“Thanks, guys—and good luck.” She walked out to her car, the ground still damp from the hard rain. The moon had come out, and the air was fresh with the coming spring. She drove home slowly, rehearsing what she would tell Jeff about the meeting. It was like walking through a long valley up into another mountain range, weaving his point of view into hers. How long will it last? This can’t be right.
“How’d the meeting go?” Jeff asked when she got home.
Jess patted Miko’s head, avoiding eye contact with Jeff. “It was good. Some kids from Earth in Mind were there. Their names were Mink, Remedy, and Butterfly. God, I would love to be them, to be twenty, so convinced that what they’re doing is the absolute right thing.”
“Good, good. I took Miko for a walk. We missed you.” He hugged her close, and Jess was grateful he didn’t ask for more, though she had the layers ready to cover what had really happened: what she was willing to do or not, to say or not. She didn’t want to fight with him—it was too hard, and she was too tired. Jeff reached tenderly around her and slipped the hairband from her ponytail, running his fingers through her long hair.
She rested in his tenderness and felt the whole day fall away. If she could somehow just wish it all back, they could stay right where they had been these past months. He whispered into her hair, “I know we can work this out.” Even as she felt herself melting toward him, she knew there was something else looming in the room, forcing itself up between them from the ground. It was cold and hard and smelled like damp concrete.
JESS
Jess pulled her small truck into her familiar parking spot in front of the hedge surrounding the dark brown walls of the Oregon Fish and Wildlife offices. She sat in silence for a moment, imagining what might be going on behind Rich’s closed door or what might be waiting for her in her email inbox. It seemed impossible to her that something so certain could have changed so fast.
Her body was sore, and she hadn’t slept well the night before. She walked slowly into the building’s small, too-bright kitchen, where coffee was brewing, and stood watching the steady stream pour into the clear glass pot.
A hand on her shoulder startled her. “Jess.”
She turned quickly around and looked up into Jeff’s dark eyes. “What are you doing here? I thought you had to go take measurements in the reservoir above the dam.”
“I thought I did, too, but I’ve been called into a meeting today, with the hydrologist and the fish guy—I think his name is Dave—from the Forest Service.”
“What?” she said, shoving him into the corner. “Why wasn’t I told about this meeting?”
“I don’t know—maybe they’re worried about you and me. Maybe they know about your involvement with the enviro groups—”
“I’m the lead fucking scientist for the state on this project! They can’t have secret meetings without me!”
“Well, they’re not exactly secret if I’m involved—they all know about us.”
“Fucking shit. They are going around me, aren’t they?” Jess turned and closed the sliding door into the kitchen, then continued, “Jeff, you have to help me. Rich won’t stand for this, won’t sign the agreement. I know that!”
“I don’t know that for sure, Jess. I know you’ve known Rich a long time, but he has a family, he’s going to retire soon, and he’s done this work for years and knows when to choose his battles.” Jeff looked nervous, and Jess wished they could just slip away. Instead, she pushed past him and slid the door open loudly, startling Emily, the receptionist, who was waiting outside, holding an empty PowerCorp coffee cup.
Shit, Jess thought, and she rushed down the dim, brown-paneled hall to the slightly open door of Rich’s office. He was on the phone, but Jess didn’t care. “Rich! Hey, what’s going on? You can’t have a meeting without me!”
Rich whispered, “Hold on” into the phone and cradled it against his chest to keep Jess’s shouting from entering his conversation.
“Jess, let me finish this call and I’ll come talk to you in your office.”
“No. I’ll wait right here.” She flopped onto the green fake-leather couch and stared hard at her hands. She heard Rich saying softly, “I’ll have to call you back. I’m sorry. Shouldn’t be long.”
When he hung up, he said, “Jess, I know—”
“You know! Of course you know! Why wasn’t I told about this meeting today? Dave is here, Jeff is here, and I’m being sent out to check fishing licenses? I wasn’t hired, I didn’t get my PhD, to do that! What is going on?” Jess stood up and leaned on the front of Rich’s desk, sliding his nameplate to one side: RICH HANSON, DEPARTMENT OF FISH AND WILDLIFE.
“Jess, please calm down. You have to understand what we’re up against here. I know how hard you’ve worked on this, and your science is good, real good. Your results line up with everything we all know about what’s best for the river. But you’re too close to the project. You have too many . . . well, too many personal feelings about what’s going on with the river.”
“What! Oh my God, Rich, not you! I took this job because I trusted you and I respected you as a scientist. I know you and my dad were friends, and I know from him what a good job you’ve done for the state, for the fish, and for the river. I can’t let you do this. I won’t—”
“Please try to understand that there are a lot of sides to this story. There are the needs of the fish, that’s for sure, and there are the needs of PowerCorp. It’s about balancing all that out.”
“Don’t feed me that crap, Rich! You and I both know what’s best here, in the long run, the short run, the only run, for the salmon and steelhead in this river! If this license is renewed, it will be another forty-five years before we get a chance at making any significant changes at all in this part of the river. How can you be okay with that?”
