When the moon was right and the tide deep, the man drifted down North Fork of a morning, rode the flood tide up the Siuslaw to the mill by skiff, dressed his lumber into a raft at slack tide, then herded it downriver on the ebb. The next turn of the tide put him off the mouth of North Fork, and he spent slackwater turning his raft into the North Fork channel. When the next flood tide swung in, he rode his raft by dark up North Fork until he came to his claim. A nice two-story house came out of that one log, with siding left over for the barn, and the man passed on easy ways to his children.
He took the time, he knew the ways. The river did the rest.
The early drift-netters on the Siuslaw suffered under two delusions that sweetened their lives considerably. I talked with Trygve Nordhal, who remembered both. First, it seemed obvious that any motor on the boat would scare off the fish. Second, salmon can see, right? By day, they would surely stay out of any net you laid down. So the word went. So drift boats went by spruce oars only, and by night. You had to know every tree on the dim night-sky horizon, sight them against the starlit clouds to turn and turn, to stay in the channel clear.
Every stretch of good driftwater on the river had a name. There was the Barney Drift, where old Indian Barney once fished. There was the Squaw Drift, and to the side of it, little Papoose Drift, then the Town Drift, Woodpile, Stickpatch, Sandpile, Spruce Point, The Homestead, and Deep Hole Drift where the salmon crowded the deep channel against the north bank. At the Barney Drift, the best of them all as Tryg told it, “We’d go out about twenty oarstrokes, and then we’d lay net, and drift down to what we called The Gap, and pick up the net. Then we’d lay out again, and drift down to what we called The Three Shorts. And that was the end of the ebb-tide drift.”
Talking of fish and the river, Trygve’s voice spoke with the rush and ebb of water. There was the turbulent haste of his knowing words, then a milling around at slack, then a drift back down for ebb: “Early in the season, we’d go whenever the tides were right. If it was a minus tide in the evening, we’d fish below the bridge—if it was high tide in the evening, just about dark, why the fish would make it across the bar, clear up to North Fork before you caught them, and you couldn’t catch a fish below the bridge. They never stopped. They came on the tide as far as they could. If it was low water in the evening, for some reason they came in on the morning tide, they flew around, and went back down for a minus tide—low water in the evening, first dark. But if it was high water in the evening, you could not catch a fish below Florence on high water slack. They’d all be up to Barney Drift. They’d catch a hundred fish to the boat up here. You wouldn’t catch one below the bridge. They move in cycles like that. And you catch more fish if it wasn’t raining. If it was raining, they’d move right up the river. Seemed like they don’t go up the river until they have some fresh water.”
The nets were twenty-five meshes deep for the lower river, thirty meshes deep for the upper channel. Meshes ran eight inches for Chinook salmon, six and three-quarters for silverside, six and a quarter for fall steelhead. Fishermen who didn’t know the river spent their days mending net they’d trailed into snags. Not only the drift sites had names, but the hidden snags as well. Trygve: “Right off the Town Drift, downstream side, you had to pick up fast. A big spruce tree had fallen in the river there years ago, and it had The Eagle’s Nest, they called it. Would just about take your whole net, if you got caught in that.”
In one night with a set net, a farmer on the river could catch enough of the big Chinook to last all winter. One Chinook would fill several gallon jars for salt-fish, and a net could pick forty fish from the river in one night. No one recorded the Siuslaw Indian names for these fishing sites, but with a river so rich, they may have been similar to what Franz Boas recorded for the Kwakiutl candlefish stations way north: “Full in Mouth,” “Fat,” “Eating Straight Down,” “Eating All,” “Eagle Bowl,” “Owning Many,” “Place of Succumbing.” When a Kwakiutl mother bore twins, she knew they were salmon; if they came near water, they might take off their human masks and swim away.
On the Siuslaw, when fall rain failed to fill the river deep, the grocery schooner from San Francisco couldn’t make it in across the bar. Then people ate salmon and potatoes three times a day, every day, all winter long. Like the Siuslaw people before them, those pioneers ate the river.
