Pulse

We walk cautiously along the trail in leaden morning light, here for the spawning salmon and for a change. That’s how she said it on the phone last week, my daughter: I need a big fucking change of scenery.

The forest is dank, decayed, ripe with torn-open fish carried from the creek by bears. Alders and spruce collect the mist and drip ceaselessly. Leaves of Devil’s Club are yellow and veined with autumnal inevitability. We stop every few minutes, watching the water and listening for whatever is out there in the woods.

She could be from an outdoors catalog, my only child. With her athletic build, a no-nonsense rope of braided black hair, and her eight-weight flyrod. Except her denim is flecked with mud, she wears no makeup, and her skin is scaly. There is a new puffiness around her neck and under her jawline. She does not smile.

We talk only haltingly along the trail. I want to announce our presence in the forest, to avoid surprises downstream. And I want to understand. I know only that the other woman, her once-declared partner-for-life, walked away after my daughter’s second failed pregnancy. The partner had said she was tired of all the disappointment.

The word my daughter used was empty. She had flown back to Alaska for a long weekend away from her work and her suddenly quiet townhouse. When I picked her up along the airport curb, the first words I managed to say were, “How are you feeling?”

Empty, she told me, what else would you expect?

Her mother has been gone three years now, and I am not good at this. I don’t believe I was disengaged, yet as our daughter grew into a young woman, it was the two of them who would sit for hours laughing, crying, and apparently making sense of the cosmos. Last boyfriend. First girlfriend. Cut from the swim team. Poor decisions at weekend parties. When our daughter announced she was sick of the president and his misogynistic bullshit, her mother convinced her not to drop out of college and move to Australia to work on a fishing boat.

Then there was the crash, my wife’s tires sliding on black ice, the truck off the bank and into the ocean, her body finally recovered amidst a school of wintering salmon. My daughter shouldered our loss like a mountain guide, carrying her own burdensome sorrow while propping me up. She was sturdy and dependable, at least around me. Her girlfriend – the forever partner – must have seen the rest.

And now, along our trail, she seems adrift. We find a promising stretch of water and clamber down the bank. It is a short wade across to a sandbar. Beyond, the creek foams around rocks, swirls under rotting deadfall, and eases into deepening pools. We distance ourselves and cast, hopeful. These fish have returned from years at sea, some laden with eggs and searching, miraculously, to give birth and die in the exact gravel beds where they hatched.

Finally, she yells as a coho erupts in chrome fury. The salmon zings line from her reel, rushes upstream, and bursts from the water again. My daughter carefully follows the fish, begins to win the tug-of-war. Eventually, she pulls her catch into the slack water at her feet. She backs away from the creek, her rod curled into an arc under the strain. She slides the fish onto the sand. It is gleaming, exhausted. Its gills pulse, gasp. I anticipate oily filets and finger the knife sheathed at my side.

My daughter kneels over the salmon. With a twist of her wrist, she removes the fluorescent green fly. She cups the fish, one hand under its belly, the other grasping the tapered body just in front of the tail. She bends and kisses it on the head, prepared to return it to the water. She hesitates and kisses it again. Then a third time.

Finally, she eases it back into the creek, where it pauses to recuperate as its gills filter oxygen from the cool, unsullied, innocent water. In an instant,t the salmon darts into the current and is gone.

She turns to me and shrugs. Then, she takes off her boots and wades into the pool.

I drop my gear and run towards her as she leans forward and gently slips under the surface. I can see the red of her checked plaid shirt as she is pulled downstream by the current. She comes up for air in a wide green pool and rolls gently onto her back. She looks at me and raises her hand as if waving a slow, calm goodbye.

She turns away and rhythmically kicks her feet, headed towards the ocean.