Coast Range

by Nick Neely

  “You did it right,” she replied.

  “We can do it our way,” said Kelly.

  Robert then took over as master of ceremonies, stuttering a little. He was silvered and portly, down-to-earth, and he wore a beaded, bear-claw necklace. He read a simple poem by a cherished elder and then told it like it was:

  “These five young men that we have here today . . . we’re going to take this salmon down to the river and return it so that we may be able to enjoy this ceremony and the nourishment that it has brought to our people for, for, a lot of years.

  “These young men have stepped up and volunteered to do this, and what is great about it, is that they’re going to pass on to their . . . maybe one day their children will want to be a part of it. These young men are somebody, or some, that we can be proud of. To step up and do this. Younger people that, that . . . to see them and know what they are doing is a wonderful thing.”

  Rena jumped in, as a damselfly landed on her mottled hand and flickered away: “You young people—pardon me, Robert—listen to your elders, and you obey everything that your daddy teaches you. The tribal children, even the white ones . . . walk the straight and narrow, and when it comes your turn, and you’re grown up, you can carry on, and your children, and your children.”

  Robert: “Before we do go down, there are some people who I would like for us to honor. Their names are in the program, so I’ll just go ahead and read them. Let’s keep them in our hearts and think of their families.

  “Honoring friends in passing,” said Robert.

  Donald Allan, Jr.

  Barbara Davis

  Robert Davis

  Delbert Rainville

  Deagan Season

  James Sturgeon

  Thomas Sturgeon

  Florence Watkins

  Melissa Wheelock.

  In the coming year, Rena Cox would be added to the list.

  Three boys gripped the tray, and two followed, and they led us through the tents and trailers, a quiet procession across pine and fir needle with the hum of generators all around. At the road, they looked both ways and went across to the river: their eyes on the fish, so the tray wouldn’t tip; and on the ground, so they wouldn’t stumble. Down the trail they shuffled, past stands of blackberry and stinging nettle, to a little graveled beach where Robert would speak of their common journey and responsibilities. I had been asked not to follow, not to take pictures, but I watched from above as they stood, knee-deep.

  Behind me, the procession coiled into a circle in a small grove on the upper bank. Everyone held hands as Jessica spoke: “Grandfather, we ask you to protect these members of the tribe. We ask that you give them guidance, to lead them along a good path, a straight path. We ask that you give them the wisdom to face the tough choices that they’re going to have to make in their life. And we ask that you give them a caring heart so that they can listen to it and make the best choices, not only based on what is right in the world, but what is right in their souls.” Then the women began to sing.

  The Cow Creek Band had lost track of much of its heritage during its fragmented years, but now it had come back together to re-educate its youth. In addition to the powwow, the band holds an annual one-day Culture Camp for about fifty kids, during which a batch of salmon is cooked the authentic way: on cedar staves over flame. As Teri described to me, a more traditional salmon ritual is also observed at the camp with a small audience on hand: “Everybody comes up and they take a bite of the fish, and then they put a piece on a cedar bough for their family, for prosperity and prayers. Seven or eight young warriors—boys that we choose—they’ll dive . . . it doesn’t matter what time of year. Each takes a bough, and they dive down to the bottom of the river and give it back to the river.” They place the salmon under stones.

  But today the boys simply slid the metal tray into the river and the ragged skin was given over. They were braves now, their feet in a flow that could only be believed, not seen. From my vantage point, I could see the carcass release a cloud of mayonnaise, leaving a milky footprint on the waves. This was milt in its own right. I imagined bits of orange flesh scattering downstream among the cobble to waiting crawdads and rootlets, and perhaps the fry of wild salmon. Slowly the skin drifted. It hung on a ledge, unhurried, and then gathered steam, turning over like an old plastic bag toward the Pacific, toward the casino. The women finished chanting, and the boys climbed back up the stairs of the bank and were greeted by whoops and cries; and the salmon carcass flashed vaguely silver as it ghosted past two lovers sitting, hip to hip, on a mossy boulder above the South Umpqua.

  When the boys returned to the campsite, each was presented with a long object bound loosely in blood-red cloth. Cautiously, around the same table where the salmon had just lain in state, they unwrapped the fabric to reveal eagle feathers—some golden, some bald. In this day and age, only tribal members and certain educators may legally own such a thing. With serious eyes, in the thick sage light, they held the quills’ hollow stubs and ran their fingers down the long vanes, smoothing and reuniting the barbs as if to make each feather perfect for flight. I wondered if they were picturing the six-foot wingspans of these birds—those whiteheads—that, on some rivers, gather by the thousand to scavenge the salmon that give themselves up to their progeny, to eaglets and boys.

