Beneath Her Breath

by CHELSEY WATERS

Up the canyon’s walls, colors have bleached to pastel in the late summer heat. Oxidized feldspar forks through the granite, lightning streaks dulled a faint orange. Lichen, paled from neon to lime, lift their brittle edges to find and cup moisture. What few trees and brush root out a teetering existence on the cliff faces wear skins of ash and dust. Even the surface of the river, all soft curves to the canyon’s sharp angles, soaks up these muted tones, reflecting sky grainy and matte with smoke from neighboring forest fires.

The animals, too, stay closer to the water, bighorn sheep and mule deer stepping gently along the banks when the high springs and seeps run dry; bears and mountain lions seeming to cross with more frequency, as if looking for an excuse to bathe away the heat of late summer; eagles, osprey, and herons winging the gap wind or stalking on prehistoric legs, voracious shadows as the water thins and fish find fewer places to hide. 

This place is home to those of us shaped by its tectonic ridges and mountain-carving streams, and it plays host to lives as delicate as orchids and as impenetrable as grizzlies, to subzero winter temperatures and summer heat that blurs the edges of the water, to rocks formed millions of years ago and mayflies that hatch without mouths, that procreate and die within a day.

The only thing older than this place is us.

On this particular day, an outfitter and her guides load their boats, strapping coolers and dry bags and oars to turquoise rubber rafts bobbing expectantly in a deep eddy. While the clients find life jackets and apply sunscreen, the crew, altogether, jump in the water, a first-day-of-trip tradition older than anyone can remember, what they joke is a sacrifice to the river gods for good weather and downstream wind. We can feel their excitement, the thrumming of heartbeats as cold water jolts their sunbaked bodies, and in some we can feel apprehension, some arrhythmic staccato formed by both a joy that comes from being in this beauty and an awareness of the power and forces who inhabit the canyon.

Then the clients—dry for now, until the river bends and drops just downstream—divide themselves among the boats, ropes are coiled and stowed, and the guides shove off. We watch as they take in this place, as their bones seek a connection and their brains consider how it feels to be—almost—wild. Then the waves come, and their attention shifts to survival.

They stop for the evening at a small hot spring, enlarged first by Indigenous people who called themselves the Tukudika and hunted bighorn sheep here, later by the white and Chinese placer miners who tunneled for gold in the canyon walls, still later by Forest Service crews and early river boaters, who built wooden walls that, over time, have mostly disintegrated.

“I want to build a resort here.”

A man steps into the old pool as he speaks, and, like a tanker on shoals, sunscreen sheens across the surface. Others flinch slightly as the oily rainbow reaches them, as he goes on: The hotel would be there, overlooking the bend in the river; this stony pool would be expanded, shaped like a lazy river—maybe paralleling the actual river, the man muses, admiring his idea of symmetry; there, he’d cut down the trees, put in a cabana serving cold beer and iced pop.

There’s a child in the group, a little girl with vexatiously curly hair, and we love to watch her when the man talks: she scrunches her nose into a series of ridges and rolls those brown eyes toward the heavens, like an irritated supplicant praying for the end to come. When she’s waited a polite amount of time and no gods in heaven or on earth have stemmed the tide of capitalism spilling from the man’s tongue, she stands up out of the water and says, “Excuse me, but you can’t build here. No one can. It’s wilderness, a wild and scenic river.” The angle her elbow makes, small hand on her bony hip, seems to nod and add, Duh.

The man hasn’t been interrupted for a quarter of a century, at least not by a woman, and certainly not one whose birthday candles still number in the single digits.

“Well, no, but I’m saying if I could,” he says, summoning a smile.

Then he realizes he has retreated in the face of a little girl and reconsiders. “I know some people,” he adds for the benefit of those on the periphery, hoping to coalition-build against this child. “Deregulation is popular these days, you know. It’s not impossible.”

“But why?” the girl asks, and we immediately leap onto her side of the argument.

“Just imagine a pool with a slide,” the man says, like she can be bribed with the promise of an ice cream sundae or a pony or anything Norman Rockwell might have painted children doing.

