I heard them while I was outside planting daffodils and moving terracotta planters under the house for winter. A lonesome sound, those cries echoing off the mountain, muffled by cloud, then clear as someone talking in the same room. I finally saw them, a perfect vee, and so high up I couldn’t even begin to count them. Mostly I love the routines of my life but when the geese fly overhead, sometimes I feel tethered. Like Issa, who wrote,
the hoe’s a curse
I’m thinking tonight…
wild geese calling
One moment, wishing for flight, and the next, entranced by a forgotten geranium, untouched by last week’s frost!
Friends came for dinner the other night and they mentioned they’d been finding a lot of pine mushrooms. We’ve looked in our usual places lately but until yesterday, we hadn’t yet seen any pines. But then, this bounty — and it’s only about half of what there was in a place we’ve picked every year (picked five or six large mushrooms at most).
The other day we stopped at Anderson Creek to see the chum salmon run in progress. These are Oncorhynchus keta, also called dog salmon for the hooked snout and canine-like teeth the males form during spawning. (The females develop a less pronounced version of this kype as well.) They are lovely fish, about 10-20 pounds, with green and dark purple vertical bars on their bodies. I think their migration is the longest of any of the genus. When we stopped the other day, the water level was quite low — we’ve had a very long mild fall thus far, with only a little rain.
Today I went back, hoping to take a few photographs. All last night it rained hard and the creek was quite full. I thought how often I’d come to Anderson Creek on school field trips, all the children watching the drama of the living fish and the dead. Just beyond, Oyster Bay with its remnants of ancient fish weirs, and everywhere the scent of the season — leaves, rotting fish, damp ground. I wish I could share the sound of the salmon pushing their way through cold water to find the right place to dig their redds and lay their eggs. It’s one of the best ways to know where we are in the year — bears fattening on the carcasses, ravens klooking in the cedars, eagles making their thin vocalizations that sound so eerie filtered down through rain and trees.
The light wasn’t good for pictures but I took some anyway and hope you can see the shapes of the fish in the water, under ferns, hovering with a chosen mate.
