Coast Range

by Nick Neely

Where aerial shooting is legal and the den is in open terrain, wait until Coyote’s little ones venture outside to frolic and doze in the sun for the first time, then decimate Coyote and his progeny all at once, like a hailstorm from an empty sky. Think “video game.”

  Denning is cost-effective. Bullets are cheap. Coyote will sell them to you in bulk. I mean come on, now. Don’t be a sucker: Can’t you see it was Coyote who invented the gun?

  1 Answer: Coyote wrote the question.

  The Garden of Earthly Delights

  I had not expected to see all this mutilation. It would seem something of a tradition. Along this trail, the slender and old madrones, each and every one, are carved with the whims of passersby, like the arborglyphs of lonely Basque shepherds on aspen around the West. But do you know the madrone? It is the most human of trees. It has soft, smooth skin and often bends like a dancer twisting his or her myriad, dryadic arms. It exfoliates as it grows, shedding translucent cinnamon curls. Bursting at its seams. This tree, with the milky under-color of the rind of a honeydew melon; which flares from nude to satin orange to fillet red; which, when mature, sometimes deigns to grow a scaly bark, rough and gray. The quintessence of umbilical, the mother tree: madrone.

  Like revelers at a tavern table, we carve into this body, peanut shells underfoot. We have nothing, here, if not time and keys. Walking this trail to the top of Lower Table Rock near Medford, Oregon, you climb through black oak and glossy manzanita (some little cousin, by language, family, and texture) and then the madrones take hold in the nutrient-poor soil, where they thrive and wait for fire. That’s where I begin to slow, noticing these inscriptions. Studying this proliferation of incisions. They build in number until you can’t ignore them. Is this simple graffiti or collective art? A memorial or a gallery of horrors?

  As a kid in California, I was taught to call these “refrigerator trees.” Put your hand on its smooth surface, docents and teachers said. Press your cheek to it. Wrap yourself around it and feel the chill of sap close beneath the skin. As if magnetized, we are attracted. On this trail, we leave on them missives and sketches, the equivalent of (the desire for) family photos and shopping lists. Some trees are cut so profusely they are unreadable, sorely disfigured. Others only lightly marked. With smiley faces, penises, and other likeable vulgarities. With indiscriminant scratches, the passing glance of a fingernail.

  But most of all with names and, especially, initials. We remind these trees and ourselves of our persistence. SETH scrawled as if with claws. Inez. Emily. Noah. MICAH. MJ, KLB. IN (or HZ, depending on how you read it). Pick any two letters. There is a multiplication of equations: S + J, KD + MN. J + A 4 EVER. A + C = . John + Chris. Shaila y Martin 2012 . . . unknown. Some of them so fresh, so viscous green, they might have been excavated this afternoon.

  In a certain light, this place is violent (and how the light does shift as the clouds pass in a high wind, spotlights playing through the trees). There is, here, the pseudo-masochistic attempt to define a skin. Don’t pretend you don’t see it, this body. These trees are nothing if not figurative. They have accidental pimples and impromptu teats, swellings and cavities where the trees’ flesh has died back or grown over broken limbs. And I don’t doubt that some of these carvers imagined the skin of a madrone was someone else’s. Or their own. We play at vivisection. Pretend surgeon. We are the tattoo or tortured artists. This walk is a reminder that stories (you plus me) are often scouring, the erasure of something. What is an essay, a book, but an incision into a tree?

  But most carve not because the tree stands for the body—not consciously, I believe—but because it is softer than rock. These madrones present themselves, a supple medium to bind our love in its blindness. In theirs. There is such ultimate sweetness in such severe writing. This trail is a lovers’ arbor, a linear bower with a long memory of holding hands. After all, the primary symbols here are plusses and hearts (), one kept safe in the bubble of the other. And maybe it should come as no surprise that before the heart symbol—that dimpled inversion of a teardrop—came to mean “love” in the thirteenth century, the shape already existed on heraldry as a representation of foliage. Of water lily and ivy, and in nearby forests, the sorrel that lays at the feet of giants.

  There are, as well, the stars and crosses of sanctioned faith; but the difference between a plus sign and a cross, I see now, is a mere and tenuous extension. Jesus Team A is also carved here and there, and is everywhere implied, I imagine, for those who carry its letter in their hearts (faded scarlet, on a madrone). And nearby, the wavering circle-A of Anarchy. And as I near the summit of the trail, another svelte bole reads, Dios te quiero mucho, in a vertical cascade. But who is this you: God, or some other affection?