  Later I asked one of the boys, Scott, age twelve, from the nearby town of Riddle, if the salmon ceremony was important to him.

  “When they honored me with the eagle feather,” he replied in a voice that approached silence.

  Did he have somewhere in mind for it?

  “In my dresser,” he said.

  “Seems like a safe place,” I replied.

  “I got’a go . . . ,” he said.

  I asked another of the new braves, Trevor, if he was going to enjoy the salmon dinner that was on its way that evening. His cousin, DJ, there by his side, took the words right out of his mouth: “He doesn’t like it. He likes fish sticks.”

  Trevor nodded solemnly.

  At last, the time grew near. The salmon had been lifted by human hands at least fourteen times: Once when they were sorted at the hatchery. Once after they were killed. Once when they were unloaded at the casino. Once in its kitchen. Once to hitch a ride to the powwow. Once to be mayo’d. Once foiled. Seven times over the pit, in the hands of Barry McKown. Now they would be lifted at least twice more. Once so that their flesh could be harvested, mounded for the buffet; and one last time, on the tines of a fork.

  They had remained an extra hour on the grate and finally cooked, and now Barry and others carried the radiant packets to another table. A box of latex gloves awaited volunteers. This time, I wanted to lend a hand, to earn my keep for the weekend. Unwrapped from the aluminum and its own blue-gray skin, the flesh was at first too hot to touch and shrunk the plastic around our sweating fingers. But we managed to loosen the meat, with the help of spatulas, all of us reaching onto the table. Hands working over these lemon-adorned bodies, beautifully destroyed, their bones minted at sea. “Those aren’t bones,” said Jessica. “Those are Indian toothpicks.” We plied and piled those pastel chevrons, mortared with ocean fat, onto silver trays to serve to the tribe at large. The sweet, clean-smelling steam rose visibly in the warm air.

  For six months, following a strong, or perhaps weak, moment just after New Year’s on a subway platform in New York City, I’d been an honest vegetarian. But as I picked over the soft fish, my fingers lifted an orphaned piece to my mouth. First one stray flake. A minute later, a second. Then the floodgates opened, and it was all I could do to keep my lips off the sticky gloves. Even in death, these salmon were the antithesis of dry, and tasting them, I felt, like everyone else present, that here was our own flesh come back to us, with a hint of mayo. Those boys may have stood more firmly in a spiritual flow—in the runoff of these mountains—but I felt something like a current then, as dinner was announced over the PA and people queued up in a long line with their eager stomachs, their aluminum camp ware, an
d their ancestors on the tips of their tongues, if not everywhere overhead.

  Discovering Anna

  As a child, I set out in search of hummingbirds. Probably this wasn’t ordinary for a boy, and I was fortunate, indeed, to have come into a large and varied country south of San Francisco, a dry sea of chaparral up against—and sometimes over—the deer fence, a landscape with plenty of perches to map and explore: yellow sticky monkey flower, poison oak, coyote brush, ceanothus, and the miscellaneous exotics of the garden.

  Anna’s hummingbird was the species. Calypte anna, an abundant resident of the Pacific Slope. Even in winter, they’re here, outside the rain-slithered window, hovering in the green, shifting from branch to branch to probe for insects, pillaging spiders and their stuck prey with hardly a quiver. A hardy bird. All but a few North American hummers migrate, and come spring, the orangish Allen’s would also arrive suddenly from Mexico to spar for territory. But he’s smaller, less frequent, and, for now, another story.

  Who is Anna? She was the duchess of Rivoli, Anna Masséna. Her husband, François Victor Masséna, the duke, was an amateur ornithologist with a vast collection of exquisite bird skins that eventually included the “type specimen” of his wife’s namesake. One imagines her as striking: light on her feet, a fine dancer; draped in stones that caught and refracted the candlelight of nineteenth-century France; a touch spoiled, certainly. She became the official mistress of the household to Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III and last empress of France. Earlier, in 1828, Audubon visited Anna and observed that she was “a beautiful young woman, not more than twenty, extremely graceful and polite.”