“Well, Jess, I guess my perspective is that we all have a different take on what will really help restore the salmon populations. I happen to believe that if we can put a ladder around the dam, we can at least partially restore the spawning grounds.”
“But, Rich, you didn’t believe that yesterday.”
He just sat there. Jess looked at him and backed away from his desk, sitting back down on the couch. The room fell away as she recognized the familiar numbing of betrayal, and she suddenly didn’t care to try to rescue Rich or her relationship with him. For some reason, because of some conversation that must have threatened his job or scared him in some other way, he was gone to her.
“I have to go to work.” She stood up, and the silence between them felt like a dark, toxic haze that Jess couldn’t quite see through. “But, Rich, you know I’m right.”
He didn’t say anything. He picked up his phone to redial his call.
Jess went back to her office and stared at her computer screen. She thought of the meeting at Martin’s the night before and began to wonder if she shouldn’t get more involved. Jeff, she sighed to herself, and looked up at the photo of the two of them on her desk. When they had first gotten together, it had all seemed simple enough. She had brought to him the current science and studies that she had done and been familiar with in graduate school, and he had brought to her his experience in working for years in this community, on this river. Now, now . . . Jess sighed and tried to think of what to do next. She felt alone, like she was a character in an old black-and-white Western, invisible to everyone in the office, even Jeff. How were they going to hold their relationship together through this?
Sitting at her desk, Jess felt small and powerless, wondering what her colleagues might be saying about her in front of Jeff. It’s just not right, she thought. None of this was supposed to happen. She rearranged the reports on her desk; they all showed the continual decline of the coho, chinook, and steelhead that had lived in the Nesika for thousands of years. To her, it was simple: the salmon and steelhead were in a dangerous decline, and the best way to help them was to restore their spawning grounds by removing the old, worn-out Green Springs dam. She couldn’t conceiv
e of what they might be considering in the meeting down the hall. Anything they would think of would only create a false front for a failed project. How can they ignore the science? It’s not just some story someone made up. It was as real to her as her hands and fingers.
Just let it go, she told herself, but Martin’s comments from the night before rang in her ears. What if . . .
She grabbed her keys off her desk and hurried out to her truck. She wanted to check the migration monitoring station at Colliding Rivers station, where the Nesika ran headlong into the Toketee River upstream, creating a storm of white turbulence.
As she drove, Jess thought about calling her uncle Robert, her mother’s older brother and a large, sweet presence at family events. After Monica’s death, when Jess’s parents, consumed by grief, hadn’t seemed to have room for her and her loss, Robert had become a source of solace for her. And when the time had come for Jess to go to college, he had supported and championed her bright mind and tender wits and had inspired and encouraged her desire to follow him in his passion.
He, too, had been attacked by the agency he worked for. The Forest Service, where he was the director of one of the largest studies on salmon in the Columbia River, had disregarded and discarded his own findings. He had written a report concluding that the continued decline of salmon populations couldn’t be offset by “manufacturing” the fish in hatcheries; the life cycle of the salmon was simply too complicated to be reproduced in an industrial environment. The wild salmon followed a story in their genetic code that was unique to their birth river. These genes shaped the physical growth of the salmon, which depended on the flows and currents of the river itself. To remove the eggs, to remove the bodies of the parents from the streams, was to degrade the environment and compromise the development of the salmon in a way that contributed to their demise and possible extinction. But the hatcheries were the tools of government agencies and justified the use of rivers for profit.
As Robert became more vocal in his criticism, his agency job became more difficult, until he had to “retire” early. He then started a private consulting company, built a large house on the Columbia River, and devoted his time to writing about salmon. His books and lectures became the fuel for young biologists and ecologists to fight for the wild fish.
Now, Jess knew, she needed him more than ever. She called him from the Colliding Rivers parking lot. “Uncle Robert!”
“Jess, hey—good to hear from you. I was just thinking about you. How’s things going in the working world these days?”
“Well, I wish I could say great, everything’s fine, but, to tell you the truth, I’m not exactly sure what to say to you about it. We had a meeting the other day with PowerCorp, and basically they just walked out of the meeting, declaring that they would not sign any settlement agreement that involves removing the Green Springs dam.”
“What? But, Jess, I thought you said they were onboard with that.”
“Yeah, I—well, we—did, too. But they got some directive from your old friend with the Forest Service Mark Rey, who we both know is a conservative ass, assuring PowerCorp that there would be no holdout on the Forest Service’s part in regard to leaving in the Green Springs. It really sucks.”
Jess felt as if she might start crying, and Robert was silent on the other side. She knew he was experiencing echoes of his own conflict with the Forest Service, how they cornered him when he proposed a new guideline to measure impacts of logging on salmon habitat. He had found himself defending his science against what he thought was a public institution—only no, it wasn’t. The Forest Service had become just one more federal agency being run by corporations and serving only corporate interest.
