salmon

The small Adams Lake country store is dim but noisy, with the radio pumping some jumbled rock-and-roll music and local announcements. Move right, and a plastic ghoul on the wall shrieks in your face. Faint left, and a bleached skull mask mounted on the freezer screams in your ear. Long strands of Halloween wigs hang everywhere, tangled and dusty: the last year's stock trotted out just in time to feel a bit pagan.

The shelves are crammed with merchandise, from moose jerky in plastic bags to dark Belgian chocolate, small armies of colorful booze bottles, moss-green pickles, fishing equipment, cheap plastic toys, an array of hardware and a bunch of videos. The films' titles hint of violence and fairy tales: there is Defiance, Hell to Pay, Massacre at Fort Hollman and God's Gun, but also The Swan Princess.

"Do you have any lead weights, the kind divers use?" asks John. A small blond woman behind the counter says she sure hopes so, and if John waits two minutes she will check her ex-husband's gear: he is -- or was, since his gear is still here -- a diver. We wait, and she returns, shaking her head: no.

"Your ex, he is no longer diving?" I ask. "I don't know, " she replies. "He left me in April, didn't even take any of his stuff. I have been kind of numb all the time, but now I am thinking this: if he left me, maybe I do not really need him?"

I touch her sleeve and ask her name: it is Connie. She is smiling but not really. Maybe she does not need him, or maybe she does. Maybe the loud radio music is pushing the void he left behind into the corner of the store they used to run together, from 8am until 9pm, every day. "This is hard," says Connie, "these long hours, alone." We agree, tell her our names, and she shakes our hands over the counter, hard. Life is what it is, take it or run away from it, screaming, into the big dark woods of British Columbia right behind the store, or anywhere else when this void catches up with you. It is your choice.

"Anything else you need?" Connie asks, and I look around for some food. We have been on a river full of salmon for a good while now, and are running low. Bananas? One dollar each, Connie warns me, and then puts a bunch on the counter and says: let's make it 50 cents each, OK? so you can have them for breakfast. Tomatoes? Again, one dollar each, but hey, you can have them for 50 cents. No discount on chocolate or moose jerky, smoked by a native family living downstream, but we buy them, too, as well as some sandwich bread and a carton of milk. We also pump plenty of drinking water into our camper's tank using Connie's garden hose outside, free of charge. And: yes! Two pairs of swimming goggles for John, adult size, four Canadian bucks each. A pink pair and a black pair, the last of the season.

We return to the Adams River to photograph red waves of migrating salmon, shimmering in the swift current. Watching the largest sockeye run in the century in British Columbia has a Zen quality to it, and we often stand on the river bank and slip into the pulsing rhythm of the swimming fish, hour after hour after hour. John says their red skeins skirting large boulders resemble Andy Goldsworthy's garlands of leaves he sets afloat in streams, working -- according to the sculptor -- "in a quiet and subversive way."

By now, the fish have traveled hundreds of miles from the sea, up the silty Frazer and over the rocks and the clean gravel bottom of the Adams, their primary breeding habitat where they were hatched a few years ago. They have not eaten for many days and have been swimming hard, and as they lose their strength and immunity their smooth skin becomes mottled with infections and a flesh-eating fungus. Fishermen avoid them now, for their once succulent flesh is no longer edible, but black bears, coyotes, wolves, foxes and birds do not mind: good protein does not have to be pretty and sweetly scented to fill their needs.

Pulled by their genetic memory and a sense of smell, the salmon have been swimming by us every day and night for two weeks, alone and in large multilayer groups, swirling around in eddies and jumping as if trying to gain more speed. Their ruby-red sleek bodies are slicing the river, with green heads pointing upstream where -- soon, soon -- the females will turn on one side and twist-flop their bodies to excavate a nest in the gravel for the safekeeping of their eggs, and their mates will spill their milky fish sperm over the eggs. Then the pair will move upstream to repeat the process, until -- utterly spent, their hormones and bodies exhausted -- they will die.

