distance: seals bobbing and diving, the river crashing into the sea, waves colliding like hands clapping. Her Yurok buddies weren’t fishing anymore; they were talking. One gestured toward our rock. I kind of hoped they’d join us. Except Pat would really get cranky then.
Maybe I did go too far on the drive up. But I wished he’d let it go.
“So it’s not much of a surprise, huh?” the woman continued. “That they’re king of the river. They’re mean and tough, they got teeth like nails. If they were bigger, man, sharks wouldn’t stand a chance, never mind seals.” She squinted at me, sipping. “Because the cussed things can hide right in the open. Their silt-bark color, they can sit right in front of a rock, forget behind it. They can look like part of the scenery. And you swim by feeling safe and cautious, whoever you are — maybe some fancy fish swum upriver — and munch! You’re eel food. But the river ends some-where, you know what I mean?
Every river has its mouth. There’s always that bigger mouth out there waiting for you to wash in, no matter how sly and bad you are at home. You heed those urges and leave your territory, and you’re dinner.”
Pat was tapping the bottom of my foot with his. Tapping, tapping urgently like I should do something.
That’s when I made up my mind: Forget marriage. He was too young. Didn’t want to hear this Yurok woman talk and was tapping on me like, Make her go away, Mom. I had kids, two of them, and they were grown now and out of the house. And not much later, their dad went too (though I didn’t miss him and I did miss the kids, at least sometimes). And I didn’t need someone fifteen years younger than me always putting the responsibility on me. I paid most of the bills, got the food together (didn’t cook, but knew my delis), picked up around the house, told Pat what he should read, because engineers don’t know squat about literature or history; and every time someone needed getting rid of or something social had to be handled or even just a business letter had to be written, it was tap-tap-tap, oh, Maggie, could you please…?
I reached behind me and shoved Pat’s foot away. If he wanted to be antisocial, he could think of a way to make the woman leave himself. We had plenty of time to talk, just the two of us. I didn’t want her to go yet.
“Got any more?” the Yurok asked.
I pulled the second bottle out of our beat-up backpack and opened it, trying not to look at Pat, knowing he’d have that hermity scowl now big-time.
“You picnic like this pretty often?” she asked.
“Yeah, we always keep stuff in the trunk — wine, canned salmon, crackers. Gives us the option.” That was the other side of it: Pat was fun, and he let me have control. If I said let’s go, he said okay. That means everything if you spent twenty years with a stick-in-the-mud.
“You come here a lot?” she asked.
“No. This was a special trip.”
“It was supposed to be,” Pat fussed.
I hastily added, “Our beaches down around Santa Cruz and Monterey are nice, but we’ve been to them a thousand times.”
“Mmm.” She let me refill her cup. I had more too. Pat didn’t seem to be drinking.
“Now, the sea lion is a strange one,” she said. “There’s little it won’t eat, and not much it won’t do to survive, but it has no guile.
It swims along, do-de-do, and has a bite whenever it can. It doesn’t hide or trick. It’s lazy. If it can find a place to gorge, it’ll do that and forget about hunting. It doesn’t seem to have the hunting instinct.
It just wants to eat and swim and jolly around. Mate. Be playful.”
She broke another piece of salmon off, holding it in fingers with silt and sand under the nails. “Whereas an eel is always lurking, even when it’s just eaten. It never just cavorts. It’s always thinking ahead, like a miser worrying how to get more.”
“Until it leaves home and washes into the sea lion’s mouth.” I concluded the thought for her.
“What the eel needs”—she sat up—“is a way to say, Hell no. Here it is, the smarter, stealthier creature. And what does nature do but use its own instinct against it. Favor some fat, lazy thing that’s not even a fish, it’s a mammal that lives in the water, that doesn’t really belong and yet has food poured down its gullet just for being in the right place.” She pointed at the sea lion heads bobbing in the waves.
“Look at them. This is their welfare cafeteria. They do nothing but open their mouths.”
Pat put in, “You could say you’re like the seals. You’re out there with those steel-pronged things, spearing eels.”
I wanted to hit him. It seemed a rude thing to say.
“The Yurok are like the eels.” She removed her hat. Her dark hair, flattened on top, began to blow in the wind coming off the water.
“The Yurok were king because the Yurok knew how to blend in.
The Yurok thought always of food for tomorrow because Yurok nightmares were full of yesterday’s starvation. The Yurok were part of the dark bottom of history’s river, silent and ready. And they got swept out into the bigger mouths that waited-without deserving.”
She leaped to her feet. She looked majestic, her hair blowing against a background of gray-white clouds, her arms and chin raised to the heavens. “This is where the ancient river meets the thing that is so much bigger, the thing the eel can’t bear to understand because the knowledge is too bitter.”
Behind me, Pat whispered, “This is weird. Look at her friends.”
On the beach, the Yurok men raised their arms too. They stood just like the woman, maybe imitating her to tease her, maybe just coincidence.
“Where the ancient river meets the thing that is much bigger, and the eel can’t understand because the knowledge is too bitter,” she repeated to the sky.
Pat was poking me now, hardly bothering to whisper. “I don’t like this! She’s acting crazy!”
I smacked him with an absent-minded hand behind my back, like a horse swatting off a fly. Maybe this was too much for a software engineer — why had I ever thought I could marry someone as unlyr-ical as that? — but it was a writer’s dream. It was real-deal Yurok lore. If she quit because of him, I’d push Pat’s unimaginative damn butt right off the rock.
She shook her head from side to side, hair whipping her cheeks.
“At the mouth of the river, you learn the truth: follow your obsession, and the current carries you into a hundred waiting mouths. But if you lie quiet”—she bent forward so I could see her bright dark eyes—“and think passionately of trapping your prey, if your hunger is a great gnawing within you, immobilizing you until the moment when you become a rocket of appetite to consume what swims near—”
“What do they want?” Pat’s shadow fell across the rock. I turned to see that he was standing now, staring down the beach at the Yurok men.
They’d taken several paces toward us. They seemed to be watching the woman.
She was on a roll, didn’t even notice. “Then you don’t ride the river into the idle mouth, the appetite without intelligence, the hunger that happens without knowing itself.”
Pat’s anoraked arm reached over me and plucked the paper cup from her hand. “You better leave now.”
“What is your problem, Patrick?” I jumped to my feet. Big damn kid, Jesus Christ. Scared by legends, by champagne talk on a beach!
“Mellow the hell out.”
My words wiped the martial look off his face. A marveling betrayal replaced it. “You think you’re so smart, Maggie, you think you know everything! But you’re really just a sheltered little housewife.”
I was too angry to speak. I maybe hadn’t earned much over the years, but I was a
His lips compressed, his eyes squinted, his whole freckled Scot’s face crimped with wronged frustration. “But I guess the Mature One has seen more than a child like myself. I guess it takes an Artist to really know life.”
“Oh, for Christ sake!” I spoke the words with both arms and my torso. “Are you such a white-bread baby you can’t hear a little bit of Yurok metaphor without freaking out?”
He turned, began to clamber down the rock. He was muttering.
I caught the words “princess” and “know everything,” as well as some serious profanity.
I turned to find the Yurok woman sitting on the blanket, drinking sedately, her posture unabashedly terrible. I remained standing for a few minutes, watching Patrick jerk along the beach, fists buried in his pockets.
“He doesn’t want my friends to join us,” she concluded correctly.