  All these symbols, these letters, are a kind of arrow pointing to the self as well as to the top of Lower Table Rock, where you can stand on the edge of basalt cliffs (the remains of an ancient volcanic plain) and look out at the fertile Rogue Valley (a gouge in time). Where we will survey the S curves of the river and the pear orchards, their white spoiling blossoms, and see Medford in the distance, and I-5 cutting through (its traveling cars like the ants trailing up the trees). Mount McLoughlin is a snowy stratovolcano on the horizon. The red-faced vultures soar along the cliffs, below us, swerving hard in the warm updrafts that blow across our cheeks.

  The madrone, I should say, was given its name by a certain Father Crespi on the first Spanish expedition into Alta California, the Portolá expedition, not far from where I grew up beside San Francisco Bay. He didn’t care for its Native name (they had come to evangelize); and he didn’t name it the refrigerator tree. Instead, this tree, which from Baja to British Columbia grows along the coast where it isn’t too wet, made him remember the madroño of his homeland: the strawberry tree, with fruits that do resemble fresas. It is another in the Arbutus genus, a close relative of our madroño. And “The Strawberry Tree,” you might be interested to hear, was also the original name for Hieronymus Bosch’s famous triptych, the altarpiece now in the Prado and known as The Garden of Earthly Delights. In the early sixteenth century, paintings weren’t titled; but in the catalog of the Court of Spain, this one from the Netherlands later became known as La Pintura del Madroño.

  The left panel of Bosch’s wild masterpiece is the unblemished paradise of Adam and Eve; the right depicts a wondrous but woeful damnation in an underworld of fire and demons. The largest, center panel overflows with a strange fantasy of nudes and fruits, either a picture of sin before the flood or, perhaps, if we read more generously, of paradise realized. No one really knows; we interpret according to our tastes. Pale, attenuated bodies lean against and pick from the strawberry trees; they hold and wear what look like cherries but which, to my mind, could just as easily be the edible berries of our madrone: blood-red and a favorite of birds (mostly tasteless to us). Bosch’s people cavort and contort with each other and animals in a landscape of excess that, if you study their small faces, isn’t necessarily the same as bliss. Nor is it meant to be.

  Here I stand, alive, in the garden del Madroño. There are nudes all around, twisting. There is love, and there are the knives that lacerate it. That prove it. Off the trail, in a nexus of trunks, I even find one on the ground: a burnished, winking serration with a black plastic handle (the madrone’s leaves also lanceolate and sometimes serrated). The knife is dropped or hidden, as if paramours were caught in the act and fled, leaving this evidence. Wanting to be found. As if they plan to return and continue their surreptitious, bawdy art. To cut their hearts out all over again. Or is it left here intentionally so that others, so that I, will take it up and add to the writing? I think of the third panel of Bosch’s garden, a netherworld where knives loom, splitting a pair of gigantic ears and piercing hands and stomachs. Pinning us like moths. This realm is hinged to all the others.

  Soon I begin to doubt whether particular windows into the gray heartwood are old letters or natural scars. Soon the innate patterns of bark, all checkers and curls, begin to pulse and
blend with alphabet. I think a tree says fear, when it may say pearl. I think a heart holds Dad, and am disappointed when it is only D+D. Even in the moment of reading, on these trees is everywhere the reminder of growth and change. It teaches who would carve. All these letters will be distorted, subsumed, by new skin. Even the deepest shapes, the largest hearts, slowly infold. Most of these equations are quite literally left unfinished. Gradually the living phloem moves forward, like a lava flow always on the verge of cooling.

  The biggest trees hold the longest memory, but it is the younger madrones that are ripest for paring, with their soft, herbal skin. Those near the trail’s few benches (also carved) are especially vulnerable, most popular, and I wander through these groves, a voyeur with his instruments, his camera and his notebook. Red- Neck, reads one tree, and the words are so apt, so freighted, they rise (as they do over my head) to utter significance. Stacked one atop another, they are; the hyphen a copyeditor’s afterthought. These words are a put-down and a coming-together, a declaration of identity. But I think also of all the necking that has gone on in places like this, from here to 4 ever.