Salmon came up, logs came down. There is one house on Cox Island with no road but the river—the Sanborne house, now windowless and sagging. Mrs. Sanborne told me how she stood by the top window at dusk, and saw her husband float past in a raw December storm, hopping from log to log on a big billowing raft that had broken loose. He glanced once at her lamp-lit shape, waved, and then turned furious to his work and drifted darker downstream west. That time, he lived.
Fred Buss told me how the river took a life. The tug was coming in to dock, and the crowd on shore was as turbulent as the water. People simply jostled Miss Sherman loose from balance, and down she went from the pier. A young man shucked his hat and went in after her, swam under the keel, but came up alone.
Miss Sherman had just become engaged, Fred said, and that softened his way with the story some, but he told it stroke by stroke as an oarsman would who lived by killing the river’s fish and knowing its way.
“We watched for her three nights, thinking she’d come to our nets as others had, and every time we pulled in heavy, reached for some silver arm of fish by the lamp-box, it might be her. Fish drown, too, in the net, you know. They come in stiff, cold. And sometimes salmon come to the lamp, up out of the channel, and drop away again. But Miss Sherman stayed down three days.
“Then we were mending net on the dock in the morning. My partner says, ‘We’ll see Miss Sherman soon. She ought to be floating by now.’ And by God, there she comes, slow past our dock on the ebb, face down, white bump on the water. I was for putting a net out, but these damn fools had to turn her over with an oar. Of course her face was gone. Crabs had eaten that, breasts and all. I said to let her be, but they would not. Jesus, it made me mad. As she rolled up, her left fist came out of the water. There’s her gold ring then, hanging by the fingerbone.”
When they finally paved a road down the north bank of the Siuslaw, Ted Bugbee was foreman. One December morning when the river was ice, he got plain disgusted with the hand-tools he’d been given to use—sledges, picks, and shovels rusted dull, split hickory handles taped but raw with splinters.
“Boys,” he said, “let’s pitch our tools into the river, and see if I can’t get us a new set from the boss. Ready? All together now—heave ho!” With the shouts and laughter of a good drunk, the boys flung out, and tools went skittering onto the ice but stayed. The ice that day ran too thin to walk on, but too thick to let the tools drop through. Ted had a problem. Should the boss come by, it could be tough to explain how those tools came to lie on the long silver road of the Siuslaw.
“With rocks—sink ’em!” Rocks it was, the ice shattered, and the old tools were gone.
“Break time, boys. Start a fire. I’ll be back.” Ted went straight to the boss, just waking in his Mapleton hotel.
“Say, Boss, the boys are in a hell of a fix down there. No tools to speak of, and they’re standing idle. Hate to see that. Shall I swing by the hardware for a new set? Fine. Right, Sir. Sorry to wake you, Sir.”
In the city, a hundred miles from the Siuslaw, I wake to the whisper and throb of the freeway—Interstate 5, a lit ribbon one-quarter mile north. Once when I complained of its noise, as I opened the window on a June evening and the freeway roared, my wife’s mother said, “Pretend you are hearing the river.”
The river, yes. Her words were wise. I thought I could school my ears to that memory of water’s grace. I would hear the whisper of the road, and I would learn to remember one pioneer, drifting down the Siuslaw in a skiff of split cedar—the man who shot a swimming bear, then dove to the riverbed to pull its sleeping form up by the ear. But my heart was weak. In the night, I burrowed into the seashe
ll of my pillow, but the whisper I heard was not water. I dove for the secret turmoil of dreams. The road’s urgent drone, the whine of speed, the growl of trucks gearing down to climb—all that swarm of noise would not soften to a watersound for me. Try midnight, try three before dawn: the same.
The road is a frozen river that never thaws.
When I stand on the overpass bridge and look down, I can see how water designed the freeway road. Six lanes follow a canyon water carved, a canyon aimed east, then north toward the Willamette River. On-ramps join the road and thicken it, like generous tributaries in spate. There is a tidal ebb in the commuter rush at dawn downstream toward the city, then noon slack, and then flood-tide dusk, when the lit eyes of the silversides fight their way back up-canyon, sniffing for the exact small pool where they shall spawn. Where north- and southbound lanes divide, an island hides in the road with pines and a deep thicket of blackberry. From above, I can see where drifters have built their campfire and slept on cardboard.