Some sockeye die right by my feet as I slosh across small creeks. They take a running start upstream, struggle with the current, float hopelessly backwards, skitter sideways, struggle upright in the shallow water, and try again and again, until the effort becomes too huge and they lie down, motionless, with their fish mouths opening and closing, opening and closing. At first, stuck on dry land and in shallow water while John snorkels and wades in the river, I try to prop them up so they could swim again, but there is no use and I stop.

We are here because David, who was diving in British Columbia, sent us a glowing message a month ago when we were still in Alaska:

... have you heard about the RECORD sockeye run in the Fraser River...the biggest in at least a century, over 35 million sockeye expected, possibly the greatest migration of any vertebrate on Earth. Peak will be in about six weeks, best place to go is the Adams River.

Let me know if you need more info; I will be going in four weeks.

Four weeks and dozens of messages later, we bushwhack to a small tributary of the Adams and embrace Gayle. David and Conor, a marine biologist from Vancouver, crouch in a shallow pool among slowly circling sockeye and look in their drysuits like a pair of fishing black bears. It takes us one day of scouting the river to get hooked, but we need some underwater equipment: a $100 underwater bag we quickly procured is a bit better than a ziplock bag and about as efficient.

The wheels turn quickly. Gayle and David, a master underwater photographer who took some good images in a couple of days, soon return to the Catskills where we all live, and Gayle raids our basement. She sends us two large parcels of John's underwater gear and more boxes are expedited by B&H in NYC. Aware that the Canadian customs will sit on our equipment for weeks while wrapping it in tons of bureaucratic red tape, we drive across the border to the US, and intercept all parcels in the house of our old friends. Andre and I go back to 1962 and our climbing days in the Polish mountains; Anne walked into our lives only a bit later.

Their living room is soon turned into a messy tinkerer's dream, since John is missing some crucial pieces of equipment and must make them from whatever he can procure. And in spite of his novice status as an underwater photographer, he also wants to build some extra devices to -- no doubt -- impress the sockeye. Days pass, and he labors from dawn to dusk, raiding hardware stores to buy many astonishing items and changing his design often. Anne and Andre feed us, their dogs -- Moopy and Sophie -- walk us, and one day we collect John's contraption we call gulgutiera -- from the "gul-gul' sound made by large sinking objects -- and sprint back to the Canadian border.

The red tape appears instantly, and after the compulsory timeout in the customs' office we are asked two questions, one designed for Alzheimer's patients to test their memory ("name all states of the Union you have lived in since you were 18") and another to see what grade of elementary school we could attend safely ("so, what were you thinking when you woke up one day and said to yourself: 'I want to go to Canada'?")

Eventually the scrupulous Canadians let us in, but it is already dark and BC mountains pile up like beached whales. We detour into a narrow valley and crawl into our bed -- used twice before, as we crossed and recrossed the border -- at Ladyhawke Vineyard in Keremeos. We come another full circle here because we have known the owner, Joann, since 1975: she was a girl then, and lived in the Northwest Territories. Her father, Willy, a legendary bush pilot, flew us to the Arctic and into the laps of the unsuspecting Inuit of Umingmaktok for our first National Geographic magazine assignment. Willy and his Bandits, as he and his pilots were called, infuriated a multitude of aviation regulators, but the people living in the remote Arctic communities he served -- loved him. Joann inherited Willy's grit and before she planted her first Marechal Foch grape stalk in Keremeos two years ago she managed her father's airline.

Next morning we drive further north, and soon kiss the Adams River on both cheeks: the sockeye are still there, swimming, red and glorious. I scout the watershed for the best spots, photograph the river and endless graphics of salmon carcasses, and stumble among mossy boulders. There are many photographers combing the river, including some feisty Japanese divers occupying our favorite pools and acting as if they owned the Adams. Yet at dusk, as they emerge from the bushes along the river, they suddenly become docile. They bend sideways and beg: "Please?" while I open heavy zippers on the backs of their drysuits and set them free.

