Salmon in Morrison Creek

Watching the salmon run in Morrison Creek last week, I took a short video, wondering if it would come close to capturing the salmon’s struggle as it swam against a current rushed along by a deluge of record-setting rain. A master of camouflage, the salmon’s survival depends on being hard to see. Its shimmering silvery scales become one with the light reflected off the water, and its shades of brown and grey blend in with the rock, gravel, and sand bed of the creek itself. If the water is shallow enough, the salmon’s presence is betrayed most often by its dorsal fin slicing through the surface.

The odds are against the salmon at the best of times, but a wild creek overflowing its banks poses additional hazards. The sheer force of the high water volume could push the salmon back towards the ocean. Or, when the water inevitably recedes, it might strand them in places where water doesn’t usually flow. They will be trapped between salmonberry and Oregon grape, big leaf maple trunks and rocks, an easy meal for bears, coyotes, corvids and other predators.

Metaphors abound.

But I’m trying not to anthropomorphize the salmon’s biological necessity. I’m trying not to attach my human emotion and my human experience to them. I’m trying to appreciate this wild moment, to be with them in nature, not to interpret them. Too much thinking can spoil an experience.

Yet, I cannot help but impose narrative. It’s my job as a writer to do so. That one is resting under a bridge, I tell myself, tired out by its repeated efforts to hurl itself over the many low rock waterfalls. Soon, it will have gathered its strength again and push forward. A few feet away, two salmon are finding their way together upstream when they slide into a channel that pushes them backwards over a ten inch drop they had managed to hurdle only moments before. I imagine their disappointment. I imagine them consoling each other. These are chum salmon, and I’ve taken the word “chum” too much to heart. I cheer on another hearty salmon at least sixty centimetres long as it surges over another rock waterfall with seeming ease. I cheer out loud. I can’t help myself. So much for being detached.

When I get home and look at the video, I am amazed. The salmon, which I knew would be hard to capture in the water, is there. I can see it, shimmering. Then the image changes; it becomes only an outline of itself, ghostly. A vanishing ghost salmon. There, not there, there, not there.

And I start to weep. The metaphor of the spawning salmon consumes me. It is me. This is how I feel. In a cycle of chronic illness, I too am here, then not here, a mere outline of myself, a shadow. I become a ghost of myself. Apparitional. I come back. I disappear again. I come back again, firm up, return to form. But I am vanishing again now. Translucent. Transparent. If you look for too long, you can see right through me.