They walked silently out of the building and back to their bright green Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife truck. Slowly opening the passenger door, Jess longed to be at home, sitting in the backyard with her dog, Miko, watching the slow fade of light in her garden. She wanted to ask Rich all kinds of questions, but the silent weight in the cab of the truck seemed to push at her chest, not giving her enough air to form words.
When she got back to her desk, she looked quickly at her email, but her attention was fractured. Six more hours left in the workday. She looked at her calendar, hoping that she had scheduled some field time for herself in the afternoon. She had: from one o’clock on, she would be up at the Nesika, making sure the fishermen were staying within the limits of their catches at the Corridor fishing area. In the fall, the coho were coming upstream in their dangerously small numbers, and Jess knew that if Power-Corp got its way, the fish population could continue to decline to the point where its slide into extinction was inevitable.
She imagined their slick bodies pushing upriver, silver flashing through the turbulent white water. The Corridor was a beautiful fishing spot, one that Jess had gone to with her family many times. It was a narrow place in the basalt canyon that forced the runs of salmon and steelhead to run a kind of fishing gauntlet. Jess had caught her first steelhead there when she was just nine. She longed for those days, but was that because she hadn’t known the salmon were in decline back then? The only story she remembered was the tale of how, in the fall, when the salmon were running upriver, you could “walk across on their backs.”
She thought back to when she had done her doctoral research in Alaska. She had kayaked by herself to a small island off Sitka. When she landed her kayak, she walked up toward a forested area in hopes of seeing a grizzly feeding on the salmon. She stood in the salmon stream where it entered the sound. Hundreds of salmon were making their way upstream, pushing against her rubber boots, being directed by the delicate shift in their hormones that signaled them to spawn . . .
Now, Jess looked up at the charts surrounding her desk. They looked like some kind of bizarre modern-art display in which the lines all went down, indicating loss of habitat and changes in the ocean currents, pointing to one thing: diving salmon populations. All the studies she had done with Jeff supported the one conclusion that would restore the spawning habitat above the dam: dam removal. They had put together an extensive evaluation of the habitat, showing that to simply provide fish with passage around the dam would put native salmon into a sedentary pond invaded by predatory species, like brown trout. This was not the salmons’ habitat; their young would be eaten as trout food as they attempted to down-migrate through the reservoir behind the dam.
Jess wanted to call Jeff to talk all this through, but she wasn’t sure who might be listening over the cubicle walls that created her artificial office, so instead she gathered her things and drove to her house for lunch.
“Hey, Miko!” she called, as she opened her front door. The love of her life came bounding out of the back room. He was big even for a male Akita, his black-masked face and strong, 135-pound, fawn-colored body moving toward her like a force of pure joy.
She knelt down and buried her face in his thick fur. “Damn, boy, how could it be like this? It seems like there’s no logic working anymore.” She absentmindedly pushed the PLAY button on her answering machine, and familiar voices rang through the room: someone selling carpet cleaning, a reminder call for her haircut . . . Blah, blah, thought Jess, and she punched the STOP button.
“Let’s go, boy. Let’s go see what’s going on up the river.” Miko spun in his “let’s go” ritual, and Jess opened the door. The day was bright, the temperature high and unsettling for fall. She wondered if she should take some temperature measurements while she was upstream. The already too-warm river was enough to slow the coho from moving upstream in time to spawn.
As soon as she got into her truck, she called Jeff. She left him a message: “Hey, Jeff, it’s me. I’m going upriver to do some work at Corridor. What the fuck happened today? Jesus—did you know about it? Anyway, you do now, don’t you?” She heard her voice sharpening, and she took a breath. “If you’re upriver today, give me a call, okay? If not, I guess we’ll just catch up at dinner.”
