Birthday blur...

Today is my birthday. Happy birthday me.

How did I get here so quickly? Sometimes it seems as though my whole life is a rushed through journey, there and back again, a bit of a blur. I recollect some small part of it – high days and holidays, dark days and death days - but the rest is ill defined, badly remembered. Whole tracts of my life seem lost to me – they are there somewhere deep, but the days and years submerge them, have dulled and blunted my rememberings with their cumulative weight and sunk them.

Here, let me explain - what was I thinking on this day, my birthday, in 1983? No idea. I think that tells it.

On the day I was born the floodgates of The Dalles Dam were closed. Doesn’t sound like much, but with the closing of the floodgates Celilo Falls ceased to exist along with the Salmon fisheries that Native American Indians had been fishing for thousands of years. At the moment I entered the world hundreds of observers watched as the rising waters of the Columbia River rapidly silenced the falls, submerged the ancient fishing platforms, consumed the village of Celilo, and ended a way of life as my own tiny life kicked in.

Of course I don’t remember this, but I know because my Uncle Charlie used to tell me about it. I can see him now in our living room, my mum and dad out somewhere, telling me how the Red Indians danced around their totems as the water rose. All the big chiefs from the TV were there – Sitting Bull, Geronimo, Cochise, Hiawatha, Crazy Horse, sitting on their Indian ponies wearing eagle feather headdresses.

Charlie said that it was a crime, describing how the water rose above the roofs of the village and how sometimes even today you could hear the chapel bell ringing beneath the water. He’d tell me that since that day no Indian had fished the reservoir left behind by the flooding and that the Salmon had all gone away, taken by Noa-kinem, the Salmon God, to the great fishing lakes in the sky.

Charlie said that electricity wasn’t worth the destruction and sometimes the things people did in the name of progress was quite simply wrong, but that you couldn’t stop progress – more’s the pity.

He was like that my Uncle Charlie. A man who remembered things and built stories to help him remember what was important. He may not have always been historically accurate, and he may sometimes have muddled his stories up a little, but he remembered the important things. He was a story teller my Uncle Charlie, a tale spinner.

And that’s what I’m trying to do with this blog – build stories to help me remember things, create an almost daily record in words and pictures of what I’m doing, thinking, seeing. I’m not always accurate, often it’s written in code, sometimes I muddle things a little, and not all the things I record are important - but then this isn’t meant to be a diary, even though it’s all about me.

In my future I’ll be able to look into the blog and see through the water to the memories beneath without the need to worry about the blur effect of passing years. I’ll always know what I was thinking on this day in 2010, even if nobody else does.

Happy birthday me.