Remove your shoes at the edge of our island. Close your eyes and fly your mind north to the headwaters—Mount Umbach, 6,000 feet above sea level to a chain of small lakes. Tilt your head back and let the first sounds take a meandering course. Trust this process, said your yoik teacher. Turn your mind west, then northwest, flow south along the Three Sisters Range, across highway, enter a deep canyon, cut through plateaus, and swiftly fall into a narrow channel. Squeeze yourself between walls of volcanic rock. Flow north past stratovolcanoes, and downstream to Telegraph Creek. Carry a river boat in your mind filled with tourists and locals, float an old cottonwood log down past cousin’s Blue Bird floathouse, and a rickety moose camp. Meander past kids in their orange life-jackets swimming off the dock at Twin Lakes. Flow-fly past the hot tub over two nude bathers, and past “The Desert” with the picnickers eating smoked salmon sandwiches on the sand. Drift near the cabins on Farm Island. Flow through the memories of Grandfather homesteading, my mother and her first home as a toddler watching moose eat the garden’s carrots and watching stars streaking overhead across another river of sky. Catch a glint of salmon, hear the sealion’s bellow. Surge home, past the airport lights, past the old derelict boats rotting on the beach, past the harbors, and line of highway, to touch the rocky island shore. There, cold-kiss the current across your toes, suck up the notes into your legs, reach belly and breath. Draw the river in. Fill up with a sandbar, spin in a whirlpool. Open your mouth and make a sound like gravel. Scrape like a cottonwood tree sloughing off the riverbank into the slough. Sound like silt and grit. Become the Shtax’heen.
