Fish

I have a very detailed memory. I would not claim it is particularly accurate, but I find that I remember all sorts of minutiae about people and places from the past without much sense of hierarchy in their importance. Having returned to more or less where I started in life, physically, I have lots of interactions with people in which I recall mutual acquaintances with such detail that I mislead the person I am talking to into sensing a greater connection between myself and the person or subject at hand than really exists.

For instance, I asked a new friend here if a kid I grew up with named Jason was still around. I did not know Jason well, but we played baseball together and had many friends in common in high school. But you would think, from what I remember of him, that Jason had either been my best friend or else someone for whom I had a sycophantic attraction to. I have no doubt that the person I was talking to will see Jason, mention my name, and be confused when Jason cannot really recall me with any clarity.

By the same process, when I meet someone who has been here for a long time and we play that game of parlaying old stories on top of one another, I know that I leave a strange impression of being at once very familiar with this place and yet completely unknown in the community. I talk as if I have always been a part of this place, and yet no one knows my name.

A ghost.

I was driving home today, and a neighbor was hitchhiking down Cachagua Road. When I picked him up, he said that he had seen a rainbow trout in the flowing creek. I had forgotten this happens, how the dry leaf choked stream bed floods and then once clear the trout make their way fast up from the river to the bigger pools. People tell me the steelhead still make it past San Clemente dam and all the way to Jamesburg in a good water year.

It somehow made me feel a little better, to see an obvious metaphorical connection to my own life here. You see the trout and remember that they are part of this place, have their own nose for what goes on in the temporary streams, but most of the time they are invisible.

Back

I returned home last night, from a month away, and the creek was running. The sheer sonic size of it—the entire canyon seems to be reverberating and echoing with the noise of it—adds a different dimension to the day. When I am in the Northwest, it strikes me that one of the things I hate most about Portland is the lack of kinetic force in the winter. The skies are leaden, the wind does not blow much, there is no ocean to punch a hole in the monotony. The weather, the time, just sits there day after day.

That, of course, is how I experience it, not an absolute observation. Nonetheless, though the Willamette Valley winter rots my soul from the inside out, I think that I could probably endure a winter on the Oregon Coast. The ocean, the storm wind, these events alleviate the grey tension of the winter day for me. Clear and cold is my favorite winter recipe; the interplay of sunshine and stinging air is completely invigorating. I love mushrooms and fungi, but I am not myself suited to winter where they thrive.

In any event, the creek is rushing along and a big windy storm is on the way. After breakfast I could not take it any longer and decided I had to finally go for a run up in the "closed" national forest.

By the time I was a mile or two in, the rain picked up and the dozer-loosened soil was soft under my feet. I came around a bend where the true forest trailheads begin and saw in the distance a vehicle parked at the end of the access road around the dam. I turned around.

Further up the Carmel River I could see the blackened hillsides, though the water spilling over the dam did not look muddy or really even very brown at all. I could not help but notice though, that it seems to take very little rainfall anymore to fill the silted-up dam and get the spillway flowing.

Back toward the parking lot, a Forest Service truck was heading out into the rain. I slowed down, ready to take whatever warning the driver might wish to saddle on me for jumping the Cal-Am fence. But he rolled down his window and just asked how far in I had been, whether I had seen anyone else. I mentioned the rig at the trail up toward Blue Rock and we waved each other on. Sometimes people are just plain reasonable.