  Down the trail comes a pair. She is, of course, a redhead, her shoulder-length hair windswept like the meadow (its ephemeral pools) atop Lower Table Rock; her eyebrows are pierced, a deflated backpack on her shoulders. He is wearing black-and-white camo shorts that hang below his knees, tall white socks pulled over his angular calves. His black T-shirt reads, Fried Chicken and Gasoline, and I don’t quite know its degree of irony (how to read it). Down the trail, they flow, holding hands, a jaunt in their step and with the relaxed, faint smiles of electric companionship. Of a fulfilling date. On this unexpectedly sunny afternoon in late March, his exposed and chiseled triceps have burned rosy. Their necks are the pink of their affection. A hermit thrush in the understory sings with its ruddy tail.

  The Carcass Toss

  When the doors opened, it was the smell that hit you: almost sweet, but with the faint sour of turned flesh. More outsized fish—366 steelhead, to be precise, behemoth oceangoing trout—awaited me in a pair of cloud-white totes, voluminous and lined with translucent plastic bags. For a week, they had been thawing under the overhead heaters in the spawning house. Whenever the technicians needed to work inside, sorting or “collecting” the steelhead and salmon, they forklifted the totes into the March sunlight, aired out the place, hosed down the concrete floor. The flies enjoyed a taste, and then the fish were wheeled back in. But this was to be the last exit, for this batch. Soon more totes would be driven out of the freezer, where, for two weeks, the carcasses are kept at -10 degrees Fahrenheit to kill a parasite that will poison scavenging dogs.

  I was drinking my coffee with Chuck Fustish, a salmonid biologist for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, having returned to the Cole Rivers Hatchery north of Medford. We had ridden upstream together to pick up the essential ingredient for tomorrow’s “stream enrichment” session. With other volunteers, we were going to hurl these bad boys, these noxious remains, into one of the Rogue’s nursery creeks. The idea was to simulate the natural die-off of salmon and steelhead, which no longer exists as it once did in the Northwest because of collapsed wild populations. These silver goliaths deliver not only thousands of eggs to their birth streams, but also all the sea-won nutrients in their rippling elephantine bodies. It is a crucial delivery, a key gift to river ecosystems, but in Oregon less than 10 percent of historic wild salmon and steelhead still exists. Surplus hatchery fish, however, we can toss. Over seventy thousand carcasses are launched into Oregon and Washington creeks each year.

  The affable, and aptly named, Chuck wore a beige ODFW polo tucked into jeans below his stomach and a fluorescent orange ball cap that declared the agency’s role in regulating the hunt. He has ice-blue eyes, curly gray hair, and a face genially askew to one side, his mouth sliding as if in a permanent Wyoming drawl. As a young man, Chuck gave up that sagebrush ocean for Oregon and his obsession with big fish, which he first glimpsed in the gloss of National Geographic. After earning a master’s in fisheries at Oregon State, he migrated to the Rogue Valley, where he’d worked for ODFW for thirty-nine years. He would retire come June, in just a few months.

  One of Chuck’s diehard volunteers, Larry Butts, had ridden along as well, as he usually does the day before a carcass toss. Short and scrappy, with roseate thread veins in his pale cheeks, Larry had flown for the Navy and American Airlines before retiring to the Rogue Valley where he was raised. He was a fast but quiet talker, a fish zealot who drove a large green truck with a “Bend Over” anti-Obama sticker on the bumper.

  Chuck, Larry, and company lob carcasses into the Rogue and its upper tributaries on ten Saturdays a year: salmon in the fall and early winter, steelhead in the spring, when each arrives. Salmon, “the king of fish,” are famous for their all-or-nothing, one-and-done reproductive strategy, known as semelparity: After three or four years at sea, they run inland—potentially hundreds of miles—and devote every last ounce of their existence to broods of tangerine, oleaginous eggs buried loosely in gravel nests called “redds,” which the females painstakingly excavate and groom with their tails. Then, without fail, they perish. Their carcasses sink away or float to nearby banks.

  In fewer numbers, steelhead also go to the ocean, typically for two years, before returning inland; but the strongest among them, especially females, fin back to the Pacific once more, rejuvenate, and attempt the epic spawning journey all over again in future years: iteroparity. Genetically, steelhead are merely a rainbow trout, a grandiose maritime one, and scientists aren’t sure why some trout fry become steelhead and others are content with freshwater. But probably this gigantism is genetic and an elaborate strategy, or anomaly, to bolster the species’ fitness: It hedges bets against the vicissitudes of a single habitat; it hides roe in disparate baskets. In any case, for our modern enrichment purposes, a steelhead carcass serves just as well as a salmon’s. Though a tad smaller and less iconic, it’s an analogous sack of nutrients. It likewise stinks to high heaven. This spring alone Chuck and Larry would let fly eight tons of steelhead into Rogue tributaries.