Jess ended the call and put her phone back in her pack. As she parked her truck near the fishing area, an osprey dove across the road in front of her, caught a thermal, and lifted up and over the Nesika. The hawklike bird’s large white body stood out against the dark green river as it dove carefully into the deep resting pool below the falls of the Narrows. Ospreys always reminded Jess of the day of the accident: the quiet after the motor died on the boat, the rush of the water, her father shouting, and the high cry of the bird circling over them. It had been almost twenty years since then.
Pulling slowly to the side of the road, Jess looked out at the river and the families fishing along the Nesika’s banks. She thought of the salmon, the importance of the fish to the river and to the people of Penden Valley, and the large concrete dam thirty-five miles upstream.
As she began to check the visitors’ fishing licenses and salmon tags, she recognized an older man who was tying a neon green-and-orange plastic lure to his fishing line. He was an old family friend and father of one of her best friends growing up. Her heart tugged as she remembered her dad, bent over his tackle box, searching through a tangle of lures while trying to divine which one the salmon would go for. Jess used to help him; he would let her tie the lure on the end of the line using a special fishing knot. Then, almost five years ago, he had died suddenly of heart failure while working in his backyard garden. Attacked by his heart—a heart broken by the loss of his daughter—and by trying to love the fragments of his wife, who was so incredibly broken and wounded.
“Hey, Cliff.” The man looked up at Jess with watery reddish-blue eyes, his graying hair sticking out from under his well-worn dark green Ducks Unlimited cap.
“Jess—hey! Good to see you!” He was like an old bear as he lumbered upright to face her. She longed to hug him but, realizing she was in uniform, simply reached out her hand in greeting.
“How’s it going today? Catching anything?” Jess knew that fishing in the middle of the day was more of a meditation, a distraction, or practice for the times of day, like the early morning and late afternoon, when the fish were moving in the cool river, less likely to be spotted by predators with the sun shining on their silver backs. Cliff reached to take out his fishing license, and Jess gestured to him to put it away.
“Not getting much today,” he said. “I caught one of those damn small-mouth bass, though. I didn’t think they came this far upriver.”
“Well, Cliff, the river’s pretty warm this year. I’m not surprised the bass have come up this far. It’s too bad—their favorite food is salmon and steelhead fingerlings. They don’t belong in here.”
“Yeah—someone told me they got in the river in sixty-four, when the big floods came. The Nesika flooded some fishing ponds up near the coast. The bass came into the river and have been doing great since the water’s been heating up these years.”
Looking out over the river, Jess sighed. “I remember going down to Ford’s pond when I was a kid. It was full of bass and bluegill perch, remember? Dad would always fall in trying to walk out on the old pond logs. They love the warm water, these fish; if the river keeps getting warmer, there’ll be a bigger bass fishery than salmon fishery on the Nesika.”
“He was something, your dad.” Cliff shook his head and bent down next to his fishing pole. “The river’s sure changing these days. It’s a lot different since you were a kid, huh?”
Jess nodded, and he continued, “How’s your mom?”
“Mom’s good. Busy with her knitting and begging me for grandkids. You know, you should call her sometime. I know she’d love to hear from you. I think she gets pretty lonely sometimes.” Jess noticed that he got a faraway look and went back to tying on his lure, so she said, “We
ll, I’d better go. There’s more folks up here than I expected.”
“Okay. And I will give your mom a call. Good luck with what you’re trying to do for these salmon,” he said, gesturing toward the river.
The afternoon sun flashed in the folds and roll of the river. Jess walked downstream, toward the other people fishing, calling Miko to follow her. The whistling cry of the osprey caught her attention as it circled over the deep green pool below the white rush of the water moving through the basalt narrows. Good luck, she thought. And then she checked her phone to see if Jeff had called back.
