You know the river brought you here. To this bend. On a Tuesday.
You might come here on a Tuesday. To the trail, to this bench, to this place where the willows and sand and gravel meet the edge of history. Yours. The rivers. At this bend.
In the heart of Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains, a woman unknowingly begins what becomes a journey of understanding. Haunted by personal loss and the complex history of the American West, she seeks beauty and understanding at alpine lakes, beside wild rivers, crosscountry skiing, on trails, and with her dogs. Here, amidst granite peaks and endangered beings, she confronts the challenges and awe of nature, the ethics of hunting, the past, an uncertain future, and the depths of her own being. As she navigates physical and emotional landscapes, she grapples with questions of identity, belonging, and the delicate balance between humanity and the wild.
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It’s the end of something. Or the beginning. And you need a place that is reserved. Reserved, not in the sense of “just for you” but reserved as in “holding back a little.” Somewhere aside. Off to the side. A place to watch from. So you can see, as you do now, the child in her red jacket. The lilac skirt as it flutters against the woman’s knees. Birds whose names you promised to learn but have yet to find the time to do so and it aches you to know that you have put this simple task so far down now, so far down on the to do list.
And there goes the dog chasing the stick the water has worn smooth. For a moment you bound along with it, your own fur bouncing, and think that maybe it’s finally time for another dog. A new dog. You remember that joy of watching wagging. Of the welcome home. Yes, maybe it is time. You lean back against the bench thinking about time and the dog runs from view and is soon forgotten or forsaken like the water bowl you placed on the shelf in the closet.
You are far enough from the river to see it as an owl might, as the past might, but from the height of a willow. It is dawn, or it is early evening. The summer heat is pressing, more pressing than you remember from other, younger days on the river. Other bends. Before the dams. You wonder if, sitting here, you breathe in the exhalations of fish. You ask, are there salmon in this river? The alders answer. The cottonwood answer and their answer is enough. Isn’t this why you have come here? For enough? To be in a place that is with and without. Here the climbing and struggling is merely an ant upon your trouser leg with nothing to sell. No agenda. A being that sees you as a thing to be wandered, explored. Tastes that drop of honey, or was it hummingbird nectar, that dripped off your finger at a time when a sweet need of another was what you filled.
You draw a circle with your toe and watch the earth fall in. You wish your scuffing would uncover an arrowhead. You know it is cliché, but you long to find one. Not because your pockets are empty, but because to hold an arrowhead would help you remember that others have come here and have left their wisdom, and, like them, you want to leave something of value. Something useful. To not be forgotten. Something that someone might uncover with an oh and remember what it feels like to be filled with wonder and mystery and curiosity, something that brings them to their knees in search of more. You think you may have something in common with the person who left that arrowhead. Maybe it is a love of rivers. Maybe they too liked the smell of wet rocks and cottonwood resin.
You wish to throw a rock and hear the splash. You remember what it meant to be a child at the river. To bring your bare soles to the seam. But even then, you understood choices. Other’s fear. The danger of going too far in the swift stream. But you could not help it. We all want to get carried away. Sometimes. Where are those skipped rocks now? Those chances and splashes? Where is the fishing pole and your mother’s sack lunches and that lover who loved to make love beside water? A couple flutters a quilt to the sand and lie down. In your mind, you lie down, too.
When you were small, you thought that rivers were meant to take things away. The stick you threw, the ball, that plaything that you let go of. You saw floods. The house carried away. The logs, the road. You saw fish float from baited hook. Even snow and ice were carried down, down. If the river can take, can it also bring back? You know the river brought you here. To this bend. On a Tuesday.
And now the clouds must be gathering. Or perhaps the sun has dropped below the horizon, or you are just growing older, tired, but it is darker. You rise and walk finally to the river’s edge. You see sky reflected there. The blue of it. The light left shimmering in water. The children have gone home for their suppers. The lovers moved back into the trees. In the distance a dog barks and the dog and the lovers and the child in the red jacket and even the woman in the lilac skirt were never there at all. This is why you have come to the river. You and these memories. You and every river you have ever known. Ever loved. Weren’t they all the life you wanted to be part of? Weren’t each of the rivers what you craved from life? To bring life? To bring and be carried away? To be useful and beautiful and to have shores that would gather others?
And here it still is. And it is not too late. Not too late to take off your shoes. Your coat will be on the bench where you leave it. We will all be here with you, all of us, arrowheads pressed in our palms, dogs at our sides, wading together, into the gush of cool, feeling the smooth of stones skipped for centuries, the salmon returning past the breeched dams bringing us together like pebbles into a redd. A community, a family, kin holding on to one another, gathering at this bend and with all the river brings.
CMarie Fuhrman the author of Salmon Weather: Writing from the Land of No Return and Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems, and co-editor of Cascadia: Art, Ecology, Poetry and Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations. She has published poetry and nonfiction in multiple journals and anthologies including Orion, Emergence Magazine, Alta, and others. She is associate director and director of poetry at Western Colorado University, where she teaches nature writing. She is the director of the Elk River Writers Workshop. A former Idaho Writer in Residence, she lives in the Salmon River Mountains of Idaho with dogs, a fish biologist, and wildness
Read poetry by CMarie Fuhrman appearing in Terrain.org: “Cryptobiotic Sonnet” and “Kokanee”.
Header photo by OLya_L, courtesy Shutterstock.