  The forklift whined in and out of the aseptic spawning house as it hoisted the totes onto Chuck’s wooden flatbed trailer. It also loaded a third virginal tote between the laden, blood-spattered ones, just in case we needed to pitchfork some of the argentine bodies over to expose a frozen block below. “Otherwise,” Larry told me, “you’re sitting there with a crowbar and hammer trying to throw them into the stream. Tissue seems to hold its cold better than water.” But these fish had left the freezer a week ago and it seemed turning the fish over, like the fertile compost they were, might not be necessary. As I stood by the totes, a playful breeze swirled and sent me reeling.

  “Aren’t they nice?” said Chuck. “You’re going to love it.”

  “The smell takes some adjusting,” I said.

  “It gets better,” Chuck replied.

  Fading metallic, lightly freckled, the steelhead had settled into one another, each cradled in the soft valley of two more. Rather they had melted together: oozed, a mucilaginous film their temporary glue. On average each was four and a half pounds. Together they weighed sixteen hundred pounds. The genus of Pacific salmon and trout, Oncorhynchus, means “hook nose,” and their jaws had grown long and sickled, becoming the “kypes” that display their fitness, their desirability. All, or nearly all, were male. At the hatchery, most females are squeezed of their sunset eggs with the push of a thumb and hauled downstream in a tanker truck to be “recycled,” alive, back into the Rogue for anglers. But the males receive no such second chance, since they can’t be stripped of their milt and so might spawn with wild fish, diluting the imperiled native gene pool if they “stray,” if they don’t return to the hatchery. Their only second chance is enrichment.

  It was only males in jeans standing around these fish, I noticed—me, Chuck, Larry, and several hatchery employees. It was to be that kind of guys’ weekend. We wended south towa
rd Medford along the Crater Lake Highway, the Rogue gliding low and pitted beside us, bedrock visible in the river where it usually isn’t: a dry year. I rode in the back of Chuck’s cab, listening to Larry talk like a gentle riffle. Then onto a rolling back road through boutique wineries and old orchards, the famous Medford pear blossoms just emerged, pale and diaphanous, on their lumpish branches. Chuck prefers to avoid the main thoroughfares when towing fish so as not to create a public disturbance. “One time,” said Chuck, “we let’m go real good, spring Chinook carcasses in the fall, and of course the flies are real thick at the end of the year. I had a trail of flies going from here to Medford. They were all trying to catch back up.” No flies in our exhaust, so far as I could tell; the fish hadn’t been thawed for long, and it wasn’t yet the warm season. But our lone tailgater, a woman in a cream sedan, did pass us impatiently, and I wondered if it was Chuck’s languid steering or if she’d caught a whiff.

  We pulled into the Denman Wildlife Area, Chuck’s headquarters, which rests in Central Point, adjacent to Medford, in the middle of the broad, fertile Rogue Valley. The unassuming office sat beside a tranquil pond with a view of snow-capped Mount McLoughlin, 9,495 feet in elevation, to the hazy east in the Cascades. It was a World War II army building turned faux chalet: forestry brown, with evergreen shutters sporting the cutout silhouettes of rising trout and antlered bucks. We rumbled past to a rear gravel lot and unhitched the trailer beside an aged red barn with dust holding the light in its cavernous mouth. The fish would benefit from an afternoon’s sunbath.

  Then we hit the highway, I-5, heading west a half hour to Grants Pass to drop off some little steelhead hitching a sloshy ride with us in a plastic trash can. Steelhead and salmon morph from newly hatched alevin to fry, to parr, to smolt, the stage when the fish silvers—ocean camouflage—and heads for salt. These were parr. At the hatchery, they had been netted from one of its concrete ponds for “an experiment.” They were guinea pigs, canaries. They were going to be placed into a tiny creek, and if they survived, then ODFW would build a temporary barrier and pour in thousands more to “imprint” on the flow for several weeks. When the grown fish returned from the ocean, those survivors would rediscover their first stream—steelhead might be able to smell it from thirteen miles away—and linger, trying to find a way up despite an impassable dam. It was yet another ploy to bring luck to anglers.