JEFF
The fluorescent lights buzzed loudly, and Jeff reached over and turned on the radio in his small trailer. Because he was new, they had given him a temporary office, down the gravel road just past the main offices for the Nesika Power Project. He was waiting to hear how the meeting had gone. Knowing that Jess was presenting their part of the research that had solidified the recommendation to remove the Green Springs dam, he imagined that evening, when he saw her again, would be charged with a powerful sense of accomplishment and that rush of Jess that he so loved. Jeff knew PowerCorp executives were uneasy about the possibility of removing the dam, but he also knew that they had other fights, bigger than the one over this little dam up in the high reaches of the Nesika. Jeff was even hoping there would be some publicity benefit to PowerCorp if it removed the dam—a new story told by an old, outdated corporate model—and he looked forward to working on the next phase of the restoration science that would be published and documented for other dam removal projects.
Jeff’s phone buzzed, and Janice at the front desk called him in to see Stan and Mack. He felt uneasy; the meeting should have gone on longer than this.
Stan and Mack sat waiting for him in the small meeting office in the main building.
“Jeff, take a seat,” Mack said, looking somewhere past Jeff, his large hands folded officially on the fake-wood tabletop. “We want to let you know how the meeting went. We had to deny the proposal to remove the dam. Just late yesterday, we got a fax from Mark Rey, the head of the US Forest Service, assuring us of their support to keep the Green Springs dam in the river. What this means is, that decision would override the proposal from the state agency and the environmental groups to remove the dam.”
Jeff shifted in his seat. He remembered the camaraderie early in the negotiations, when Rich and the others, including Dave Rankin from the US Forest Service, had been convinced the dam would come out. It was like a win for the local boys, a legacy for the agency. But what meant more to PowerCorp than any of this was the amount of money it would cost it to remove the dam and restore the river. The actual science and what was best for the river didn’t matter to the company at all.
“Great. Well, let’s get on with it, then, shall we? Jeff, correct me if I’m wrong, but all we have left to do is to draft a memo that outlines what the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife needs from PowerCorp in order to support the new license.” He paused and looked at Jeff. “We gotta make sure what we recommend won’t be criticized too heavily by the science geeks at the agencies. That’s why we need you, Jeff. Stan, what do we have so far? Did you see a copy of the memo that we had faxed down from Portland?” Mack shouted into the next room: “Hey, Janice, could you bring that folder on my desk that’s marked ‘Rey’?” Then he turned back to the others. “Hey, I heard a good one today. Do you know what a salmon says when it hits its head on a rock?” He paused. “Dam!”
Jeff smiled, but he felt as if he were in on plans to beat up a kid after school. He shook off his uneasiness when Janice came into the room and handed the folder to Mack.
The memo sat in front of him like a death warrant. Mark Rey assured the heads of PowerCorp that the Forest Service would not interfere in any negotiations over the new license. The Federal Energy Resource Commission was anxiously awaiting their recommendations, certain that the new license would be one that kept the Green Springs dam in place.
Jeff thought of Jess, her soft curves in the bed just hours before. He knew how much the dam closure meant to her, to Rich, and to the others from the environmental groups. Closing his eyes for a moment, he felt the familiar sinking in his stomach that he experienced whenever he faced something like this. He was grateful for his years of work and for his ability to stay out of the mainstream of major conflicts, but now he was faced with something that compromised more than him. He was the one who would have to craft a report that would provide the science to keep the Green Springs dam in place. He decided to let Mack react first.
Mack sat up and looked over the report in front of him. “Okay, one of the moves we can make is to set up what’s called a mitigation fund. I have word from the office in Portland that we can put up to two million dollars into a fund that would support the various projects we recommend to mitigate the loss of habitat and other detrimental effects of the Green Springs dam. This looks good to the agencies, because who gets this money? Right, Jeff?” He nodded at Jeff.
Jeff was certain the money would be invested in the Nesika Power Project on an annual basis. And knowing that the fund would be allocated over a seven-year period would quiet Rich and the others. Of course, he knew most of this money would never actually be spent on restoration projects. Some of it would be used to upgrade the power station itself, and maybe the guy who ran it would get a raise for keeping a closer eye on regulating the downstream flows. The salmon would continue to be blocked from their spawning grounds, and the money would continue changing hands in the same way it had since the beginning of land management.
