A wall clock was leaned against a fir beside Barry’s camping chair to help him monitor the fishes’ progress. He grew slightly concerned. The salmon were taking awful long to bake and time was beginning to run short, the shadows lengthening across the parched meadow. He didn’t have his briquettes, as he was supposed to—the organizing committee had forgotten them—and the cedar wasn’t white-hot. “I could get scalped and hung up from a tree if the fish don’t come out,” Barry said. As he handled the fish, gradually they reclaimed their native shape, the foil conforming to their curved bodies, while leaking juice browned their crinkled topography and sizzled away. Across one end of the grate, roasted lemon rings lay scattered like a spill of enormous roe.
Another flip, and then Barry took me to the river. In a year of heavy snows, the South Umpqua Falls plunges classically along the north bank, the near side: headlong from ledges, in a torrent. But on the far side, it’s less a falls than a glide. A smooth, low dome of bedrock spreads the water so thin that it appears as a ten-thousand-thread sheet pulled across the stone. People were walking up and down this easy cascade barefoot or in flip-flops. A woman held the hands of her two kids, one a toddler, as they made the brilliant, flowing descent in yellow and red life jackets.
In the old days, salmon also walked up the dome with their bellies on the slab and their dorsa in the air—and they still made the climb, apparently, on certain moonlit nights. Once the tribe built weirs atop the falls and set cone-shaped traps, woven of hazel shoots, in the fast channels below, so that the thwarted fish would be swept back into these basket funnels and pinned by the strong current. You’re no longer allowed to fish for salmon at the falls, but sometimes, Teri had told me earlier, you can glimpse them deep in the pool, if you swim with a mask. If you brave the cold. “But you seldom see them,” said Barry, “there are so many people here making noise.”
Kids were hollering and sliding off the ledge into the bracing pool. Some on inner tubes, others on their bums. The seasoned or foolhardy launched into backflips. “Yeah, it’s really high,” said Barry. “Big falls this year. Beautiful. I love the way the water just rolls down the hump of rock.” It was six or seven inches above usual, he estimated. A concrete fish ladder ran up the north bank for times of low water, when the dome might go dry. “Might as well make it easy on them,” said Barry. The ladder was like the one at Cole Rivers, only smaller, and these stairs led to a different kind of afterlife. The ascending fish would forge into the narrowing mountains, toward the Rogue-Umpqua Divide, to offer their offspring the best possible start: cold, clear water.
“This place can fill with hundreds of people,” said Barry, as he surveyed the bright, roaring scene and looked at his watch. The salmon were waiting. Barry had started coming to the powwow in his midtwenties, and this year was his thirty-seventh. “All the people that had to work today,” he said, “they’re going to come in this weekend. They’re going to start coming in bumper-to-bumper.” They would be hungry.
Jessica wasn’t happy about the state of the sacred fish. It wasn’t exactly cooked, and tension was simmering between her and Barry. Traditionally, the meat of the one ceremonial salmon is gleaned and eaten, while the skin and bones are left untouched. Jessica and a friend named Lottie were hunched over the table like surgeons over a patient, and this procedure wasn’t going well. Normally the skin peels back easily, as one, but this time it was resisting—and then tearing. Inside, the fillet was sloppy, a vibrant raw orange, as wet as a kiss. Slipping the flesh from the hair-thin bones was nearly impossible.
Between subtle frowns, Jessica told me the origin of the tribe’s reverence for salmon, a story that, in its essence, holds true for much of the Native culture of Cascadia: “Long ago, animals walked upright like humans. Once we arrived, some of the animals realized we were starving. We weren’t able to feed ourselves. Salmon was one of those animals, and they said, ‘We will provide for you and be your food.’ So that’s when they went to the river and became fish. They go out to sea, they come back, and the females of course give birth, but their body nourishes their fry. That’s why we honor them. The salmon is one of those people that stepped forward. They chose to give their life up for us, so that we wouldn’t starve.” Implicit in this story, of course, is that we are the “fry” of salmon, that they are our parents even as we catch and devour them—as perhaps all children do—and sometimes make an awful mess of them, as we have with dams and stream degradation in more recent history.
The ceremonial salmon was in tatters. When Jessica and Lottie were finished, they endeavored, carefully, to reconstruct the fish. But frankly, it looked monstrous as it lay on the tray, with its shredded gray skin draped unconvincingly across its midsection like a blanket full of holes. Its eyes had baked to an opaque white. The conspicuous teeth of its upper jaw suggested a mischievous smirk, as if the salmon knew of and enjoyed the trouble it had made. It was sprawled in a slurry of mayo, fat, and sloppy orange shards.
“Turned out nice, didn’t it?” Barry said.
“No,” said Jessica.
“Yeah, it’s not done yet,” Barry replied. “The fire never was hot. I didn’t have my briquettes here this year. They just lowered the grate, instead.”
Aunt Rena noticed when she was led forward for another blessing.
“It’s not cooking fast enough, so this is what they did,” said Grandma Gin. “Will that be okay?”
We held our breath.
“That’ll be all right,” Aunt Rena said, to palpable exhales. “We will have it this way, this year. But next year, it better be done. They better put it on earlier than you did today.”
“Give me briquettes next year, and it’ll be done,” Barry said softly.
The boys lined up in front of the table, three still in their baby fat, two others older and slimming. Their T-shirts told of the region and its predilections: Go Ducks with the bright yellow O of the university in Eugene; skater designs with frenetic lettering and skulls wearing bejeweled crowns; the 18th Annual Strawberry Cup at the Willamette Speedway in Lebanon, Oregon (sponsored by Napa Auto Parts). One boy sported a fauxhawk, his hair shaved on each side, but robust, tussled, on top. Another had an epic scrape across his cheek, a raspberry from an encounter with pavement. A third was much taller than the rest. Somehow he’d evaded this rite of passage, until now.
The kids didn’t look so much Native, as American, both healthy and unkempt. They looked as if they’d been camping in the woods of Oregon. The five of them stood before tribal elder Robert Van-Norman, a retired logger and Vietnam vet, who held the wing of an eagle and slowly fanned the smudge smoldering in its abalone. The white tendrils drifted over the boys, and over the fish presented on a tray lined, naturally, with foil. It remained a horrendous sight, which made it the more serious and captivating. Behind the kids stood friends and family, and the dedicated few—not the whole tribe—some leaning against a faded pickup with peeling blue paint. This included girls in the shortest of jean shorts, generous belt buckles, and blond pigtails, and I wondered what they made of this moment: whether they felt brave and left out.
Aunt Rena again:
“Grandfather, I would like for you to bless us . . . and the river, who has provided us with the salmon that we will partake of at the elder’s dinner. That’s all I’ve got to say.”
“Aho,” the crowd echoed. “Aho.”
“Now those boys are going to go down in a minute,” Rena continued, turning to address them. “When you get ready to push this