Sept. 26 -- Sunday night

Quiet dinner. Nobody fought. Dad told Mom about the fish, the whole thing, start to finish, like it was his own idea to go up there. Mom looked at me across the table and winked.

For dessert she made blackberry cobbler. I spend half my working life hacking out Himalayan blackberry, the worst invasive in this county, and I had two helpings. Dad said, "Don't tell your boss." I said, "Dad, I think my boss would understand."

That's all. I just wanted to write down a Sunday with nobody slamming a door.

Sept. 25 -- Saturday

I took Dad to Cabin Creek.

We went in his pickup, because he wasn't about to ride in "that little car," and I didn't argue. The SAVE A LOGGER, EAT AN OWL sticker on his bumper has faded so much you can only read LOGGER now. He knew the gravel road better than I did. At the second switchback he said, "I felled that whole unit up there. Summer of '78. Your mother was pregnant with Wade." The unit is a thirty-foot-tall stand of Doug fir now, thick as hair. The company replanted it the next spring. He's told me that a hundred times, and it's true, and today I just said, "It looks good, Dad." Because it does.

The restoration reach is about half a mile. Last summer we put in the big wood, whole Doug fir logs with the rootwads still on, set into the creek with an excavator, to make pools. Last winter we planted alder, cedar and willow on both banks, and the rancher let us fence his cows out of it. Dad walked it like he was inspecting a landing. He didn't like how one log was cabled. "That'll move in a big water," he said. He's probably right. I'm going to tell Rick.

Then we got to the pool below the biggest log jam, and there they were. Chinook. Three big dark ones holding in the deep water, tails waving, and down on the gravel at the tail of the pool a pair of them, the female turning on her side and flashing her pale belly, digging her nest in the gravel. The rain last Sunday brought them up.

Dad crouched down on the bank. He has bad knees from thirty years on steep ground and he doesn't crouch for anything. He stayed down there a long time. He said, "Huh." Then, after a while: "Your grandpa said when he was a kid you could about walk across the river on their backs." I said I know. Then he nodded at the log the pool formed behind and said, "That's a good stick."

I said, "Somebody fell that tree."

He said, "Yeah. Somebody like me."

And he put his hand on my shoulder, heavy, the way he did when I was ten, and we stood there and watched the fish until the light went. He didn't turn the radio on the whole way home.

Sept. 21 -- Tuesday

First real rain since June came in Sunday night. The whole valley smells like wet dust and fir. The creeks came up a few inches overnight.

Rick called me at home at 7 a.m., which he never does, and said, "Get up to Cabin Creek." There are chinook spawning in the restoration reach. Above where the old culvert was. The culvert that sat there hanging three feet above the water for twenty years, till we tore it out two summers ago, and nothing with fins could get past it. Rick was practically crying on the phone. Rick is a fifty-year-old hydrologist with a beard to his chest.

I drove up after work and sat on the bank for an hour. Then I did something I didn't expect to do. I called Dad and asked him if he wanted to see them.

I was sure he'd say no. He said, "What time."

Sept. 12 -- Sunday night, late

Bad one tonight.

It started with me saying our project money this year comes partly out of the state lottery, since the voters passed that measure last fall for salmon and parks. Dad said, "So people buying scratch tickets are paying you to put trees back in the creek that they paid me to take out." Which is actually kind of funny, and I should have laughed. Instead I got defensive.

Then it was the old fight. He said the mill closed because of the owl and "you people." I said the mill closed because the big timber on private land was cut faster than it grew back, and the company automated half the jobs out of there years before, and the owl was just the thing everybody could point at. He said I was quoting somebody from Eugene. I said I was quoting the newspaper. Mom said, "Pass the potatoes," which is her version of a fire hose.

The honest truth is that we're both right, and neither of us will say it at the table. The owl got listed when I was sixteen. That year there were yellow ribbons on every car antenna in town. I wore one to school. The federal cut dropped and dropped, and nobody in Portland lost their house over it. People here did. I know families who went on food stamps. I know a man who cried in the bank. When I say "restoration" at dinner, Dad hears somebody telling him his whole life was a mistake.

He went out to the shop and didn't come back in. Mom told me while we did the dishes that he's been going to the retraining class at the community college, a computer class for laid-off workers, and he hates it. He can't make the mouse go where he wants. He's fifty-six. He could drop a two-hundred-foot tree on a dime.

I went out to the shop to say goodnight and he was sharpening chains he has no reason to sharpen. He said goodnight without looking up.

Sept. 2 -- Thursday

They auctioned off the last of the equipment at the old mill site today. Dad went. Mom asked him not to and he went anyway, and stood in the back in his good jacket, and watched men from out of state bid on the machinery.

He was never a mill man. He was a gyppo logger, a small contract outfit, him and three other guys and a yarder and a couple of trucks. But every log he cut for twenty years went through that mill, and when the mill went, the outfit went with it. He sold the yarder last winter to a guy in Idaho.

Mom said he came home, sat in the truck in the driveway for half an hour, and came in and said the pot roast smelled good. That's Dad.

Aug. 23 -- Monday

Ninety-seven degrees in town. We were up on the creek by six to beat the heat, me and Rick and two high school kids from the summer youth crew, doing "release," which is a nice word for cutting blackberry and grass back from around the seedlings we planted so they don't get smothered.

We put in about twelve hundred trees along that creek in February. Pouring rain, mud to the ankles, planting bars, twenty volunteers, three of whom quit at lunch. Today we counted. About two out of three are alive, which Rick says is good for a dry summer. The beavers got the willows at the bottom end, all of them, clean as pencils. I'm not even mad. It's a beaver. It's a sign things are working.

I had a moment up there, with the saw going and sweat in my eyes, when I thought: this is what Dad did. Hot, steep, dirty, out before sunrise, home too tired to talk. The work is backwards, but the body doing it is the same. I'm his kid all the way down.

Aug. 15 -- Sunday

Sunday dinner, a good one. Dad asked about work, which he doesn't usually. I told him we're trying to get shade back over the creeks, keep the water cool for the fish. He said, "When I started out in '69 we yarded the logs right down the creek bed. Didn't think a thing about it. That's just how it was done." Then he said, "They changed the rules on that before you were born." I said I know. He said, "Well, it was a stupid way to do it." My jaw about hit the table. I'm writing it down so I have proof.

His hands on the table while he talked. Scars across both of them, a finger that doesn't bend right. I think about all the trees those hands put on the ground, and all the times they fixed my bike.

Aug. 7 -- Saturday

Starting this because my friend Anna in Portland keeps one and says it helps her think. I think better on paper, but paper doesn't talk back, and apparently sometimes the Internet does.

So. I'm twenty-five. I grew up in a mill town up the river from here. My dad logged for thirty years, my grandpa logged, my brother Wade runs a feller buncher over in Idaho because there's no work here. The mill closed last year. I went off to college, came back with a biology degree, and got a job putting trees back along the same creeks my family helped cut them away from.

Some people in town think I'm a traitor. Some people I work with think my dad is the enemy. I think they're all wrong, and I love my dad, and I love these creeks, and I'm tired of being asked to pick.

Title's from the nickname. Also from the view out my kitchen window. Both still standing.