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Talking Story  by Polo

From The Asian Reporter, V17, #43 (October 23, 2007), page 7.

There’s a hand of fertile land, turning quickly into a finger or so of sand, then diminishing into a line of ragged wooden poles driven crooked into our river’s dark bottom — that’s all that marks the extraordinary moment our two grand matriarchs meet. Our Rivers Willamette and Columbia. And of course a small roadside signboard. They call the place Kelley Point Park.

"Hey ... why they call this Kelley Point?" I ask a couple of black men fishing off that sandy finger. "Don’ know," the older uncle says.

"You think there’s a Mr. Kelley?" I persist, peeking into their catch bucket. "Maay-be," he says.

"Is this lunch?" I say, looking inside his pail. "Ha ha, maybe after a few more years," he says. We pause. We look up and watch a serenely deliberate, tall iron Taiwan grain tanker slide past our point. She steams slow, she steams east from this auspicious place. Upstream on grand River Columbia.

"Good morning. Good luck," I go. Thanks, they reply.

South on this grainy gray strand, upstream on our generous River Willamette’s eastern shore, a Mexican family’s simmering a big blackened pot of something savory. Women are scolding and laughing. Driftwood smoke woven with soup steam blows my way. Long-long casting rods are stuck deep into slate sand. Men and boys, hands stuck deep into pants pockets, gaze out over our silent rolling river. "Buenos," I say. Good morning they answer, those two brothers, their sons, their nephews.

"Por qué Kelley Point?" I ask. "Qué?" the nearest me asks back. What?

"Who’s Kelley?" And "Why’s this place named for him?" I say. "I don’ know," he shrugs.

Kelley Point Park has a world of meaning, about 8,000 years worth. About as long as families have fished here, have lived here. This shore is as sacred as any auspicious place on our planet’s tender face. You can feel it in your fibrous marrow. Sure you can. You can tell it by those tiny tobacco bundles of bright fabric tied to shrub branches at our river’s edge. Gifts for the generous spirits of these rivers, of their shores; for tribal peoples’ enduring ancestors too. Fishing still. But who on earth is Mr. Kelley?

You have to wonder if Mr. Kelley can recite the names of these two Mother Rivers’ one hundred children: Clatsop and Klickitat and Clackamas among them. Can he calculate quickly how many billion tons of elemental carbon passed by this point in the delicate rib bones of Chinook and Sockeye and Steelhead over those eight millennia of Indian care for their kind matriarchs? Can Mr. Kelley tell us what now, now that these River peoples no longer steward those river salmon along their sacred cycle? Does he know what will happen to us all sharing this shore?

We worry that Mr. Kelley’s workmen, the guys who put his name on that park signboard, don’t worship this exquisite confluence of these two river systems. River Columbia soaking and draining a quarter million square miles of our blessed continent, and River Willamette carrying along sediments of our valley’s farm fields and fruit orchards, carrying away effluent from grazing sheep and content cows and energetic cities. All of that perpetually passing this point named just for that small man.

And now, just as these men are casting lures and those men are called for lunch, both broad rivers are braiding their complex histories. It’s happening right here at this extraordinary meeting place, at this park named for Mr. Kelley.

Combined now, these lovely rivers will roll another hundred miles until they empty into our big green sea just past Astoria’s treacherous breakers. Out there they’ll blend into a clockwise cycle of cold Pacific Ocean, that same current carrying away ships packed with Pendleton wheat and bringing here boatloads of Yokohama compacts.

Way out there tall waves will froth into black overcast, and those monster clouds will be blown right back and fall as rain on our Coastal and Cascade Mountains. And that rain will run off into rivulets then streams then creeks then run right back into our mother rivers’ arms, again. And again. And pass along this special place again. Our point.

And maybe Mr. Kelley is somewhere in the middle of all that. Knowing all this. Being all this. And then again, maybe not.

But maybe from here forward we should look deeper, think longer, about how we name important places, these wondrous places white folks will have to share a bit more from now on. Share better with those hopeful black fishermen, with that happy brown family too; share bigger with these restive native ancestors and their edgy children as well. Because share we must. As every family does. Sure we do.

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