The Shifting Pool
thinking about cold water and good change
About a month ago, on a day too hot to stay inside, I drove out to a small creek in Marin where I like to swim. As I walked through the thick bramble and made it to the spot, I was shocked to see the pool of water more open than it normally appears. I quickly realized that the thirty foot log that was lodged into a giant boulder with a piece of rebar was gone, torn out from the rock from the winter storms.
I’ve gone consistently to this spot a few times every summer for the past three. I know it well. I know when is the best time to catch the deep pool covered in light, I know how its water is always frigid, and how the salmon fry love this deep sanctuary surrounded by sharp boulders and shallow waters on each side of the pool. It’s become a place so special to me that I’m afraid, whoever I end up showing this place to, that they might by sharing it with others accidentally make it a new “spot.” I do it, keep this place a half secret, for the coho and steelhead fry. Or, at least that’s part of the reason. I also do it for myself. In the ever expanding and shifting Bay Area, to have a sliver of sanctuary, of stable peace like this, is a hard thing to part with.
It is places like this, that seem to step outside of daily life, that provide a sense of calm with the certainty that they will always be there, unchanged. But when I arrived, the giant log that my brother and I used to swim jump off of the first time we found it, that I sat on so many time in the shade and sun in quiet calm, was gone, the piece of rebar that kept it in its place running downstream in some winter storm with it.
It was a shock to see the pool so bare, so much more open to the light at first. But still, it was beautiful. Even more so, maybe. Clearly this had happened in the winter, and eventually when I walked down stream I saw the log jammed up against other trees from some flash flood. And staring at the open pool with no log gave me this odd sense of relief. The tree, I assume, was placed there, the rebar reinforcing its presence in the creek, and likely with the intention of keeping coverage for the young salmon of the creek, the fry, seeing as logs and downed trees are perfect areas for the fish to hide in the shade and away from predators like river otters.
What was odd about finding the log gone wasn’t necessarily that it had changed, but how welcome I had received that big shift in what I think of as my sanctuary. I never thought it could change, and if it did, I never considered the possibility of it shifting for the better. How change could be, not just enjoyed for its novelty, but good.
Maybe it’s because I write and think so much about climate change, or that no major shifts have occurred purely positively for me in a while, but lately I've grown reticent to change. It’s not so much as I hate it, but that I live with false expectation, brought on by my own chance history, that change will inevitably mean something horrible. Change, however much I long for it in certain ways, cannot be anything else but tragic. This, I’m sure you know, is only one way of seeing change.
I slipped into the water from the shoreline, the water as frigid as ever and bright in the afternoon light. The banks are still covered in foliage for fish to hide, under willows and dead oak branches. The freezing cold water consumed me, and I could swim more freely without the log there. And I could see that the fish would have enough space to hide. And that it was maybe better for the pool. The log itself was a human intervention the first place to the pool, and its absence only a reconstitution of its old way. It’s shifting didn’t necessarily mean good. It didn’t mean bad. It only had changed. But what makes that palace beautiful, its quiet, the distance from trails and sight from the road, the way the light hits it at one in the afternoon, none of that had changed. A log had moved and helped me to admire all the rest that was left just a small bit more. That’s it.