Today it's almost impossible to see any trace of the 2020 Chum Run in Beatty Creek. I scoured the log jambs and nearby bushes searching for a carcass or two, or even a shred of skin, or a jaw bone. Nothing. The last two major rain-rivers blew up the creek and the resultant torrents carried it all away to Mud Bay. However, of you dig into the mud below the gravel an inch or two, an aroma rises that immediately brings to the mind the final days of the run. They are hard days for the salmon, and their death agony is a hard thing to observe. But I spend as much time beside the creek as I can so that I may serve as a kind of witness to the strangeness and the beauty of their existence, as well as the seemingly cruel end to their lives. I never fail to be struck by the powerful and strange beauty of the "Inevitable" as the fish pass from this state of being to the next. It is instructive. And while I never weep, I am always moved.
From time to time I've tried to capture a moment of all this - an image that conveys a bit of the quiet, inevitable passage of these great and valiant fish. Below are a few of those attempts.
Please don't try to tell me these water warriors are not valiant; don't explain to me their comings and goings in the frequently mechanical, materialistic terms that are so often used to explain aspects of nature. It is Nature flowing between the banks of Beatty Creek - Nature and the Great Mystery of Being.