The look she returns is narrow-eyed and straight-lipped, and we’re reminded of the woman from whence she came, who runs this outfit, who at this moment is walking this way with a mesh bag full of the cold beer and soda, observing her child’s profile, recognizing the body language.

The mother calls to the girl. “Eden, can you help me, please?”

We can feel the power shift from the girl to her mother, and in the vacuum the man starts up again. We mourn the loss, and turn our attention downstream, to where a heron hunts fingerlings in the shallows, its beak glittering in the late afternoon sunshine.

The girl doesn’t often ride this river—rarely is there room for extra bodies on these trips her mother guides. So the canyon feels new to her, the rapids surprising her with rocks and varying ferocities that differ from her earlier trips. If she asked her mother about this—which she does not—her mother would say that the river has moods. We know this isn’t true, but we understand why a person might think that. A submerged rock one week can leap jagged from the water the next; channels shift as the season winds down, and in days a rapids can turn from rollercoaster waves to a technical, pinballing rock garden.

On the second day, the girl folds herself over the bow of her mother’s raft, head over the water, watching the rocks pass swiftly beneath. The rubber prow gasps and sucks at small waves, and she wonders what the fish think of such sounds. In deep pools, where the water is flat and deep, trout fin the shadows. The girl learns to pick them out with her eyes by the small flicks of their tails as they work to stay hidden.

In one narrow and unusually deep pool, she sees two logs drifting parallel with each other along the sandy bottom of the river. Each is about twice the girl’s height, with white, bony knobs protruding from their spines—and she knows immediately that these are fish but has never heard of or seen such creatures. She looks up at her mother, whose eyes flit from daughter to water, checking the other boats, watchful of her clients and guides.

“Did you see something?” her mother asks.

The child stares down as the boat passes over the last inches of the creatures, then she jumps and runs along the side thwart, hopping over her mother’s left oar, landing on the bags strapped in the stern. She flattens herself on top and looks into the water again. But the angle of the sun is changed, obscuring the fish from her view. Reluctantly, she retakes her seat at the front.

“Eden?” her mother prompts.

The girl can’t believe what she has seen, is certain such creatures don’t exist.

“There aren’t . . . alligators here,” she says quietly, squinting up at her mother for confirmation.

We love the smile her mother doesn’t give, the laugh she doesn’t utter at a ridiculous question.

“No,” the mother says. “Why?”

The girl looks back at the water. “It was probably a log.”

The mother nods, takes seriously her child’s thoughts. “Rivers can make dead things look alive,” she says.

The girl is quiet. Like most children, she has learned to doubt what her eyes have shown her, what shouldn’t be. But right now, she knows what she saw and does not want anyone—not even her mother—to cast doubt on the apparition of two giant, gray logs with snouts and fins and flexible, cartilaginous skeletons. If she asked, her mother might tell her about white sturgeon, how they are called living dinosaurs and can grow to twenty or more feet over a century’s lifespan. And her mother might tell her about how humans nearly fished the sturgeon to extinction for their caviar a century earlier, how three hundred miles downstream, grainy photos show the fish hoisted on chains by the tail, dead noses smelling their own blood pooling beneath them as fishermen stare iron-eyed into the camera. If we could tell her, we’d explain how the sturgeon that still exist are smaller now, and some may never see the ocean—or if they do, not return. Fish ladders aren’t designed for sturgeon to climb, to return after their migratory period. And so the dinosaur fish haunt the deep waters, living an aquarium-like existence between dams.

But the mother does not tell the girl, and we do not tell the girl, and she is left to wonder at what mysteries lie beneath her breath. 

The group stops for lunch beside a deep eddy. Eden spends her time imitating the heron from yesterday, stalking fish, until she forgets to be a heron and wants to be a fish instead. She kneels unselfconsciously, small bottom in the air in a way that makes us smile, face in the water for as long as she can hold her breath.

