no death

I'm trying hard to tell something true.
I saw , myself, that there is no death.
I saw it myself. It really happened.
It is true.

Every two weeks,  I was paid, by the Fish and Wildlife Agency of the state of Oregon, to go to the headwaters  to see the spawning Chinooks. To record their acts.

The first week,  In deep pools , the last deep pools before the waters become algae-warm and still , the Chinooks , those few that have become Gods, Huge and gravid and hook-beaked., They wait. In the cool water, for the last time.
They were careless. Easy to observe. You could see them. They were fearless.You could reach into the cool water and touch their backs. I did. You could have too.
I could tell you where. I could have shown you on a map.
I wish you could have seen it. for it was a great beauty.
There were hundreds of them.

2 weeks later, upstream from the deep pools, Hook-beaked males and huge gravid females had begun digging their nests in what clean gravels they could find upstream from the pools,in the riffles.
Gravel , and eggs, and sperm, sperm, sperm...

2 weeks later, Poor dying huge Chinooks,in their beauty,  beaten and hosts to fungus, lay sideways near the banks of ancient river, their gills trying in vain to pull enough oxygen from the warm water to sustain life......But the warm waters of spawning dont provide enough oxygen for a cold deep ocean God.  So the great fish dies.
It might seem sad, but who among us will ever attain what these River Gods have attained, to absolutley have fullfilled ALL you have been meant to do , in life. All! Completed. Done.
Rest well, Chinooks!

2 weeks later, The banks are smelly with decomposed fishes. But nothing is still. Vibrating, pulsating, buzzing, insects make lively the dead fishes. Flies make  halos round the bodies of the Gods. There are wriggling swarms of maggots, along the sand, forming the shapes of the big Chinooks.  Birds fight over the carcasses, and bears come out the woods to dine.
Death is lively!


2 weeks later. Its quiet. There is no sign that any of it ever happened. There are no insects, no fish carcasses, hardly a bone, to show that it ever even happened. The fishes are gone. The insects are gone. The birds, the bears, ....gone. Like it never happened. Like nothing lived. Like nothing died.
Gone. Like it never happened. Leaving us  who have seen it, to doubt what we saw.


It gets colder. It gets dryer ..........Winter.....but in the very first melting of next early spring, still colder than what seems reasonable for life,............hearts pulse within scarlet salmon eggs in the cold gravels.