  Apparently, the duchess was admired also by René-Primevère Lesson, a surgeon and naturalist, surely related vocations. It was he who named the species. In 1822, he left France to serve on a four-year trip around the world, during which he saw and described many of South America’s most brilliant, pip-squeak birds. Rounding Tierra del Fuego, La Coquille (an apt ship name, The Shell) went as far north as Peru and then cut across the Pacific to Tahiti. Lesson gathered specimens of all kinds during his circumnavigation and brought them home to study, label, and slip away in drawers. For years, he labored to prepare the zoological chapters of the expedition’s official record, and afterward he produced the world’s first monograph on hummers: three volumes of luminous, hand-colored plates. It was in preparation for this work that he chanced upon an unrecognized skin in Duke Masséna’s collection.

  Hummingbirds, you should know, are found only in the New World. There are more than three hundred species, but only fourteen commonly breed in North America. Fittingly, Christopher Columbus was the first to write of them, in his diary: “Little birds . . . so different from ours it is a marvel.” Not long after, Pope Leo X was presented with a preserved skin that is thought to have arrived inside a chest of curios and treasures, a gift from the king of Portugal in 1514. The bird’s chin may well have been as ruby as the robes of Leo’s cardinals. Europeans were captivated. They thought it half insect. Oiseau-mouche, the French said, “fly-bird.”

  From the age of four or five, I kept little cardboard jewelry boxes in a spare bureau in my room. Each full of findings: sand dollars, oak galls, feathers, owl pellets jutting with rodent bones. A cabinet of curiosities, its drawers squeaking with the weight of geodes and fossils. If you have a sharp eye, these enthusiasms start to build upon themselves, or maybe it’s the other way around. Soon others begin to notice as well. For Christmases: a rock tumbler, a seashell book, a chemistry kit (with beak-like forceps and pipettes), a microscope, binoculars, and many other useful tools I can no longer recall. Also for Christmas: more discarded gift boxes, each ready to be neatly packed and fitted into the display.

  Calypte. It comes from a Greek root that means “to cover or conceal,” and a male Anna’s hummingbird does peer out from beneath a hood, a veil of iridescent red. All hummers glow with refractive color. Their most lustrous feathers don’t hold colorful pigments, only black melanin. Instead, a number of wavelengths reflect—rebound—from various depths in the feather’s crystalline nanostructure so that, when the angle is just so, their crests and troughs align, synch up, “constructively interfere.” These parallel strands of light are the intensification you see. Grind up this bird’s iridescent plumage and just a small, ashen pile of dust will remain. When the angle of reflection is wrong, his crown looks entirely black; but if he turns and stares straight at you, then flash—like a red sky glancing off a sea. He can raise or lower his feather tracts, adjusting and directing this aggressive hue based on his mood. What is he hiding under there? His crown patch blends into his scaled gorget, which looks like chain mail guarding his voice.

  In memory, I’m standing on our lawn with a view across the valley to a crest called Skyline, where the Pacific fog would pour over the redwoods many evenings and waver like a white tide. From the grass, in the late-afternoon sun, I’d watch the excursions of the male Anna’s, especially his courtship dive. Only the males perform this elaborate dance, the most extraordinary of North American hummingbird displays: He rises slowly, elegantly, into the air, pausing to warble before he’s lost to the viewer more than one hundred feet overhead. Too high to see, a speck in the platinum sky. Then he plummets—or rather, powers down at fifty-five wingbeats per second—only to brake sharply in front of a perched female and sound a piercing note: a sharp pik made not with his voice, as once thought, but with his two outermost tail feathers. They cut the air like a bullroarer. Quickly, he circles back, rises again. How many times have I watched him perform this “J-shaped dive,” as it’s called, this loop-the-loop before an inconspicuous female, “the object of the display” down below in our Australian bottlebrush? Hundreds. Thousands, in my mind’s eye.

  But what you really must know about Anna’s, about the male specifically, is that he’s the only North American hummingbird that truly sings. The males of other species make sharp, aggressive chip notes full of desire, and those of the other Calypte species, Costa’s, do let forth a simple ascending-descending “song.” But just Anna’s have a bona fide tune, something to almost whistle along with. It’s a squeaky warble, rodent-like. But I find it adorable. Even today, while walking a city street, I will hear his raspy singing, perhaps from a tree growing in a planter outside of Safeway. Any young sapling off the sidewalk might hold one belting at its tip amid the waves of traffic noise. Sometimes I’ll stop midstride, point to the air, and say to a friend, “There’s an Anna’s.” Wait a few seconds, listen. “There.” I seem attuned to high frequencies, like a dog. Once you zero in on a sound, you’re not likely to forget it. The key is learning that other language naturally, when you’re young and receptive. I’ve heard it takes a teenager an average of seven times to commit something to memory. For an adult, often more than twenty.

