returning home, to mountains

 

“from the sea to the sky”

“from the sea to the sky”

promises the naming of the road we follow

as we leave Vancouver on the coast

for mountains that volcanoes and plate tectonics

have fought gravity to endure high,

I had thought that these last days in British Columbia

would be different from the edges that keep calling to me,

instead, I now savor the streams cascading down toward the sea,

laughing as waterfalls that both hold and erode,

the way up and the way down, so parallel and contrasting,

I imagine the salmon, born high up these streams,

spending their lives in the ocean,

and then, driven by a primal need to come home,

climb up the rivers to where their mothers laid them,

the First Peoples’ harvesting many of them for their own needs,

never taking too many,

the same with the bears’ feeding,

the ocean and the mountains connected into one,

like the salmon I feel coming to the mountains as coming home,

I am drawn to stare at bare rock, partly swathed in white snow,

I am drawn to rivers returning to the sea, with enormous energy,

these days are for us of mountains,

and I feel drawn to both the climb  up and to the return down to the sea,

both mountains and sea are of the  beginnings.

by Henry H. Walker

July 20, ‘22