She heard coughing coming from inside the small home of her brother. Some of her people were beginning to cough and seem sick in a new way. Somehow she knew this was connected with her vision, and her fear expanded. She placed her hand on the curve of the small mud-and-wood roof that covered her brother’s low, earthen home. Go away, it seemed to say. She could feel the heat of the disease rise up under her hand, and she yanked her hand away. This was something so powerful, so foreign, that she was sure she wasn’t the only one receiving these visions, having these feelings.
The community house was quiet and felt to Piah like being in a large earth bowl. Familiar faces blended with the dark walls, and deer and elk hides lined the floors and walls. The smoke curled slowly toward the small opening, and the women were beginning to bring in dried salmon and fresh elk for the meal. Small children rolled on the floor, continuous with the family that surrounded them. For a moment, Piah forgot the images that swirled around her and settled into her place near the fire.
Someone behind her started coughing and startled her. It wasn’t a familiar cough to her—there was a low rattle, almost like a hum, to it that wasn’t right. She looked over and saw her brother’s wife bending over, caring for her newborn son. Then an elder uncle in the far corner started coughing—the same cough. Piah reached out and started tending the fire; the image of the man’s face seemed to dance in the rising smoke. She waited for her father to come in. She would seek his counsel, let him know what had come to her. Since she had seen the vision, she had felt a new, inexplicable kind of impatience, as if something were pushing her from behind—not pulling her toward it in the benevolent way the slope of a mountain, the call of a bird, or the high, sweet singing of the Nesika would.
Her husband, Maika, came in with Libah. She was happy to see them but felt haunted by the visions and suddenly very protective of them. Maika moved toward her, and they embraced. His long hair smelled like a bear pelt. Her baby reached for her, and Piah’s heart filled with a leaping recognition and love for her daughter. Her breasts were taut with milk, and she sat in a corner to nurse and melt into her child. Next to Libah and Maika, she felt the strands of family travel through her to the land and the crying animals in the dying evening light.
Piah’s father came in, and she could tell by the strain in his face, his mouth pulled tight with concern, that something was wrong. One of his sisters had come down with the strange rash. The shaman would journey that night, he announced, to find out what spirit had come into their camp, what guest had landed in the chests of the people who were getting sick, and how they could make it leave them alone. Outside the wind was rolling through the forest and up into the river canyon. Piah switched Libah to her other breast and leaned into the sure back of her husband. He stroked the blue tattoo on her chin and smiled. Piah rested in her place; she knew the shaman would help them. The elders were preparing the smoke and drum for the night’s ceremony. A tingling coursed through her—the presences of the spirits were beginning to gather. The soft fur of an otter brushed the outside of her leg. Food was passed in silence. An old woman began humming her power song in the corner. The low tones of the night river blended into her singing, and the circle of people who had gathered began to swell with anticipation. Someone had come and was waiting to be seen.
When the meal finished, the drumming grew louder as others joined in with their drums and began chanting their part of the power song. When Piah had gone on her vision quest, she had received her part of the power song to share with her people. The song had lived for many generations, and each member of her tribe had been gifted his or her part. The song was like a member of their tribe, a living being that changed and grew, reflecting the times they lived in. Piah felt her song rise and catch the others. It wove around them like a nest, holding them in their home, assuring them.
The shaman in the corner rose in her mask. It was the prized mask of Raven, a trade made with the Lower Nesika tribe. Raven would look over the land for them, seeking the intruder, naming it and calling it into the circle to be addressed and questioned. Often, Piah remembered, some of the spirits who seemed to want to do them harm were the spirits trying most to get their attention, and when their message had been received, they slunk away into the dark places they’d come from.
Piah pulled Libah close to her as the ceremony began. The swirling of the song seemed to build like an active volcano around them; it held them in its molten belly while the shaman slipped into her trance. The eyes of the mask gleamed in the firelight, and Piah felt herself slipping into the place of visions. She stopped herself by opening her eyes and focusing on the dance. Smoke from burning green cedar branches filled the room, and Piah’s eyes watered. She covered Libah’s face and kept singing.
After a long time, Piah sensed the singing shifting, the volcano dissolving, and the molten cauldron spilling forth, carrying the shaman back to her people.
The shaman lay on the ground next to the fire. Piah’s father lifted the heavy mask from her head. The eyes no longer gleamed, and the final humming of the song slowed and stopped. The shaman retched and vomited on the dirt floor. Piah was afraid. Had the spirit possessed the shaman and ridden Raven back into their home?
When she stopped, Piah’s father began asking questions in a low, rolling voice. When he was finished, he stood up and described the shaman’s vision for the people. She had seen a strange village and a man who had light skin and a rough gray beard. Piah’s heart skipped. She felt sick from the vomit smell and the smoke. There was no question that this was the same man she had seen in her vision. She thought of Mian, questing on the mountain above them. The sound of an avalanche roared in her ears, drowning out the familiar song of the Nesika.