She wiggles deeper into the water and stares wet-eyed at the aquatic landscape. Sediment rides the river today from an isolated rainstorm that washed out a gully dozens of miles upstream, and the girl sees the particles float in the water: molecules of wood and rock, of decayed leaves and pine needles, of desiccated flowers and berries, fur and feathers.

Minnows swarm here, and the girl watches how, like flocks of starlings, they move in concert. She occasionally lets a single bubble out of a nostril and observes the fish disperse and then reaccumulate, pendulating between curiosity and fear.

When she has to breathe, she lifts her face up into her world, that hair washing over her cheeks in rivers, streams, rivulets. She pushes it away and takes a deep breath, glares at the grownups with their indulgent smiles, and goes under once more.

We want to tell her that the violence of her evacuation and reentry have scared the minnows into diaspora, but her eyes now flit to the fingerlings farther down, over the lip where the sandbar suddenly gives way. In the depths of the eddy lie rocks a hundred million years old, most tumbled into soft curves but some still angular, newly cleaved from the granite batholith. Among them she sees small trout: the pink-streaked rainbows, the red-gilled cutthroats, their genetically bastardized offspring, the cutbows. Then, a greenish rock reveals itself as a fish with a deep cleft in its tail, a pikeminnow that has been lying in wait for this moment as a juvenile rainbow swims too near. The pikeminnow tilts its head to the side and, in a gulp, swallows the smaller fish. There is an elegance we admire in the fluid disappearance, the death and life of our creatures.

The girl tries to imagine what it’s like to be gulped, to spend her last moments in the wet belly of a fish, perhaps one with bony ridges on its back. She looks beyond the pikeminnow, over a spiny line of rocks leading down into the blacker depths. It isn’t hard to imagine the river as a creature, a single mouth from headwaters to confluence, that she’s teetering on the precipice of soft lips. Isn’t hard to imagine that the two impossible creatures she saw are out there, somewhere. Unknowing and curiosity summon goosebumps to the girl’s skin, and she begins to feel watched, as though the river has eyes, as though every molecule is a finger, a sucker, a grasping limb. It is the beginning of understanding.

She lifts her head again and sits up in the air. The water glimmers where light catches each edge of the river’s surface, weaving golden sunlines into a texture so thick it feels like an invitation. She swims into it and floats, facedown, eyes open, letting the eddy carry her upstream, feeling invisible hands holding her fast on the surface. Rocks and branches lie far below her in curious lines, a ribcage of detritus. Where the water swirls sunshine in the deepest places, spectral lines form and dissipate, never lingering long enough for her to hold their contours in her mind.

The eddy takes her as far as its head, and she reaches out a hand, cups the current, and edges little by little into the main current: a wrist, a shoulder, her left hip, eyes searching the water beneath until she realizes just how swift that water is. She abruptly pushes against the hands that bear her—our hands—and finds nothing but wet space.

The man who would like to build a hotel, who would like roads and a parking lot, screened windows and air conditioning, sees the girl and shouts; the mother finds her daughter with her eyes, and the girl lifts her head, sees the tail of the eddy as she floats past, and she kicks for shore even as her mother grabs a loose life jacket and dives in.

We carry her downstream, on fingers, fins, tentacles, molecules of ourselves—not with malice, but because we are bound by gravity and nature, we are pledged to beauty and brutality and even sorrow.

The girl can swim, but our bodies—the combined streams and knowledge of hundreds of feeder creeks, of rain and thunderstorm flash floods, of water escaping aquifers in seeps and springs—are stronger, and as she thrashes, we wrap her wrists and ankles, her neck and waist and bony child-hips and draw her into us as the canyon narrows and we gather speed—

But her mother knows us well. She reaches the girl in three short strokes, extends the life jacket to her daughter, who grabs it even as we breach her mouth. The girl coughs, and breathes air, their four legs kick for shore, and we release them to their air-world, watch the mother speak and kneel and embrace. They make for the boats but the girl looks back, scarcely believing what she saw when we held her: not just our faces and our bodies, but the spirits and ghosts of those we’ve absorbed, a vision of a world she is on the precipice of understanding.