Origin Stream

by Rachel Greenley

SPRING
In late spring the Lostine River swells and rolls, thick like mercury, swallowing the shoreline, sucking in boulders and logs to spit downstream. I hear rocks collide under the surface. I stand on the bluff swiveling my head at each echo, squinting, but the drama is hidden underneath the current. Merganser ducks fly by, riding the wave of cold air streaming from the water’s origin of snow-capped peaks. The river is a multi-level highway, with the ducks flying downstream above and the salmon swimming upstream below. I wish there were a pause button for the river. The water chatters incessantly, muting the song of the western Tanager perched high above in a Douglas fir. The bird’s bright yellow breast and scarlet head suggest I’m in someplace tropical rather than the mountains of northeast Oregon. I stand here contemplating a request. Our neighbors have asked us to build a community well on our land.

We’re new to this rural area. There’s a homeowners’ association up the road consisting of roughly twenty-five plots of two-to-five acres. We’re not part of the association, residing just beyond its border. Its president emailed us; would we consider a community well on our property? Their existing well will someday be inadequate, and an aquifer flows beneath our land. A discussion between the association members is accidentally appended to the email. One neighbor has written, “I heard the new buyers are a retired policeman and a retired nurse so it sounds like they may be rather openminded people.”

My husband, Kyle, and I are not police officers, nor nurses, nor are we retired. Do open-minded people gravitate toward a specific profession? What profession is most likely to agree to a well being built on one’s property for others? A social worker? A community activist? A firefighter?

Perhaps more telling than our professions is that we are city people—that is, wary. We head to the woods to escape the lack of privacy that goes with urban postage stamp lots and windows that face each other. In the course of a day at our home in Seattle, I hear two-year-old Lacy next door singing “Let It Go” on repeat. I hear Jess and Priya barking at their dogs to stop barking. As I wash dishes at the kitchen sink, I see the man who sits on his deck smoking cigarettes and gazing at the Olympic Mountains. Every once in a while, my movement catches his eye, and as I see him turn, I quickly look away. We go to our rural Oregon land to tune out people and tune in nature.

At dawn in this remote Oregon valley, the earth is damp and spongy underfoot. Pine needles lose their snap overnight. Then the light brightens, filtered through lodgepole and ponderosa pines, rays reaching as if hanging jewels on the tips of dewed branches. The sky shifts from the saffron of dawn to a hopeful, happy shade of blue. The sun seems like it will stay suspended overhead, deliciously christening us. But too quickly, the mountains cradling the valley shorten the day, shadows extinguishing light as if the murky river line steadily rose until the peaks were submerged. The dark and chill come quickly now as if I were underwater, as if I were the granite at the bottom of the river bed, watching the iridescent bellies of rainbow trout and chinook salmon glide by.

Using the computer program, River Runner, I can drop a simulated raindrop in a river and track its journey to the ocean. Playing with this tool is a great way to lose an afternoon. I’ve done this with the Lostine River to mimic not just the raindrop’s journey but that of the salmon.

Ninety-three square miles of the Wallowa mountains, including seventeen peaks over 9,000 feet, feed the Lostine River. If a raindrop fell alongside the land on which I stand, it would cruise twelve miles down the Lostine, then twenty-seven miles in the Wallowa River, eighty miles in the Grande Ronde, then the Snake for one-hundred-sixty-seven miles through the rolling Palouse Hills, and at last join the Columbia for three-hundred-seventeen miles before spilling out into the Pacific Ocean. That’s over six hundred miles.

Now imagine a fish doing the same. Twice in its lifespan. As children, we learn that salmon are born in freshwater. As adolescents, they make the journey to the ocean and live there for years absorbing marine nutrients before returning to their origin stream to give birth, and then die—their decaying bodies providing nourishment for the children they leave behind. I think of my own children. If their biology drove them to make a journey to their origins, where would they go? If they were mimicking salmon, their origin stream would be a maternity ward in Chicago with a view of Lake Michigan. When I gave birth to the twins there, their father—my first husband—could not be with me. Grief is a long journey in itself. Had he lived, would I still have returned to my origin stream, the Pacific Northwest? Would I be wondering about a well?

SUMMER
We sleep in a blue tent while my husband, Kyle, builds a small cabin of cedar shingles, birch walls, and fir floors. He’s made coat hooks and towel racks from drift wood foraged at the river’s edge. I once saw an American mink at the same river’s edge. He stood on his hind legs, his slender chocolate body turned toward me, black eyes on mine. His snout was short and squat, less weasel, more teddy bear. In a flash, while I stood blinking, he scampered across the river and up the opposite bank. Once, a black bear also ambled by. I knew he was an adolescent by his walk. He walked just like my teen children—part bravado, part insecurity. I stood watching, realizing there was an entire world that lived in the woods mostly unseen. Like the salmon under the surface.

