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A few years ago, around 2000, there was another of those big landslides on the Van Duzen River. This one was visible from the highway bridge upstream in the Cheatam Grove, part of Grizzly Creek State Park. An exposed, derelict culvert stood out, the product of a poorly drained logging road combined with additional water draining from some recent uphill clear cuts. The foot of this slide, thousands of yards of clay, sand and rock, was enough to redirect part of the river toward the opposite bank, a sand bar that stretches out from a remnant stand of old-growth redwoods. During high-water storms, the river cut a shallow channel, shortcutting the bar to the bridge and developing a couple of waist-deep scour holes.
A couple of years later I missed a memorial for a friend, an artist and river activist, that was held on that river bar a week after one of those big rain storms in November. As my friend Sal told me about the service, he described some salmon that had been stranded and died in this new side channel. These fall-run chinook were on the spawning venture of their life cycle. They had holed up in the channel long enough to have the water level drop beneath them after the drainage from the storm had subsided.
With an arm load of art material, I ventured there to find several large fish, the longest being 46 inches long and a foot wide. Using Gyotaku prints* that I lifted from these extraordinary salmon, I have produced several multi-media paintings that offer powerful visual testaments to the lives of these creatures. In a later excursion, I found the tracks of a raccoon that had dragged the fish up into the brush near the trees.
Last year, there was much less water running through that channel, as the river had washed a portion of the slide downstream. The last salmon I printed there was so fresh and silver that I was tempted to bring it home. I smeared it with silt to lift several crusty prints onto thick rice paper.
On this cover is a multi-media piece titled Just Logged. It measures 95x 34 and its medium is craft paper laminated on wood panel painted with acrylics. For more information contact me at mguerro@northcoast.com.
*Gyotaku (gyo = fish and taku = rubbing or impression) is a 100-year-old process by which Japanese fishermen pressed their catches onto rice paper for preservation.