Drew put-in before Dooley Bridge, his goal being to photograph the length of the river through town, marking its changes as it went from rural to urban to estuarine environments in the space of four miles. Being June and approaching the summer solstice in this northern state, the sky began to lighten before five in the morning. Drew had been up since four, having loaded his kayak onto his Subaru the previous evening. His main goal was to be up before the tourists and their jet skis, and he had provided himself a wide buffer. Most of the tourists were not up for breakfast until around nine. The tides were also fortuitous; he would be going downriver during ebb tide and returning at flow.
Traffic on the highway was almost completely silent, had it not been for the logging trucks going both north and south, a puzzle to Drew. Why would logs cut from forests south of him be transported north, and vice versa? Did the mills accept different diameters of trees? He made a note in his waterproof field notebook to look next time he was up on the highway. Beyond the minimal traffic, Drew listened to the birds in the riparian zone and deeper into the alder and hemlock forest. The robins were awake, as were the Swainson's thrush and Pacific-slope Flycatcher. He paddled quietly, primarily to stay on course, and looked for photo opportunities.
He was not a nature photographer. His composition was passable, but wouldn't win prizes. Instead, he taught biology and ecology at the local community college and used his photos to highlight local flora and fauna, as well as issues facing the county. Right away he started getting pictures of the riparian zone. Shrubs and woody debris provided good cover for juvenile salmonids, and trees shaded the banks in some areas where cattle hadn't trampled it. The shrub story was dominated by Himalayan blackberry, which was not good, being an invasive plant. He took close up shots of the blackberry so that students could learn its distinctive five-leaflet shape, and then backed off the bank for a long shot showing nothing but blackberry from meander to meander.
He enjoyed exploring in the kayak. It sat so low in the river that he felt as if he were part of the river in a way he never had in his canoe. It moved with his hips and he idly wondered if the kayak were causing his hips to roll or whether it was his hips that caused the kayak to rock. It was like an extension of him, or a graceful extra limb.
Satisfied that he had a good representative sample of the rural area, he powered along the river, developing a satisfying burn in his shoulders and arms. He was slender, fit and young looking; his light hair had not yet started to gray, and despite his years outdoors, his face did not look weather-beaten or even much lined.
In the residential area south of town, which tended to contain short-term rentals and thus tourists, he slowed down again to take pictures of storm sewer pipes and fertilized lawns, and shortly after that, he arrived downtown. Here there was no shading of the banks, and concrete and wooden boardwalks indicated that the city valued human enjoyment of the river over the organisms that depended on the river for their lives. This was no surprise to him, but he wanted to document it for his students in such a way that explained non-hysterically that humans had the ability to make choices, that they didn't have to be unconscious to organisms that had no choice.
He had to strike such a careful balance of passion and logic with his students. During his college years, he remembered his fellow students willingly swallowing ideology and spouting off about the Vietnam War, Civil Rights, Women's Lib, and so forth. Students today were more cynical, he thought, and possibly apathetic, and didn't appreciate appeals to their emotions. Perhaps they were overwhelmed in the information age, or maybe the ease of consumerism and increased materialism or readily available internet porn had dulled their passions for abstractions. Or maybe they were overwhelmed by having to work a full-time job in order to pay for school tuition, which in real dollars was far higher than it used to be. Or maybe they were just smarter than his generation was; maybe they were more cautious about expressing their opinions until they had done more research about sensitive topics. He was willing to entertain that thought.
Once past downtown, he entered the residential area north of town, where Ocean View's actual residents lived, and then the river opened up into a sheltered estuary. He was particularly interested in getting shots of all the shore pines that had fallen from the cut bank into the estuary from the south. Several years before he had identified and flagged rows of individual pines so that he could estimate the rate at which the north end of Ocean View was eroding. Depending on the intensity of the winter storm season, he had found that the city was losing about half a foot of sand per year, which was subsequently deposited north of the estuary. The exclusive little village of Stratford was thus gaining at about the same rate. This caused no end of letters to the editor from upset Ocean View property owners. As the geologist at his college always said, with glee, "The ocean will always win!"
He had been on the river for about three hours. The day was clear and beginning to warm up; the past week had been a heat wave with temperatures in the mid-80s. He had some time before the tide turned, and he planned to beach his kayak and eat a picnic breakfast before investigating the encroaching European beach grass on the dunes to the west of Stratford. As he looked for a suitable pullout, he noticed a small dark head bobbing up and down, swimming slowly upriver. A sea lion? Too small. An otter? Wouldn't that be feather in his cap to document the first otter on the north Oregon coast, he thought. He pulled out his binoculars. Not an otter. Human. Female?
He paddled down to meet her.
She was swimming up river, a head-high breaststroke, and she drew even with his kayak and put her slightly blue hand lightly on the bow.
"Hey, Drew! What an unexpected pleasure! What are you doing out here?"
It was Katy Michaels, his ex-wife's teaching partner at the town's middle school.
He smiled back and said, "I was just going to pull out and have some breakfast. Would you like to join me?"
"Sure," she said, "I'm sure my lips are blue. My pack is upriver about another hundred yards. I'm about ready for breakfast." She turned to her side and switched to sidestroke. She kept pace with him.
Katy, according to his ex-wife, was wild. There had been some personality conflicts between them. She was the youngest teacher on staff at twenty-four; his wife, Annette, was his age, which was just over fifty. In Annette's opinion, Katy was nothing but an overgrown pre-adolescent herself, and not mature enough to teach. Annette complained that if Katy were unprepared for a lesson, she'd just take the kids outside and measure the depth of the mud on the creek bank or some other nonsense.
Drew had said, "I don't see anything wrong with measuring the depth of sediments. That's actually valid scientific inquiry. Was she measuring it on a cut bank or a point bar? I'm glad there's a middle school science teacher who's teaching something other than trivia." They were already separated at this point and Annette hadn't talked to him for three days after he had stuck up for young Miss Michaels.
Annette always had something to complain about, and the past year Katy was her favorite topic. The latest and most interesting information about Katy had nothing to do with Annette, but Annette felt it necessary to spread it around as widely as possible: Katy had seduced the second-youngest faculty member, Sandeep, a math teacher and first generation American whose parents had moved here from the Indian subcontinent years ago because of violence between Muslims and Sikhs.
"How did you find that out?" asked Drew, affecting a bored tone of voice to let his ex-wife know that he didn't approve of gossip, without admitting that he was actually interested in Katy's seduction of Sandeep.
"Oh, it's just awful and so unfair," Annette had said. Annette had heard it from Judy, who had heard it from Adina. Adina was the third youngest faculty member and a widow with a six year-old child. Adina was Judy's teaching partner and Judy and Annette were best friends. Before Katy had come to work at the school, "a slow fire" had been building between Adina and Sandeep for about a year and a half, according to Annette who had heard it from Judy.
"How did Judy know?" Drew asked.
"Adina had confided in her!" Annette had retorted indignantly.
"Some confidant," Drew said and rolled his eyes, something Annette couldn't tell because they were on the phone.
Ignoring the slight to her friend, Annette said, "Well, over spring break, Adina's daughter was staying the night with a friend and so Adina got up early to take a morning walk on the dunes. She was just minding her own business when all of a sudden she stumbles on Katy's little lovenest in the shore pines. There's Katy, naked as a jay bird, her leg flung over Sandeep, both asleep in a pile of sleeping bags. Adina said Katy woke up and invited her to have some hot chocolate right out of her thermos! She had some gall, that's what I say. Adina said Sandeep wouldn't meet her eyes."
