Mukoli

A Third Instance of Water

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One part of me expected that sitting in the Listening Circle would be a pleasant yet uneventful undertaking; another part hoped for an unambiguous message. I’ve always wanted to receive some sign that I’m on the right path, or better yet, a sign as to what path I ought to be on. Life is uncertain, and the way forward isn’t always obvious. So I listened.

By the time I sat in the basalt amphitheater, sunshine had drenched the dark rock surfaces for over eight hours. The bench burned through my thin hiking pants and I fished out my slim Moleskine notebook to place between my butt and the hot stone. 

The basalt bench was one of six, three at the southwest of the clearing and three at the northeast: enormous arcs of stone. Each could easily have sat forty of me, but I was not with a multitude. I was alone. 

Our adult kids, both in their twenties, were more interested in the smaller, traditional bench fifty paces north overlooking the Snake River. They soaked up the pure blue sky, the amber-colored hills, and the river, broad and steady. Then, they walked back down the hill to see if there was good swimming to be had in the lake.

“Since this is called the Listening Circle,” I said to my husband, “I’d like to sit, and listen.” He genially followed our kids while I stayed behind.

Our family of four had set out from Portland, Oregon to visit the three Confluence sites located far enough away to require an overnight drive. The first of these, the Listening Circle at Chief Timothy Park, was created by celebrated artist, Maya Lin, to mark a place of significance. When Cayuse elder, Antone Minthorn, viewed a documentary on Maya Lin’s VietNam Memorial, he invited her to create installations along the Columbia River, and the Confluence Project was born. The story of Lewis and Clark’s journey along the Snake River to the Columbia, and eventually to the Pacific Ocean, has commonly been told as if the White experience is the one that matters. The Confluence Project planned to correct this skewed narrative.

Behind me and down the hill, the park – RV hookups, picnic tables, grass, tall trees, and restrooms with showers – roasted in the hot sun. The terrain in front of me would have been familiar to the Nez Perce, Cayuse, and Umatilla ancestors who’ve been here since time immemorial. It was a good place to listen. A steady breeze allayed the vehement sun and stirred the low grasses, whispering through the sagebrush and yarrow. A metallic blue damselfly looped through the air. A large bird flew high in the rich blue of the sky. When the four of us had been here, this same bird kept its distance, but now that only I remained, it allowed itself the luxury of curiosity. It flew closer, sweeping through the air, sketching unhurried arcs longer than the basalt benches, lower and lower.

Given the shape and size of the bird, I decided it would turn out to be a large hawk. I willed it to come close enough to see more than a silhouette. It took its time. It might have been curious, but maybe it also wanted to check out the small rodent situation on the ground, or the fish situation in the river. 

The bird soared closer. Interesting, I thought. It has a white breast and belly, and a black striped tail – just like an osprey. I wonder what it is. I committed its colors to memory, curious to check out the markings when we were back in cell range.

I also kept listening. The bird’s presence felt promising. I leaned in, hoping to hear it if it brought a message for me.

The bird stayed low for so long I lost track of time. When it rose again, as sedately as ever, I bent my head back to keep its outline crisp through the upper lens of my progressive glasses. I lowered my head when my neck tired, and when I looked again, the bird was gone. I stood and scanned the opposite hillside in case it had flown so low it blended in with the hilly land. No luck. It had vanished.

Sweat beaded at my hairline and cooled in the air. I lingered, but the important moment had come and gone without the crystalline voice of certainty I’d hoped for, affirming the significance of my life, of me.

Grasshoppers sprang away as I turned to the path and headed down the hill to my family.

I’ve misled you. Earlier, I gave the impression that both our offspring strode toward the lake with anticipation and energy. This was not actually the case. Our son had already been ill for a week. We’d considered canceling our trip, but then his fever would dip into normal range and he’d feel fine. Then it would rise again. Every Covid test came back negative. Our son said he still wanted to come, curious to visit the Confluence sites. His older sister did plunge into the park’s lake, but he waded in slowly, hoping to cool his fever and to not be a downer. Then he sat in the shade until we were ready to leave. 

As we drove from the park back onto Highway 12, I described the bird that flew closer once they all left. Simultaneously, my son and daughter said, “You mean the osprey that was hanging around?” They laughed that I’d had all the components yet failed to fit the pieces together.

 I reminded our son, “We could go to urgent care in Walla Walla.”

“I know,” he said. “I feel like I’m going to kick this soon,” and I acquiesced because he’s an adult and gets to decide, and who wants to go to urgent care anyway? 

***

My maternal great grandmother was raised in the Christian Science church. Her eldest son heard there were jobs in Seattle and left his two-year-old daughter in his devout mother’s care.

