I was twenty nine when I took a bride. I was a late bloomer, living in the
California High Sierras. I worked for
several years, decided to go to college, then went to work again and found a
wife. I was searching for someone who
could share in the beauty of the life I had found; someone to share in the
beauty of the nature all around me. I
had only to look in my backyard. Or, at
least, in my parents backyard.
My wife was not a country girl. I met her in college, moved away and found
her again through winter letters, written by my heart in solitude. She responded in kind. Our hearts just gravitated towards each other
like a seed to fertile ground.
She was a southern California girl, raised in the big city
with grocery stores and shopping malls.
The only wild animals she ever saw were the spiders that haunted her
backyard or on the occasional trip to the zoo.
But she fell in love with me and said she would go wherever I took
her.
My wife moved in with me on my grandmother’s birthday. June 24th. My grandmother would have been 84 had she not
died four days earlier. But I brought my
wife to my apartment in a little High Sierra town surrounded by forests. From our living room window you could see the
ducks landing on the meadow across the street.
We could hear the squirrels and chipmunks scurrying up the pine trees to
grab the nuts from the pine cones. Occasionally
a deer would wander through the meadow.
I was happy to share these gifts with my wife. A love together is a wondrous thing. And throughout the summer our love grew.
By the fall she was beginning to feel at home in the
mountains. It was then that I decided to
take her out to the stream profile museum at Taylor Creek, just off Highway
89. I tried to explain to her what she
could expect to see. I told her that the
salmon were running upstream. She
laughed as she tried to picture salmon “running” as she explained. “Cause they don’t have feet”.
We pulled into the parking lot, paved-over meadow lot, used
by hikers in the summer and cross country skiers in the winter. The lot was surrounded by various types of
pine and fir trees. On this particular
day, it was just my wife and I, and the forest service employee who was
stationed there for the entire month of October to guard the salmon in the
stream. I think the forest service was also there to warn the human visitors
that there may be bears about due to the abundance of delicious, nutritious fish. It was always wise to be wary of bears in the
Sierras.
We parked our car on the southern edge of the parking lot
near the stream. I didn’t want to be too
far from the car just in case a bear, or bears, were in the area. We got out of the car and walked to the edge
of the lot. The lot was constructed on a
piece of ground above the stream bed. We
could hear the water of the stream as we got out of our vehicle. I led her to the edge of the parking
lot. We stood there looking over the
stream bed. The edge of the stream was
lined with hundreds of kokanee salmon.
Other salmon were swimming upstream to complete their life cycle.
I turned my head momentarily to watch a bird fly through the
trees around us and to soak in the natural beauty of nature’s spectacle. I turned to my wife and I could see tears in
her eyes. I reached out, put my arm
around her and asked if she was ok. She
said that she was saddened by the end of their lives. I told her that is was natural for them to
die like this. They had just finished
mating and laying their eggs in the stream.
There were hundreds of these salmon on the side of the stream and
thousands more making their way upstream.
I told her this was the way of
nature and they have been living and dying this way for thousands of
years.
She turned and thanked me for showing her the beauty of the
world. I explained that it was my
pleasure. She had enjoyed her life in
Lake Tahoe.
We moved away three years later. But we are making plans to return there to
finish our lives as close to Taylor Creek as we can get.
D.
D.
