Photo: Andy Ambelang
The river is high this week; high for the last four weeks. Almost the color of chocolate milk, and running now with a visible determination to get downhill—downstream—home—it swirls and gurgles and trips over itself. A fisherman friend tells me that the change in the river level upsets the fish, as it would us if we woke up in a thick haze, or with our lawns somehow over our houses. The fish—he tells me—stay below the surface and wait it out.
As for me, I’m not content to wait out the high water. My most direct interaction with the river is kayaking, and while the water is fast and unpredictable, I have to paddle with care. Two weeks ago, at Brennan’s Wave, two other paddlers in the eddy pointed frantically upstream and I was just able to avoid a tractor tire, half-submerged, in the current.
The junk coming downstream is both the result of the spring runoff and something even more rejuvenating, something longer awaited. This April, the Milltown Dam, which segregated the Clark Fork from the Blackfoot River, was breached. Two long-separated lovers were rejoined for the first time in one-hundred years. It was not without conflict: heavy metals that were integral in keep the two apart washed downstream—cadmium, nickel, even mercury—killing the fish and closing the river to people.
If you go to Milltown, to Bonner, and look at the breached dam, it looks like chaos. A bridge lies on its side, spanning nothing. Tattered rebar and chunks of concrete litter the bank, and heavy machinery fouls the air. The Blackfoot, twisting through a diversion channel, almost reluctantly, trickles back into the Clark Fork. What looks like destruction may, downstream, closer to the source, really be progress. Silt from the Blackfoot muddies the Clark Fork, new sediment over the old.
