Outsiders or newcomers to Washington may think that Microsoft, or Boeing, if they haven’t read of recent defections, is the King of the Northwest.

But anyone over the age of fifty who was born and raised in Western Washington will know that Salmon is the Once and Only King. There is no way to have been raised in this state and missed seeing and being inspired by the magnificent salmon runs that have historically shaped the Pacific Northwest and the cultures that have thrived here.

Richard Hugo, born in White Center, just as I was, offers poems that celebrate this event and others that mourn its passing as industry, aided and abetted by government neglect, have decimated these magnificent runs.

“Skykomish River Running,” though it focuses somewhat on the steelhead thriving on the salmon runs, beautifully captures the feelings one has when observing a salmon run:

Aware that summer baked the water clear,
today I came to see a fleet of trout.
But as I wade the salmon limp away,
their dorsal fins like gravestones in the air,
on their sides the red that kills the leaves.
Only sun can beat a stream this thin.
The river Sky is humming in my ear.

Where this river empties in the sea,
trout are waiting for September rain
to sting their thirst alive. If they speed
upstream behind the kings and eat the eggs
the silvers lay, I’ll pound the drum for rain.
But sunlight drums, the river is the same,
running like old water in my ear.

I will cultivate the trout, teach their fins
to wave in water like the legs of girls
tormented black in pools. I will swim a
week to be a witness to the spawning,
be a trout, eat the eggs of salmon—
anything to live until the trout and rain
are running in the river in my ear.

The river Sky is running in my hair.
I am floating past the troutless pools
learning water is the easy way to go.
I will reach the sea before December
when the Sky is turning gray and wild
and rolling heavy from the east to say
late autumn was an Oriental child.

The narrator begins by simply wading out into the middle of a salmon migration, accurately observing the “dorsal fins like gravestones in the air” and the bright autumn-like colors of the dying fish.

But in the midst of this sacrificial and holy grounds, the narrator suddenly feels“the river Sky” humming in his ear, as he becomes one with the river and identifies with the Indians who gave this river its name, SKYkomish, saying he’ll “pound the drum for rain.” He continues to transform, saying I will “be a trout,” “swim a/ week to be a witness to the spawning,” and, in the last stanza, “floating past the troutless pools/learning water is the easy way to go.”

I, too, am of these salmon, nourished of their flesh before I was flesh. I, too, struggled with them, brothers, nearly as big as myself, to discover through the struggle who I was and who I was to become. I, too, survived the winter to be reborn in spring by feasting on their flesh.

And I, like Hugo, discovered my common heritage with the American natives who celebrated the salmon’s spirit long before my ancestors came to these shores. I continually try to reinforce that shared heritage by attempting to ensure the salmon’s continued existence despite the many obstacles they face.

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.

Usually I hate “prose poems,” you know those kinds of poems poets write to fill out a book when they can’t write real poetry anymore. Have to admit, a goodly amount of the time I don’t even bother to read them. Just skip right over them looking for something I might enjoy. And, if the truth be known, I didn’t like any other one of these in Hugo’s Selected Poems.

But this “Letter to Levertov from Butte” summarizes the essence of Richard Hugo’s poetry so beautifully that I would be a fool to try to write anything better. In fact, it’s so clearly written that I won’t insult your intelligence by trying to interpret it.

