Salmon, the Boundless Beyond, and the Home Stream
Exploring the migratory patterns of salmon and the way we make a life along the oscillating continuum of the boundless and the familiar.
I come to the Pacific Northwest by way of the Mitten — moving from Royal Oak, Michigan to Spokane, Washington when I was 18. I was drawn to the PNW initially by exploration on Google Earth as an elementary schooler. A trip to Vancouver, BC during my junior year of high school along with a teenage music taste centered around the Seattle Folk wave of the early 2010’s solidified the deal.
I had some context for Spokane, where I landed, too. On the day my family left to go back to Michigan after dropping me off at college, I walked downtown from my house and stood above the waterfalls that cascade through the city. Watching them, I recalled reading about this same scene in 10th grade English via the works of Sherman Alexie. I had come across a photo on Google Earth that was taken just east of here, somewhere in the Selkirk mountains, during those Google Earth exploration days. Rolling hills, wild flowers, and what was likely lake Pend Oreille as features. 12 year old me had thought it was beyond beautiful, Narnia-esque.
Over my time here, I have grown into an affinity for place-centric meaning-making. Sprung initially by the likes of Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver, continuing through Robin Wall Kimmerer and David James Duncan, my entrenchment in this area has grown a spirituality that binds itself to land. Something I recognize, mournfully, was woven within the psyche of this land for many 1000’s of years before the likes of me and my ancestors occupied it.
Above the fireplace in our house, my wife and I have a hydrologic map of the Spokane River watershed. The spiritual community I facilitate reworked our name a few years ago, moving from the original Biblically motivated vine/branches metaphor name of Branches to our present name of All These Branches. A shift corresponding with a community extending its ideological framework from specific religious ideology to eco-centric spirituality. The imagery of its reworked name born from the notion that each little stream makes up a vast watershed, similar to how each person, animal, plant and thing makes up the vastness of what we call the Divine.
One of the most pointed and potent spiritual components of this geographic area that has captured me since moving here resides within those rivers and streams: Salmon, and the migratory patterns they live by. I first learned about this through the aforementioned writer, David James Duncan, and have fallen into the grasps of its wonder through many mediums and murmurings ever since.
Here’s the 30,000 foot premise. Salmon are born in specific streams, head to the ocean, and then come back to their specific stream to reproduce and die. I’ll get into this more in a minute... Historically, Spokane had massive salmon runs. The falls that I stood over those early days of being here were a sacred place due to their salmon runs for First Nations people. And a stream just downstream from them, Latah creek, was said to be so full of salmon during the run that you could walk across it on the backs of the fish. Spokane doesn’t have these runs anymore due to dams and pollution. That’s a whole other essay. If you want to learn more / get involved in efforts to change that, check out Save Our Wild Salmon.
Here’s a helpful graphic from The Seattle Times on migratory patterns.
For my purposes, I am going to draw out a migration as it could (and did in the past) have played out here in this region. What prevents these patterns now are the “developments” that white settlers imposed onto the region. Dams, environmental pollutants from farming, etc..
The journey of a Little Spokane River Salmon:
We begin in a tributary of the Spokane river, the Little Spokane. A lush an beautiful stream north of town. Upon hatching, a young salmon fry would develop into a smolt and spend a couple years living in the water of the Little Spokane just near present day St. George’s School. In due time, the smolt would make its way from the Little Spokane to the Spokane river, following the serpentine flow of its birth stream to just northwest of town, near present day Spokane House. From there it would continue onward, eventually reaching the Columbia River confluence in Roosevelt, WA. Still journeying, ever persistent, the growing smolt would follow the Columbia all the way to present day Astoria. From there, they would set off on their journey into Big Blue, navigating the Pacific ocean for a couple years. A journey of over 300 miles.
Then, by some great grace/holiness/scientific wonder, after those years out in the great blue yonder, the salmon would return to the mouth of the Columbia at Astoria, make their way up the Columbia, travel the hundreds of miles to Roosevelt, enter the Spokane River, travel along its cliff lined terrain, past Tumm Tumm, enter the Little Spokane, returning sometimes to within feet of where it was born, having made the entire journey eating nothing, but using its fat reserves from its time in the Pacific. Upon reaching this space, known to them, returned to by them; the female lays her eggs, the male milts over them, and then they die. Right near their place of birth, prior to their offspring being born. Then, when born, the next generation begins the cycle again.
Scientist Suzanne Simard points out toward the end of her book Finding the Mother Tree that there are ongoing studies pointing to decaying adult salmon carcasses, when consumed by bear or other animal in regions of British Columbia, helping fuel the health of the trees in those ecosystems. In the forests salmon can access, their nitrogen has been found in cedars, sitka spruce, plants, insects, and fungi. But for forests located in areas salmon cannot access because of dams or other barriers, the ecosystem suffers from a lack of nutrients that decaying salmon would otherwise help provide through decomposing into the soil.
The web of interplay between pieces within a place is vast. To use the Merlin Sheldrake quote I’ve used in earlier essays, the notion of the individual is a matter of perspective.
