A river and work - {Print text }
Pristine: A wild, natural
stream in a snow-capped frame;
Destined for pixels, paints or song.
Hey, even writers work on this river.
The Whole Salmon River project started because some folks were keen on the paintings of Tony Foster. His art depicts the intense scenery of wilderness and therefore it makes an ideal set of frames for capturing a river system from headwaters to convergence.
Ideal is not the right word, though. Perfect is. The image we see captured in a Tony Foster painting is perfect; we see the river of imagination.
For some of us when we look at the image, we remember, and then, we think: “I know exactly where that image comes from. I know that place.”
The images in our mind are clear. Pure. Pristine. Nature that is perfect. The art instinctively draws us to place. We see something recognizable – a tree, a river’s bend, a mountain view – in every painting. We feel we know this scene, even if we’ve never been there before. We close our eyes and recollect every time we’ve seen a field of purple-crowned wild flowers, a great mountain bolted to the earth by pine trees, or the Salmon River itself glistening through a rugged canyon.
But the art is more than the image we see. Tony Foster’s art, like the artists that have come before him, is a metaphor for how many see the American West and the Salmon River.
We’ve been trained to look for perfect images in our art; every scene is a renewed chapter in our storytelling legacy about nature, purity and the notion of what’s wild. For most of us the story goes back to the Bible and the Garden of Eden: There was once this perfect place. Then man messed it up and was kicked out, destined to search for such a spot all over again. We’ve been looking for the original Garden ever since. We want Nature the way it was, the way it’s supposed to be. We want to go home.
Historian Donald Worster once said that a “pristine idea of nature is, of course, a modern European invention. When the Europeans arrived in the New World, they thought they were encountering a nature completely separate from any human society – a state of ‘virginity’ in their male fantasies.”
A fantasy or not, the images are beautiful. And they make us yearn for the Garden that might be.
But do these paintings tell the story of the Salmon River – and how its channel wanders through our soul? No, of course not. The perfection of the paintings – the very ideal of the art – distances us from the real world. It’s an image that cannot be, a small glimpse of a world that never was.
Now hold that thought for a minute. Let’s come back to it – after a conversation with ourselves about art, craft and work.
Tony Foster practices wonderful discipline. When he’s on the river he starts at daylight by packing his sketchbook. Then he walks until he finds the image he wants. Then he creates art – painting or sketching a daily journal of images matched with telling reminders of place, items like shells or an animal’s tooth. These images, along with the collected souvenirs, return to Foster’s studio where they are incorporated into a final vision.
Showing a sketch is like a writer showing a draft with all of the fuzzy thinking, weird sentences and funny notions sitting out there for all to observe. It’s nothing like the art that is yet to come. But the revelations of what's seen and reported in sketch is an old subject, too. Not much different from the Lewis & Clark journals of another era or a 21st century river web-log posted daily on the web.
But the rough draft helps us explain content, too. It's the deep thought, the one that's real, untouched by the revision of what's supposed to be seen or said.
Foster has said his purpose in his art is painting the fragile wilderness with an eye toward conservation. “My work is about wilderness, a celebration of the fact that even on our overcrowded and increasingly polluted planet there exist places of intense beauty without any mark of human interference. I see it as my role as an artist to spend time in these places, to distill my experiences, and to bring my evidence back to civilization. The paintings are not simply landscapes – they are a way of describing what happens when I make my journeys,” he said.
But Nature never was untouched – at least since we’ve been kicked out of the garden, if that’s your story. In fact another story, the ones told by Shoshones, starts with humans and animals talking and sharing the world. We humans were not separate from the natural world, but the same.
And so it might go with a different kind of landscape portrait, one that includes people.
The ideal portrait, then, might be to balance the paintings of Tony Foster with a photographer who captures people.
Terry Evans' photographs do tell a story about the river and the people. By looking at who's on the river, we see more about the character of the Salmon itself.
Indeed this is a river system with a human activity that’s always been busy and full.
Ten thousand years ago, or more, that activity was hunting and fishing. But even then the Shoshone and Nez Perce tribes altered nature when it fit their purposes. Perhaps it was building a fish weir, capturing food. Or it could have been setting a fire to clear off brush. Either way people were part of the natural world, not separate from the state of purity.
Near Riggins, when salmon are running, you see reminders of that connection to the river when Nez Perce tribal members sell fish out of the back of their pickup trucks.
The same is true for the “recreational” fishers – men and women standing on the river’s bank, lined up by the hundreds, as they toss their lines into the river in some sort of unison. It calls humans to life in so many fashions.
Or even images.
“Snap!” A raft full of tourists goes through a rapid and a picture is taken automatically. Of course the picture will be available later, a souvenir for sale. Not all that different from the recreational fishers who get their picture with their catch.
For those who place automatic cameras, or run gift shops, or process and ship waste of every kind, the river is the source of jobs serving the people who travel to the Salmon in search of nature.
From Stanley to Lewiston there are so many small towns full of motels, cafes, and real estate companies selling – or more often, renting – nature in a boxed cabin set.
Sometimes I think there are more real estate firms along the river than almost anything else. It makes me wonder how many “working ranches” there could possibly be? And, how many of those ranches will remain ranches after they’re sold? More likely the property will keep some sort of name that ties it to its roots, something like, River Ranch Estates. Today the danger to the river itself comes from our love of place. We build too much, we overstay our welcome, we lack balance.
It is this permanent recreation that is a shift from the previous generation. It wasn’t all that long ago, for many of us, that we worked the land and extracted the wealth as we went. We played some, but mostly we took things and then left.
We dug up the riverbed searching for gold or other precious metals. We cut trees and hauled or floated them to the city. We let cows wander even into the creeks that fed into the Salmon. We thought that nature would somehow take care of us – no matter how badly we treated it.
This, too, is an old story, the Garden that will not go away. An old mining law still makes it possible for someone to stake a claim, set up a dredge and start crushing rocks in the name of gold. Perhaps the only thing that’s saved so much of the river and its banks is that it’s expensive work. But if the price of gold climbs high enough, some will take advantage of the law and mine again.
The basics of this story play out no matter what extractive industry we’re talking about – when the price of the resource is “right,” someone will stake a claim and take bounty. It’s all too inevitable.
Still, I hope we’ve learned from our past. The fact is that the big, corporate mines – the kind that today wouldn’t be allowed near the river – are smarter than they were a generation ago. These days the fouling of the riverbank is more likely to occur from an individual claim. It’s a small step, but progress nonetheless.
There are other kinds of stories I want to hear, too.
I like the other old stories, those that show how life on the river includes humans, plants and animals. Think about how we learned to “work” on a river. We watched the beaver make dams. We watched the busy ants create perhaps the first urban environment.
Then, there’s already a new story being told, one that floats down the river of possibility. This is the story of balance and of survival. Consider the wolf – nearly wiped off the face of the earth because it was an evil predator. But we humans learned our lesson; we learned that our souls need the wolf. We need a river system that works for humans as well as our brothers and sisters in the plant and animal world.
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