The Fish Hawk River flows through one's soul and is
fact-similar to the rust and rustic of the Pacific Northwest Mountains where
the mist and the moss co-mingle, memories mix with folk lore, and the woods
conceal treasures buried and uncovered that come up empty, the beach is
bone-bare and rocky and guarded by an unseen coot with a shotgun hiding in an
old house trailer covered by a crusty blue tarp, and the road is switched-back
and the cabins shoot out thin smoke and sometimes get shot-gunned through the
ceiling and the folk are used to looking over their shoulders and sometimes
take to sweeping the back streets and always protect their secrets.
The big secret is there are two Fish Hawks. One, just as
real as water, is of the spirit. You can feel it if it lets you and you let it.
Seeing it is a bonus, but not necessary. And it doesn't matter whether you
believe it. It doesn't care.
This spirit-Fish Hawk was there long before the Osqua
Indians silently climbed its banks to see what they had been hearing for miles.
To touch what they had been smelling - the mist of ages, the chilled air of the
mountains flowing down to coalesce with the force of the River's grace.
It is as timeless as air, as impersonal as the wind, as
forever as the force of its mystical water. It cares naught for day or night.
It finds its solace in the unitary existence of both at once. It recognizes no
past nor future. The Now is its continuum.
The
companion Fish Hawk, the one outside of mind but within earthly margins, the
one the Osqua tasted the first time they knelt on its rocky moss-slippery
shore, is the surveyed and mapped river that courses down from the high peaks
and fuses its snow melt with the innocence of brooks and the trickiness of
precocious creeks and roars without restraint past unlocked houses high up from
its banks, past a musty grocery store whose shelves are almost empty and the owner will follow you
down the aisles,
past a dark beer-piss tavern, a boarded up post office, and at least one cave
dweller. That Fish Hawk cascades under High Bridge bridge, which is where the
town representing that sparsely-peopled spot on the map got its name - though
calling Highbridge a town is like calling a ghost town New York City.
As the
Osqua looked over their shoulders for the last time and with resolute
resignation climbed back up into the mountains from whence came their ancient
ancestors, as they smelt the whites' sweat, smelt their wheezing whiskey
breath, heard their grunts and the force of their hammers - a sound as
offensive as any to their ears, they took as revelation (though it could have
as easily been called rationalization) the building of Highbridge bridge. They
climbed and ran and drug their shelter, their tools, their weapons. Up. Up. Up. Soon they were well
above the hurly-burly of the whites and their pounding and cursing. They turned
and looked down on their erstwhile homeland for the last time.
Gink-chaw and Gink-chow come together there, the elder
headman intoned solemnly. There is the place, he waved his hands out over the
area of the bridge being built, for the ancients and the whites. Silence now to
remember them and to bless the new ones. Remember our ancient family. Breathe
out kind hope to the new ones now.
May the oneness of Gink-chaw and Gink-chow in this place be sacred and
revered by the whites. Let us take this realization with us to our once and
future home.
For the
Osqua had always believed the Fish Hawks were one, much like in the Genesis
Creation story at the very beginning where dark and light were one before Elohim separated them and
called the Light day and the Dark night. Only the Osqua believed, though they
rarely spoke of it, that no such separation of the Fish Hawks ever took place.
On damp cold nights in front of the fire with the River raging in the
background and the ginkgin coursing through their veins and their visions
soaring above and around them, they silently bore witness to the two Fish Hawks
as one Force. For hasn't the Great Power created the wet roaring Fish Hawk (Gink-chaw) to be one with the Spirit-infused Fish Hawk (Gink-chow ) from the very Beginning? And on those special
ginkgin-fueled nights - the blessed ginkgin heating their insides just as the
huge campfire warmed their skins - couldn't they see the River dancing with Its
Spirit companion? Couldn't they hear them harmonize, Gink-chaw supplying the underlying bass chords and Gink-chow trebling Its lilting falsetto
lines? And didn't even their mutual aromas complement each other - Gink-chaw piercing the night with Its
pine-scented fragrance, mingling compassionately with Gink-chow's gray dank musty smell? And as for touch - who could
deny, especially on those ethereal evenings when the ginkgin celebrated its
liberation into the cosmos through the Osqua's higher consciousness, that the mist
wafting off the River (Gink-chaw's
intoxicating vapor) merged subtly with Gink-chow's
invisible impersonal caress?
Before beginningless beginnings,
beyond endless ends, the present moment manifests Gink-chaw which within temporal world consciousness evokes with
breath-inhalation-exhalation, and pause to sense that soft spot between both, the
unmanifested unbounded presence of Gink-chow.
And so
they turned their backs on the River, on the Rivers, and, as they climbed, did
not look back.
You'd do
good not to look back as you pass on through Highbridge. Don't bother stopping
if you've got no business
there. And you don't. There's no gas station since old Mac closed his down and
then died - grabbing at his chest,
wheezing and yelling, Gol-dernnit!, high
atop a hill while tending to his beaver traps - died, but not before he had
cleared all the timber around his place for the money the previous spring. Yep,
you best be heading on down the road, Jack. If you don't know that, the folks
around there glowering at you will give
you a hint. And if
you can't take the hint maybe a - What business you got here, mister?! - will
drive the message home.
Both Fish
Hawks take what they want and ignore the left-overs. The earthly mapped one
takes the Steelhead, the soil from its banks, the silence from the air. It'll
take a runaway car with a beer-drinking hell-raiser on its roof. It's spiritual
equivalent will coerce him onto a continuum of fear and fury, over a water path
preceded by bikers who have brought hell down instead of raising it up. The
Fish Hawk whose energy you can touch leaves the scraggly strands of moss that
it has ripped from trees too close to its banks and from forgiving rocks in its
path. It'll give the dirt it scrounged up-river to a shallow spot around the
bend to make a shore of sorts or a sand
bar, but not a generous one. It does not believe in extravagance.
Sure, it
waters all plant life at its edges. Sure it
carries the Steelhead. But it does what it does without feeling. Both Fish
Hawks reject sentimentality. They do not care how long you've lived near it or
if you have come to let it live in you. They do not care whether you are living
at all. They do not care if a baby died before it could grow up to try to
figure out who its father was. They do not care about deceit or isolation. And
their waters won't mourn your death when your time hits you. If anything they
will rejoice because of you absence. But even that is extra-vengeance beyond
their banks. The truth is - they both know
your secrets, those
secrets embedded deep in your psyche and your only solace is they are not going
reveal them.
The secrets? If you look inside the
folk lore, separate the memories from the dreams, wander the back trails
between fir and hemlock and pine - high-stepping the twisted jungle tangle,
grab some soil and squeeze in it your hands and wedge it into your fingernails
before its dust gets swept into the River, before the chimney smoke is no more,
before the wood stove goes cold, before the fire in the heart burns out, you might see some of the secrets in and
around Highbridge in Fish Hawk Country. You might even see the oneness of the
two Fish Hawk Rivers. Some have.
But don't
ever think you're going to pinch all the secrets out. You can't know them all
because the Fish Hawk, that meta for a stream of conscientiousness - the one
that can flood your soul if you let it while ignoring your very presence, snags those secrets for
itself, roars and hurls them over its moss-carpeted madness, foaming and
raging, grasping and churning, swirling sadness and hope, and relentlessly
forces them on down to the sea of all secrets where they are lost forever.
