The Same River

by Lisa M. Reddick

  “That would be fine, Mom. I’d love to see Uncle Robert. And I like Jody.”

  “Great. I’ll call them later today. Is everything all right with you?”

  “Well, I had a strange thing happen yesterday. Rich from the agency called and said he had something he wanted to show me. I went over there, and for some reason he gave me the copies of the meeting notes that were used to write the report that justified everything they needed to let PowerCorp keep the Green Springs dam in place. I’m not really sure why. Maybe he feels guilty, or maybe now that he’s retiring he just doesn’t care.”

  “Gosh, sweetie, how hard it must have been for you to go back. I heard from Cliff that he was having a tough time with retirement. Cliff also told me Jeff is back in town. Have you heard anything from him?”

  Jess felt a rush of heat in her face. “No. I didn’t even know he was back.”

  “Well, maybe you should call him. He might be able to help you out with some of this, especially if Rich is willing to talk to you now.”

  “Right now I just want to go upriver and take Miko fly-fishing. There’s a strong run of summer steelhead moving up the Nesika, and I feel like it would be fun to go and bother them.”

  “Well, sweetheart, you be careful. I’ll let you know what I hear from Uncle Robert. I love you.” Jess took in everything she could. Enough for both, she thought.

  “I love you, too, Mom. Bye.”

  She stared at her phone for a moment, mulling over her mom’s advice, and thought about calling Jeff. She was struggling with her work and longing for the meaning it had once held for her. But she knew her mom was right—Jeff had been part of those meetings, and Jess had a dim feeling that he might be able to help her now.

  Jeff. She wished she didn’t miss him so much. She leaned back in her chair, toying again with her feelings about calling him. Maybe an email would be a better idea. She looked up at the picture of a Molalla woman carrying her small child down to the river. This was a copy of the only documented photo of a Molalla and had been a gift to her from the chair of her doctoral committee. The woman in the picture was walking through a ray of sunlight down to the Nesika, her baby bound to her back. The child was looking straight at the camera, across time, into Jess’s eyes—like the river itself peering out, seeking something, beckoning.

  She reached out, grabbed her phone, and dialed his number.

  The neon-orange fly-fishing line drifted in a slow arc on the surface of the deep pool. The sun was warm, and a kingfisher trilled from the branch of a fir tree hanging over the river just upstream. Jess played the line downstream, then whipped it up and over her head, laying it back down in the upstream current with the flair and ease born of many years of fishing.

  Reeling in her line, Jess carefully walked upstream and called to Miko, who had found an interesting downed tree to sniff through. The sun had just come over the ridge and begun drying the forest; the rising steam lay over the still, opaque green depths of the pool. Jess breathed in the cool fall air and let herself rest for a moment, before heading back to her truck. She hoped Jeff was upriver today, available, willing to talk with her.

  She had a message from him waiting for her. “Hey, Jess, good to hear from you! I’m working on a highway project up on the Nesika. Try to call me. I’ll keep my phone on, and hopefully I’ll be able to hear it above the noise of the trucks.”

  Jess looked down at her cell phone as if it were an injured animal. She was surprised at how good it felt to hear his voice, how deeply she had let herself fall both toward and away from him. She played the message one more time and noticed her hands shaking and her heart beating more quickly. What do I want? she wondered. After what had happened to Mink, after they had found the plans, she had never had a chance to talk with Jeff, to hear more from him about what was happening, to get answers to the questions she had been afraid to ask him.

  She took a moment to drink some tea from her metal thermos before returning Jeff’s call. Maybe we could have lunch at the lodge. Maybe he won’t answer. Maybe . . .

  “Hey, Jeff, it’s me, Jess.” She paused, as a small but vast silence overtook their conversation.

  “Jess, what’s up?”

  “Thanks for calling back. Look, some stuff has come up about what happened last year, and I think it would be helpful if I could talk with you about it. I’m upriver today.”

