Remembering a River

The Cycle by Tegan Keyes

A single thread
in a tapestry weaving though

the orca’s teeth, the heron’s beak,
the eagle’s plunging talons,
the bear’s dark gut,
the tangled roots of cedar and spruce,

and now the glittering moss of microbes
frilling across the tired body
tarnished green and red

which has accomplished
nothing less
than the mending
of the world.

No river that I know gives up her freedom willingly. The Elwha is no exception. In 1912, two years after the Olympic Power Company began constructing a dam along her path, the Elwha River—in a show of agency and defiance—washed out the foundation of the dam that had been laid upon her. Her current thrust heavy concrete slabs from a bed of salmon eggs—tiny fish, sustenance for the Elwha Valley. Within a year, the Olympic Power Company rebuilt and completed the first dam.

Yet the story of the dams begins long before their construction—around 1850—when a “treaty” between the Klallam Tribes and the United States government was forged. A treaty that would mean losing nearly everything for the Klallam people.

The dams were more than industrial endeavors; they were relics, echoes of a deeper and more insidious force: colonial conquest and imperialism. Through this lens, the Elwha’s power became a resource to control—stripped of the sacred interdependence with the mountains and forests that shape her.

Just as rivers resist surrender, we humans rarely forfeit what we love. The Klallam Tribes faced concrete barriers knowing all too well the domination code wielded by colonists and capitalists. This small account cannot do justice to the multitude of lifetimes dedicated to fighting for the Elwha’s emancipation over 101 years (1913–2014). The endurance of the Klallam peoples in this century-long struggle—for both their river and their way of life—is unmatched, their activism mirrored only by their kinfolk: the Pacific salmon.

In the early 1900s, salmon swam in such abundance that the Elwha River alone supported over 400,000 fish annually. The very year the first dam was completed in 1913, that number dropped to an estimated 3,000. From 400,000 to 3,000 in mere months—the heartbeat of an ecosystem silenced almost overnight.

The second dam carved a still reservoir out of the valley, drowning fertile banks and native plants, displacing birds, and starving old-growth trees of nutrients once delivered by salmon returning year after year to spawn and die. As marine biologist Alexandra Morton writes: “Salmon are a living artery keeping the entire coastline alive... they are the blood flowing through its body.” Within a few short years of their loss, the valley became almost unrecognizable.

Salmon, however, are not faint of heart. As a keystone species, their lives sustain countless others. Born in freshwater, they travel thousands of miles through the Pacific before returning to their exact birthplace to spawn—and die. Despite every obstacle, they remember their home waters.

In 1913, 400,000 salmon returned to the Elwha, intent on fulfilling their ancient calling. Instead, they met a concrete wall. Packed together, leaping and writhing, they searched for passage and perished in droves. Yet they came back five years later. Ten years later. Thirty. Sixty. Though their numbers dwindled, their purpose never wavered.

By then, generations of salmon returned to a place they had never even been born. No fish ladders had ever been built, despite laws requiring them since the late 1800s. Eighty years after the first dam rose, the salmon still came "home"—to the same impassable wall.

How did they know where to return? How could they find the Elwha from thousands of miles away in Alaskan waters? Somehow, against all logic, they remembered.

When the time finally came to remove the dams, there had never been a project quite like it—the largest dam removal in history. Some scientists warned it could take nearly a century for the river to cleanse itself enough to sustain life again. The weight of this loss pressed heavily on the Klallam people’s shoulders, who, like the salmon, still dreamed of the Elwha’s freedom. Hope lingered, quiet but unwavering.

Then, in August 2014, the last dam came down.

The blast shook the earth, mountains, and trees. Concrete shattered and cascaded into the canyon, releasing a roar of water long imprisoned. Onlookers—Indigenous activists, scientists, politicians—stood shoulder to shoulder, their bodies tense with grief, hope, and awe. And then, almost immediately, a salmon was seen swimming upriver through the debris—into waters no salmon had entered in over a hundred years.

The river remembered.

What followed stunned the world. That first salmon sparked a resurrection. Chinook, coho, sockeye, pink, and chum surged upstream. Trout returned. Lamprey reclaimed their full range. And with them came dippers, elk, cougars, and bears. Life rippled outward in a trophic cascade—an ecological prayer answered at last.

The Elwha recovered with astonishing speed. Most remarkable of all was what happened at her mouth: millions of tons of sediment released by the dam removal reshaped the coastline, forming a sandy estuary from formerly jagged shorelines. New sloughs and barrier islands emerged, nurturing ocean grasses, surf smelt, Dungeness crab, and forage fish. In turn, eagles, herons, seals, and kelps returned to abundance. Some scientists called it “a geological event in a human timeframe,” marveling at the magnitude and speed of rebirth.

Now, salmon runs are projected to surpass even pre-dam numbers.

The river’s recovery asks something of us: maybe we are not so different from the Elwha. Perhaps colonial conditioning built invisible dams within our own spirits—beliefs that we are not enough, not worthy of belonging.

Maybe our dependence on capitalist culture severed us from our own place and purpose in the web of life, creating vast inner voids for existential doubt and disorientation.

Many doubted the Elwha would ever come back, or that its creatures could remember what had been erased. Yet, after a century of absence, they did. The salmon, the bear, the trees—all remembered their place in the circle. They remembered the river, as if she had always been free.

Perhaps the Elwha’s story offers a promise: that healing—personal, collective, ecological—is not isolated, but shared. No matter how long we’ve been disconnected from our true power and belonging, a great remembering awaits us too.