But…
I am not a scientist. I’m a Supportive Housing Program Manager / Pastor (so are you) who happens to enjoy attempting to make meaning based on observation and then tell you about it. This whole migratory process has whirled me with wonder for the place I call home now. But recently, it has also caused me to consider the place of my birth. Because, like a salmon, I can’t help but find myself still drawn to what resides there, the place upstream from the ocean I have ventured out into.
Michigan is a peninsula so nice we did it twice. Upper and lower, as Michiganders like to say. It is a natural resource wonder, with the Great Lakes making up more than 20% of all the worlds fresh water. Standing on the shores of each of the lakes is a marvel. I’m awed by it still anytime I am there. You can’t see across the lake, you get white caps forming, people surf their waves, there have been freighter ships sunk while navigating them. These lakes are, in their own way, a great blue yonder. And fittingly, a familiar friend resides within them.
The streams, rivers, and Great Lakes of Michigan play host to salmon. Although not originally native — they were introduced to help control a damaging over producing of herring — Great Lakes Chinook salmon are a staple to Lake Michigan nowadays. Unlike their Pacific Northwest relatives, Great Lakes salmon don’t move from fresh to salt water. But their patterns are marvelously consistent with their PNW counterparts. See the graphic from Michigan State University below. Stream to river to lake and back again.
I never knew this growing up. No one talked about it. But I’ve been stuck on this recently.
Every year I return home for a weekend golfing trip with all the guys on my Dad’s side of the family. It’s in the northern portion of Michigan’s lower peninsula. An exceedingly beautiful area full of deciduous forest and rolling hills. One of the courses we play is called Betsy Valley, named for the river a couple miles south, the Betsy River. I’ve come to find out that this is a prime area for salmon runs in the Fall. The fish born upstream the Betsy will follow its course out to the vast Lake Michigan, exploring and living a life for a few years, and then will return, through the same confluence pattern they took years earlier, this time in reverse, only to die and let the process begin again with their offspring.
It would seem that these creatures carry within their inherent being a desire for boundlessness paired with a reverence for the familiar. Whether Great Lake or Pacific, it is all ocean, boundless beyond. And yet, it is also all stream, all home.
Where, in this breath-like migratory pattern, is the salmon a salmon? Of course this question is unanswerable and unnecessary . The salmon always is. The boundless beyond of ocean or lake is woven within the fabric of the home stream just as the home stream is woven within the ocean or the Great Lake.
From The Brothers Karamasov,
…all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth.
For the longest time, every phone call I had with my parents would digress into a conversation around who would move to the location of the other. Would I move back to Michigan? Would they move to the Pacific Northwest? There was love in the topic, of course. But it always seemed like it doubled as a way to not really talk about anything. Instead, it was a topic used to mask the blatant but hard to talk about fact that being apart is hard and that it would be a lot easier to not have to deal with that hardship if there was proximity.
All is an ocean, all is a home stream. There is a continuity and a through-line that is at the beginning, middle, and end of a salmons migratory habit. Other or apart does not satisfy the reality of each stage, because it all is. The water in the stream becomes the river which becomes the lake or the ocean. The clouds form, the rains fall, and what travelled out, returns in. The salmon is on the same journey as the water it is within.
Moving away is not necessarily moving away. Ocean and stream are, in one sense, vastly distinct, but they are webbed in the way that they contain. For me to be the son, brother, husband, friend that I am, all has been ocean, all has been stream. The salmon, in all its questing, remains in water all the same.
So, too, you. Only this Water might not be wet.
The whole of the great earth is my own True Body. The whole of the great earth is the real Human Being. - Dōgen
The whole of the great water is the True Salmon.
Whether upstream, great blue yonder.
Spokane, Royal Oak.
The whole of the continuum is where love, its ever evolving but always holding presence, catches and caresses.
There is an oscillating nature to who we are as humans. Unlike the salmon, it is not as linear as a birth, a quest, a return, and a death; although those are all part of it. It is an ever continuous in-breath and out-breath between the boundless and the specific. But it is us all the way, it is home all the way, it is the One True Body all the way. In the words of St. Catherine of Sienna, all the way to heaven is heaven.
What is the terrain of our ocean, our Great Lake? Our boundlessness? What is the terrain of our stream? Our familiar? What are we making of the journey between?
I am mesmerized by the life and migratory patterns of these fish. It is marvelous, perhaps even holy, if you chose to use that word.
And yet there questing, of known to unknown to known, is the work of a fully-embodied and fully-alive life. An option I know that I have: To know, to be willing to step beyond, and to be willing to return to the known again, with grace.
There is a lesson here. One that I would do a disservice if I tried to state explicitly.
It exists somewhere in the notion of knowing you are never fully detached from the balance of the boundless and the familiar, you are always swimming amidst their pathway. That what exists in each place and the place between, is life. And that our propensity to oscillate in that space between, is one of life’s wild gifts; one that is not looking for commitment to one end or the other, but a willing presence all the way.