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river rat: totem
This picture resurfaced after being lost for years. At one point I wondered if it had ever been taken at all-if it was a false memory-me standing in the coal sand beneath the cabin pointing a beat up 35 mm Nikon at the new addition to Skull Island. Sometimes I find myself wondering if any of the island happened or if some mechanism in my brain has created the myth in such wondrous detail to soothe scars and mollify regrets. But here it is.
Totem poles are powerful mojo, and believe me when I tell you, this one throws a triple-eyed whammy on me every time I see or think about it. The island and all we accomplished there, bringing a frontier spirit complete with squatter's mentality, made what we did seem new and fresh even though hundreds of others had built cabins and retreats long before us.
One sunny day we decided what to do with a huge beam we'd scrounged from the end of a bigger island upstream. Along with two of my brothers we set the fifteen foot railroad cross tie into a five foot deep hole in the ground, lined the sides of the creosote soaked beam with flat stones and tamped sand and pebbles into the hole to make the pole solid, like it had grown there.
The pole stuck up out of the ground boldly like it didn't belong. The foreign, angular mass of it and the fact that it was black stood in stark contrast to the deep green of the trees and the sparkling shimmer of the water. It made the outhouse we'd built look tiny in comparison.
"Ahhhhhhhh-oohhhhmmmmmmmmmmm." Seconds after the work was finished, in unison, the three of us chanted to the monolith, and I swear, if there had been any bleached hominid femur bones lying around we'd have thumped them on the ground and declared the second coming.
Pacific Northwest tribes erecting totems have the good sense to carve them while they're still on the ground. Good sense had nothing to do with brother Garth's design or any part of his life. In fact, when David Byrne put together the Stop Making Sense album, Garth used the title liberally with any tight-ass he happened upon. No, he would carve it upright with a hatchet, an axe, and a pair of dull chisels balancing himself on top of an empty 55 gallon drum.
My other brother and I decided to go fishing. Digging the hole and hoying the beam into place called for something like fishing, or sleeping. Or both. We poled the boat up stream a few islands and anchored on the mountain side of the river at the top of a deep channel where we knew schools of catfish would volunteer to be our baits' best friends.
"I'm going to carve this pole." He shouted at us. He had swung into manic mode.
That's all Garth said before we loaded the boat and left. Then he set to drawing on the greasy surface with a magic marker, jumping up and down from the barrel ten times before we made it to where our johnboat was tied up. By the time we were just north of our island we could hear the hack, hack, hack of the hatchet and the occasional ping of hammer to chisel head.
We caught some fish that afternoon, more of them closer to dark when feeding time began. When the sun dropped below Key Hill behind town we pulled up our anchor and started a lazy drift towards the island. The water at dusk is alive with darting bugs and concentric ripples of fish chasing minnows and flies and with the exception of when a storm is threatening, I have never raced off the water at that hour. Some moments in time merit slowing down and floating slows everything nicely.
The seven p.m. run of the coal trains on the eastern shore resonated so deeply, it was like a low harmonics grenade going off over and over in my gut. Not an unpleasant feeling, but unusual and one that made me wonder why it didn't show up on the smooth water. Maybe it did. Maybe it shows up in everything all at once and is impossible to tell the difference or see the vibrations.
When we came to the end of our island I expected Garth to be still at it, maniacally swinging an axe into the black wood of the beam, or even to find him standing next to a single toothpick the way cartoon sawmills turn one giant tree into the smallest piece of usable wood. Save for the early croaking of bull frogs and the deep thrum of the coal car traffic all we could hear from the cabin was a familiar David Gilmour guitar solo careening off the birch trees and rocks near the island. He probably passed out half way through the job, I remember thinking. I know I expected to find him drunk and covered in black slivers of toxic wood chips.
We loaded our catch onto the bank where we'd moor the boat, careful to not lose the half dozen cats to a slippery slide down the rocks and back into the water. We both made it to the top of the dock stairs at the same time and dropped our riggings and fish into the dirt. In the six hours we had been on the water the totem went from a muddy, black railroad cross-tie to what you see in the picture.
Garth had finished painting early enough to go down to the channel where the rope swing was and take a bath. He stood in his red velvet robe and flip-flops drinking straight from a bottle of Tiger Rose. He looked like the opposite of a game show hostess showing off the prize behind door number three, his hand outstretched towards the finished pole still wet with the paint he smeared on with a makeshift paint brush.
The pole stayed just about like you see it here until the day some vandal chopped it and the cabin down and burned them a few years later.