JESS
The fury of the environmental groups mirrored the smugness of the agencies and PowerCorp. Meetings held in homes and living rooms were more subdued after the accident with the Earth in Mind kids. Mink was still recovering in the hospital, and Remedy had been arrested in neighboring Wyoming while hiding out on a sheep ranch with his friends.
Jess had tried to stay out of it after giving Suzie her password. She had kept her head down at work, fulfilling her daily tasks with a kind of dedication and silence that kept her superiors blind to the action organizing against them.
Now, she found herself in a clearing with no job and no relationship, and filled with a new kind of purpose that would require her energy, her passion, and her calculating savvy to transform her work into a meaningful mosaic that would sustain the steady pressure on PowerCorp to change.
She knew she needed to get away, to find time to reconnect with what really mattered to her, what inspired her, and what was at the core of her work. She decided to go to the Nesika and spend time on its banks, listen for her voice there. Jess had done this when she was in high school. She used to take off and spend days and nights alone along the river, tending to the complexity of her feelings, her visions, and her teenage passion for the world and for life. Now, her questions were different, but her desire to be close to the river, and her trust in it, assured her that this would still be the best thing to do.
Jess dropped Miko off at her mom’s house and drove her small truck up the winding highway along the Nesika. She wanted to be above the dams, above the PowerCorp offices near the source, the clear, translucent spring high in the mountain valley that fed the Nesika. She had enough supplies with her for three or four days and could already feel solitude calling to her like an old friend.
The logging road was rough, and her truck bounced slowly through the potholes and tire tracks. When she got to the end, she turned off the engine and just sat in the silence of the forest, the Nesika a gentle hush of current like a soft wind through the trees.
It was quiet, so quiet. The shrill call of a flicker rang around her, and she opened the door of her truck. The stillness struck her, and she missed her dog, but she knew that if he had been here he would have been a distraction from her work, from her goal to go deep
er, to be still and let the river, plants, and other animals be her companions.
Her pack was heavy as she swung it over her shoulders, but she liked the weight of it and cinched the waist belt tight enough to keep the shoulder straps from cutting into her back. As she headed down the road to the river, a small gray squirrel cried out an alarm, announcing to the woods that an intruder had arrived. Jess smiled to herself and rested in the cadence of her walking, enjoying the sturdiness of her boots, the strength of her body, the definition of her edges already emerging in this solitude.
After hiking for a few hours, she found a clearing next to the small, young Nesika for her camp. She put down her pack and rested near the water. It was shallow and wide here and made a high-pitched sound as it fell over the rocks lining its bed. Jess sighed; the stillness of the forest and the movement of the river seemed so simple to her, pure in some ways and vulnerable, childlike, in others. Her mind raced, and she looked forward to the time when it would begin to quiet and match the rhythm of time here in the forest—a slow, steady kind of time in which light and dark rose and fell in a dance, in which the river was a constant, steady presence, rising and falling in its own cadence, responding to seasons and weather and, up here, free from human touch.
She set up her camp and her small two-person tent and made a fire ring of river stones. She put her food into a bright red bear canister and stored it away from her camp. The damp chill of the coming evening graced the slanted light of the forest. Jess walked down to the riverbank and sat, resting her back against a downed cedar. The current sounded like a small drum as it wound over stones and ran toward the sea. She wondered what it was like for the water to suddenly encounter the dams and flumes of the power system.
For a moment, she thought she heard a voice in the river, a young woman singing, chanting in an old way. Jess listened harder, trying to tune in to the voice, as if it were a distant radio signal. The song seemed to come from the river itself, from the trees along the bank swaying in the early-evening breeze.
Jess had brought a book with her, The Water Walker, about a group of Native American women who were creating ceremonies to bless and heal rivers. She read about the women who carried water from each of the four oceans—the Mother Earth Water Walkers—and poured them into Lake Superior. They were offering the water to the center of Turtle Island so it could have a conversation and return to their home oceans. In another ceremony, a group of women and men carried water from the source of the Mississippi river to the delta, wanting to give the river “a taste of herself.”
A kingfisher called out from a small lodgepole pine just above the current of the river. Jess thought about what these people did, about their intention to offer a prayer to the water, and she decided that, in the spirit of that ceremony, she would carry water from the source of the Nesika to the place just below the Green Springs dam. From where she was, the walk would take about two days. She was grateful that the old Nesika trail had been restored and would carry her close to the riverbank for most of the way.
She got up and began to look for wood for her evening fire. Everything that had happened to her felt far away, down in Penden Valley. People there were watching the news, preparing dinner, searching the Internet, hanging on to the distractions of daily life, while she was alone with her river and ready to weave together whatever strands of meaning were left for her.
The next morning, a blue jay woke her up just as it was getting light. She slipped out of her sleeping bag and zipped open her tent door. The Nesika looked sweet to her in the early morning. A gentle mist rested on its surface, and the song from the day before seemed to glow within it.