How did the conversation go when, weeks later, he returned for his child, only to learn she’d died in his absence? My great grandmother had done nothing but call the Christian Science minister when his daughter had fallen ill. Were there recriminations? Surely there were tears on both sides, and wailing. 

His sister, my grandmother, became a born-again visitor of medical doctors, though she never quite lost the conviction that positive thoughts had the power to heal.

***

The next day, our son felt worse. Once again he rejected the idea of urgent care and instead said, “Let’s go” when we waffled about the fifty-minute drive to the next Confluence site. My anxiety for him hummed all morning, an underground river of maternal concern. 

Almost certainly the Confluence Project hadn’t intended for this site – at Sacagawea State Park in Pascoe, Washington – to so starkly illustrate the impact of colonization and industrialization on these ancient lands and their people. Intentional or not, the effect was harrowing.

Highway 12 eases northward at Wallula Junction and parallels the Columbia River, past the Packaging Corporation of America, and the mineral processing plant. Industrialization perches on the banks of the river, so omnipresent that the wildlife refuge we passed seemed little more than cynical greenwashing. To finally reach the park – named for Sacagawea, the enslaved teenage Shoshone guide and interpreter for Lewis and Clark – we idled behind dump trucks with a view of ugliness so disheartening it was hard to appreciate the green once we finally reached the park. 

Perhaps this was why I told my family, “We can look around, but then we need to get back to urgent care.” Everyone sighed, as if they’d been waiting for someone to make a decision, and finally, I had.

We ate lunch before finding the Story Circles. Walking to the picnic tables, we passed an informational signboard. A photo taken in the Thirties revealed a beautifully stark land as it existed before the dams were built. We sat, but I stood almost immediately again. The aggressive yellowjackets knotted my stomach – or maybe it was the fact that we were a full hour from urgent care’s medical advice.

The Confluence Story Circles contained some of the plants native to this land. The honey-colored flowers of the sagebrush planted in one Circle served to highlight what has been lost. If the photo we’d seen was anything to go by, its warm, mustardy blossoms would have covered this landscape less than a hundred years ago. Now, fewer plants than fingers on my hand had been placed here, in memoriam, surrounded by bigleaf maple and neatly trimmed lawns.

Rather than join our circumambulation, my son lowered himself onto a stone and my daughter sat protectively beside him. We headed to Walla Walla and, hours later, left urgent care with a diagnosis of bacterial tonsillitis, unable to fill his prescription until the following morning. 

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We had planned to visit one more site on the coast; my son asked that we drop him home beforehand where he could rest and allow the antibiotics to start working.

***

My paternal great grandmother gave birth to ten children, only five of whom survived infancy. Her dead children were never far from her thoughts. Even when one child died, she had to keep going because the other children needed her. 

Did Lewis and Clark grieve when Charles Floyd died during their expedition? Did they continue under the weight and uncertainty that death might come again? Did they glance anxiously at the remaining crew, worried they’d see signs of impending illness, the way my great grandmother must have?

How about the Cayuse in the 1840s when the measles scoured their villages? They were intimate with death before this time, of course. As my great grandmother had been, too. She would have understood the gutting anguish of an indiscriminate killer destroying half of one’s world. They all knew the icy feeling of hearing a new cough or sensing an unnatural heat radiating from a loved one’s skin.

***

We delivered our son home around 3:30 then continued on to our VRBO. He’d be safe there. Friends and family lived minutes away should he need rescuing. My heart lightened the further away we drove, relieved to spread his care among others.

The cabin in Skamokawa Valley, Washington brought us to within an hour of the last Confluence Project site at Cape Disappointment. The small cottage had an unimpeded view of the Columbia River and a path that wound through knee-high brush to the sandy edge of the water. Our daughter donned her swimsuit, and for a while I got to be anxious about her. I texted our son a photo of the slate-gray river, his sister’s head a dark speck bobbing on the water, evidence of her daring.

That night, I climbed the stairs to close the windows in the loft. Upriver, the unmistakable silhouette of a large bird perched in the upper branches of a Norway spruce. Unquestionably an osprey, I thought. 

A quick Google search revealed that seeing an osprey could indicate abundance, prowess, keen-sightedness, or victory. Of course, seeing an osprey at the Snake River, and then again at the Columbia, could mean ospreys favored rivers. 

Cape Disappointment was named by John Meares who, try as he might, could not locate the entrance to the river. If another White guy hadn’t beaten them to it, Lewis and Clark might have named it Cape Misery. “Misery” because, in reaching it, the October weather first pinned their canoes against the rocks for two weeks while the pelting rain rotted their clothes from their bodies. 

We were the opposite of disappointed and miserable as we drove to the Cape, dazzled by the cloudless, glittering day. 