I’ve found the equivalent of beach-drift on that road bank: lengths of stovewood bounced from a truck, exotic weeds sprung from gravel, skidded ears of corn, greasy wrappers glittering like fish bones. One day I slowed for a great blue heron poised by the median ditch. Birds haunt the road, hawks on posts, starlings billowing. Do high geese follow the freeway north, now that it runs as geographic ribbon brighter than the river? My cousin saw the long column of migrating butterflies flickering above that road, bound south for Mexico. All day, they clogged the grilles of cars.
Driving the freeway south one winter day, I pulled over where a woman stood with her thumb in the wind. She was an old hand at this, I saw at once, as she stepped in front of my Malibu to hold me still while she checked me out through the windshield. Then she opened the door.
“How far?” she said, wanting the tone of my voice to tell if I was dangerous.
“I’m going to Salem—forty miles.”
“Okay for a start.” She climbed in, sandals on her feet, feathers in her hair. We set out. I waited for the story that is a hitchhiker’s ticket. Ten miles passed in silence. As we cruised out over the freeway bridge, crossing the Willamette, she spoke.
“Wow. This river has probably been here a long time.”
“Yeah,” I said. “A while.”
“Do you think,” she said, “it’s been here two hundred years?” I studied her face for a smile. None. At Salem, she stepped out without a word.
One fog-night I slept on an island in the river: watersound and cold. I snuggled deep in my bag and dreamed. In my dream was a wizard wearing a five-pronged bronze ring. He called it “the perfect ring of beauty and evil.” Whoever wore the ring could see into another as God sees, could see that soul as a perfect ring—shining, flawed, forgiven. There was dance, set to the pentameter chant of a hunting song that named the animals. It stopped. I struggled for the ring—it was on my finger. I turned to my partner: eyes and hair of a naked soul, luminous hands raised up, her heart wild with pleasure and grief.
Watersound woke me. Dark. I was ready to lie there season by season, to die from my life, or to live as the river lives, to climb with salmon and fall away from that final loving work like rain, to tumble headlong, to flicker away silver with light, powered by moon and sun.
DANCING BEAR OF THE SIUSLAW
Why so many stories about bear? When I was little, my brother came home from summer-camp and told me. They ran a bear down with dogs, he said, shot it, dragged it to camp, skinned it out while a ring of children looked on. A skinned bear looks most like a man, my brother said. He lay there at the hub of their silent circle, the ragged disguise of his blood-matted fur bundled away. He was a man.
That’s the heart of it. Bear is our silent partner in the wilderness. In this century of our ways, bear keeps an honesty. Since President Teddy, our children carry small, furry souls to bed. Far from home, I dreamed of the marriage of bear and woman, and I was comforted. The sun was hot, the grass was wet: “Will you be my love today?” she said. “Will you be my love today?” Waking from that was sweet. Something had been healed. If I lived alone, I believe I would gradually take on the mossy costume of bear, the rank scent and ungainly grace of that dancer standing to sip wind. They tell me that an Eskimo, exiled for education to the state of Washington, tramped into the mountains seeking something to teach him respect. Books had it not, nor wise teachers. The city was tinsel. He sought bear.
When I did oral history in the Siuslaw Valley on the central Oregon coast, bear kept weaseling into stories.
“You know,” said bachelor Charlie Camp, “they used to wrestle bear, down here at the service station in Mapleton. I worked on the railroad, tamping ballast and driving spikes. It was real boring work, but I got used to it, I guess. Night in town was for bear. It was a switch from days. Right there at the north end of the covered bridge they kept him muzzled, with a kind of boxing mittens of rawhide covering his claws. He was chained, too, so he had enough handicap to even things out. These big loggers used to bet heavy they could pin him before the clock ran out. Thing was, he wouldn’t stand. If he’d stand, they could usually knock him down. But he’d hunch tight and they rode him, then he’d roll and the boys would really squall.”
