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Requiem
The bridge across the Gate awash in rain. Victoria’s Requiem is playing, the chorus’ major sixths ascending the tall towers, pinnacles of refined sorrow and they carry my heart with them. I cross the Californian aorta, the main way from the Californian heart, the Bay of San Francisco and it beats still, but faintly.
Each year brings with it rain, and rain freshens the rivers that at last flow out the Gate, and the salmon hold until the water tastes right to them. There were millions of them, not long ago, and I have talked to men who remembered watching salmon harvested with pitchforks. From the ocean they came, the Californian sacrament, leering monsters from the deep set on wriggling their way past the mouth of the creek I live on, up through the Delta and the Valley, to fling themselves onto the cobble bars of Sierra Nevada rivers, food for grizzlies and condors and people. They sacrificed their lives so their young might live, and smolts tumbled down the streams each year into the Delta.
There were three runs each year, or four, depending on how you count them, great pulses of Chinook into the rivers for their young to tumble down in turn.
Thousands of miles of spawning beds reached by the Gate, a watery hand with a hundred fingers, and one by one we chopped those fingers off. The dams went in. Snowmelt languished in dull reservoirs, and downstream the winter and spring run chinook staggered. Those runs are a historical curiosity now. The spring run on the San Joaquin River is extinct: the San Joaquin’s slack, piss-river tributaries are, below their respective dams, far too warm for spawning in spring. The Sacramento spring run and the Winter runs on both branches of the Central Valley watershed are not far behind. It is the fall run of Chinook that has survived so far to keep Central California a salmon country. That run is a fraction of its historic size, but still a quarter million fish a year.
But not this year. The fall run of Chinook into the Central Valley has collapsed.
I cross the opening of a dead heart, and Tomás Luis de Victoria’s grief a half-millennium old is near too much to bear. They have fallen, there below me, kept from the mountains we have so betrayed. Oh, my mountains. Unto you all flesh once came, dug redds in streambeds, mixed milt and egg with meltwater, brought life out of the gravel. They are falling now, the last of them. The bay constricted and intoxicated, salmon smolts sucked by millions into turbines, their water shipped to the desert to grow cotton, billion-dollar concrete aqueducts running past rivers dry in summer, fish curling in the sun on the bottoms.
Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla. The soul of California’s land and water and we are losing them. Dona eis requiem.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Chris, I love that you push my vocabulary beyond its limits. I looked up redd, though, and the Mac widget dictionary had only a verb meaning “tidy up.” (My jumbo unabridged dictionaries had meaning 2, the salmon/trout spawning sense.) I learned what milt was a couple years ago (and like that it lends itself to japery about ordering a tuna milt at a diner).
Such gall to reengineer rivers that have been running for eons, and siphon off the water—humans never seem to improve matters below the river’s surface.
By: By Orange on 2008 01 30
I wish I had similar powers of description, vocabulary and eloquence to describe what the Rockefellers did to West Virginia… a place of magic that I visited often in my childhood, now completely transformed.
They used to call it “Almost Heaven,” which was later inserted into a John Denver song and put on license plates. It really was.
Now, I can only say: what Chris said.
By: By Daisy on 2008 01 30
Dona eis requiem
Beautiful piece…
but why does this final phrase make me want to whack myself in the head with a Bible?
Daisy, are you familiar with this John Prine tune?
By: By Sven DiMilo on 2008 01 30
hmmm, bad link…but a couple of extra clicks’ll get you there. It’s called “Paradise”
By: By Sven DiMilo on 2008 01 30
We’re done for, in the end.
Completely destroying anything wild and beautiful - I’m at a loss for words.
So much loss.
Oh well - what’s the news of Britney today?? :D :D
/sarcasm
By: By sravana on 2008 01 30
The other night I saw a pre-release screening of a documentary film called “The 11th Hour.” Produced and narrated by Leo DiCaprio, if that floats your boat (don’t know what’s up w/ Britney). Lots of very striking imagery spliced together with interview footage of all the right people. Very well done. It followed the now-numbingly-familiar blueprint for environmental work, i.e. an hour of fact-based, unflinching doom & gloom followed by a half-hour of optimistic hope for the future if we all get together and try real hard now (the 11th hour). I am a sucker for that format, but this time, I have to say, the optimistic hope part (again, extremely well done, with sincerely stirring rhetoric from some very smart and articulate people) was not quite enough to lift me above the misanthropic pessimism induced by the first hour (which covered the gamut from endocrine disruptors and global climate change to habitat destruction).
Our little Spaceship is way fucked up, it’s the fault of us, our parents, and our grandparents, and it will never—can never—be anywhere close to the same even as when I made my appearance less than a half-century ago. This is profoundly sad.
I guess I’ll keep trying to do my little part with careful purchases, leaving the Jeep at home when I can, giving my paltry contributions to the organizations of good people, and continuing to educate younger folks. But this movie was free, it starred Leo, and from a campus of 8500 resident undergrads, most living closer than a city block to the theater, only about 40 could be bothered to show up. My stomach still hurts. What a fucked-up world I have bequeathed to my still-innocent daughter.
By: By Sven DiMilo on 2008 01 31
Victoria speaks more than ever, doesn’t he?
Versa est in luctum cithara mea et organum meum in vocem flentium.
My harp is turned to mourning and my organ into the voice of those that weep.
Don’t know if you saw Dave Neiwert’s piece on the Puget Sound/PNW orcas and the salmon.
By: By Theriomorph on 2008 01 31
I hadn’t seen that, Tmorph. Thanks.
And from the comments on that Orcinus post, I see my old pal Felice has a blog now. That’s good news. He’s been working on Klamath River environmental politics for a very long time: when I was doing Terrain and then Faultline, if I wanted to know the right, ethical, consistent position on a North Coast issue, I asked Felice.
Guess I’ll have to send him some readers.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2008 01 31
Sven beat me to it on the Prine song. Mr Peabody and Mr Rockefeller are no doubt well acquainted and to add insult to injury Sen. Jay Rockefeller occupies the seat of senatorial stupidity, fecklessly waving Bush’s civil liberties outrages into law.
By: By Charles on 2008 01 31
=9= Send him some redders, while you’re at it.
By: By Jym on 2008 02 01
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