This is salmon spawing time on west-coast shores. The first pink salmon started homing in on their birth streams some time in July and August and when the first good rainfall (never far away on this coast) gave them sufficient water depth to head upstream, they went. Other species are still moving in now, with coho and spring and chum salmon filling the estuaries of waterways, thrashing against currents to mate in pebbly upstream reaches and then as spent bodies, drifting down again to feed a host of other life.
One very accessible waterway where we could always witness this life-to-death cycle play out is Goldstream Park where the stream flows alongside our section of the Trans Canada Highway. A drive up-island always felt like it started at that park, no matter from what point in the city we had set out. Once down into the ravine, winding between canyon wall and water, we were really on our way, one world behind us, an adventure ahead.
And always, coming out of the shade of the last curve to start the climb up the Malahat, passing the entrance to the park, car filled with the chatter of children, I remembered the gentle man who was teacher and custodian in this corner of the inlet and whose name the nature house at the park now bears.
I met Freeman King in the fall of 1965. New to Victoria and almost new to teaching, I decided to take my grade five class out to Goldstream to watch the salmon run. Other staff assured me it would be a good education for an eastern urbanite like myself as much as for my class.
I knew about salmon spawning only as textbook information for Ontario classrooms. The facts were as clear in my pre-trip lessons as the colour plates in the children's books as I told them what to look for and where to look for it. Forty youngsters, field-trip happy, were counted into cars and driven out to Goldstream and turned loose to look for salmon.
In retrospect, it wasn't the best instruction for maintaining control of a group of 10-year olds and for a while it looked as if one of my recurrent nightmares would be coming true as kids galloped along banks, splashed through shallows, yelled back and forth and poked at dead fish with boots and sticks.
And then I noticed one group gathered around the grown-up hunched down by a shallow pool. Others began moving toward them too, drawn by the promise of something gruesome occurring. It was Freeman King, the park ranger, chatting with the young people as he opened up a rotting salmon carcass with his jacknife.
When I got there, the biology lesson was moving right along and I hung on the edge listening to the autopsy report being delivered by a group of ten-year olds complete with exclamations about the stink and the bugs. What struck me was that Freeman wasn't delivering a lecture; he was as interested as the youngsters in what was to be found in that carcass, providing the odd term here and there, but mostly just opening things up and nodding as his audience contributed their collective knowledge about fish anatomy. The longest speech he gave was in response to the observation by one of his clique that "They all die after they've spawned, don't they."
He nodded and allowed that most people would say that; most people would say that things in nature got old and died and that death was the end, but he couldn't completely agree with that notion.
"Look at how much life these salmon are giving," he told them. "Their eggs are in the gravel upstream and they'll hatch into new life when they're ready. As for these bodies, well the ravens eat them, and the seagulls, and the raccoons and the snails. The crabs in the inlet will pick the bones of any that float downstream. Even the insects along the stream here will feed on them, and then when the young salmon hatch out, these bugs or their offspring will be eaten in turn. Life never stops; it just changes shape and its name."
And that was it: some observations and a quiet declaration of the way it was for him. Then he stood up and ambled off along the bank, a silent demonstration of how to move without disturbing his charges.
For most of the children, that day was their first confrontation with a philosophy of existence and they internalized it in varying degrees by repeating it, shuffling or murmuring agreement. Perhaps they would remember it in later years as I did when some member of their family died. For all of them though, the meeting with "the old guy in charge of the creek" was the high point of the field trip and the reports they wrote had as much to do with him and his observations as with salmon spawning.
Freeman King really was the old guy in charge of the creek to countless groups of schoolchildren who visited Goldstream Park. People have told me he could deliver thunderous blasts to any who needed verbal buckshot to penetrate their callous stupidity, but I was never within range when he did. I just remember seeing him years after, still chatting to groups, taking all the time in the world to listen as much as to talk, and granting always the gift of interest to children sorting out the complexities of life and death along the watercourse.
In an age of sound bites and hyper-news when communications between adult and child are too often monopolized by the former in the form of bubbly assertions or painful interrogations, neither of which allow for more than monosyllabic responses, Freeman King was a open-minded listener and a demonstration of what it is to take a stand without imposing it. For a young teacher, he was a lesson in how to listen a person into discovery.