John is never free. He loves the salmon, the way the fish press on with their dramatic and short lives, but every day his mind chases new possibilities of improving his gulgutiera or the images he is striving for. He photographs all day, every day, and at night he improves or repairs whatever has failed. I list items he has made and altered.

He built a long arm for his strobes, using aluminum bars wrapped in dark pipe insulator to eliminate their reflections; modified his quick-release L-shaped bracket and altered the underwater camera housing's attachment to allow vertical and horizontal formats without repositioning the strobes; stripped and carved the plug and removed the casing to get his wireless remote inside the housing; modified the said housing to accommodate a lens no one else is using underwater; used a commercial window cleaning squeegee with a 15-foot telescopic handle to construct a movable platform for his camera, allowing him to lower it to the bottom of the river and move it around without scaring the fish away from the lens; wrapped a Styrofoam block carved from the sheet yanked from under our camper mattress in a black plastic bag and attached it to the squeegee to gain buoyancy for his under-and-over images.

He also wrapped his wireless transmitter in a ziplock bag while protecting its antenna with cardboard cut from a cereal box and using a neck strap from a nylon cord which traveled with us for 30 years; replaced a flash battery compartment lid (held by a flimsy washer which got lost right away) with a piece of a yogurt container lid; used plenty of electric tape purchased in New Zealand 15 years ago; employed a monopod head and quick-release clamps for controlling the angle of the camera and the arm holding the strobes. Lacking a drysuit, he opted for his water-repelling kayak suit (not fully waterproof) and to prevent drenching he slipped on his rain pants and jacket before the suit went on. He also borrowed a diving hood and mask with a snorkel from Conor.

John's kayaking gloves and a pair of khaki colored Crocs (the fish hated his yellow ones) completed his river attire. And the lead weights, necessary to keep his feet from floating up as he bent down to stick his head underwater? He stuffed ziplock bags full of coarse gravel into his suit's leggings and placed some rocks around his waist.

Yet John's inventions are put aside when another old Arctic friend, Margo, and her family come to see us on the Adams. Margo and her husband Howie flew down from Qurluktuk, an Arctic community in Nunavut: they wanted to be around while their younger daughter gave birth to her first baby, and the little girl -- Pitikhi in Inuktitut, Zasha in English -- arrived safely. John, still dripping, emerges from the river, and we attack the fried chicken the family brought, finishing the feast with our moose jerky.

The dark aromatic meat remind us of 'mipku,' dry caribou strips we carried in our pockets many years ago, when young Margo and the two of us, also young, went fishing for trout in Arctic Sound where her parents had their traditional Inuit camp. After midnight the wind dropped and ferocious Arctic mosquitoes descended on us in dense unforgiving clouds, but we caught our fish and returned triumphant. Little Pitikhi has not met these mosquitoes yet, but if our vaguely articulated plans work out, we may all go to Arctic Sound next year. Who knows? And who knew we would still be rushing across the continent to see each other, admire the new baby, watch the sockeye, and suck the bones of BC chickens and dry moose meat -- together?

On our last day on the river we hike to a beautiful "fisheries pool" hidden behind scraggly conifers and ancient yellow birches. Here rapids veer toward one bank of the Adams, leaving a quiet eddy on the side where young workers of Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans congregate to count, sex, tag and release hundreds of sockeye, trying to approximate the size of the run. It is their day off and we have the pool to ourselves, so John shuffles into the river and begins his aquatic gyrations: bending motionless with his snorkeled face in the water to watch the fish, quietly floating on the surface above the salmon, and raising his squeegee handle like a Volga's river raft guide wielding his push pole.

After several hours he sends me a happy thumbs-up, for today nothing got stuck or malfunctioned. Smiling, he sloshes ashore carrying his impossible gulgutiera, but soon his mood darkens: the dome protecting the lens rotates but fails to unscrew. Still dripping and trapped in his suit, John tries to free the stubborn acrylic bubble, but nothing works.