Crickets chirped in Charlie’s house, and a log truck thundered past. The clock worked a while in solitude. “A few guys beat him, but a lot got broken bones. That bear learned to get a turn of his chain around a guy’s body, and then he won every time. So they decided to turn him loose inside the garage for a night match. That bear steamed in his pen, and when the first challenger stepped up, they pulled the trap door open. Trouble was, he’d lost all fear of man. Went on a rampage and right away the lights got knocked out and everybody went to growling and clubbing each other on the fur-top thinking it was bear. Somebody got the door open, and he was gone. They found a mitten down by the cannery but never saw the bear again. A little afterward, we got a movie theater, and had little socials and things. Somehow, nothing was quite fun like bear.”
Charlie glanced out the window at his pet cow. A tire hung from a maple tree for the cow to scratch its back on. Inside, gray underwear festooned the furniture.
“I’m a bachelor,” he said, “and I live like a bachelor.”
Another old-timer down the road, Dan Miles, trapped his first bear when he was eight. The trap itself was so big, he couldn’t carry it alone. Bear lard, he said, made the best pie crust in the world. He remembered skinning out bear in the fall with fat so thick you could bury your hand in it, and he still kept a jar of the finer grease to keep rust off his saws.
“I chased a swing donkey one winter,” he said, “when we had a pole-road up in that Luckiamute country. Pole-road’s a chute for running logs down off a hill into water. You fasten two big logs on the sides, and two little ones in the trough—run that chute half a mile down the slope sometimes. Lay your logs in at the top and they skid the trough clean to the river.
“There was a man—I guess it was the truth, because he brought a whole lot of his crew down and they all claimed it—said they shot a bear with one of them logs. It was when they had their lunch down at the foot of their pole-road. And that old bear knew to come around after lunch to clean up the scraps. That’s when they always managed to leave enough scraps for the bear. Well, they get up top, and they turn in these whole bunch of toots on the whistle, so that bear could know to get out of the way. That bear started across the foot of the pole-road just as they turn in this whole bunch of toots. Thought he could make her across, but he never made her. That log went through just like a bullet.
“And sometimes the logs went so fast they had to drive marlin spikes in the trough to slow them down. Logs ran so fast, the shavings flew twenty feet high, chiseling out of the heads of them spikes.”
Dan eased back and was done. I didn’t have to believe. I knew the story was true, we got such a quiet joy from it. His wife came in from making applesauce.
“That’s not right,” she said. “Tell
about your schooling.” But he would not. His first wife had been killed by a logging truck. Her first husband died falling from a spar tree. They had married within the week of both events, being well in the habit of living with someone.
“Got so damn lonely,” as Dan said. Friends complained, but they two knew how it was. Death helps tell you how to live.
Another logger killed a sow bear by the bad luck of falling a tree on her. Bucking out the log, he found her sprawled under it, and twin cubs burrowing in to suckle her still. This made him think of his own daughter. He carried the cubs home, wrapped warm in the skin of their mother. One died, one lived chained in the yard. That logger’s daughter was the natural envy of her friends, until the bear began to grow. That’s the old story then, some wild maturity the world can’t handle. That morning came when her bear hugged her hard, would not let go, she screamed, her mother came with an iron frying pan and killed the bear with one blow.
Bear stories always seem to be about two things, about bear and a partner. It may be a dream partner of some meaning. For Charlie, bear was counterpart to the sheer boredom of railroad work. For Dan, bear was partner to the marvel of traveling logs. For the logger, cub was brother to his daughter. The brotherhood of bear and self came most clearly from the mouth of Martin Christensen, trapper at eighty-three on Tsiltcoos Lake.
“I used to hunt bear too,” he said. “Killed my share. But once, you know how the old loggers left stumps fifteen, twenty foot high? They’d springboard up, and saw clean through. Left that kinky wood in the butt-swell stand, and just hauled the straight trunk to the mill. They came back later and harvested the stumps, once they figured how to use them. Anyway, I used to sit up on one of them stumps where I could see along a bear trail, and I’d wait. At berry time, bear walks almost drunk, rambling in a fog of his own pleasure. That’s the time to kill them, I thought. Kill ’em happy, fat. Fellow has a family, kids. You get to thinking that way.
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