Taylor Creek

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 24^th.  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.