Forest Salmon in the Salmon Forest

Posted on September 22, 2017 by Harold Rhenisch

In a trickle of water among the ferns among the roots of a red cedar tree high above San Josef Bay,

… a tiny salmon lives out its first year, hunting insects in water so dark it feels like air, occasionally shot through with light as the trees high above shift in the sky.

The trees that shade these tiny waters have grown from the bodies of the ancestors of this salmon. Now, this salmon forest is home for the future. This fish is the forest.

This is just one of the spiritual bodies of a salmon. Look at the skin it draws to itself from the water and carries to sea.

Eating farmed salmon is poison for your soul.

Salmon Coming Home to the Rain

Posted on September 18, 2017 by Harold Rhenisch

Chinook Salmon, Stamp River, Cascadia 17.9.17
A half hour after the skies broke at last with rain.

The Glacial Sky of Cascadia in the Morning

Posted on August 11, 2017 by Harold Rhenisch

This is not an image of mountains, not of what rises or mounts, but what held against the ice that cut all else away.

The Coast Mountains

The ice is now air. Humans, bears, martins, squirrels, eagles and bobcats, to name a few, pass through it: the people of the ice. Nice.

Salmon On the Way to Sea

Posted on August 3, 2017 by Harold Rhenisch

While making arrangements for my father’s funeral a week ago, I walked down at dawn to the mouth of Simm’s Creek, on Eastern Vancouver Island. No, this is not rain.

Four years from now, with some incredible luck, this plucky little salmon will be coming home.

Others like it will be returning to the fire forests (note the smoke) over the mountains to the east. Fire, water and fish: it is enough.

Eel Trouble at Miracle Beach

Posted on May 28, 2016 by Harold Rhenisch

So, you find an eel, right? Excellent hunting!
one
And then the eel fights back.
two

Sigh.

The Beaches of Cascadia

Posted on September 3, 2015 by Harold Rhenisch

If your country started out as a chain of volcanoes …. …very exotic volcanoes… … in the tropical Pacific, very different volcanoes …. … in five different island chains over 150 million years …. … and if they then drifted across the sea and crashed into North America, lifting new volcanoes up into the clouds … … and welding the bits together …. a P1790726 … and then if super-cooled, subglacial water had blasted all that away and the sea had a go at it for 10,000 years …. … why, then your beaches might look like this, too. All beaches are beautiful, of course, but these are the beaches of Cascadia. To be more specific, these are the beaches of the newest chain of islands to crash on the shore, Islandia. And if you lift your head and look across the last water to the previous chain, now uplifted and ice-carved and creating rain, why it might just look like this…