Eva Saulitis describes hiking “streams and bear trails and muskegs and mountains” in Prince William Sound, Alaska. The environment has taken on a different meaning for her since she learned she has an incurable form of breast cancer:
In “King Of The River,” a poem by Stanley Kunitz, he … watches salmon battling up a stream, and the parallel he draws with human life and striving and passion and aging is tight and explicit and maybe even a little overwrought—at least I saw it that way when I first read the poem. I was in my thirties then, and my health was a given. Now the poem reads more like a biblical truth. The great clock of your life / is slowing down, / and the small clocks run wild. These great clocks and small clocks are the very texture of our days on earth.
Yet for most of us, most of the time, they tick on unheard. In the society in which I live, in that other world, across the mountains—far from this wild place where death is explicit and occurs in plain sight, where it is ordinary and everyday and unremarkable—people don’t talk about dying.
People rarely witness the dying of their fellow humans (much less the animals they eat). Special people minister to the dying. Sometimes people in their travail fly overseas and pay strangers to hasten their dying. We have no charnel grounds, only cemeteries shaded by big trees, mowed and tended by groundskeepers. Or we’re handed the ashes of our loved ones, in sealed urns or handsome boxes, to disperse at sea or from mountain peaks.
Facing death in a death-phobic culture is lonely. But in wild places like Prince William Sound or the woods and sloughs behind my house, it is different. The salmon dying in their stream tell me I am not alone. The evidence is everywhere: in the skull of an immature eagle I found in the woods; in the bones of a moose in the gully below my house; in the corpse of a wasp on the windowsill; in the fall of a birch leaf from its branch. These things tell me death is true, right, graceful; not tragic, not failure, not defeat. For this you were born, writes Stanley Kunitz. For this you were born, say the salmon. A tough, gritty fisherman friend I knew in my twenties called Prince William Sound “God’s country.” It still is, and I am in good company here.
The Dish 