  He said, “Sure—I can meet with you later today. I’ll be done here around two or so. We could meet at the lodge for some coffee. Will that work for you?”

  “Yeah, that’s perfect. See you at two o’clock. Thanks, Jeff.”

  Gathering her fishing gear, Jess called Miko into the cab of her truck. Petting his sweet head, she looked into his brown eyes. They were so certain, so constant; they seemed like the one thing in her life she could depend on.

  “Let’s go, boy.”

  She waited at the intersection while log trucks whipped by with their latest quarry from the timber sale up Blanch Creek. She played the conversation with Jeff over and over in her mind. He had sounded good, like himself, maybe even happy to hear from her. In less than four hours, she would be meeting him. Her body trembled with nervousness and curiosity.

  Pulling into a gap in the log-truck traffic, Jess decided to distract herself by going to see whether Martin and his crew were ground-truthing the Blanch Creek logging area. “Ground-truthing.” Jess had always liked the sound of that—telling the truth of the ground. It really meant that because you couldn’t count on the timber companies to follow the rules of an environmental impact statement, someone had to become parental and check on their work. Martin’s organization, the Nesika Watershed Council, was ground-truthing the latest logging operation on Blanch Creek, a major tributary of the Nesika. It wasn’t easy, and no one paid them for it, but if the rules weren’t followed, there would be another landslide like the one two years before, which had suffocated all of the developing salmon redds in Gold Creek, another tributary of the Nesika.

  Turning onto the small logging road, she could see the dust and hear the grating sound of chain saws screeching through the woods. Swinging her truck around the bend, she parked in a wide pull-off in the road and decided to walk up the hill the rest of the way. Miko bounded ahead of her, leaping noisily into the underbrush. She shouldered her old green daypack and started up the road. Not far off, Jess could hear the familiar sounds of the logging camp: the compression brakes of logging trucks huffing through the trees; the constant wail of chain saws and shouting loggers. She stopped and watched them in the distance and imagined maybe they felt a kind of closeness to the land, the open heartwood of trees, and the sweet smell of sun reaching the forest loam for the first time in a century.

  The road was damp from the morning rain, and a robin bounced along with her through the red lace of vine maples. Although bright flashes of sun danced on the road, she could sense the small shift toward winter beginning. Jess longed for the comfort of a turn in time that would happen no matter what was going on around her.

  She saw the clearing up ahead and hoped that she would find Martin working in the new clear-cut of the forest sale. Miko bounded ahead and met Martin before she did. Other members of Martin’s ground-truthing team wandered slowly in the forest around them, as if people from an ancient time, measuring the girth of trees, shouting numbers and slope percentages like incantations.

  Jess saw the top of Martin’s shaggy, multicolored wool hat disappear into the underbrush, and she called out, “Hey, Martin! It’s me, Jess!”

  “Jess!” he called out from within the damp, sun-filled forest. “What are you doing up here? I was thinking of calling you the other day and asking some advice about this stream and how it became classified as a level two when there’s no question there are salmon just downstream from here. It should be a level three, at the very least. Did you see that show on TV last week? I was going to email you about it. Jess, it’s so good to see you! How have you been? Have you heard anything from Suzie? Someon
e heard from her not long ago—can’t remember who . . .”

  Jess pushed her fists deep in her pockets. Suzie. “No, after she left, I just kind of gave up on her. It was just so crazy, and so much was going on for me, reaching out to her or trying to find her didn’t make sense.”

  Jess bent over and patted Miko’s head. “I did just talk with Jeff, and we’re going to meet up later at the lodge. I had some time to kill before then, so I thought I would come up and see how things are going.”

  Martin got very still. “Whoa, Jess . . . That . . . Wow. Still slutting around for PowerCorp. Actually, Deb, his girlfriend from Alaska—don’t know if you know about her—well, she’s right over there.” Martin gestured toward a woman bending over and hammering in a survey stake. She stood, and Jess noticed that she was tall and slim, with a long, dark ponytail flowing out from under her black wool hat.

