Hi Friends,
One of the things I love about the fall season where I live in California’s Sierra Nevada is that all of it is ephemeral. That’s ironic, of course, since one of the things we humans most struggle with is our (and our loved ones) ephemeral natures, but maybe that’s why so many of us connect to fall—it shows us that this is the way of the natural world. The yellow aspen leaves only last a few weeks before floating to earth, and the bears and chipmunks are in a mad rush to fatten up for the winter. Also, this is the time of year when the Kokanee salmon here at Lake Tahoe spawn, and I take my yearly pilgrimage out to Taylor Creek, always hoping I’m not too late, which will mean rotting fish carcasses, rather than the red tide of still-swimming fish.
A few days ago, my husband and I made our way to Taylor Creek, and not only were the salmon spawning, but they were bigger than I have ever remembered. I wondered if they had gotten that way because they weren’t able to spawn at Taylor Creek last fall because Lake Tahoe was so low that the creek no longer reached its edge. I thought maybe the fish couldn’t spawn so they didn’t die, holding off for another year, growing bigger than usual. After asking my friend Shari, a fish biologist, I learned that this wasn’t what happened.
According to Shari, the salmon probably spawned in a less desirable area and then died. She said the fish were likely bigger due to favorable conditions, like more water in the lake, which was definitely the case after our record-breaking winter last year.
Dr. Google agreed with Shari, saying that the fish may have spawned at the edge of the lake or even in a different stream that they could access, but also that these non-Native salmon are resilient and can wait until as late as February to spawn, when precipitation levels were back up—that the fish waited to spawn, putting off their deaths (though not for another whole year like I believed they had). But five more months of life in a 2-7 year life span is not nothing.
And of course this got me thinking about the ways environmental factors extend (or shorten) our own lives. And the way those fish are so very determined to breed and die in the place they were born—that after swimming around the lake clockwise (another biologist friend told me this), they always find their way back home.
This also got me thinking about how the living and traveling and returning and dying are all part of a cycle that we might be in awe of, but we do not mourn. There’s a brilliant and beautiful essay called “Wild Darkness” by Eva Saulitis that considers the salmon run in a much more eloquent and nuanced and devastating way than I am doing here. If you haven’t read the essay, you should stop everything and do so right now. It’s here.
Saulitis’ essay considers the salmon life cycle in her quest to understand and grapple with her own terminal cancer, and her conclusion, finally, is this: “Death is nature. Nature is far from over. In the end, the gore at the creek comforts more than it appalls. In the end — I must believe it — just like a salmon, I will know how to die, and though I die, though I lose my life, nature wins. Nature endures. It is strange, and it is hard, but it’s comfort, and I’ll take it.”
Unfortunately, Saulitis died from breast cancer in 2016, which was the same year one of my best friends, the poet Ilyse Kusnetz, died of the same disease. They both died too young—early 50s—and they both looked to the metaphors of nature and other animal bodies in their writing about illness and mortality. I highly recommend Ilyse Kusnetz’ poetry books as well; you can find them here and here.
For this week’s writing exercise, we’re going to think about an animal encounter we have had and how it might serve as a metaphor for our own lives. This connection doesn’t have to correlate with our entire lives or the immensity of living and dying. Nothing is too small a scale. Perhaps you encountered an ant who was carrying a large load and you watched as that ant kept backing up and trying a new route to get over a giant rock, and this reminded you