Cape Disappointment’s sites are actually two clusters of installations, four grouped together on the ocean side, and three on the bay. We chose the ocean first. The lush forest we drove through could not have felt more different from the arid terrain of the Listening Circle. 

A smaller amphitheater than the one on the Snake River lay between the ocean and the walkway to the Cedar Circle. Long planks of stone and crushed oyster shells created the walkway and were inscribed with a Chinook blessing. I read as I walked: 

We call upon the forests, the great cedar trees…

We call upon the creatures of the fields and
forests and the seas, our brothers and sisters…
We call upon all those who have lived on this earth,
our ancestors and our friends,
who dreamed the best for future generations,
and upon whose lives our lives are built,
and with thanksgiving, we call upon them to

Teach us, and show us the way

I stopped at each inscribed stone and asked the salmon people, the forests, and the ancestors to teach me and show me the way. 

Cedar is sacred to Native people. I’ve known enough cedar trees myself that I was unsurprised to feel a palpable shift when we crossed the threshold from the path to the circle. The temperature dropped and the air thrummed with oxygen. In the center stood the stump of a hundreds-year-old cedar; placed vertically at the edges of the circle were the silvered trunks of driftwood the ocean had carried ashore. 

As we entered the Cedar Circle, a woman started on the path behind us. She read the blessing as she came but at a speed-reading pace. In no time, she entered the Circle. She avoided our eyes, looked up and around, then exited as quickly as she’d come. My husband and I raised our eyebrows at each other, jarred by the tenor of her passage. 

We retraced our steps to the ocean pathway and discovered the words on that path had been rubbed into illegibility by the feet of thousands of visitors. Excerpts from Lewis and Clark’s journals were nearly erased by the feet of the culture that followed them. 

We waded in the frigid ocean until the bones of our feet ached.

Back in the car, we searched for the bayside installations. We’d already heard about the fish-cleaning table, carved from a giant slab of basalt, but we would’ve known it from fifty paces. The smell and the plump, smiling seagulls were a dead giveaway. The hard rock surface was fitted with a spray hose like the kind used for dishwashing jobs. From there, another path stretched and promised an overlook at the end. 

A trio of middle-aged tourists swept up on electric bikes and stopped several yards from the table, feet planted, straddling their frames. They turned their heads to the left then to the right, then regarded each other. Minutes later, gravel popping beneath their tires, they hummed away with the satisfied air of people having checked something off a list.

The first edge of the overlook came into view as we walked this new path. A cluster of alder trees leaned toward the water, their leaves fanned out to create a bower so charming I expected to find fairies. The water of Baker Bay unfurled beyond the trees, twinkling in the sun. 

A stretch of dark boulders lay between the overlook and the bay. Two men stood, fishing. Their distance from each other suggested they weren’t together. The streets of Portland are filled with such men, rough-looking and lean to the point of gauntness. I imagined each of them furtively retiring to a corner of the park to sleep tonight in a van or a tent.

The Snake flows into the Columbia, which in turn flows into the Pacific. At what point does one river become the next? At the mouth of the Columbia, the water can taste of salt. Does this mean it has become the ocean, or is it still the river – or some third instance of water that is both or neither?

Maya Lin intended for these sites to mark the coming together of cultures, and in marking them, to invite the visitor to consider the results of this coming together – a  puzzle with political, ethical, and social justice implications. It was impossible to be in these places and not see what was at stake: the life-giving water, the breath-giving sky. Impossible or not, some of the tourists seemed immune to noticing. But at least they were there; maybe some of them allowed themselves to be “shown the way.”

That night, all three of us swam in the Columbia. We found a slough outside the main current and practiced our sidestroke and frog kicks. We discussed how buoyancy can be elusive. Tiny fish swam with us. I looked for the osprey, but it didn’t come. 

***

It’s embarrassing how much I yearned for that message – especially when, reflecting on this trip, it couldn’t have been made more clear, offered in writing, no less, so there’d be less chance for ambiguity: We call upon all those who have lived on this earth/ our ancestors and our friends/ Teach us, and show us the way. I was looking for something especially for me and so I missed it at first, the message for all of us. 

If I allow my ancestors and others who’ve lived to show me the way, then first I must give thanks. Our son’s recovery was slow, but also steady. When he fell ill, I worried, but not that he would die. I wish I could reach backwards and offer this same gift to my great grandmothers, to the Cayuse, to all people who’ve died unnecessarily. 

Maybe each of these moments was a message – the hills, the river, the flora, the stone, the insects, the bird, the woman, the bikers, the men who fished, my family, the sun, the air in the Cedar Circle, myself one thread among many. Like the osprey, at first I had all the parts but couldn’t see how they fit. The Chinook blessing spelled things out, just in case. I wanted a sign I was on the right path; how could my path be wrong when it had brought me here?

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