Headwaters - {Print text }
Basin springs this winter:
channels of cold water,
rushing in small ice canyons;
streams forming Salmon River
How does the Salmon River sing its story?
Listen.
Not just to one part of the river, the unspoiled, the sounds usually recorded. This melody has become routine; a refrain we’re supposed to hear. We know the sound of free running water and recognize that the Salmon River is extraordinary. These are the sounds we should hear in every river because it’s river of our imagination.
But there’s something else to hear, too. Listen to the Whole Salmon River and the sounds composed of every creek, spring and fork from source to confluence.
Listen.
Hear the steady flow: The constant narrative, streams of history. These sounds are always the same, but every day a new interpretation is composed with fresh notes.
The variation might come from a bear splashing her way across the stream. Or a bald eagle swooping onto the river’s surface from his treetop-hunting lodge. Or the joyful rift from songbirds.
The river’s song is the same, yet always original.
Listen.
Hear the human echoes, chattering from a thousand generations. Season after season of chase: people eagerly hunting the river’s namesake. And with equal vigor: the salmon fighting their capture.
Human-constructed machines add rumble to the river’s rush.
Jets interrupt the silence of a world so remote it seems impossible. Other machines crush rock after rock, limiting the river’s inheritance. And trucks and cars add deep vibrations, sounds passing a still river hole at sixty-five miles per hour.
Each echo, pristine or mechanical, is recorded on the CD in my head.
I listen and hear them now.
These are the sounds that connect memory to place. The sounds that initiate a sensual recollection of the Salmon River. The sounds of experience.
We all have our own way of engaging the river.
I recall a morning rain with a gentle fog that seemed to cloak everything in gray except the river itself. I peered into the fog, listening for fish. I knew there were salmon in that hidden stream – and I wanted to hear.
Or I still smell breakfast from a campfire, our coffee had just boiled over and spilled on the rocks. The sizzle on the burners made the aroma louder.
On another day I felt the splash of ice-cold water in the summer heat. There was a rock pool and slide that I, and the other kids, felt was our secret place. We could go there and swim and splash with neither supervision nor admission fees. I hear us, laughing and playing still.
Once I remember my family cooking steaks over the fire. But I would not eat that meat because I had caught a trout that day. I had my feast designed, ordered exactly so, and it did not matter to me what was on the menu. I only wanted to eat my fish, the one I caught. Of course it was perfect. And I hear family, teasing me for eating my proud little fish.
Each sense, and the accompanying sound, embraces memory and place.
Nearly every summer, usually the first week of July, my family would travel from the Fort Hall Indian Reservation across the hot Arco desert to camp somewhere in the Salmon River country. Our goal was the same as it was for generations of Shoshone-Bannock tribal members: to fish.
I grew up hearing stories about how the Fort Bridger Treaty with the United States guaranteed the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes the right to hunt and fish in the usual and accustomed places on the unoccupied lands of the United States.
Behind that legal language was the simple promise that tribal members could “hunt” salmon on public lands. Then such a simple promise was never quite so easy. I also remember days when my father would be “warned” by a game warden; told he couldn’t fish and that he’d be arrested if he were to continue this particular tradition. When I was present, he’d put away his stuff and move on.
But in 1972 the Supreme Court affirmed the tribes’ treaty rights and the issue shifted from one of law enforcement to today’s challenge of managing a scarce natural resource, Chinook salmon.
The great irony is that I am of the generation that benefited from all the legal challenges to treaty rights – something previous generations paid so high a price for – only to watch the fish fight for survival. Even now it’s an open question about the extinction of salmon.
Still, my memories are intact. I hear them now.
One of my favorite childhood camping spots was where Eight Mile Creek flows into the Yankee Fork. I liked my bed near both waters, often a few feet from the gravel bank. I loved to listen to every note of the two streams through the night.
My buddies and I – our sleeping bags a few hundred yards away from our parents or grandparents – would then talk through the night about that camp and the dangers we anticipated. We had heard a story about a bear coming into camp and with one paw ripping off a line of salmon that was hanging between two trees. I think we all claimed that the bear’s adventure had happened to our family when we weren’t there. But we all knew it to be true.
I also learned on those trips that the river was not just a place of holiday, but one of work. On one trip I went home with relatives because my father stayed behind to work on a road that was under construction. I knew then that so many folks worked the river: at supply stores, for government agencies, or for other enterprises connected to the land.
Then a river’s course, like life’s journey, means there’s sure to be surprise ahead. But our expectations always disappear after the turn of the bend, the anticipation different from what we actually experience. Followed by memories that are different yet.
The first time I experienced riding a rapid on a raft was exactly like that.
Again it’s the sounds that stick with me.
My memory starts with the gentle, steady sound of a river’s flow accompanied by commands from our craft’s skipper.
“Stroke.”
Looking around I see the river from a new angle. The view from on the river is total – not just the slice you see from the road or a path. And, unlike a walk in the river, you feel motion and a sense of wonder about what’s ahead.
“Stroke.”
Except for our conversations – and often we are quiet – the boat floats so that the river’s sound is more prominent than our own sounds.
“Stroke.”
But the sound of the water is changing, the sound becoming more intense. We can hear ahead, imaging what’s behind the next bend. It’s a far-off reminder that the river has its adagio followed by crescendo.
“And rest.”
We talk about what to do next. A quick instruction on what happens if all goes awry, if necessary, how we should float ourselves to shore.”
Then we travel over the rapid – such as it was – with little fanfare. The rapid of my imagination was much greater than the actual experience.
Then the truly great thing about a river journey is that the experience is different every time.
A close call might come when it’s least expected.
Like a hole that every boat in our party navigated with ease – except for the last raft, the one I was in. We went down a steep canyon of water and then right back up again. I thought it was fun until more experienced hands told me how close we had come to flipping the raft.
Or a particularly dangerous rapid that was as wild as I imagined. We were lucky we traversed the rapid with thrills, not tragedy. Yet I saw the power of the river because a raft of four people hoisted and then tossed across a stream as if it was a little toy.
The intensity of the river’s volume at a rapid and the quiet swirl of the eddy beyond remains long after you’ve left the river. The sounds of anticipation roll around – accompanied by the echoes of memory. I hear them both. I hear a song for the whole Salmon River.
- {Print text}
Project Involvement :: Back to Bio
Post Office Box 656, Sun Valley,Idaho 83353
191 Fifth Street East, Ketchum
P: 208.726.9491
Email: information@sunvalleycenter.org
www.sunvalleycenter.org
The gallery is always free and open to the public.