Welcome Home
It was summer again, and the dreams had returned. They weren’t nightmares, but
rather strange, surreal visions that refused to disappear into my subconscious after I woke up.
I’d find myself staring off into space, my mind floating down the Columbia River of my
imagination, and I’d tell myself over and over that it wasn’t real. It was just a dream, after
all. But I knew my chants were painfully ineffectual; reason rendered completely useless to
exorcize these dreams.
My therapist told me that it was because I was too stressed out, that I needed to take
a vacation, so I left the city in search of the kind of catharsis you see in the movies. I got in
my old Toyota Camry with half a tank of gas, a crumpled $20 bill, and vague notions of
tracking the Columbia from its headwaters in Canada to where it empties into the Pacific
Ocean.
It seemed like a reasonably romantic plan, but after a head-on collision with logistics,
I found myself staying with my parents and visiting the stretch of the Columbia I grew up with
in between Howard Amon and Leslie Groves. Late at night I slip out of the house and wander
along abandoned bike paths next to the river, taking short naps. The river sings me lullabies.
And I dream of the Columbia, its banks overflowing. I watch with increasing disbelief
as shallow pools form at my feet, dancing the slow, ancient dance of erosion with my shoe
leather. It’s the ratio of life, you know: two molecules hydrogen, one molecule oxygen
sounds like two fingers, one thumb making up one claw in a sea of a billion others, all
perfectly 2:1, each grasping claw taking a little piece of me downstream, one atom at a time.
They crawl up my legs, over my shoulders, and on top of my head, my mouth agape, until
water rushes in. Like dirt into an open grave.
Sometimes, I dream of a wall of water 100 feet high suddenly rising up behind me, the
wrath of Grand Coulee poured out on the Columbia River Basin. I see it rushing, cresting,
then crashing down upon my wide-eyed, upturned face. The moment before it hits, I wonder
how many tons of water that would be, exactly. Given that a cubic foot of water weighs
approximately 52.4 pounds, a column 100 feet high and 1 foot wide would be 5,240 pounds.
Since one ton is… and then I’m simultaneously crushed, torn apart, and swept away by a force
I can’t even imagine, let alone calculate.
Other times, I dream of myself in the Columbia, or the Columbia as it would have
looked if all those kamikaze runs the salmon used to make against those 14 concrete barriers
we erected had actually succeeded. I can barely see the banks and I can the insistent tug of
the outer rings of a whirlpool the size of a football field on my dangling feet. Momentum and
gravity work together in a casual tandem to slowly pull me under. There’s no rush—after all,
there’s no where else for me to go but down.
So I wake up, and I have to admit to myself that there are no answers for me here. I
think I knew that all along, but I slip into the water anyway. It’s peaceful and I’m tired so I
let the gentle current rock me to sleep.
And I dream of floods, you know; two parts destruction, one part laughter.