"I am screwed," he declares and tires again. No go. Exasperated, he inspects his gulgutiera made of many modified parts and says: "I need a crowbar."

A crowbar? To attack the fragile acrylic dome and, since John's bigger model would not fit inside, bang on my poor camera trapped underneath it? And I suddenly remember how 35 years ago John dismantled his large format Linhoff with a small hatchet and a screwdriver, fixed it, put it back together, and when I asked what he was planning to do with some parts he left out, replied confidently: "you do not need them." And we didn't.

Quietly, I walk into the bushes and return with one of the 5-foot long iron spikes the fisheries' crew pounded into the river's bottom to hang their sockeye nets.

John's eyes light up. He slides the rusty end of the bar into the bowels of his apparatus, finds the right spot, hits the other end with a rock, and something inside the gulgutiera shifts. "Now I need a really narrow and hard object," he says and we are lucky again: my car key set includes just the right key, which after some pushing, prodding and banging finishes the job. John unscrews the dome to change his lens, and we laugh like crazy and hug on the river bank, with the red salmon swimming right by us, undaunted and unstoppable, to their destiny. And we realize the embrace of our friends who helped us see and admire the fish feels like a safe eddy must feel to the salmon: restful, reassuring, important.

©Yva Momatiuk

birthday animals

I am walking on an old logging trail which branches off Lower Cache Road, a tributary to Alaska Highway in British Columbia. Thin strands of morning fog soften scraggly black spruce and float among white aspen trunks. A long time ago, during his trek to the South Pole, Roald Amundsen used to order his men to get up before sunrise, get out of their tent, and breathe in polar air and the morning light in to make the rest of the day meaningful. I am doing my Amundsen thing now, and this is August 18, my birthday. I am 70 years old. When did it happen, and how?

The question is unnecessary because I know the answer: I lived that long. And possibly much longer, cramming life in, at times heedlessly: take much, climb that, try what beckons. The family legend has it that ever since I could walk, I refused to hold anyone's hand and just bolted off to find what would surely remain out of reach if I just walked nicely next to some protective grownup.

Even after many years, Marynia, my old nanny who died recently just short of her 100th birthday, remembered with dread her chases after the disappearing child who never looked back, just ran. Eventually Pecia -- my father -- refused to take me anywhere, because he could never relax and just enjoy a stroll with his little daughter, the way many parents in Warsaw walked with their small but already mannerly children. He hated to imagine I would get run over by a streetcar, and deeply feared my mother's wrath should he allow that to happen. 

My mother --called Mek by me and my brother -- was probably somewhat concerned but must have pretended to be upset when Marynia and Pecia reported my escapades. For her, I was a small chip of her own large spirit. Raised in Russia, she came to Poland at 14, after her father, a white general, was murdered in the turmoil of the Revolution, and her mother, who lost everything and melted into the countryside like many other landed gentry at that time, kept her two young daughters alive by running a small orphanage full of starving children and digging out potatoes left behind by farmers who already finished their harvest.

They eventually came to Poland on a cattle train, which took 6 weeks to reach the border. My mother was wearing old rags, her head was shaved to prevent lice, and she did not speak any Polish. Twelve years later, she was a young lawyer with two degrees, one from Warsaw University and another from Sorbonne, which used to have its extension program in Poland.  She was well versed in several foreign languages, married, living and working in Warsaw, and helping to support her mother and her older sister, who "lost her way," never finished high school, and became a cabaret dancer and a mother of two sons out of wedlock whose fathers disappeared. Then the war came, and before six million Poles and Polish Jews died and the war ended, Mek went ahead and had her two children, first me, and then my brother Jeremi. When I asked her later why she decided to have kids right in the middle of these terrifying and deadly times, she told me it was her affirmation of life. 

