I was spouting off about salmon to a co-worker about how much I like and admire the salmon species. She brought me this 20 page short story by a woman from Moscow Idaho about looking for salmon in the Selway River. The opening paragraph was stunning. It went like this:

I keep thinking about salmon. About how their lives are all about going home. Home to a patch of upturned gravel on the upper Selway River. About how their river home is chosen for them by previous generations of spawning ancestors. They don't choose it. I keep thinking about spawning females. I've never seen a spawning salmon but her image shimmers in my mind. The way she roughs the gravel and drops a hundred eggs for the male to milt. The way she flips her tail over the gravel to cover those eggs. I'd love to see this and capture it in a photograph. He leopard spotted tailfin working violently. The water riffling above her gravel nest and downstream, those riffles disappearing in the Selway.

I do keep thinking about salmon. They are running in Alaska right now. I was trying to put my affinity for them into words and I think that their lives seem to be mirroring my own...born in a small town, lived there for a few years before moving to the big city and subsequently traveling, growing and expanding their world view. Now I am swimming back home. I don't know exactly why I have this desire to be in Montana. I have some general reasons such as wanting to be closer to friends and family and wanting to explore and take ownership of the place where I was raised. However, there seems to be some deeper intangible pull and the fact that the salmon are doing the same thing make me feel better. I read that salmon are considered to be the wisest of animals in Celtic tradition. The standard depiction of the salmon's journey to the spawning grounds shows this animal struggling but when it jumps upstream, it doesn't fight the current. It simply jumps over it, or finds the reverse current which flows beneath the surface. I also read that this form of leaping inspired the word somersault, which is actually derived from the Celtic term salmon-sault, whatever that means. I think that I am trying to understand my history and reconnect and/or create roots. I want to be a part of something bigger then myself. I think that I can make the most difference here. I need to return in thought and feeling to my childhood and my old stomping ground for that understanding. I guess that wherever we are, we are always going home and life is about the journey not the destination. I just like salmon, it's as simple as that. I also really like polar bears but I'll save that for next time...