Standing with the Salmon Choosing Life
October 21, 2021
Last weekend, Jessica and I camped along the Salmon River near Mount Hood, an hour’s drive from Portland. It was a beautiful fall weekend, the air crisp and cool, the leaves beginning to turn, and, most exciting for us, the salmon returning to spawn. We saw a dozen or so salmon, 2 to 3 feet in length, return to the river of their birth to lay their eggs and die. We were mesmerized as they rested in a pool, swam around in slow circles, or flapped around with sudden vigor. Here was life, one generation of salmon completing their life cycle and another just beginning.
Yet there was something heart-breaking about it all, too. According to the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission (made up of the Yakama, Umatilla, Warm Springs, and Nez Perce tribes), the 13,000 miles of the Columbia river and its tributaries used to see 10 to 16 million salmon returning each year – and that’s a conservative estimate. In 2021, the numbers are closer to 2 million. That number itself is an improvement from the 1990s, an increase thanks to the efforts of the CRITFC, and yet falls short of the group’s restoration goal of 4 million. What we see today is a pale shadow of the once abundant runs that nourished the local people, bears and other wildlife, and even the surrounding forests who would take in the nutrients from the decaying remains left by humans and predators. Even as we marveled at the power of life, we grieved the loss of what once was and our own part in that loss, for we know that it is our addiction to economic growth and its attendant hazards – dams, pollution, warming temperatures – that are suffocating the rivers and all who call them home.
Meanwhile, back on the streets on Portland, thousands of people are forced to live outside, even as night-time temperatures dip to the low 30s amidst persistent rain. These are our neighbors, pushed to destitution by the same forces that are killing the salmon – industrial capitalism and corporate greed.
In the Exodus story, God leads the Hebrew people out of civilization and into the wilderness, and there offers the people a choice: “Today I set before you life and prosperity, death and disaster… Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live.” (Deuteronomy 30:15,19)
Dandelion House is an attempt to step outside – even a little bit – of the dominant paradigms of our civilization so that we, too, might choose life. Our guiding principles are Relationship, Reverence, and Resistance – relationship with our neighbors and the place we call home, reverence for all beings and for the Life Source, and Resistance against the powers warring against the salmon and our human friends on the streets.
With your help, we want to buy a house to house the unhoused, create community, and live in deep reverence for all that sustains life. Can you help?