|
|
|
Soccer and Salmon
Now, the soccer and the salmon. (I tried to think of a clever line about the soccer and the sockeye, but I couldn't.)
My grandson, Sam, is 10 and just started school in Hood River this fall. This was the last soccer game of the season and I'm ashamed to say the first one I've been to. I expected it to be miserable because the drive up the river was really nasty, raining and blowing in a style only the Columbia Gorge can produce. But we outran the rain and it stayed dry, if a little chilly and a lot windy, until the game was over. Our team lost 8-1 and they said it was the best game they ever had. Sigh. But we had observed that the other team had 8 or 9 players in reserve and ours had only one. Also they had some really great players for 9, 10, and 11-year-olds. And we also noticed that their players were named Cesar and Juan and Edguardo and were cheered in two languages (bueno, Jose, good kick!); ours were named Brody and Jason and Micah and only a few of them could run fast. Sam said one of the Moms was prophetic at the first practice. Actually he said she was clairvoyant, but I doubt it. She looked over the kids who had turned out for the team and said, "Oh, no, we're going to get creamed, we don't have even ONE Mexican." And that's about it. Also, they didn't have any girls on either team. I remember when Sam's dad, Kyle, was playing 30 years ago, the teams were just starting to integrate and playing girls was still a little unusual for the guys. At the beginning they often pulled their kicks and so forth. They got over it. But I can still see one young beauty, Katherine, charging down the sideline with all 20" of blond hair streaming out behind her and everyone else, on the field and off, just stopping and watching. Great fun, especially because she was on our team.
The Mexican community is very strong in Hood River because there are lots of apples and pears and cherries to pick and many of the itinerant pickers eventually settle in the communities around the Hood River Valley. So it makes it a great place, better than Portland even, to buy Mexican-style groceries, e.g., canned tomatillas that don't cost and arm and a leg. And all those lovely caramel sauces. Great Mexican restaurants and crafts all around and the fancy satiny, ruffled dresses the girls wear for special occasions. It's good for a young lad like Sam, who spent most of his life in central Pennsylvania, where their idea of hot sauce is Heinz 57, to live close to another culture. Well, the Pennsylvania Dutch do have sauerkraut and quilts, but it's not the same.
After the game, we went to lunch at the Char Burger in Cascade Locks, just above Bonneville dam. This is a very old and famous cafeteria-style burger and sandwich house. Their motto is "Not just a burger joint." It is, though. But, it's stuffed full of arrowhead collections and branding irons and pioneer accoutrement of various sorts and life-size stuffed cowboys. And it's right on the river and just below the Bridge of the Gods, so it's a pretty fun place to go.
Here's a legend about the original Bridge of the Gods and here's a picture of the man-made one.
After lunch, the salmon. We had called the Multnomah Falls Visitor Center earlier and they said there were only 9 salmon in their little creek, but that there were hundreds at Eagle Creek just 4 miles downriver. So that's where we went. You can, of course, see the fish in the fish ladders at the dam, but in the ladders they are generally still vibrant and look like their nature magazine portraits. And they're behind glass. I prefer to observe close up and personal.
Sam and Margie decided to stay in the car, but Jeffi, Kyle and I clambered down a little hill to the edge of the creek. And there were indeed hundreds of salmon in the 18" to 24" range swirling and struggling, humping over each other and out of the water, trying to move over the rocks, further up the creek, following the homing scent. At this point in their life-cycle, the fish have stopped eating and are actually starting to rot. Their one purpose is to return to the area where they were hatched to spawn and die.
A short aside for those of you not on the US west coast. All five varieties of Pacific salmon (and the steelhead, actually a trout), are anadromous, which means they hatch from eggs in fresh water, travel to salt water to live out their lives and then return to the same fresh water to spawn. This is true of both wild and hatchery-raised salmon. There is a huge hatchery vs. wild salmon debate here with many, many facets; and whether you can tell the difference when you eat one is about the most trivial aspect. I'm not going to discuss any of them, but if you're interested, here is a pretty good article, even if clearly on the "wild salmon" side.
Watching the fish, at the end like this, is an experience that for me inspires reverence. Many of them are so beaten up, skin and even bits of flesh sloughing off, their snouts all gray and bruised looking, the rainbow shimmer gone. But they are still powerful, still beautiful in a macabre way and still doing the breeding dances, making nests and defending them, laying and fertilizing eggs.
I live the kind of life where I seldom face the dramatic realities of nature. It was good to get out and be reminded and come home feeling sad, but also more connected. Fall seems a better season for it to me than Spring. Maybe it's that plains upbringing. You might think about trying to find it, too, wherever you are.
|
