Beargasms and Imperial Residue

the Further Adventures of Trashy Drifter

Chapter 40

Beargasms and Imperial Residue

Bear-gasm; (n) A feeling of intense pleasure accompanied by a
gasp, exhaled by a tourist upon his/her first sighting of a grizzly.

Oh beloved, the salmon are here. The reek of rotting fish hangs thick in the air like an old curtain. I’ve
seen them teeming in their multitudes, boiling the surface of the water, frothing, seething and lurking.
Their spent bones and flesh flutter underwater and cling to the rocks and sticks like Tibetan prayer flags,
unravelling their gifts to the stream. The water smells and looks like cold fish-head soup, thick with
shreds of the dead.

I have kayaked up the river on a rising tide with schools of salmon darting and swirling under my keel.
They have leaped into the air, high enough and close enough to grab with bare hands. To coast silently
up a rainforest river, with fish swarming below, eagles and herons coasting coolly overhead with the
surreal speech of the ravens filling the moss and lichen draped forest is to feel the sanctity of the wild.
Then, when a bear weighs in and begins catching and eating fish just twenty feet away, one can feel
so overloaded with the sheer power of natural beauty being pounded into one’s eye sockets that it’s
enough to make one barf!

Just last week, over ten thousand salmon died, because there were more fish in the stream than oxygen
to breathe. Their carcasses litter the banks and float down into the cove. Many of their bodies bear bite
marks on their bellies, where the bears have ripped out the eggs and left the rest to the scavengers.
But those ten thousand were just a fraction of the fish that are here now, and they keep arriving. The
Spawnathon is on!

It literally looks as though you could walk across the stream on the backs of the salmon, the streams
are black with their bodies and the party is well underway. Every day is an all day, all you can eat sushi
buffet and the bears have arrived to feast. Just this afternoon I have seen twelve different grizzly bears,
becoming roly poly and pulling a Marlon Brando. The eagles are here as well, the trees are full of them

and their squeaky wheel screeches pierce the air, today I counted over sixty that I could see with the
naked eye. They supervise the mass suicide haughtily from their lofty perches.

So, when there are bears to be seen, the tourists are happy. Even though they are drenched with rain
and shivering, they bear the grins of kids delighted with what Santa has brought them. Although I must
say, for me personally, I am much more in love with my accordion. My mother in law bought Bella a
Frontalini squeezebox at a garage sale and I have been noodling away on it compulsively. I would almost
admit that I am addicted to it. The way a junkie craves his dope is nothing compared to how I yearn to
play that thing. When I am out on a boat, or on a hike, I can hardly wait to come back home, sweep her
up in my arms and squeeze her tight. There’s something about how an accordion vibrates your chest
cavity as you play that makes it incredibly intimate, the way it breathes in and out and responds so
attentively to your fingers caresses, is unparalleled. That is, of course when it is played well, when it’s
not, it weeps and bawls like a bratty child.

But I digress, a few days ago; I led a hike up a mountain while playing accordion. I played sea shanties
and Leonard Cohen songs. The way that the music transcended language got me to thinking about
language and how all our guests here manage to speak English, except for a few recalcitrant and
resolute Italians and French.

English is indeed the world’s communicator. I’ve been picking up some scraps and fragments of Danish
and Italian and Dutch, but really, everyone is quite happy to speak in English if they can. When the Dalai
Lama talks to Desmond Tutu, they do so in English. We had two Swiss guests here recently. One spoke
French and the other German, but to speak to each other, the spoke in English, the common ground.

This language we speak, which we are speaking now, is of course an invasive species which has
invaded this land and choked out other ones which had thrived for millennia. Not so long ago,
Kwakwakwakwa’kwa was spoken in this cove. Hell I can’t even say Kwakwakwakwakwa’kwa much less
speak it, can you?

And so, beloved, I leave you with this parting thought. When you think of me, can you do so in a
language which cannot be spoken?