So, my time this Summer communing with my Salmon River has been horribly foreshortened...
In the month and a half I was home this Summer, the weather was oppressively hot and humid, and often there would be heavy thunderstorms with torrential rain in the late afternoons. Your standard Climate Change scenario...Salmon River was running very high with storm run-off, and the only way for me to cope with that steam bath kind of weather was to get my body in that river...
Emmet and I went most days after work. We'd go cool off before I would be able to deal with the kitchen chores. One time snorkeling we found a large breeder trout, I'd say twenty inches or so, probably a male because his face was twisted upward like how spawning salmon get, and he had a puncture wound on his back--I'm guessing from the bill of a heron. He let us move close to him and even touch him. I think he was near death.
When Emmet went away for a week to summer camp I continued going there every day after work. I was trying to catch up on lost time from my first New York trip and anticipating the next. One day I went and there were a bunch of people up in the cascade section, so I went to the lower, more open part. The water was so high that that the three big rocks usually visible were showing only three to four inches above water. When the river is this high, it's great for hanging; you dive to the bottom, grab onto a rock and just hang in the strong current feeling the energy of the moving water. My Happy Place. I did that for a while, letting the river pull away the sick heat of the day, then I made three piled rock sculptures, one on each of the big boulders. I often do this, and they are usually gone the next time I go back, but the next day I went back and they were all three resolute and lined up with the Belt of Orion. I had the place to myself this time so I went to the cascades where you can sit back and let the water stream over your head, creating a cavity of air that you can breathe in under water. After a while three guys, probably in their third decades approached coming down the river on inner tubes. The cascades are formed by a solid rock ledge that used to be the base for the mill dam that used to be there. In the spot where the mill wheel once was there is an opening for a swift patch of rapids. A certain rock takes the brunt of the flow and splashes it over, making an impossible navigational zone. You can't not flip over here. They came down one at a time, and one at a time they flipped over. Competition was apparently a motivator for them and they came back several more times to see who could do it without flipping, and each time they all flipped. When they gave up they pulled over on the small beach down below me and smoked cigarettes, then I noticed one of them throwing rocks. Then they were all throwing rocks and I realized they were trying to knock down my stone piles from the day before!
At first I was offended, but realized it was silly and then I started rooting for them. I liked the irony of them not knowing, and I knowing who had placed those cairns there and that I was there to see my temporary creations purposefully destroyed. One guy was throwing lefty and I secretly rooted for him. They were not successful for some ten minutes I'd say, but finally one of the right-handed guys hit the cairn and it all tumbled into the eddy behind the boulder. After that, they got back into the water and continued downstream.
The next day was another miserable steam bath. The old mill cascade area was mobbed, so I went further upstream to find a spot. Up the dirt road in the State Forest I found a nice widened area where a small rock dam had deepened it for swimming. I snorkeled around a bit, then I found a nice flat boulder about four inches under the surface of the water. On it, I built a nice, almost cylindrical cairn about a foot and a half tall, looking like it was floating on the water surface. I often wonder about some of the rocks I find in the river. Some I have found are green or purple and have a hardness and smothness unlike local rocks. I almost want to think they are slate, but they don't seem to be layered. In this spot I found a boulder about the size of an air conditioner, deep black with white veins running through it. Obviously dropped by a glacier and over time made it downstream from somewhere North of here where a stone like this would exist. I left the cairn to the elements. Another giant rainstorm raised the river by a foot a few days later, and that was that.
