Copper Reflections
By Kenyon Fields

In the ancient Taoist text of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, we are reminded that on Earth there is nothing more soft and subtle, yet nothing more capable of grinding down the most resilient and mighty mountains, than water. In its humble course water seeks the lowest ground, following the path of least resistance. With it are carried grains of sand that were built over millennia into fortresses that only ice and persistent rain can pulverize. This paradox aptly summarizes the contradiction entailed in the Copper River - at once a monument to or symbol of the fragility of wildness, and of the awesome power and resilience of the wild.

One finds in a virgin ecosystem a mosaic, a lattice of overlapping patterns at all levels of scale, from the ripples of rain in a tiny pocket of water to the interwoven canopies of trees. A basic structural pattern found recurring throughout the wild is anastomosis, or "braided interconnection between parts of a branching system", and there is no more apt descriptor for the lower reaches and delta of the Copper River. Viewing its profusely braided network of channels from the air brings to mind the long sandy blonde locks of my beloved companion. Or if my personal metaphor does not suit, think then of the river's channels as testimony to the braiding of seal, grizz, bald eagles, ice, wind, trees, sand and salmon that is this place. For water does not live alone.

Nature knows no borders, carries no passport, and runs in no elections. Nature respects only the intricately woven workings of the planet such as gravity, sound, thermodynamics, the elements, and life. In wildness one is surrounded by these aspects of the greater whole as they vie for attention. Perhaps it is the calving ice thundering down upon water, the gurgle and roar of water laden with milky glacial flour furiously seeking the lowest resting place, the throaty declarations of ravens playing in the heights, the amber warmth from a sucker-patch in the clouds, or the deep chill of the river's afternoon wind. One becomes the other as we gradually learn our place.

- OOO -

Sandblasted and prune-skinned, coming home to Cordova from a week's rafting on the Copper isn't the worst option. I am fortunate to have both the river to experience and the new home of Cordova to return to, nestled between the jagged coastline of Prince William Sound and the Copper River Delta. This picaresque little town is a fish, not a fishing town. The rains that bathe we rubber ducks (whose idea of Sunday dress is fishing bibs and rubber boots - Alaska slippers) leave us as wet as any salmonid, and the percentage of our body fat that consists of omega-3 fatty acids from salmon meat surely makes we Cordovans marine mammals. In New York one is assumed to know that Sotheby's is a high-roller auction house, "the floor" is the Stock Exchange, and the "A" is a subway to Brooklyn. In Cordova one is assumed to know that an "opener" is when no males and only half the females are to be found on the town's streets, disappeared for the fishing grounds, leaving the harbor with only a couple hundred small boats, ie: deserted. Bowpickers and sternpickers, highliners and longliners, seiners and trawlers and chums and dogs and humpies and kings and Chinooks and geez I'm getting confused. And the salmon can't seem to make up their mind on what color is hip these days. It's reds now, silvers pretty soon, and I heard there are a few pinks around. To make matters worse, someone even told me the salmon here are forest critters.

How does that work? Well, the salmon enter the forests when they return upriver, upcreek (or up-Crick, if you don't want your cover blown, revealing your true "Outsider" blood), and en route they feed the forest-dwelling furries such as two species of bear that remind you it's Alaska here. The eagles, ravens, crows and gulls get their fair share, while the soil is fertilized by the remains of fish carried through the salmonberry thickets to the birds' mossy dinner tables amidst the lichen-draped Sitka spruce. As the last of a salmon rots into the soil, an unmistakable silhouette is left outlined into the moss carpet. The decaying fish bleaches the original color of the moss, and the only remaining evidence of the source for such a fishprint is a salmon skeleton delicately nestled within.

It is not only in the forests here that one may find interdigitated cycles of life and land. For as the salmon are to the forest, the forest is to the river. And the river completes and returns the metacycle by washing the landscape in a never-ending spring-cleaning that provides a most bountiful nursery for the salmon to begin again another round.

- OOO -

Navigating down the river perched upon what amounts to an oversized pair of balloons with frame, my eyes stand glued to the walls of rock, ice and waterfalls that encapsulate my little being from every direction in the horizontal plane. Perhaps it is an avian ambassador's shrill cry that calls my attention to the vertical dimension of the river's world. Looking then from mountaintop down to water's edge, I look deeper into time. Layer after layer a time is unfolded before me whose language is known only amongst rocks and the river whose meandering has faithfully carved its way into the guts of the Earth, century after century after century. The bubbling of the water's turbulence mimics at a tiny scale the pulse of the river's snake-like body from side to side of the river valley's retaining walls. It is a pulse, a throbbing, a patient drive intolerant of any foreign choreography imposed upon its dance.

I side with Thoreau who wrote, "In wildness is the preservation of the world". Wildness and its rivers like the Copper need no help to exist. That is, unless we get involved; once involved, it is we who need help. We need to become more and more involved to take care of our original involvement and to prepare for future complications. We are well into this cycle here at the Copper Basin. What began in the early years of the 20th century as efforts to extract useful bounty grew ever more complex as time passed. All that remains of the original effort to open the Copper River ecosystem to Copper mining are rusting rails and a scar from the railroad running over a 100-mile length along the river's western face. But there is a legacy to be dealt with that lives on nearly a century after the railroad's last use. This legacy amounts to the question of whether we are ready to learn to dance with the river, or if we insist on imposing our choreography upon it. Developmental pressures are mounting in every direction, with no end in sight.

Water has no fixed shape of its own, but rather takes on the shape of the terrain over which it flows or of the container that holds it. It adapts to both season and place: freezing in winter, dissolving in summer, becoming mist and dew in the heavens, springs and lakes on the earth.

Is there a form of involvement in a river's wholeness that breaks from the cycle of human induced complications and returns the river to its own hands? Is there a way to continue our lives as fisherpeople and hikers and those who use paper, while simultaneously learning from water to adapt to the terrain, rather than adapt it to our whims? I believe so, and I believe it may well allow for human involvement of simply a different type than the miner's engagements. It entails a basic initial choice (securing the future of the Copper system as a wilderness area), and a pact between two parties. However, in this pact there can be only one voting party. This unfortunately unequal precondition places a party, whose age rivals us by tens of thousands of years, under the power of our control of choice. We must speak for the river.
If I had to think like a river, I would think systemically.

Yet there is no better spokesperson for the place than the place itself. The trance of its liquid time tells no lies. The tracks of its bears urge us to stand straight and observe with clarity. The cold of its water and wind reminds us of to whom respect is due. The longer we live by the river the more we become it - our bodies and hearts made of salmon proteins, river water, and air filtered and exhaled by the forests. The Copper is the only river that has managed to find a way through the lofty barrier of the Chugach Mountains to the sea. May we let it admire its work in solace? Down the long road, the river and its critters do have a vote. If nothing else, it is the vote of time, the vote of flood, erosion, and change, all of which far outlast our politics and lifetimes.

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