Letter to Levertov from Butte

Dear Denise: Long way from, long time since Boulder. I hope
you and Mitch are doing OK. I get rumors. You’re in Moscow,
Montreal. Whatever place I hear, it’s always one of glamor.
I’m not anywhere glamorous. I’m in a town where children
get hurt early. Degraded by drab homes. Beaten by drunken
parents, by other children. Mitch might understand. It’s kind
of a microscopic Brooklyn, if you can imagine Brooklyn
with open pit mines, and more Irish than Jewish. I’ve heard
from many of the students we had that summer. Even seen
a dozen or so since then. They remember the conference
fondly. So do I. Heard from Herb Gold twice and read now and then
about Isaac Bashevis Singer who seems an enduring diamond.
The mines here are not diamond. Nothing is. What endures
is sadness and long memories of labor wars in the early
part of the century. This is the town where you choose sides
to die on, company or man, and both are losers. Because
so many people died in mines and fights, early in history
man said screw it and the fun began. More bars and whores
per capita than any town in America. You live only
for today. Let me go symbolic for a minute: great birds
cross over you anyplace, here they grin and dive. Dashiell
Hammett based Red Harvest here though he called it Personville
and "person" he made sure to tell us was "poison" in the slang.
I have ambiguous feelings coming from a place like this
and having clawed my way away, thanks to a few weak gifts
and psychiatry and the luck of living in a country
where enough money floats to the top for the shipwrecked
to hang on. On one hand, no matter what my salary is
or title, I remain a common laborer, stained by the perpetual
dust from loading flour or coal. I stay humble, inadequate
inside. And my way of knowing how people get hurt, make
my (damn this next word) heart go out through the stinking air
into the shacks of Walkerville, to the wife who has turned
forever to the wall, the husband sobbing at the kitchen
table and the unwashed children taking it in and in and in
until they are the wall, the table, even the dog the parents
kill each month when the money’s gone. On the other hand,
I know the cruelty of poverty, the embittering ways
love is denied, and food, the mean near-insanity of being
and being deprived, the trivial compensations of each day,
recapturing old years in broadcast tunes you try to recall
in bars, hunched over the beer you can’t afford, or bending
to the bad job you’re lucky enough to have. How, finally,
hate takes over, hippie, nigger, Indian, anyone you can lump
like garbage in a pit, including women. And I don’t want
to be part of it. I want to be what I am, a writer good enough
to teach with you and Gold and Singer, even if only in
some conference leader’s imagination. And I want my life
inside to go on long as I do, though I only populate bare
landscape with surrogate suffering, with lame men
crippled by more than disease, and create finally
a simple grief I can deal with, a pain the indigent can find
acceptable. I do go on. Forgive this raving. Give my best
to Mitch and keep plenty for yourself. Your rich friend, Dick.

When I started reading Hugo’s Selected Poems, I was mainly hoping that Hugo would help me remember places like the Skykomish and the Duwamish in a new light, which he certainly has done .

What I ended up discovering, though, is that we shared a lot more than similar experiences. We ended up seeing the world through our experiences. White Center apparently left indelible memories, memories that, in turn, affected the way we both saw the rest of our lives. Like Hugo I “remain a common laborer, stained by the perpetual/dust from loading flour or coal,” though in my case it is more likely the dust from the janitorial work I did to put myself through college.

A major difference, though, is that Hugo stayed in White Center much longer than I did. He was left to grow up with grandparents. My parents, on the other hand, were gradually fighting their way out of White Center. We moved constantly as my dad worked his way up in his company, but I never lost the memory of White Center and the people I knew there. Like Hugo, I’ve always identified more with the poor and the working class than I have with the wealthy. I think if I had stayed in White Center I would have ended up with a viewpoint even more similar to the one Hugo expressed in this letter to Denise Levertov. As it is, though, having escaped that world early one, I am slightly more optimistic than Hugo is in most of his poetry.

After the Army I became a caseworker in order to help the poor, but I was unable to endure the sheer misery that I came into contact with daily. I knew that if I stayed in that job very long I would end up killing an abusive father or, worst of all, I would become indifferent to the pain I saw every day. I quit that job and became a teacher because I felt I would be more able to help them as a teacher.

As a teacher, I tried to identify with all of my students, but the ones I often cared for the most, and went out of my way to help the most, were the ones who had to struggle the hardest to succeed, the ones who were in the most danger if they did fail, because they would fail life not merely another English class. That’s not to say that many of them didn’t fail, because they did fail in much higher numbers than their classmates. Perhaps I knew that would happen, too, because I saw my share of failures and deaths in my childhood.

I’m not sure how many people today would identify with the central image in these two poems, but I certainly do. I’ve always had a garden my whole life, and there’s nothing more back breaking than hoeing a garden, particularly a new garden with lots of rocks. Perhaps, though, I’m even fonder of the image because it reminds me of all the times I would return home to find my mother in her last years weeding the garden, keeping it as spotless as she kept the house. Then again, maybe it just reminds me of Roethke’s excellent poem “Long Live the Weeds," and how we define ourselves by the weeds we fight.

The image of a person hoeing the garden is obviously an important image to Hugo because he used this same image in poems that were written years apart and a continent away from each other.

