the genetic “tales” of salmon, detectable as traces of isotopes found in marine environments. A tree that’s older than the dam below it, for example, might contain in its very body the record of salmon that spawned, died, and decomposed around its roots. I think of our massive backyard cedars, and those my brother, father, and I planted ourselves. If the original trunks, wide as our family can collectively reach, don’t hold traces of salmon– if that past is too far gone– our saplings someday might.

*

In one dream, I’m not there. More like a camera trained over a culvert’s outfall, the movie is set at night: water spills quietly out of sight, down to the pool below. The scene goes on long enough to show what’s around: root wads of old trees buckle the lip of a decommissioned road. Then come voices, a slow murmur of conversation I can’t understand, rising into a chorus, chortling, leaping with laughter. Faces appear in the water’s outfall: almost-human, bright-cheeked, ruddy with blush, the steelhead and coho merge into a rainbow, a stream of light pouring upwards, back into the culvert, into its rusted gaze, and home.

Sam Olson holds an MFA in Poetry from Oregon State University. Raised in Portland, Oregon with family roots across Montana, he calls both states home. His writing appears in Watershed Review, Portland Review, and Cutbank Literary Magazine.