Different trails home

We are home now and settling into the day to day routine/grind of work life once again. But before we drove the last stretch of highway to Vancouver Island we stopped at Adams River near Shuswap Lake in BC's interior. This river is home to one of North America's largest sockeye salmon runs, and this year, 2010, is a big one with an estimated 2 million fish returning.

The actual run is three weeks - from October 4th to 24th, so our visit was a tad early. Still we saw some early returns collecting in sunny pools, chasing each other over gravel beds, and laying eggs among the small pebbles of the river bottom.

From time to time we all return home. Infrequent or regular it is usually a journey that draws us to an internal realm and reminds us of roots: of trails walked or forgotten, of personalities that fit like a good coat, or feel like a worn out skin.  Home is a complex connection, and for most of us navigation to the front door is not too difficult a task. Now, think yourself fish....

...and imagine being hard-wired to steer your soft body from the depths of an ocean to the mouth of a muddy river. Next, you push against stiff currents for 500 miles, veer from one river to the next, until you reach the banks of creek where you were born. The water is dark. There are no 'landmarks' to show the way. No headlights. No one waiting with a candle in the window.

The sokeye salmon 'smell' their way home. Each river scented, stored in fish memory. Survival, re-production, the manifestation of natural cycles in the body of a small red fish, stone bruised, fin-tattered, partly grey as its scales decay: this drive is ancient. Once home the female turns on her side and flaps her tail to sweep out a circle of gravel to lay some 3,500 eggs. The male fertilizes with a whitish milt. Exhausted, both fish die...and life begins again.

The poet Don MacKay says home 'is a place where, that at least until our century, the world could be founded and made sense of, the heart of the real.' He discusses this 'heart' as a point at which exists a critical axis... a vertical line with a path leading upwards to the sky, and downwards to the underworld...and a horizontal line which represents 'the traffic of the world, all the possible roads leading across the earth to other places'....

Home. Center of the axis. Middle point between sky gods and underworld gods....traffic...and roads leading us to other places. Within 3 months the salmon hatch and are on their way to becoming 'fry'and then 'smolt' that will make their way out to sea, leaving home for larger life, returning in four years to breed and die.

And what of all of us? We go about modern-ness with break neck speed. We go and do, and go....

Here is a link to John's photos for the day......