Was my mother a survivalist by nature, or the events of her early life left her no other choice? I do not know. But I know she was an ardent feminist -- even though she did not know the term -- and did not want me to be still, which later translated into her well articulated life lessons designed to prevent me from getting hooked on any womanly activity which may, in her understanding of freedom, clip my stride: an excessive attention to my appearance ("good looks don't need any artificial help")  an early marriage ("first, get your university degree, then travel, and then, and only if you really want to, get married") and even cooking ("I hope you never have to do it.")

We fought throughout all our lives together. She was a severe critic, a relentless judge, and she needed more overt and cozy love than I, busy to escape her guiding hand, had time or inclination to deliver.  As she grew older, she became less of the crazy and flamboyant Russian I loved, and more of the demanding, angry and disappointed German Frau I feared. I knew I did not want to be like her, but I did get my university degree, traveled, married late, avoided cooking as much as I could, and had my first pedicure ever -- courtesy of our daughter Tara, one of her birthday gifts -- last week in Colorado. 

And today the sunlight licks the trees on the logging road and a grouse rises noisily from the ditch, flapping madly away. I gather wild raspberries, tasty but small and misshapen: not enough rain?  and see that John is already awake. I return to the camper and he asks me what I want for my birthday. Animals, I say, many animals. He reminds me I already had two pre-birthday moose crossing the road last night, and a family of deer in a ravine, and many ravens soaring over the forest. I want more.

Over the course of its nearly 1,600 miles from Dawson Creek to Fairbanks, Alaska Highway parallels some of the largest and most rugged tracts of land in North America, scarred by mineral exploration and logging but also unfenced, heavily forested, and largely devoid of human presence, with large rivers, Peace, Liard,Teslin, Hyland, Rancheria and Yukon, creating abundant animal corridors full of nutrients.  As the day unfolds and we drive North, I get the following:

-- an immature Golden eagle, flying low
-- a squirrel crossing the road suddenly right in front of us and surviving
-- a Snowshoe hare, whose round eyes remind me of my father Pecia who I am sure reincarnated into a hare
-- ravens and more ravens
-- a young coyote, loping toward us for a while
-- Stone sheep -- bighorns' cousins -- licking dry mineral deposits along the highway in the Northern Rockies
-- a young caribou bull with very dark fur and loudly clicking leg tendons
-- large groups of bison, also feeding in a ditch and resting

And then it rains black bears. A mother bear bending small trees to browse on their leaves. Her cub, suddenly startled, climbing a tall aspen trunk with determination and speed, and perching there for a while only to descend just as fast. Another velvety cub with brown cheeks and big round ears following his mother. Another bear grazing steadily not far away.

My birthday animals. All of them.


©Yva Momatiuk

stars and crows

We wake up in dense fog with eucalyptus trees leaning close, their branches shedding long tendrils of bark. It is a surprising warm morning, fragrant with their scent. Ah, and here is some soft daylight, too, so sweet after long dark hours spent in our small van. These are the shortest days of the year, racing toward the austral winter solstice not many days away. In the last week or so, dusk comes on the heels of dawn with almost no time in between, so we grab this brief daylight and try to fill it with what we want to do.

The soil here is sandy, as if the Southern Ocean was just beyond the eucalyptus grove instead a hundred miles away. We love these sandy farm fields we sometimes select for our camping spots, usually after much bumping around on unpaved country roads well after dark. Even after torrential rains which come in the middle of the night out of nowhere as far as our weather maps are concerned, our van does not get bogged down in a Wyoming-type gumbo, but drives out smoothly as if gliding on silk.

This morning we glide toward the sea, but the fog is beautiful and we spend hours trying to find our different objects of desire. I am chasing pale trees which pop out of the milky light, and John is after large spider webs, luminescent with dew and draped on farm fences like drying diapers. Whose diapers, though? We did read a mile long list of Australian snakes, ranging from some non-venomous giants to their smaller but highly poisonous kin whose fangs could lay us low in 5 minutes, but are there also "5-minute spiders" lurking in tall grass underfoot, ready to defend their lacy webs. These concerns bring me back to my python.

