for the first time in living memory

imagine a creek that laughed through the winter moons behind, through, for, the winter village of your family, as long as both people and creek laughed winters through to the sea.
imagine a creek as a vein, ever flowing down, out, away, washing land, filling ocean.
imagine a creek as an artery, salmon returning home, feeding bear, wolf, eagle, human, cedar, forest.
imagine a thin green space through a nanaimo subdivision holding this gentle creek that spills into departure bay under a bridge for cars passing petrocan and macs, a public beach and a new carving acknowledging the ancient site of a peoples winter village

This year the salmon came back, no need to imagine, but witness.
at least 100 pink salmon, swimming, thriving, fertilizing, dying

this year the salmon came back, for the first time in living memory

Imagine

people sitting beside a river as unimaginable as the Skeena
telling stories of when the salmon used to run before the spill

that bitumen that leaked somewhere, for weeks, before the helicopters could land through the fog, letting little humans scramble through slick thickets of once were trees, two pipes, one with bitumen, the other pumping chemical, leaking, if not spewing. unimaginable.

Or Imagine (or experience!)

people this year harvesting salmon, 40 50 lb's a fish
or eulachen early spring, that fish that sustains us by the millions

from hartley bay through to smithers there's people who live with this river
100 000's of dollars are generated by tourism and even more through fishing

...

Tsimshian woman drying salmon 1920