The salmon talked me into a lifestyle change. There's a hole, a pipe, in the bulkhead at the East Bay Marina. Every year salmon swim into that hole, trying to get back home. Salmon have to make it all the way up Plum Street in that hole. that hole is Moxlie Creek.

Once you know that there are salmon down there it's hard to forget. You imagine their moony eyes while you walk home from the bar in your slutty boots. It's hard to be extraordinarily vacuous when you always have the salmon in the back of your mind: in the pipe down there - on their way to daylight at Watershed Park. Salmon are the history that isn't trivia. They are what was here before."

"I think about how many of doing any kind of progressive work in this region swim beneath the surface combing for what was here before, and taking inventory of what is now. There's the chance that you will be changed by what you are looking for."

I took of my boots and my socks and set them down on the edge of the bridge... I squatted in the pebbles and fished interesting rocks out of the stream for myself. I cleaned them and held them and put them in my pocket. Then I stool like Huck Finn with my jeans rolled up, with my back to the bridge and my two empty little brown boots. I sang to the forest. I hummed. I made up waltzes. I belted out Russian drinking songs. Opened my mouth wide and sang."

posted by Unknown @ 4:39 PM