“Damn, Jess, I really thought this would go through. I’m so sorry. I knew when you started working for the agency that there would be some hard times, but . . . I don’t know—maybe I’m still too naive myself to realize how low they would go to get what they want. I just don’t get it. There’s no way there’s a trade-off for anyone in this. One thing I can guarantee you: they’re not telling you everything they know.”
“That’s just it. You know how I’ve been seeing this guy, Jeff? He’s the head fish biologist for PowerCorp. We worked on all the reports together, he knows the science as well as I do, and he’s back at the office at some private meeting that I wasn’t invited to.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Jess. There are matters of the heart and matters of work. Sometimes the two just don’t always mix that well. Maybe this is one of those times, sweetheart. You’re a good scientist. Your papers on sediment reduction and the relationship of water temperature to spawning rates are some of the best I’ve ever read. You’re well respected and well published. If they know what’s good for them, they won’t ignore your science.”
“Thanks. But they are ignoring it as we speak!” Jess gazed out the window of her truck. It was a clear day, and the golden leaves of the maples at Colliding Rivers station rocked in the light wind of the late morning. She looked out over the blending of the two rivers. She loved their force, rushing down from their high mountain sources and colliding headlong into each other, before rolling together into the same basalt riverbed.
“Jess, listen to me. They’re going to do what they’re going to do. These people are corporate hacks operating in an environment where facts don’t matter. There is a really profound sense of invincibility among people who have corporate power. But you and I know that is only one kind of power. You have to wait. When the time is right, be ready with what you know.”
Jess sat in silence for a moment. “I don’t know if I can do that.”
“I don’t know if you have any choice.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. Uncle Robert, this is so hard.”
“I’m not telling you to be a good girl—don’t get me wrong about that. You know what happened to me. I’m just saying that it would better serve your career, and maybe the river in the long run, if you can stick to your science and not lose your job over this. I can tell you there’s no way out. There’s no way you can fight them. Not like you want to right now.”
He paused, then asked, “How’s your mom doing?”
“I think fine. I’m never in touch with her as much as I want to be. I’ve been so busy. She doesn’t even know what’s going on. I ran into my dad’s friend Cliff the other day up at Corridor. You know, Uncle Robert, there was a time when all this seemed so simple: the fish just came back year after year. There were no questions, no concerns, no endangered-species listings. Now there’s constant fighting while the populations just keep declining.”
“Well, these are the days when change seems to be accelerating at an almost exponential speed. One thing changes, like the temperature readings you reported on last spring when you first started this project, and it affects other variables in unpredictable ways that continue their influence in even more unpredictable ways.”
Jess looked out at the turbulent water as it crashed into itself and said, “It’s like chaos theory. We’ve adopted this crazy motif of measuring and understanding, then behaving as if those measurements aren’t true or don’t matter. The system becomes chaotic, and the ability to predict an outcome more difficult. Like all the science around climate change—who knows how those weather changes will affect the ocean temperatures, which will have some effect on the ocean migration of all salmon species . . . Then what?”
“Then throw in human behavior, motivated by God knows what, mostly money, and there are times when it seems like we don’t have a chance with the wild salmon.”
“But, Uncle Robert, isn’t there also the opposite effect? Could the changes become so extreme that the attempts at intervention produce a positive change and the system compensates in a good direction?”
“I know what you’re saying, Jess. That’s just it, in some ways: the closer we seem to get, the further away we become. Keep on doing your good work, girl, and you know there’s a chance you’ll find something irrefutable.”
“But what I have is already irrefutable. They know that. They’re just choosing to ignore it.”
“I guess what I’m saying is that there will come a time when what you know about what’s happening to the wild salmon populations in the Nesika will create an influence that will turn around what’s happening right now.”
“Thanks, Uncle Robert. Your support in this means a lot to me. I’m going out to check the fish counts for the past few days. There should be a lot more coho in the river this year than there are. I’m going to do some temperature readings up above the dam later in the day, when the surface temperature is highest. It’s late October. The water should be cooling after all this rain we’ve been having.”
“Yeah, sweetheart. Again, I’m so, so sorry. I know how hard this is, believe me. Please stay in touch with me and let me know how it’s going. Actually, it looks like I might be down your way to give a talk at Nesika Community College in a month or so. I’ll let you know, okay?”
“It would be so good to see you. I’ll be in touch soon. Promise.”
“Take care of yourself, kiddo, and pat that enormous dog for me, will ya?”
“Sure will. You take care, too.”
Jess let in what he was saying and looked out over the rivers through mist that swirled and gathered on her windshield. She rolled down her car window so she could hear the rhythm of the white water drumming on the boulders in the rapids.
In a calm back eddy, a great blue heron was carefully picking its way through the shallows just in front of her truck. Its snakelike neck jutted out in front of it as if it were following something. It struck the surface of the water with an almost imperceptible splash and came up with a small fingerling, holding it in the flash of the sun for a moment.
The Same River Page 6