In the late fall I went west again, this time by myself, and visited the café in the Cascades run by Troyce Nix and Candace Sweeney. There was already snow up in the mountains, and the larches had turned gold among the fir and pine trees, and log trucks boomed down with giant ponderosas were gearing up for the long pull over a pass to a sawmill town on the Washington coast. I wanted to tell Candace and Troyce that I was just traveling through and coincidentally had found their café. In actuality, I didn’t know why I was there. Maybe it was because of the clean smell of the air, the boulders encrusted with the skeletons of hellgrammites in the creek beds, the bluish-white outline of the Cascades themselves, the autumnal suggestion of death on the wind, followed by winter and, with good luck, another spring.
When I place my hand in a cold pool and fingerling salmon nibble the ends of my fingers, I know the pool will freeze over and the fingerlings will live under the ice until May, when the ice will thaw and the adult salmon will swim into the river’s main channel and eventually work their way out to sea. All of these things will happen of their own accord, without my doing anything about them, and for some strange reason, I take great comfort in that fact.
James Lee Burke, DR17 - Swan Peak
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