Selway River Speaks

Here, there is no cell service. Here, the news is heralded by the wheep wheep wheep of a Spotted Sandpiper calling from a silky white sand beach. Here, I am sheltered from the torrents. Here, I breathe in the honeyed tangerine blooms of syringa, the Idaho state flower and a name far more poetic than mock orange.

Here, I merge in the flow of Selway River flying, gliding, and plunging like a raven. Here, I remember backpacks deep into the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness and the roadless wilds of Meadow Creek.

Today, camping by the river, I play with words like Selway plays with stones she polishes and tosses upon the banks in shiny silvery mica, speckled granite, and quartz:

Raven rivers the sky in pool and drop, twist, and turn.

Swainson’s Thrush flowers the dawn in petaled song.

Western redcedar ferns the riverside in her droop and sway.

Stone cliff face sprouts a polypody fern from under her right nostril.

Buttercups sip sunshine from gold goblets polished by bees.

Syringa tosses a thousand kisses to the standing dead cedar.

Cedar Waxwings cherry the riverside forest.

Selway River flutes thrush song. She slips, slides, eddies, pools rolls rushes, slows, tumbles, roars, mumbles, and sighs. Across from our camp, thousands of driftwood silver trees spear the cool morning sky. They are like ghostly ancestors murmuring old stories to the emerald blanket of young trees and shrubs below. The burned forest glows with renewal naturally. Shine on.

I have questions for the river. When I am sleeping, do you shift our course and run right through my dreams? Do you carry me away in your arms? Awake in the dawn with coffee, I stretch in my cozy bed in the popup camper and gaze through the screen windows into your olive flow iced in silvery ripples. I am pulled toward you. I yearn to know the meaning of confluence.

On a walk by the Selway River road up past the falls, I step out of my human self. If not confluence, why not convergence?

I am the feathery bustle of Maidenhair Fern. My black stems are night dividing light and dark. I wave my shy fronds with slight fringes like owl feathers. I love the cool, the wet, the misty, the hidden springs and the shade of my companions—thimbleberry, snowberry, and sword fern, as stiff and strong as I am fragile.

I am MacGillivray’s Warbler of the gray hood and yellow body as I banter with the river in CHA CHA CHA cha cha. My home is the riparian forest of leafy alder, elderberry, and ninebark sunny glades below this wild forest of ponderosa, cedar, Douglas fir, and grand fir.

I am Spotted Sandpiper quick stepping and bobbing on silky white sands and protecting my nest of speckled eggs tucked below a leafy plant. I thrive where the wild river floods, carves, and flings sand and gravel bar, and where cottonwood seeds will germinate and grow. I am the gift of the flood. I know so much happiness I weep.

I am the standing dead pine hollowing like a bird bone, light enough to fly. Woodpecker carves an eye for me to see. My twisted grain splits and breaks until I have one wing. Patient, I will wait for another.

I am Selway River on a swoop over the falls. I pump my white wings so hard the cumulus clouds become nimbus. I am Peregrine barreling down at 200 miles per hour with talons extended. I veer around gargantuan mossy boulders and burst into a feathery spray. After the whoop and holler, I am soaring with wings spread wide.

On my return I know this:

Selway is the Common Merganser herding her fuzzy twelve chicks to safety;

Spotted Sandpiper gifting river gravel and sandbars in skittery grace;

Tree Swallow arcing light and quick,

Swainson’s Thrush singing smoke rings in the language of cedar;

Cedar Waxwing svelte with tail dipped in butter, plucking wild cherries from branches,

and smacking her beak to savor the juices;

Raven of mischief spinning rafts in whirlpools below boulders;

Song Sparrow tugging the leaves of alders awake with dazzle note;

Striped bee with lacy wings glinting translucent brown, abdomen touching wood;

Rope of flying blue butterflies lassoing the wet sand;

Red-eyed Vireo asking “do you see me? do you see me now? In the treetops!”;

Elderberry, oceanspray, spirea luring and alluring butterflies,bees, and flies;

Lone seedling western white pine sprouting from a woodpecker hole in a burned cedar tree.

Selway speaks of Wild, Wilderness, Free flow, Headwater, Origin, Life. Tells us:

Protect

Precious

Public Lands & Rivers

Permanently

Pura Vida!

TAKE ACTION: CONGRESS PLANS TO SELL OFF MORE THAN 250 MILLION ACRES OF OUR PUBLIC LANDS.

QUICK WAY TO TAKE ACTION– FIVE CALLS. (add your location when you click link). Please add your personal words for saving our last wild areas–the bill would include selling off roadless areas. Also oppose the Big Ugly Bill’s plan to accelerate logging and mining on the remaining public lands.

“The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs more defenders. Remaining silent about the destruction of nature is an endorsement of that destruction.“– Edward Abbey