  A girlfriend. Well, what did you expect? she chided herself. Jeff hadn’t lived the monastic life of a woman starting her own nonprofit. He lived his passionate life with someone else . . .

  “Oh, wow. I didn’t know he had a girlfriend. He met her up in Alaska?”

  “I guess so. C’mon, Jess.” He put his arm around her, and Jess leaned affectionately into the side of his damp wool coat. He smelled good, like the forest—like damp, open earth just after a hard rain.

  However, a clear-cut always felt like a kind of war zone to Jess. She knew there could be violations all over the place and slipped out from under Martin’s arm and turned to look behind them at the scarred landscape. Martin walked over and sat heavily on a damp, decaying nurse log, the young saplings swaying as he jostled their ground. “I was just reading the other day some letter from the head of the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment. They’re really framing their move to destroy any protection the forest has by turning it into some kind of monster. What they say is that the whole fucking forest is going to explode if we don’t go in and remove the dangerous woody biomass that’s choking our forests and creating a potential disaster. Jesus, Jess, it’s unbelievable! They’ve reframed the whole thing as some kind of warped horror movie. ‘Beware! The forest is going to get you!’ The terrorists are now the trees!”

  Jess knew that “woody biomass” meant trees, and that to remove the “woody biomass” meant cutting the forest. She looked down at her boots and kicked a small stone into a clump of grass. Her focus had been so much on getting the Green Springs dam removed that she had lost track of the Healthy Forest Initiative to clear-cut forests that would otherwise be protected. The administration’s ability to manipulate language and say the opposite of what it was proposing to do was almost laughable.

  “My God, Martin,” she said, “you would think they were having enough fun demonizing the Arab people and turning the world into a pit of terrorism waiting to explode. You’re right—this is some kind of nightmare we’re living in, when the administration can demonize a forest, ignoring science and ramming the whole thing down the throats of the public.”

  Martin stood up. “Come here. I want to show you something.”

  He leaped easily over the log and down a gentle slope into a clearing. The cut had taken place only a few days before. “This is a new version of abuse, called a stewardship contract. The motherfucking DNR has found a way to bypass all the typical procedures and open up land to logging and clear-cutting in a big hurry, because if they don’t, well, all this ‘woody biomass’ is going to explode any minute, and you know we have to keep the public and—get this—the firefighters safe! Can you believe they went so far as to say, ‘We have to clear-cut this hillside, because if we don’t, you and the firefighters are going to be in terrible danger’? Jess, these hills are one of the only remnants of the natural ecosystem of this river valley. Other than the care the Native Americans gave it for thousands of years, this land, the very place where we are standing, was untouched, rolling through the cycles of time, seasons, storms, life and death . . . And now look at it.

  “You know what I think? This is a time when people are too scared, too easily swayed to see only what they are shown and not to question it. I feel overwhelmed. Jess. I’ve never in all my years of working in the woods felt so desperate, so helpless.”

  Jess looked over the clearing and let the weight of what he was saying set in. She knew he was right.

  Martin looked at her and let out a sigh of resignation. “With all the fucking media spin these days, who knows what they’ll say about us? PowerCorp is like some predatory animal that stalks and kills whatever it wants, as long as the innards are money. I don’t know, and mostly I don’t care, what people think about me and my work these days. As someone said the other day, my only goal is to be a really good ancestor.”

  The area they stood in looked very much like a war zone indeed. Downed trees, scraggly undergrowth suddenly ripped from its natural place, exposed seasonal streambeds, and ever-present stumps all waited like soldiers in a minefield.

  “I like that—imagine anyone in the timber industry even thinking about himself as an ancestor. But they don’t and they won’t unless something fundamentally changes. In the meantime, we do what we can—and you know what, Martin? I have so much respect for you and the others working here,” Jess said, looking out at the scraping backhoe, watching a tree fall and the logger leaping to set the cable choker. She walked over to Martin and leaned into his shoulder. They stood like that for a long time, their blended gaze gathering the wounded image and storing it with the many others they held from their past years of activism.