From the blue tent, I could hear that world. I’d lie frozen listening to small scurries, a hoof against a rock, a shiver of nylon. The tent fabric rippled when a creature tripped over a stake line. My imagination pictured mountain lions and coyotes and grizzlies and dragons and men with guns. Our animal cam said deer, elk, squirrel, chipmunk, skunk. I slept best in spring and summer because the voices of the lush river drowned out the noise and with it, my fears.

Do I fear community? The question of the well weighs on me. I want to say yes to the well. I also don’t want to get involved. If a neighbor stood in front of me thirsty, of course I would give them water. But a well full of water? I’m not sure. I google the home association. I come across a lawsuit. It’s a typical dispute: One neighbor stockpiling junk that another neighbor feels forced to look at. I wonder what messiness I might invite into my life through participation.

I once gave a friend a large sum of money. After my first husband died, I sold our home in Chicago to move back to Seattle with our infant twins. I was struggling with grief and my friend was struggling with money. She couldn’t ease my grief but I could ease her cash flow. I didn’t realize how it would change our relationship. Even though I’d given the money with no strings, I had difficulty not standing in judgment of how she spent it. She took a trip for fun. I thought she should be paying bills. I worked for Starbucks then and she brought me back one of those city-specific Starbucks mugs. This was a thoughtful thing she did. But all I could think about is that I’d indirectly bought myself a Starbucks mug when I already had a dozen free mugs from work in my kitchen cabinet. My money—which was now her money—felt wasted. 

I worried the water could go this way too. That we’d move forward with the well, and then in August I’d notice a neighbor endlessly watering his lawn to get that perfect shade of green. In summer, I let my lawn go. It’s brittle and yellow by August. If I pass by a green lawn in late summer—when a drought is nearly always at hand—the intensity of it looks alien, and I imagine the homeowner cares more about appearances than community. Am I considering the well because of appearances, that is, how I appear?  

We weren’t planning to have a well on our land. We want to live simply, rustic. We filter water from the river as needed. In early July, there is a perfect swimming hole—large boulders surrounding a sandy basin—where we bathe. The sun warms the water by mid-afternoon. Our other bathing option is a pressure shower bag, which we fill, hang on a tree limb, and then pump with a foot peddle to gravity-feed the nozzle. It’s a great experience for those without hair.

As summer burns, the Lostine River quiets and recedes. The shoreline it previously inhaled reappears, now with a new lip of sand, created from the pounding of the rocks rolling downstream. The weather becomes stuck in thick bright heat. The understory flora along the shore shrivels and curls inward and looks more carcass than chlorophyll. Fire season started early this year—what was once three months now extends to five. It’s likely that, soon, it will come to us. (A year later, it does, serving up thick smoke, flames licking the ridgeline above us, and a level two evacuation.) There are two ways out.

The one-lane steel bridge, and the river that flows beneath it. 

There’s a retired firefighter in the home association up the road. He recently purchased a fire truck for the community’s use. Even though we are outside of the association, use of the truck has been extended to us. I consider the potential of a fire on our property, that we may someday need a firetruck that has been filled with water from the firefighter’s garden hose. The truck’s tank holds 300 gallons. The community that has asked us for water has filled the firetruck with 300 gallons of their own scarce resource. A neighbor tells me that in time they’ll pull the firetruck onto the bridge and suck up the water from the river. This makes me feel better, as if I’ve settled a debt.

FALL
A few miles from our cabin is the Lostine River Weir, a Fisheries project between the Nez Perce Tribe and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. The goal is to help the salmon recover so that both tribal and nontribal populations can fish. I volunteer to join neighbors and fishery biologists to count the spawning salmon. Kyle has done this in the past and I ask him what to expect. He describes walking through the river counting, his legs pushing against the rapidly flowing water.

I ask, “Are they easy to spot? Don’t they swim away as you walk up on them?”

He smiles. “The fish are gone. I’m just counting their nests.”

“Fish have nests?”

“I look for their reds.”

“The fish are red? The nests are red?” He laughs, shakes his head.

“Not red the color. R-E-D-D. That’s the term for their nests. Look it up.”

Salmon use their tails to make a depression in areas of the river with small stones and gravel. Once they lay their eggs, they add more gravel on top of the redd to protect the eggs from being washed away and from predators. The redds—a Scottish word meaning “to clean an area or make it tidy”—look lighter from above, making them easy to spot.

A biologist counts on the river alongside our own land but we’ve never seen her. I wonder how she climbs through the river with its rapids pushing downstream. How would she even see nests in the churning water? While a difficult task, it’s not as difficult as the salmon’s journey.

There are eight hydropower dams between our river and the Pacific Ocean. The juvenile salmon are trying to reach the ocean. The adults are trying to return to their origin stream. The rivers along their journey are getting warmer every year. If four federal dams were removed along the salmons’ path, the water would flow freely instead of being stagnant, the temperature would reduce, and more salmon would have a chance of surviving the journey. The Nez Perce and the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians, which represent over fifty Indian nations, support the proposal to remove all four Snake River dams. Despite the dams investing in salmon passages, the fish population continues to decline. Removal of the dams will not guarantee salmon restoration, and would require other solutions for farmland irrigation, flood mitigation, barge transportation, and the hydropower the dams provide today. In the Northwest, hydropower makes up 90% of carbon-free power. If we remove the dams to improve our waters, do we inadvertently increase the carbon and thus the temperature of our oceans and rivers and find ourselves back swimming in this salmon restoration riddle? Nevertheless, I believe more and more that progress means undoing what we have done.