Jess pulled on strong leather boots over rough wool socks. She wished she had some sacred special vessel to carry the water in, but she had only the water bottles she had brought for drinking. She felt a little clumsy when she went down to gather the water for her walk. She sat for a while on the bank and tried to summon a prayer, a song, something that would be like a blessing. She thought of the old, clumsy prayers from her Catholic childhood and smiled. She wanted to find another way to pray, to open herself to the spirits of the land and the river.
She stood up and walked to the edge of the water and watched the stream and the light in the water run over and around the stones of the riverbed. She thought of her sister, of how losing her to the river had created a kind of kinship, as if Jess and it were now related somehow. That was why she was here, then, why she had been called to do this work. She reached her hand into the water and held it there, waiting. The water seemed to pull away the anger, the tension, and the fury that she had been feeling. It was just the two of them, and she let go. Okay, river, tell me what to do.
She filled her red water bottle and stood up. She held the bottle next to her heart and let out a strong breath. She packed up her camp and put on her pack, carrying the water with her like a young child.
As she walked, she recited to herself the names of the plants and animals along the trail:
Mountain laurel
Salmonberry
Devil’s club
Salal
Mourning dove
Chickadee
Dark-eyed junco
Crow
Trillium
Skunk
Elderberry
Raven
Trout
The walk took two days, and each step made Jess feel lighter, more determined, and part of something very important. She looked for signs from the Native people who had lived in this river valley hundreds of years before. The Molalla people—the wild ones. They were shy, and not much was known about them; by the time traders encountered them, two waves of smallpox had decimated most of them. The only people left were herded out of the valley, to the Cow Creek reservation, more than a hundred miles away.
Sharp sadness seized Jess’s chest then. Their home, where they had lived for thousands of years, was gone to them forever. Like her sister.
The Green Springs dam looked to her like a granite fist holding back the wild flow of the Nesika. She was careful to stay out of sight of any PowerCorp workers who might be nearby that day. She found a clearing just below the dam that she was sure was hidden from the highway or anyone other than fishermen and hikers. She set up her camp and gathered her evening wood. An osprey whistled overhead and dove into the clear blue-green water just below her camp. She could see the large flumes running along the ridgetops and dropping down the hillsides into the power station. The river was fed into almost forty miles of flumes and through four power stations before it even reached the Green Springs dam. It looked like a formidable opponent.
Jess stood up and carried the water bottle down to the riverbank. The only thing she could think to do was make a promise. She held the water to her heart and closed her eyes.
Hey, river, it’s me, Jess. I am bringing you yourself, a taste of yourself from above the dams we have laid across your back. I am so sorry. I will work for you, try to give you back what is yours. In the spirit of the Water Walkers, I bless you with this gift.
She could smell the decaying body of a salmon just downstream, and an image of her young sister rose up in her again. The river gives life and takes life. She opened the top of her bottle and poured the river water back into itself, inseparable now from its own wildness.
Sitting at the water’s edge in the fading light, Jess made another promise: I offer you my life, in a new way. I will work for you and for the life in you. For coho, steelhead, chum, and chinook. I will be your Water Walker, your protector.
That night, she heard what sounded like a mountain lion’s cry not far from her camp. And in the cadence of the night river, a song rose up and was matched by distant drumming.
PART II
JESS
A year later, Water Walkers had become a lively nonprofit and Jess had become skilled at researching and finding grant money to keep her going. It was a good blend of her passion and tenacity to get the work done for the river. One of her first
projects had been to hire a professional photographer to take pictures of the Nesika, both above and below the dams. She put the photos together in a beautiful book called The River’s Cry that she hoped would help people better understand the need to completely restore the spawning grounds above the Green Springs dam. She had just finished packaging another shipment that would go to the Riverkeepers’ annual conference in New Mexico later that month. Knowing that the story of the Nesika was true for many rivers all over the world, she had dedicated the book to the Water Walkers, then and now.
Her phone rang, and she jumped, remembering that she had forgotten to return her mom’s call from the day before.
“Hi, Mom. How are you? Sorry I didn’t call back yesterday. I had kind of a weird day.”
“That’s okay, sweetheart. Is everything all right? I’ve been thinking about you so much lately. How are things with your work? I think you told me that the grant came through finally, the one that you asked for from . . . what was the name of that foundation?”
“Smitherton. They give out grants to environmental organizations thinking of pursuing legal action against corporations. I should know by the end of next week.” Jess let the silence rest between them, trying to coax out of her mother her real reason for calling.
“I was thinking of inviting Uncle Robert and his new wife, Jody, down for Thanksgiving, and I wanted to check with you about your schedule. Do you have anything going on next month?”
Jess thought of the photocopied notes she had on her desk and her desire to keep moving ahead with the lawsuit. But that shouldn’t interfere with her plans for the holidays. Her closest friends were all in other places, and she hadn’t heard from Suzie in over a year.
The Same River Page 10