Dead Salmon and Epic Poetry: Ketchikan, Alaska, USA

The drive down was not unlike, at first, the drive up the mountain.  The old bus taking the turns on the close mountain paths just a little too fast to be cautious, just a little too slow to be reckless, creaked comfortably, filled with the murmured silence of the tired.  However, halfway down, our bus driver broke the silence, the quiet détente we had all silently agreed to in order to snuggle down into our own little bubble of space. 

We had a little time, he announced with far too much cheer, so would we be interested in seeing the salmon spawning?  At first, the wall of silence seemed too strong, but the bus driver’s voice had already cracked it, and the walls came crumbling down.  Yes, yes we would like to see the salmon spawning. 

We stumbled off the bus next to a gully cut out of the ground, whether by nature or artifice I could not determine.  Peering into the murky depths, we saw nothing, at first, nothing but dirty water and concrete.  Look!  Someone pointed and soon we could spot them, their wriggling exhausted bodies struggling upstream.  The salmon.  We watched as they swam and swam until they disappeared from our view.  Only one, too exhausted to swim much longer, too weak to persevere, drifted lazily downstream, dead. 

We climbed dutifully back on the bus.  I thought of that dead salmon.  Empathized with it.  Sometimes, it was tempting to drift downstream instead of struggling up it. 

But before I could immerse myself in such dreary thoughts, the bus driver’s incessant voice cut into the now-contemplative silence undercut with the buzzing murmurs of burgeoning conversation.  Would we like to hear an epic poem?

An epic poem?  A strange request and we had no response for him.  He smilingly took that as assent and regaled us for the duration of our trip back to the cruise ship, words extracted and spun from his mind only, his booming voice filling up all the empty spaces of that old bus, the rhythmic cadences lulling us to a state of pleased repose. 

When we arrived at our destination, he thanked us for coming.  I thanked him for driving.  I watched him drive away in the growing darkness, perhaps to regale another entranced group another day with dead salmon and epic poetry.