  Several years ago, researchers from China ventured to California to investigate Calypte anna’s voice. They recorded forty-seven males in April and May at the Golden Gate Bridge, Golden Gate Park, Lake Merced, and Filoli Gardens, an old estate in the hills not far from where I grew up, a place my mother sometimes would visit for botanical watercolor classes (fine-tipped brushes, a few hairs sipping pigment). Each bird species’ song has its own rhythm and syntax: In Anna’s, the researchers—the listeners—found thirty-eight syllables in all, which build phrases like “bzz-bzz-bzz,” “chur-ZWEE,” and “dz! dz!” to name just a few. Each male knew an average of five syllables and shared some with his neighbors—the “tutors” he learned from—helping the birds to know and negotiate the ever-shifting boundaries of their territories, while shaping neighborhood dialects and the overall melody.

  Of course, the genus Calypte also calls to mind Calypso, “she who conceals,” the sea nymph who held Odysseus on the island of Ogygia for seven years. Shipwrecked and washed ashore, he didn’t object to her company at first: They shared a bed. But after a while, Odysseus grew homesick and, wishing to leave, spent his days pacing the shore with tears in his eyes. Zeus sympathized wit
h Odysseus’s plight and dispatched Hermes, his messenger. When Hermes flew into Ogygia, he marveled at Calypso’s garden: “Round her cave there was a thick wood of alder, poplar, and sweet smelling cypress trees, wherein all kinds of great birds had built their nests.” But Calypso wasn’t pleased with his tidings that she must let Odysseus go. “You gods,” she cried out, “ought to be ashamed of yourselves. You are always jealous and hate seeing a goddess take a fancy to a mortal man, and live with him in open matrimony. . . . I got fond of him and cherished him, and had set my heart on making him immortal, so that he should never grow old all his days.” But it was decreed. Her human must continue on.

  Sixth grade brought new sophistication. My parents gave me a Nikon camera, a tool to record. Quickly I borrowed my mother’s telephoto lens and stole into the brush of the backyard, into the manzanita with its small, white, bell-shaped flowers. Or I hunkered down below the prickly bottlebrush, with its profusion of crimson stamens—one of the hummingbirds’ favorites. My arms would grow shaky as I tried to steady the heavy lens and remain alert. Sometimes I’d lose focus, let my eyes wander. But I was always listening: bzzzzzzz. Then I held my breath, trying to still my camera and that blur of wings. Glossy prints, color slides: At night, the projector poured light through life on the white wall of my room, filling it with red and green. Click, click, I shuffled through. Many out of focus, off-center, but how could even one be thrown away? They held information. The sequence was crucial. I filed them away in plastic sheaths, in binders and boxes, as if to seal them off from dust. Someday I’d study them more carefully.

  Recently, high-tech cameras helped calculate the speed of a male Anna’s in his J dive: fifty-eight miles per hour. Relatively speaking, that makes him the fastest animal in the world at 385 body lengths per second—almost twice as fast as a peregrine falcon in its free-fall stoop. When a male Anna’s turns in front of his female counterpart perched below, he experiences ten times the pull of gravity, more force than fighter pilots experience in their jets (they travel a mere 150 body lengths per second). The Berkeley graduate student who took these measurements, Christopher Clark, also captured a composite of one male’s dive out of the clouds: a long necklace of images, downstrokes and upstrokes that taper into a glide before the hummer flares its tail, braking rapidly. Calling forth. Clark journeyed to a nearby park, a retired dump—always a good place to bird—in order to perform his initial experiments on C. anna. He snipped the two outer tail feathers from a netted male, released it, and then watched as the bird dove: whiff. The silence astonished him. Later, he put tail feathers in a wind tunnel to further explore their “aeroelastic flutter,” air trembling around those trailing vanes as if past the reed of a saxophone. He’d proven the source of the species’ dive note. But in point of fact, it had already been ascertained in 1940, when another inquisitive soul mounted the outer tail feather of an Anna’s on a thin strip of bamboo and, like a kid, whipped it (pik) through the air.