Last Night at the Hatchery

Last Night at the Hatchery

 Evening at the hatchery, Gold Bar, Washington. Mountains in sharp relief, the folds of their ridges turning purple in the dusk. In dim light our eyes shift towards the blue end of the spectrum, making red appear blue, making colors disappear. The Purkinje effect: discovered in 1819 by Czech anatomist Jan Purkyne, who noticed during his walking meditations at dawn that the red flowers he walked past appeared blue. He determined the eye had two systems; one adapted to bright intensity, and one useful in dimmer intensity. He discovered, in effect, why we become colorblind in moonlight.

 

At the hatchery, only a thousand feet below the mountains, a school of steelhead turn in slow circles in the creek, the water’s dark surface a skin their fins cut through like soft knives. They live in the dusk, underwater, all their lives. Part of the summer run of steelhead, now that the long summer nights come to a close, the fish are aware—of what? What compulsive joy  propels them to leap in what look like giddy circles, over and over? An apparent ancient compulsion: round and round they go, leap after leap. They wait for the gates to open, for freedom, for their release, not knowing they are half empty already, of sperm, of eggs. Fed by fish food and ancient desire, they want to go.

 The Purkinje shift, or dark adaptation. Soon I will drive to work in the dark, and come home in the dark. The Pacific Northwest winter is long. I can feel myself preparing to live in the dark shadows and moonlight, preparing my own dark adaptation. The bags of pellets for my stove stacked twelve-deep in the shed, towels stuffed under the doors of the pumphouse to keep it from freezing. Come winter, I can stand among my trees in the moonlight, color drained from the landscape, and marvel that unlike fish, we can navigate both worlds: the light, and the dark. And, like them, feel an ancient compulsion that propels us, leaping, even though we are half empty.