Pictures of the Green Springs and the Tahoma Power Station towered over them—a testament to development and to blind desperation for power, for energy to fuel a country bent on unlimited progress. The spill of the blue-green water and the web of power lines and blue sky over the granite canyon seemed like an irreversible part of the landscape. Jeff felt a stir in his groin, remembering Jess that morning, and a rising heat in his face at the knowledge that somehow this tangle of concrete and wire could stop what was happening between them, just as it had stopped the river and blocked the salmon while throwing electrons down wires—a mystery Jeff did not think he could ever completely understand.
“Okay,” he said, “what I need to do is draft a new environmental assessment that will make recommendations to mitigate for the habitat loss, work to restore some of the downstream debris and gravel that’s missing, and find a way to get the fish up and over the dam. I will take this directive back to Jess and Rich, and we’ll put something together and let you know when we’re ready to meet again.”
Mack looked down at the memo in front of him as if it were a prize catch. “Sure, Jeff, sounds great. Why don’t you take what you need from the documentation here?” He pointed to the large stack of documents on the table. “And let us know when you have a draft to show us. I’m hoping we can do this quickly so we can get going on some of those improvements we’ve been talking about. I hate it when negotiations drag on like this.”
Jeff felt as if he were floating on an ice floe down an uncharted canyon. He and his report were about to discount everything he and Jess had worked for. He had fallen for her—for her wild and brilliant mind—and fallen for their science. Maybe that had clouded his judgment, but there was nothing he could do about that now.
On the way upriver, he deliberately didn’t check the message from Jess on his cell phone. Being with her, being able to hold her and listen to her, would be better than trading messages or having a tangled call that would end in arguing. He knew she would be taking this hard.
The radio played the dull sound of local country music, and Jeff stared down the road as he thought about his first day working with Jess, six months before. She wasn’t tall, but she was strong and moved with a kind of determination. She reminded him of a wood elf, a hunter, aware of everything going on around her. Later, when she pulled off her damp wool cap, he could see her long, dark hair and a humorous glint in her crystal blue eye
s. He liked her, that day, a lot. Then they had gone up to the hot springs and he had felt as if they had been transported back into a kind of ancient timelessness that transcended them both.
It was just getting dark, so he pulled into a small picnic area to spend some time by the river. The river curved around the bend under the darkening boughs of the old-growth Douglas firs that had survived in the steep river canyon. He wished he had brought his fly rod along. Impulsively, he decided to drop in on his old friends Fred and Janine. Fred had been a young boy when his family had settled in a small farmhouse on the outskirts of Penden Valley. He had married Janine, his high school sweetheart, and moved up on the Nesika, where he’d opened the Nesika Lodge. Fred was a powerful advocate of the river, and Jeff felt slightly nervous about telling him what was going on. They had started a fly-fishing organization twenty years earlier, the Nesika Fly Fishers, and Jeff had been a charter member.
He started his truck and drove up the long gravel drive into the hills above the Nesika where Fred and Janine had lived for more than forty years. The large wooden door slowly opened; Fred looked tired and resigned as he ushered Jeff into the dimly lit cabin.
“Hey, Jeff, what brings you around here?” Fred’s lined face was lit with a familiarity that Jeff had grown to trust in the past years.
“Oh, just coming down from work and thought I’d stop in.” Jeff had always appreciated Fred’s special attention to him. Fred had been there for him when Jeff’s father had died, teaching him how to tie flies and fish the deep holes of the Nesika River. As Jeff had gotten older, he’d realized that this friendship had become a cornerstone of his work and his devotion to protecting and caring for the river.
Fred’s face dimmed with concern, and he looked over at Janine. “Yeah, I knew there was something going on. Rich was by the other day and said it looked like the dam was going to come down. I was surprised. Never thought PowerCorp would go along with that.”
The Same River Page 3