Our property is pockmarked with channels of old stream beds, long dried up. Decades before, someone used boulders to force a side channel of the river back toward the main river bed. I realize now that removing the wall of rocks and dirt might reflood the old stream beds, possibly creating the habitat the salmon prefer—wide, meandering streams with shallow gravel bott oms. If I remove what is essentially our own small dam, I’ll send the river down the middle of our property, cutting off  our cabin, and flooding our neighbors’ properties downstream. When I tell Kyle that removing the wall holding back the river might help the salmon repopulate, he points out that the river has changed over time and that the side channel that would feed those old stream beds is dry during spawning season so the ruts would remain dry too. Which gives me an easy way out from considering, or pretending to consider, that I would purposefully flood my land.

I realize what’s nagging me on the question of the well. It’s not a question of community; it’s a question of simplicity. I don’t want to replicate the city life I’m trying to leave behind here. I don’t want Disney movies and Peloton and modern amenities to find me here. I worry that the more I develop this land, the less attuned to it I’ll be. I want to spend my time watching the river to see what I might see. Had I not been paying attention, I wouldn’t have seen the bear, the mink. I want to wonder about the salmon in the river. I want to hear the Tanager above me. Some days, I think it would be simpler to be the salmon. Her journey, like mine, may be rife with obstacles. However, she has only one path to take.

WINTER
Just as winter arrives, Kyle pronounces the cabin “good enough” and we move our cots out of the tent and into four wood walls. The Tanager has long since left. We don’t know if it was the season, or the noise of saws and drills that drove him from the Douglas fir. We hope he’ll return in Spring. We look for flashes of the exotic overhead while nursing our guilt.

Dusk crawls in and within our cabin, we marvel at the novel feeling of being surrounded by hewn wood, its fresh-cut smell intoxicating. It isn’t until we close the windows against the cold night air, that I realize the river has been silenced.

To my ears, finally paused.

There’s a stillness that feels unnatural and dense. The hush feels like an absence. Heavy but empty. 

After turning from side to side in bed in the stagnant space, I open a window.

The voices of the river rush in.

In 2021, the Nez Perce—the Salmon People—took a symbolic one-mile ride on horseback from the Joseph, Oregon high school to sacred land from which they had been exiled in 1877. The tribe had purchased the nearly 150-acre parcel which sits behind the town’s rodeo grounds, where the annual Chief Joseph Days Rodeo is attended by hundreds of ranchers and tourists. The property owner who sold the land to the tribe was reported as saying it was “…strictly a business deal…” and he “…drove a hard bargain.” There’s a sad irony in being sold land that was yours to begin with.

Perhaps resource ownership is not complicated in the eyes of the law. But it certainly is when it comes to the heart. I feel ownership of our land, land likely also taken when the Nez Perce were driven from here. Yet I’m not so sure about the water. Perhaps because it is fluid, always moving, replenishing.

A neighbor—a forester by trade—comes by to look at our cabin. He assesses a dead tree, a snag, looming above our new home. The snag is also a home; its surface is scarred with insect lines and deep cavities housing birds. I’m loathe to cut it down. While we stand looking up, the forester’s nine-year-old son sprints from tree to tree, placing his hand on the bark and calling out, “This one’s a silver fir…and this one’s a ponderosa.” When perplexed by the species, the boy pinches off a few pine needles and chews on them thoughtfully. “Tastes like a grand fir.” Kyle and I—still working on our tree identification skills—catch each other’s eyes and smile. Our neighbors keep showing up and teaching us.

In winter, the river’s edges are laced with ice and snow. The landscape glitters beneath the thin sunlight. I’m careful not to slip when I balance on a rock and scoop up water with a pail, which I will carry back to the cabin and pour into a pot sitting on the wood stove. Everything takes longer to do here. I stand, admiring the art exhibit before me: Circles of ice spin in an eddy, water darts under ice sheets like shadows, ice crystal candles line the shore. I don’t know the chemistry behind this composition. And that’s okay.

When I walk back to the cabin, heavy bucket in hand, I hear a songbird and look up from the uneven ground. I take a clumsy step and soak a shin. I wonder where the aquifer is. We will need to know when we build the well.

Rachel Greenley is a Pacific Northwest writer published in New England Review, The New York Times, Orion Magazine, River Teeth, and The Baltimore Review, among others. She has been supported by the Bread Loaf Environmental Conference and the Prospect Street Writers House. Her essay, “Here in Umatilla,” was nominated for the John Burroughs Nature Essay Award. Her essay, “The Atomic Disease,” was selected as Longreads Top Essay of the Week. She received her MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars and currently writes for a public university’s healthcare system.