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The Project: Salmon Damned
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Rivers,
Ramblings, and Recollections
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"I felt that the one I called Nameless
was trying to speak to me--had long been trying. And his "words"
were silent, spoken in a language of images--these were signposts
marking both my inner and outer journey...And these things had been
given as gifts--like rain, like rivers--unlooked for, unasked for:
I had to follow the signs that I was given, as rivers follow
valleys, as spring follows winter, as leaves turn and salmon spawn and
geese fly south in October. I couldn't trade the trail these
images blazed for me for a straight and narrow way--not when the
water's way, meandering and free flowing, had always been my love."
David James Duncan
The River Why
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I remember being eighteen, my first summer on the Snake River
in central Idaho. I sat in the shadow of the McNary Dam and read
a passage from Edward Abbey's Monkey Wrench Gang aloud. To have
loved and lost a wild river gave Ed Abbey a resonant anger. It
left him poised and alert to the environmental destruction that has
become commonplace in the American West. Abbey watched the Glen
Canyon Dam destroy something no more and no less than a wild river, as
many Americans have watched their own places drowned out, cut down,
paved over. I sat next to the McNary Dam that day and imagined
whitewater, salmon, sandy shoreline and hours of river music retaking
this still and stagnant afternoon. In The Monkey Wrench Gang
river lovers bring down the Glen Canyon Dam. I know Abbey's references
to violence are not meant to be taken literally, but as I squint up at
tons of cement barring the water's flow, it is really something to
imagine that cement goliath come crumbling down.
I have been in love with the river since I was a little girl. My
earliest memories are accompanied by the sound of moving water.
As I come to the end of my undergraduate career I find a moment
to pause for reflection and to look out onto the world that I am about
to enter. I have often asked myself how I came to my present
understanding of the natural world and my place in it, and how that
understanding has shaped the way I live. I know I have more
questions that I have answers.
It is dammed up and dirty rivers that have brought me to these
questions that thrum like a mantra in my mind. How can I save what I
love? How am I complicit in the decay of this landscape of home?
Why are Americans willing to spend $1.50 on a bottle of water for
the security of knowing it is clean, and yet we are unwilling as a
people to support legislation that protects the integrity of our water
resources? What is it that we are striving for and is this a path
toward that goal, or are we only moving farther into the darkness?
I hope to see the Snake River redeemed and with it the
reemergence of a people who know how to live in the world.
These pages are a roadmap and a prayer. A roadmap which
shows the course of my undergraduate education and the way it has
shaped the way I think about the world. A prayer that I might
continue to be the author of my own story, and that I might continue to
follow this meandering path, though I know not where it leads.
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