Richard Hugo’s “Duwamish” is as melancholy and depressing as “Skykomish River Running” was exultant and uplifting, and yet the Duwamish River is less than sixty miles from the Skykomish River. The difference between the two is industrialization and pollution.

When I was growing up in Seattle, the Duwamish was probably the major source of salmon in Puget Sound. On fishing derby days, rows of boats nearly covered the bay between West Seattle and Skidroad while endless schools of salmon headed up the river.

Those salmon barely exist today, partially because of we fishermen, but mainly because of the pollution that has destroyed the salmon’s breeding grounds, the destruction that Hugo so clearly portrays in “Duwamish”:

Duwamish

Midwestern in the heat, this river’s
curves are slow and sick. Water knocks
at mills and concrete plants, and crud
compounds the gray. On the out-tide,
water, half salt water from the sea,
rambles by a barrel of molded nails,
gray lumber piles, moss on ovens
in the brickyard no one owns.
Boys are snapping tom cod spines
and jeering at the Greek who bribes
the river with his sailing coins.

Because the name is Indian, Indians
ignore the river as it cruises
past the tavern. Gulls are diving crazy
where boys nail porgies to the pile.
No Indian would interrupt his beer
to tell the story of the snipe
who dove to steal the nailed girl
late one autumn, with the final salmon in.

This river colors day. On bright days
here, the sun is always setting or obscured
by one cloud. Or the shade extended
to the far bank just before you came.
And what should flare, the Chinese red
of a searun’s-fin, the futile roses,
unkept cherry trees in spring, is muted.
For the river, there is late November
only, and the color of a slow winter.

On the short days, looking for a word,
knowing the smoke from the small homes
turns me colder than wind from
the cold river, knowing this poverty
is not a lack of money but of friends,
I come here to be cold. Not silver cold
like ice, for ice has glitter. Gray cold
like the river. Cold like 4 PM
on Sunday. Cold like a decaying porgy.

But cold is a word. There is no word along
this river I can understand or say.
Not Greek threats to a fishless moon
nor Slavic chants. All words are Indian.
Love is Indian for water, and madness
means, to Redmen, I am going home.

This is the Northwest, not the Midwest; here rivers run swift and clear, not slow and gray. But here the lumber mills and concrete plants crowd the river banks slowing the river, spewing waste products, turning the already gray water ever dingier.

At low tide the garbage discarded by new and old industries emerges, dominating the landscape. Even the businesses that helped destroy the river have shut down, leaving their brick corpses behind. It is a landscape of the dead.

Even the Indians who named this river, just as they named the beautiful Skykomish, no longer claim this river as their own. They’re ashamed of what has become of it and no longer interrupt their beer drinking to tell miraculous tales of the river.

There are more than enough gray days in Seattle, but the dinginess of this river turns even a sunny day gray. At the very least, a single cloud blocks the sun. Bright trees that should reflect brilliantly in the river are muted and gray. The river always looks gray, just like the heavy rain clouds that gather in November.

In reality, this river is dead. Dead like a decaying porgy nailed to the piling. It has been abandoned just like those who live here in poverty have been abandoned. A lack of friends has killed it.

In the end, though, the poet does not have adequate words to describe this place of abandonment. “There is no word along/ this river I can understand or say.” This is the ultimate betrayal.

It is a betrayal not only of the land, but of the heritage of the land. It is a betrayal of those whose memories are intertwined with this river. I can never take my grandson fishing on this river, so he will never know the joy that I had while fishing here with my father. In essence, he will never know my father existed at all because this river has been taken from us by greed and ignorance.

Little wonder Indians feel betrayed by the white man’s failure to honor the old fish treaties. We have destroyed not only the Indians but the very rivers that sustained them. In the end, if we’re not careful we will also destroy that which sustains us, and there will be no one to name the rivers. There will be no more Skykomish, no more Duwamish, just gray rivers dumping sewage into a gray Sound.