For days now the water in Woodard Creek has been high. Really high. Parts of the county are flooding, but this creek, which is visible from the house, has stayed within its corridor thirty feet or so down in the gully where it erodes away some of the glacial clay, sand and stones we are perched on. The water is running high and turbid from the unusual rains we are experiencing.

In most years, at the end of November and the beginning of December, there are chum salmon spawning in the stream. If the weather allows, we sleep with a window open and, being a light sleeper, I am often awakened by the sound of splashing as the big female chums beat out a spawning redd in the gravel and the males fight for territory. The following day, I work my way down the old logging road and observe the fish. There are usually five or so spawners hanging in the current where the creek winds its way through our nine acres of woods; and once I saw a big blue torpedo of a steelhead shoot through on its way upstream.
I watch for Eagles flying above the creek or perched on limbs above it and they are an infallible sign that fish are in. Each day this week I have gone to one of my lookout spots hoping to see the fish, but the fast and turbid flood waters haven’t allowed it. But early this morning I awoke from a vivid dream and in my dream the fish had returned.

I was walking along a path next to a stream when I saw a group of salmon waving back and forth in the clear waters. The chums were accompanied by a large king salmon. Kings would not likely be here, but hey; it’s a dream stream. And not only that, but I yelled up the hill and my father, appearing just as he had when he visited me in Alaska in 1974, came hustling down the trail as I waved sign language about the fish I was seeing.

My father, a chief engineer on ships, was home from the sea and, with my mother, had come to rural Alaska to see the cabin I was building and to do what he loved to do; fish. He was a large Hawai’ian man; born one hundred years ago in Hilo and just a couple of weeks ago we celebrated with a family luau in Hilo and remembered him.

I can’t recall the last time I woke up with tears in my eyes. Perhaps it’s my advancing age and the accompanying melancholy. But I am thankful for the dream’s occurrence at dawn, the time of night when vivid dreams happen and one can remember the details. There was great happiness in seeing my father again and now that my subconscious tells me they are there, I will climb down and see if I can spot the fish.
 
​Russell Cahill 12/10/2015
 

Days of Infamy
A couple of days ago on December 7th I joined most of my countrymen and women and remembered Pearl Harbor. Last Month I visited the Arizona Memorial and paid my respects to the thousands of victims of the sneak attack by Japan. I remembered my dad, granddad and uncle who served in the war and my uncle Freddy’s severe burns and shortened life. On the news, as it is every year at this time were films of FDR’s “Day of Infamy”, speech; one of the seminal speeches in modern American History. After 74 years it continues to show a time when we rallied together as one to defeat evil.

On February 19, 2016 we will remember another infamous day. On that day in 1942, FDR issued Executive Order 9066 which sent Japanese American Citizens away to remote concentration camps because of their ancestry and their names. Places like Tule Lake, a wind ripped corner of California and Minidoka, Idaho and the desert east of the Colorado River in Arizona. There was no wholesale incarceration of German Americans during the same time.

One of my former secretaries graduated from Salinas High School that year and was sent to Tule Lake. My brother in law, at age 2 was spirited off to Arizona with his family. People were rounded up at race tracks and fairgrounds and deprived of their constitutional rights as American Citizens as well as their personal dignity. Housed in leaky barracks in severe weather places like Manzanar on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada Range, The people made do with furniture crafted from produce boxes and vegetable gardens coaxed from marginal soils.

Banks got rich by foreclosing on the homes and properties of these Americans and, with a few notable exceptions where neighbors cared for the places, the people left the camps after the war to find their belongings and properties gone.

One of my friends was released from Tule Lake along with other young people who were accepted at Loyola University in Chicago; a generous gesture by the Jesuits. He was forced with others to stand outside the town limits of Alturas to wait for the bus and refused meal service and the use of rest room facilities. He completed a law degree and served in California’s government for many years.

I want to remember this just as I remember Pearl Harbor. The sneak attacks are now done by individuals. Nine Eleven to San Bernardino, it’s hard to pin it down. The rules of engagement have changed and we’ll need to adapt to fight the evil.

What we don’t need to do is repeat Executive Order 9066. For those racists and insecure Americans who want to separate out people based on religion, sexual orientation, race or national origin I have a message. You want a fight? You’ll have one! I will do everything within my power to keep this particular anomaly in our nation’s history from happening again. And if either party is stupid enough to nominate someone for President who spouts this bile I expect to have many allies in the fight.

​ Russell Cahill December 9, 2015.