Roll On Columbia

or Sometimes I get pissed there aren't giant trees and salmon everywhere, and I blame old people

You could walk across the river on their backs;

it took teams of horses to haul them out of Lake Washington;

used to be you could hold out a net and Chinook salmon

the size of a junior high boy would jump in.

But then dams and logging and legions of nets and canneries

and lawn fertilizers and meth-heads and warmer temperatures

and erosion and population explosions and mining.

Diners in small towns on state highways still hang pictures,

black and white artifacts: five or six men posed

at the base of a sky-scraper fir, wedge cut out

two men laying down inside, five or six men holding

strings of dozens of kings, looking serious

in their civil-war moustaches and suspenders

The old-timers tell their fish stories:

“used to be you’d catch two steelhead a day

now you’re lucky to get two in a season,”

a not-so-subtle hint of generation blame in their nostalgia—

as if the facebook, cell-phones and MTV were responsible.

Listening to Woody Guthrie on my Ipod

sing songs about dams on the Columbia:

leaping salmon playing in the locks,

I get the urge to trample

some local geriatrics azaleas.