in August:
“We can never exhaust the ways of seeing land or the human face.”
Art Zajonc
Given the complexities and contradictions of land and water usage in the American West and specifically of Idaho’s Salmon River, mine is an incomplete way of seeing the river and the human faces near it. I admired the river from five hundred feet above it in a small plane, and from jumping into it feet first. But my most intense impressions came from the people I met in Stanley, Salmon, White Bird, and places in between.
I met a man who is a World War II veteran, who, at age eighty-five, was deeply knowledgeable about the history of the region. He drove jagged switchbacks up to a point high above the town of Salmon while recalling to me in detail the natural and political history of the area.
There was a Vietnam vet who had lived seventeen years on the edge of the river. For some part of every day, he sat, in his chair of rock, at river’s edge absorbing the health producing negatives ions of the river. He found that the waters calmed him and helped him adjust to the difficult years after his return from the war.
I visited with a rancher who proudly shared with me his gorgeous spread. His land was irrigated from the river and his cattle watered from the river. He doesn’t pay a cent for that water.
There is a pilot who has been flying from his home base in Stanley since he was sixteen. He knows every foot of every fork of the Salmon and how to land on every quarter size piece of riverbank.
I admired two teenage sisters from Boise, who summer in Stanley. I witnessed them cutting pines, shooting rifles and spud guns, swinging by a rope high over treetops, and throwing knives. They played the violin and clarinet. They talked to me about their adventures shooting the rapids in their small raft.
I met another Vietnam veteran who had had a career with the Forest Service. He now hunts elk, fishes for steelhead, rafts the rapids, cuts pines for firewood, and is a friend to everybody within a hundred miles of Stanley. He lives in the woods, just outside of town.
There is a woman who is a Forest Service Ranger who grew up in New York, but much prefers life in Idaho along the Salmon.
These are a few of the fiercely strong people I met along the Salmon. The river’s strength most surely infuses the psyches of the people who live, work and play alongside it.
Terry Evans
April 15, 2003
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