Some days ago, frustrated by elusive wild animals we manage to find only to watch them hop or fly away, I dragged John to a place which specialized in a rehab of reptiles, and persuaded the snakeman in charge to let me handle a beautiful olive python, whose high scale count made it iridescent as the animal moved. It was a mere 6-foot baby, with gloriously smooth, mother-of-pearl skin with a hint of green and an undulating, lively body of a bored youngster. When fully grown, this non-venomous constrictor may measure 12 feet and weight up to 50 pounds.

I allowed the python to glide along my arms and shoulders, and she (for I was sure it was a she) soon draped her muscular coil comfortably around my neck, investigated my ears and resting her head on top of my head as if it were the most comfortable rock in northern deserts of Kimberly or Arnheim Land, her ancestral home. I thought about the way she would hunt in the wild, secreted among hot rocks near a game trail, or submerged in a water hole and waiting for an unwary animal to come for a drink. Once fully grown, she could grab, slowly strangle and devour a whole rock wallaby, enough to sustain her for several months. She would deal death to animals large and small, but she would be vulnerable, too: unless the temperature was warm enough for her to digest her prey, the meat she swallowed may decompose in her stomach and poison her.

But this morning there are no snakes or spiders around. The fog burns off, and we drive to the sea near a small town of Denmark, where a collection of enormous boulders, called Elephant Rocks, crowds a cove. John gathers his equipment and descends down a narrow passage between the rocks to work with their large reddish bodies at close quarters, while I photograph aquamarine sea and red lichens decorating the Elephants.

Later the shadows deepen, and we head for the hills and their dense cover of eucalyptus to find another camping spot. We do not like commercial campgrounds for many reasons, but traditionally all trees drive us nuts, too. They obscure our views, cut off the light, and hide all animals. In many countries we know, there are forests, groves and single trees, but there are also many open clean places of light and possibilities. But not in southern Australia, where trees line most highways, obscure rural roadlets and even walking trails. And between many adult trunks grow young trees with their spindly clusters of branches, effectively sealing off all vistas and forcing us to drive or walk in endless leafy and twiggy tunnels.

But the eucalyptus trees have grown on us by now. There are more than 700 species of them in Australia, from a lemon-scented eucalyptus, to a broad-leaved peppermint kind and a blue gum. The eucalyptus range from rough stringybarks to red shiny Henry Moore sculptures and white-skinned "ghost gums" with iron-hard wood so smooth I sometimes rest my cheek on their glowing trunks and close my eyes: here is a tree I know I love. There are also giant karri trees, the second tallest in the world, whose wood -- this we learned from a karri forester we once met -- paved many London sidewalks.

Tonight we have a camping choice: it is either a patch of red earth encircled by trees, or a wheat field with its bright ceiling of stars and night calls of birds. We walk to meet the farmer who just finished his planting for the day, and ask his permission to spend the night in his field. We mention the stars we cannot see in the forest, and the birds.

"I know what you mean," he says. "Once they planted all these road strips of trees everywhere, I cannot see anything, either.

I drive, I want to look out and see what's out there, so I crook my neck and all I see is these trees. Then I find myself on the wrong side of the road. This is crazy."

The darkness is coming fast, and the birds are everywhere now, flying under the stars and calling into the night. "There are these two crows who have lived here for years," the farmer says. "I hear them every day, and always wonder: what are they saying to each other? I would just love to know."

©Yva Momatiuk

beach

This morning the ocean is almost still, with small whitecaps rising here and there in lazy intervals, as if reminding itself of its sleeping power. Last night, every southern star basked in a faint moonlight glow and the mountains stood dark and blue-hazy. But today a strong weather front came fast: a thick stratus with its leading edge painted crimson by the ascending daylight silently slid over the sea and crept slowly east until it covered the sun.

It may rain.

