Carried

The river still sings in my bones

I’m sitting on the sun dappled edge of our once wild river. The river I fished on with my Father, waking up before dawn, almost sleeping as he rowed beneath the sky turning soft with light and colour. The same river, where my Grandfather caught salmon that reached to his shoulders. The one we swam in and my Father almost drowned in. For hundreds of years ancestors on both sides of my family have wrapped their lives around this river, lived from and with this life-giving river.

This great, wild river, 

dammed, 

damned, damned.

The waters rose, swallowing Sami villages, summer homes and a chunk of my grandfather’s heart. The salmon are a memory now, something that catches in the back of the throat when people tell stories about the way things were. What if salmon were storytellers? They say history is always told by the victors and how can we ever know the truth that way?

I’ll imagine and try:

The Salmon's Tale

The day we knew it was time, we returned to the river carrying the promise of new life. A final offering. We swam towards that which has called us home for thousands of years, noticing a new, strange stillness, and finally, a towering wall.

We leapt against it,

again

and again

and again.

Knowing that this is the only way to give our final gift, the one we came here for.

But the wall was too high,

and soon, the river turned red with our life-carrying bodies and all the promises they held.

The Others

There were others that waited too—with furred paws at the rivers edge—looking for the fat that would sustain them through the arctic winters. They waited, but the river rose and fell still, silent as a lake. Everything leaned in to listen. The world became less wild then, without that song.

Carrying On

Here, at waters edge, I feel a grief filled longing for wildness — for rushing waters, strong currents and the gifts they carry—touching some kind of mysterious, essential need. I hear echoes of the poem my Grandfather wrote, mourning the silencing of the river. Something hums between us—grief—a common love?

And, I feel like there’s another story here — something that’s harder to hold, to name. The story beneath the story,

the longings that connect us,

that pull us, like the salmon, home.

Where will the current take us if we let it?

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