  “Thanks. I think of Jamie and the world I’m leaving to him, and I think of the salmon and steelhead that depend on a clear path to their spawning grounds. Then I think of the dumb-ass politicians and it makes me want to scream.” He pulled Jess in even closer to his side. “Actually, sometimes I do scream.”

  He walked out into the clearing and called to Miko, who was being overly social with the logging crew. Jess shook herself from her numbness and walked back to the day-camp area that Martin and his crew had set up. She sat on a log and pulled an apple from her pack. Miko came back to her and flopped in the wet grass at her feet. Her body felt heavy and unused to being in the presence of so much destruction. She longed to feel a sense of belonging to something—to a way of changing, to a bearer of wisdom—like the elders and medicine people of the old times. She wished someone could teach her an old song she could sing to the logging crew and Martin’s workers, something that would heal what was wounded and stop everything that was happening.

  “C’mon, Miko, let’s go give them a hand.” Jess stood slowly, checked the time, and walked over to the area where two women were taking measurements, using a long orange cord. One woman was in the stream, wearing hip waders and hidden under a hat, and the other was someone from the yoga class that Jess had started taking at the local YMCA. They were measuring the stream buffer, making sure that the logging crew had left enough vegetation to keep the stream shaded and cool once the Oregon summer sun bore down on the now mostly barren hillside.

  “Miranda, it’s me, Jess, from yoga! I’m a good friend of Martin’s and came up here to see if you needed some help with ground-truthing this project. Is there something I can do?”

  “Jess! Good to see you. Sure. If you can record our measurements, we can call them out to you from down by the stream. The slope gets pretty tricky up here around the bend. This is Deb. She’s been working with Martin for the last few months.”

  Deb looked up at Jess from under her black wool hat. She had striking blue eyes that looked both a little startled and amused at the same time. She smiled at Jess and walked down toward the stream, holding the measuring tape. Miko was ready for a new game and plunged through the brush after Deb. The water was low for this time of year but flowing with a gentle, flashing, folding current. Jess smiled, secure in her understanding of the regulations being fought for so that the little stream could have the protection it needed and deserved to carry the cool water into the
salmon stream below. This was where she found a precious little stone of hope—here in this cool, shaded bend, and in the hearts and courage of the people making careful measurements, taking time away from their families and jobs to work on behalf of a life other than their own.

  “Damn!” Deb shouted. “This looks like they left only a seventy-two-foot buffer where they were supposed to leave a hundred.”

  “Yeah, God, it looks like there was a beautiful stand of cedars right here that would have been within the hundred-foot buffer zone,” Miranda said. “I think we should call Martin over here.”

  Jess looked up from her clipboard and made eye contact with Deb. She was standing tall by the stream, blending with the trees, in defiance against the rage of the timber companies striking just outside the small claim that the stream had staked.

  They stood like that for a moment. Then, breaking the weighty silence, Deb said to Jess, “I haven’t seen you up here before. Are you from around here?”

  Jess’s stomach gripped, and she had to hold on to her composure. Not good timing, she thought. Breathing out slowly, she said, “Yeah, I live in town. I’m Jess.” She hesitated as she saw the recognition dawning in Deb’s eyes. “I run Water Walkers, so I come up here to help now and then.”

  “Oh, you’re Jess, Jeff’s ex. Right.”

  “Yeah, I am.”

  Just then, Miranda and Martin came striding through the forest, talking loudly and exclaiming how messed up the land was and what level of reporting he was going to file and apply for.

  Jess and Deb broke their eye contact and refocused on the work.

  “What were the measurements again?” Jess lovingly touched the newly exposed heartwood of the cedar stumps. It was almost as if she could feel the dying pulse, the pain of the cut, of her own inability to protect them, even when there were agreements, even when there were laws.