The west coast of the Southern Island of New Zealand should be dripping wet, with its millions of tea-colored rivulets racing down the steep slopes of the Southern Alps and many powder-blue glacial rivers roaring like lions and rolling heavy boulders on its way to Tasman Sea. Yet the coastal bush, all tangled pungas and ratas and rimus and giant ferns, looks dry and strangely brown: we have learned there was precious little rain here since February, and even now in the fall, when the clouds should be dropping its daily loads of moisture collected all over the Pacific, it just may rain today. Not: surely. Not: again, but: may, and: perhaps.

We drove to the beach last night and caught the very tail of another ruby red sunset. The cabin of two gold miners we used to know, Mark and John, is still here -- tidy, weathered and quiet. Mary, an Australian woman who helped the men during their last years when age and sickness sapped their ability to cope, inherited the place and now walks her dog along the beach every day, passing an old wooden bench half hidden by encroaching gorse bushes, with a hand painted sign: MARK'S PERCH.

Mark was the more assertive younger brother, who mined opals in Australia and gold everywhere, but later settled here on Gillespie's Beach, waiting for big storms to bring shiny gold flakes and deposit them on the black sand. He and his quiet brother John never married. The brothers -- or so the legend goes --had a nice fat account in a bank in Hokitika which they used to lend money to some less enterprising and perhaps less frugal souls. They lived in a boat shed converted into a one-room dwelling, with all their tools and other necessities tucked neatly away.

We were just married when we first came here together, and Mark -- who liked visitors -- fed us some mutton and let us have Pink Pussy, a guest hut sitting in the grassy yard and facing Mt. Cook. We stayed for days and photographed along the beach, bordered by heavy canopies of native bush and tall snowy peaks of the Southern Alps. Come evening, we visited the brothers who, looking like old seals in their dark wrinkly clothes, sprawled on their narrow beds close to the sea-facing window, John on the right and Mark on the left. We used to perch sideways by their big feet clad in thick woolen socks and talk, mostly with Mark, with his brother resting with a sleepy expression of a man who did not need to talk in order to enjoy the evening.

There was a common tone to our talks and maybe our keen desire to learn, too, because we also wanted a life with few outside bounds and with the rules we would make ourselves. But in these early days 33 years ago we still could not quite imagine how to make it work, while the brothers had already managed just this kind of life. They could now rest easy on their single beds, talk about the well- remembered uncertainty of prospecting in distant lands and the hard toil which strained their bodies, and be just where they wanted to be.

Then one day a real storm came, hurrying across the ocean on the wings of thundering waves and pounding the beach for hours. And after many lean months -- or so Mark told us -- the gold finally came in, its yellow flakes shinning like crazy cat's eyes against black grains of sand. Out came the old sluice box lined with red carpeting, and the hoses, and a small pump, and several shovels. Oh, did we shovel hard, piling the sand on top of the box and watching it slosh down the carpet while the gold flecks, trapped, yellowed the carpet with its rich glow.

I was just trying to calculate how much gold we were getting with every shovelful, and how much it would bring the brothers in some very real money, when Mark suddenly called it quits. The gold was all around us, shining, beckoning, there were four of us and we were not tired, but no -- the brothers folded the hoses, packed the pump, and rolled the sluicing box back to its corner in a shed. Then Mark settled down to pluck a fat Northern Canada goose he shot the day before and planned to roast for our supper, and John first checked his possum traps (they were empty) and then sat in the grass by the Gillespie's Lagoon with a sheep trapped between his knees and proceeded to shear its long scraggly wool. Slowly.

I looked again at the golden flakes scattered all over the beach, and could not stand it anymore. I walked straight to Mark and asked him why they stopped sluicing their gold, since this was the first good, fruitful storm in so many months. He looked up at me with his merry brown eyes and replied: "I don't want to start hating it" and went back to work on his dinner bird, with sea breeze stirring goose down clinging to his hands.

I thought about Mark this morning after I stopped photographing the crimson edge of the front, put my camera away, and walked down the beach in search of bright round rocks and bits of sea-polished driftwood. I knew there were still images out there, but there was also the moist air, and the warm wind, and the surf pounding the black and shinning sand.

©Yva Momatiuk