“The Way a Ghost Dissolves” seems to describe someone special to the Hugo who lived in White Center. She appears in two poems in his first book of poems:

The Way a Ghost Dissolves

Where she lived the close remained the best.
The nearest music and the static cloud,
sun and dirt were all she understood.
She planted corn and left the rest
to elements, convinced that God
with giant faucets regulates the rain
and saves the crops from frost or foreign wind.

Fate assisted her with special cures.
Rub a half potato on your wart
and wrap it in a damp cloth. Close
your eyes and whirl three times and throw.
Then bury rag and spud exactly where
they fall. The only warts that I have now
are memories or comic on my nose.

Up at dawn. The earth provided food
if worked and watered, planted green
with rye grass every fall. Or driven wild
by snakes that kept the carrots clean,
she butchered snakes and carrots with a hoe.
Her screams were sea birds in the wind,
her chopping-nothing like it now.

I will garden on the double run,
my rhythm obvious in ringing rakes,
and trust in fate to keep me poor and kind
and work until my heart is short.

The woman in the poem is at first glance a simple, unsophisticated woman, one who loves being out of doors working in the sun and dirt. She had a simple faith that if she planted and weeded the garden that God would take care of the rest. While the lady is unsophisticated and superstitious, she has managed to survive for years because of her faith in God, and because of her hard working habits. She’s even a good enough gardener to realize that a cover crop of rye in the fall will help to produce more crops the next year, something that not many gardeners today would know. She’s certainly persistent because despite her fear of snakes, she keeps on gardening more fiercely than ever.

Despite apparently mixed feelings about her, the narrator styles his working habits after her habits. He “will garden on the “double run,” trust in fate to keep him “poor and kind,” and “work until my heart is short.” He obviously feels a lot of love for this “ghost.”

“South Italy, Remote and Stone” appeared in Hugo’s third volume of poetry written eight years later. Here he uses the same image to portray an Italian peasant’s survival and, in an extension of the image, his own survival:

South Italy, Remote and Stone

The enemy’s not poverty. It’s wind.
Morning it beats you awake to the need
for hoeing and hoeing rock. The priest proclaims
it’s not a futile wind. This air moves
with undercurrents of hope five stunted
olive trees pick up. You live all year
on the gallon of olives you sell
and hope the stone will be soil
enough to grow something in. Your hoe and wind
have fought this stone forever and lost.

Up north, the kind have issued your name:
paese abbandonato. It rings now
in this wind that clears my eyes. Your hands
are not abandoned, and the harsh length
of each day forces you to love whatever is—
a screaming wife, a child who has stared
from birth. The road I came on must be old
or some state accident. In heat, this place
is African. In cold, a second moon.

Even your tongue is hard. Syllables whip
and demons, always deposited cruel
in the prettiest unmarried girl,
must be whipped by the priest into air
where bells can drive them to rivers. Or
she will be sent out forever, alone on the roads
with her madness, no chance to be saved
by a prince or kind ox. And so on, a test
of your love. Only the ugly survive.

I’m still alive. My love was tested and passed
something like this. Much better soil.
A more favorable chance at the world.
I sent myself out forever on roads.
I’ll never be home except here, dirt poor
in abandoned country. My enemy, wind,
helps me hack each morning again at the rock.

Here the element of the wind, or human spirit, is added to the image of hoeing. For it is the human spirit that drives the peasant to “hoeing rock,” hoping against hope that the hoe and “five stunted olive trees” will carry the family through the year. Here the image is also extended to include all the peasants whose “hoe and wind have fought this stone forever and lost.”

In the second and third stanza, Hugo portrays just how difficult life is for these people and the disastrous effects such poverty has. on “paese abbandonato,’ this abandoned country.
Abandoned or not, the people struggle to survive, loving even the tragedies of their lives, “the screaming wife” or the “crippled child.” If a girl happens to be pretty, she will be persecuted by the people and driven out or sent out on the road with “no chance to be saved by a prince or kind ox.” Here, according to Hugo, “only the ugly survive,” ugly because of what it takes to survive, here where there is no room for pity or mercy.

In the final stanza, Hugo suggests that this is very much like the kind of life, though in “much better soil,” that he has survived. He is forever on the road, but it is only in a place like this that he feels truly at home. His spirit helps him to hoe the row that he has been given in life.