stories water tells

*read next post first cause this come after.
We had bought a truck and camper while we were in Watsonville, which gave us our own little house on wheels. We helled around some more. We had a friend traveling with us who was from Oregon so in the spring of 1972 we went to The Dallas Oregon to pick cherries where I remembered my dad and our family working when I was a kid. Because I was a kid I did not remember the timing and we were about two months early, but luckily the farmer hired the guys anyhow for pruning and odd jobs. We camped in their lovely valley for three months or so, which reinforced my experiences with the local legends, but that is a story for another time. Suffice it to say our friend would not sleep in a tent, he slept in the barn loft, because the hoots and howls, clicks and squawks are not coyotes or wolves.

Our friend is Wasco the local tribe, which had been relocated to Warm Springs Agency more central in Oregon, but much of their heritage is the Columbia River area. We spent quite a bit of time with his family both at the agency and in their territory. We fished sockeye salmon with great hoop nets on the white waters of the Deschutes River, and jigged eel at midnight in the light of the full moon on one of its hundreds of tributaries. His mother taught me how to cook eel, how to clean and dry/smoke salmon and eel, and how to make and use a cradle board,and how to listen to the stories water tells, among many other things.