As I stand here beside Fall Creek looking into a pool, I am haunted by the memory of a red-faced biologist. He was drinking when I met him and drinking when I left. He studies a lot of little things, bacteria mostly, whose evolutionary time is running much faster than ours. "They will take us over," he warned.

I turn toward the river.

"Chinook," my friend Matthew whispers. There in the water, a gray shadow swaggers from the depths into the shallows. The salmon's belly scrapes along the black rocks, its dorsal fin exposed, slightly drooping over as it lounges sideways in the current. Motionless, it rests mostly submerged, flirting between our world and its own.

Matthew and I scarcely breathe, but soon we relax, following its lead. The slight movement of its gills looks almost like a trick of the sunlight. It's about 2 ½ feet long, not large by any means for a fish that can grow to twice this size and weigh up to 125 pounds. In this little stream, it's huge.

I look sideways at Matthew. "It's got that fungus," he says. I look at the nose and chin of the fish and see flesh torn from where it has grazed rocks on its upstream migration, a whitish fuzz seems to bulge out of the steel-gray skin like stuffing. This is the kind of fungus that slowly colonizes a Chinook as it makes its final run to spawn. A biological reminder to hurry.

Suddenly, as if finally detecting us, the fish darts across the shallows with a blur of white water, disappearing into the deep green of the pool. Matthew smiles, fingering his box of flies. "I wanted to fish anyway." With that, he leaps off the log onto the bedrock, picks up his fly rod and walks toward the waterfall to dip his hook into this pool of genes and see what nature has spawned.

This salmon has returned to end its five-year cycle, genetically programmed to die as well as to live. Other embodiments of the life in this river are on different, interwoven and just as decisive cycles; their time is going to come just as suddenly -- maybe one at this moment, now. Or, if we were to count the bacteria in this river, perhaps a million, now.

I remember the biologist. "There are billions of bacteria, and we are breeding, overpopulating, giving them a new country to inhabit," he said sadly. "They have always been successful. Always."

I shifted uneasily.

"You've been staring into too many microscopes," I joked.

I imagined the biologist's microscope bulging with this micro-life, making him feel like a little Dutch boy with no hope of holding back the teeming millions. He is right of course, but I didn't tell him that.

Life is a hard thing to reason. Being mortal we are perhaps too attached to one life. We eat life every day; we rely on life to break down the dying things around us, to cycle nutrients to us. We constantly expend our nutrients as cells die and require nutrients for new cells to form. We thus recycle ourselves, literally becoming what we eat.

I speak about myself as a singular life, but even this is not so. In me are a million other lives, living their own micro-lives. Most obvious, by their sheer number, are my cells. They are not so different from the simpler cells that inhabit this river, but they can combine in a fairly sophisticated form to make me, for instance, or Matthew.

I watch him. The river is flowing off the mountains all around him, a mad rushing to the sea. He stands with his back to the current; the salmon and the wind come up to meet and pass him. In this interface he fishes, balanced precariously between conflicting movements. His fly rod seems like a conductor's wand. