Coast Range

by Nick Neely

  You can identify beach agates by the innumerable crescents, indentations, on their surfaces, as if imprinted in clay by a fingernail. These are the strike marks they leave on one another.

  “Thunder is no longer the voice of an angry god,” Carl Jung laments in Man and His Symbols, “nor is lightning his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree is the life principle of a man, no snake the embodiment of wisdom, no mountain cave the home of a great demon. No voices now speak to man from stones, plants, and animals, nor does he speak to them believing they can hear.”

  Once it was thought that the Thunder Spirits threw agates raucously among the snowy peaks of Mount Hood and Mount Jefferson, where they lived. Now these “thundereggs” are the state rock of Oregon. Their surfaces look pimply, but once cracked, their centers reveal brilliant patterns: star shapes, imagined galaxies. They are mainly found inland, in the sagebrush ocean beyond the Cascades, in rhyolitic lava.

  I don’t talk to my rocks, but I have sometimes tossed them in my hand or let them rattle musically among the loose change in my pocket.

  My back began to ache as I stooped at low tide in the Yachats Bay for more hours than I’d like to admit. My pale neck burned in the sun. It seemed the right price to pay.

  Looking for agates, I’ve found, is as much an exercise of the mind as of the eyes. You must block out most of the world and let in only a particular glint.

  By ignoring everything, at least we can see something.

  This one is tinted orange and has a ruddy skin-like layer that’s almost gone, as if another rub or two of the thumb would separate the stone from its chaff. It is sculpted smooth, but pocked here and there, revealing the mold of the ventricle in which it was formed.

  I’ve learned that the small cavities in the lava of the Oregon coast, those in which agates coalesce, are known as “amygdaloidal,” from the Latin for “almond.”

  Which explains why I have a strange desire to place this stone on my tongue.

  “It is believed that to look upon the agate is to rest the eyes,” wrote Pliny the Elder. “If held in the mouth, agate quenches the thirst.”

  Not surprisingly, the amygdalae are those lumps of brain matter, one buried in each hemisphere, responsible for long-term memory consolidation and the sense of smell, among other things. They let us remember the ocean air.

  Here’s one that reminds me of a lima bean. It’s what’s known as a “fancy agate,” creamy and nontransparent, but laced with a web of orange lines: broken, and then refilled.

  The act of collecting is often a psychic pleasure or necessity, but of course it can also be a genuine investment: You can spring for paintings, antiques, cars, and diamonds.

  To collect semiprecious fragments would seem an act of protest, then, of withdrawal.

  But if collecting springs from a wish to gain control, to possess, then perhaps to gather unique stones is to coerce the earth by holding some of its finest specimens hostage.

  Walking below the wrackline in Yachats, I snatched up a perfect, glowing agate. Nearly pellucid, with a hint of green. The size and hue of a peeled grape at Halloween.

  But inside drift gauzy clouds.

  It is like a glass fishing float washed in from Japan, where they adore the miniature. Where they build pedestals to cradle their “viewing stones,” which pose as mountains.

  The original crystal ball clearly must have been agate, for it already contains visions within. Rorschachian shapes. Lifelines.

  Coincidentally, it’s been found that those people who respond unusually to inkblot tests tend to have larger amygdalae, suggesting those regions are central also to creativity.

  In agates, people imagine tiny wings. Insects in amber.

  When I found that smooth, sea-green stone and turned to show her, a step behind, she gasped, took it into her hands. “It’s yours,” I said, and immediately I was jealous.

  She keeps the agate close to her, now, in the breast pocket of the down jacket she wears as she strides down the brisk avenues of New York City. At night, it hangs in the closet while her heart beats beside me.

  I’ve read somewhere that a person’s true appreciation or understanding of a work of art is revealed by how carefully, how purposefully, he holds it.

  The heart forms in the cavity of the chest and waits for its collector.

  Just north of town, we visited a small cove along a well-traveled beach trail. On a crescent of sand, one family stood by the waves and then raced upslope, laughing, just ahead of the tumbling froth. In the evening light, we found bits of agate even on the pathway, gems stepped on and worn down by passing flip-flops.

  One of them, the pebble I now pinch between my thumb and forefinger, is scarlet through and through. A mouse’s heart, no larger. It has a network of veins.

  Carnelian, I’ve learned, is a type of orange to fiery red chalcedony. The name suggests “flesh,” but the word is actually a sixteenth-century corruption of “cornelian,” after the bitter cornel cherry. The stone is supposedly healing, grounding, stimulating. As you might imagine, it’s said to enhance blood flow.

  I remember the night I found her: It was late, but I could hardly tear my eyes away. We danced together in an old Victorian house, never imagining all these years to come.

  Perhaps it was the way we caught the light. What if it had shone differently?

  Collecting, I follow my instincts, but I look up, now and then, to take my bearings so as not to overlook any ground: always the worry that the one plot you miss, the one niche you glance at too casually, will inevitably hold the greatest discovery.

  Throughout history, agates have been carved into cameos: an oval broach or pendant with a delicate and detailed portrait, often of the beloved in profile. This carving is done at the edge of two layers in an agate so that the background is one color, the relief another.

  Large agates are sculpted into cups and figurines, or simply halved to serve as bookends. Others are cut so delicately that they look like a slice of smoked salmon.

  In The Book of Agates, from which a few items of this collection have been mined, the author and rockhound Lelande Quick understands when he writes, “There are few thrills to equal the satisfaction of personally finding a beautiful agate or other quartz gem and then processing it yourself into a gem of great beauty.”

  Another memory: Out for agates one morning in Yachats, I spotted a bald eagle on the beach beside a rock. But I suspected it wasn’t a rock. Through my binoculars, I watched as the ivory-naped bird picked and tore at the mass with yellow talons as large as my hands. When it flew, I walked across the sand and discovered a headless seal pup. Squatting, I reached out to touch its fur and feel the skin of its flipper. I pinched a claw and its soft sheath slipped off in my grasp. Now it also rests in my bowl.

  All these stones, heavy in my hand—somehow, it is they who carry me away. They are an instinctual, if not witless attempt to hold experience by the experience of holding.

  Perhaps such a desire is what Emerson means by “Guard well your spare moments.”

  Or is it simply, as Benjamin writes, the “spring tide of memories which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions”? Those days, just before or after a full moon, when the ocean rises and falls to its extremes, stripping back the sand to awaken gravel beds buried for centuries?

  Oh, spare me, you say. But how can I?

  There is a fascination that wells up inside me. The Latin fascinat means “bewitched.” But saying it aloud now, I hear mainly “facet.”

  As she turned her face in the low western light of a Yachats evening, she looked young and striking. Her skin seemed carnelian in the orange glow across the Pacific, and her laugh crashed over me, as it has so many times. We shared a beer.

  But in that moment, I think I also understood that she and I would continue to change at the hands of the carving: the stiff breeze, in good times and in bad, those shifting sands.

  “I adore wearing gems,” Elizabeth Taylor sai
d, “but not because they are mine. You can’t possess radiance, you can only admire it.”

  Galileo wrote that we covet precious stones because we are afraid: “It is scarcity and plenty that make the vulgar take things to be precious or worthless; they call a diamond very beautiful because it is like pure water, and then would not exchange one for ten barrels of water. Those who so greatly exalt incorruptibility, inalterability, etc. are reduced to talking this way, I believe, by their great desire to go on living, and by the terror they have of death. They do not reflect that if men were immortal, they themselves would never have come into the world.”

  If I were immortal, oh the collection I would have. Oh the places she and I, we, would go.

  Or would it all grow tiresome? As the Chinese proverb goes, “A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.”

  One might choose to arrange these stones according to chemistry, the way some gather type specimens for a museum drawer. Or one might have an eye only for aesthetics.

  A few of the names of agate, its manifold forms: breciatted, ruin, calico, dendritic, ovoid-bearing, faulted, flame, fortification, eye, iris, rainbow, jasp, lace, mocha, moss, plume, sagenitic, stalactitic, tube, landscape.

  Those who collect for science often wish to complete their collections, which fulfills a sense of self. It is an accomplishment. But those who collect for the sake of collection, as art, cannot finish for long. Their self will seem to disintegrate.

  Many will still believe that collections are a disguise for sheer acquisitiveness, or just misdirected energy. But I hope the activity need not be seen in such a light.

  Perhaps that people return to collecting especially in their retirement, when time begins to feel of essence, suggests this gathering is a natural inclination. It triumphs over self-consciousness and often leads to its own discoveries.

  “I have been busy with a single art,” wrote W. B. Yeats, in preface to one of his collections, “that of the theatre, of a small, unpopular theatre; and this art may well seem to practical men, busy with some programme of industrial or political regeneration, of no more account than the shaping of an agate; and yet in the shaping of an agate, whether in the cutting or the making of the design, one discovers, if one have a speculative mind, thoughts that seem important and principles that may be applied to life itself, and certainly if one does not believe so, one is but a poor cutter of so hard a stone.”

  I was tempted to write that an agate is like a piece of my own bone, broken off. But it’s clear to me, finally, that the closest a body owns to an agate is the eye: Blue or green. Hazelnut and almond.

  Not long for its socket.

  Even as he went blind, Galileo stared upward at glinting worlds.

  Two years after he published his Natural History, Pliny the Elder perished in the eruption of Vesuvius that buried Pompeii in 79 A.D., a pyroclastic flow that rolled over the countryside, creating new hollows in layers of ash.

  Hollows in which agates may well form, when we are all gone and yet another epoch has descended upon the earth.

  Agates in the shapes of bodies, clinging to one another.

  The Afterlife

  A salmon’s second journey begins with its “collection.” At the Cole M. Rivers Hatchery north of Medford, Oregon, the crowder is drawn through the holding pond once a week, May through August, pushing the fish toward the rear, toward the spawning house. When I visited one June, three hundred spring Chinook were loitering, miraculously returned from the ocean to the place where, for them, it had all begun. They were conceived artificially and released as fingerling smolt into the Rogue River, which ushered them through Shady Cove and Grants Pass—all the way to Gold Beach and the Pacific. A fraction of them reach the ocean. A fraction of those return. These were the prodigal .003 percent, each fifteen or twenty pounds of sauntering muscle wrapped in silver.

  Cole Rivers is an industrial-strength facility, a real doozy. “No one wants to work here,” David Pease, the assistant manager, said with a measure of pride. Tall and laid-back, with curly brown hair, Dave was in a short-sleeved beige Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife uniform and khaki shorts, a classic game-warden look. There are eighty-seven ponds on the Cole Rivers campus, while the typical Oregon hatchery has about fifteen. On the other hand, elsewhere employees must wade through ponds with screens during the dead, or drizzle, of winter to corral their fish. Here you have the crowder, which is much like the automatic sweeper on a bowling lane.

  But it can’t handle three hundred Chinook. Not close. Most, in fact, weigh more than your average bowling ball, and the contraption began to moan and screech as it approached the spawning house. The operator, Ada Carnes, a hatchery technician with long blond hair, freckles, and deep-set eyes, backed off and lifted the gate of the crowder a touch, letting some fish escape underneath. A reprieve. Instantly they darted the length of the pen, sleek torpedoes with jaws, speckled and scarred. Many had visible hook wounds on their flanks, pink gashes. Some were “whiteheads,” covered with a fungus where they had scraped the protective mucus from their scales while forging upriver, over rock. “They’re dying,” Dave said. All of them.

  Salmon stop eating when they enter freshwater. Their whole purpose, then, is to flash upstream, and their intestines shrivel inside their massive bodies to make room for swelling gonads. The feast is over; the ocean becomes a memory. As they push on, they lean on their reserves. Become lean. By the time they reach their natal waters, salmon give “running on empty” new meaning. The jaws of the male elongate and hook, becoming a “kype” that broadcasts his prowess. A female excavates a redd in gravel with her tail and deposits her eggs, which, at that same moment, are met by a cloud of milt, his offering, a cloud settling and dissipating in a blink of current. She guards her brood until she has no strength. Then her body releases to the current and drifts, already disintegrating, to an eddy or shoulder of mud where its essentials are reabsorbed: by crawdads; by raccoons, bears, and bald eagles; by trees even several hundred feet from the bank; and by salmon fry, those thousands of unknowing mouths that need every advantage if they’re to swim the Rogue and home again, to die.

  The water began to boil. As the crowder neared the back wall, the hulking fish panicked and frenzied in the diminished space, throwing their fins into the air. A salmon’s world, of course, is immeasurable: the ocean, the wild length of the Rogue, 157 miles of rapids and anglers to the hatchery. Raked together in this concrete pool, perhaps these salmon sensed time was finally closing in. That something was lifting them. The crowder has a bottom shelf, and once the school was pinned, their floor rose—Ada elevated it—until they piled at the surface and about fifteen spilled through a gap and down a wide ramp into the facility. To the “brail” that would subdue them with an electric pulse.

  Momentarily. “If you don’t quiet them,” said Dave, “they beat you up. They’ll put a hurting on you.” Ada raised the brail ten feet and tilted it so the fish would pour onto the sorting table. The salmon flopped despite the current that had just coursed through their blood-orange interiors. But, not as much. Their heavy domes and tails thumped on the stainless steel, but they weren’t “hot,” as Dave called it. Another technician wearing a Stetson and camouflage hip-waders grasped each Chinook and stilled it, best he could, with one hand over its golden eye and the other on its tail. He slid each to Ada. Both of them wore nonabrasive cotton gloves that quickly became covered in slime.

  It was an inspection line of two. The hatchery’s first need is broodstock—fish to spawn next year’s smolts—and throughout the four-month season, Dave and company select a variety of sizes to keep the gene pool diverse. Each week, they sort the arrivals and fill quotas along the spectrum. In front of the technicians were six chutes, dark tunnels, each a vacuum leading to a different outdoor pond: something like the pneumatic tubes that propelled canisters to the tellers at drive-through banks of old. Ada passed each fish, briefly, into a metal detector, and pulled them out by the ta
il. If the buzzer sounded, she dropped the fish headfirst into Chute 2, no questions asked. As a smolt, it had been implanted with a tiny coded-wire tag (in the nasal cartilage of its snout), which would be reclaimed to see when and where it had been reared. If there was no alarm, then Ada measured the fish and called out its sex and length in millimeters. Dave would glance at his data sheet, holler over the sound of water, and scratch tallies:

  “Buck 670,” yelled Ada.

  “Yeah,” shouted Dave.

  “Buck 800.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Buck 870.”

  That’s thirty-four inches.

  “No.”

  “Oh, whoops, got him anyway . . . How about hen 810?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hen 830.”

  “Yeah,” said Dave, as a three-inch insect called a salmon fly, hatched out of the river with orange legs and abdomen, alighted on the small desk where he sat perched on a stool.

  “Buck 800.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Buck 830.”

  “No.”

  “This one’s comical,” said Ada’s cowboy partner, as he passed her the next.

  “How about a buck sub-350?” she said.

  “Sure,” Dave replied. The smallest are known as “jacks,” males that try to spawn after a single year in the ocean. Fewer than ten pounds, and sneaky.

  The sorting occurs in episodes of only a few minutes, fifteen or twenty fish at a time so they aren’t out of water too long. Then the crowder lifts again and more cascade onto the brail—zap. Over the course of the morning, Dave shouted “No” more often as broodstock requirements were filled. He referred to his paper, and each decision was impersonal. Nonetheless, it reminded me of an emperor lifting his thumb up, or down. “Yeah” sends the salmon into Chute 4 (after it receives an injection, to prevent disease) for breeding in the fall. Those genes, randomly selected, will carry on—have a chance to—and four years later (jacks aside), a fraction of the resulting smolt will return transformed. But a “No” from Dave sends the salmon hurtling through the black hole of Chute 6, for a moment, and into the pond reserved for “excess.” The afterlife begins.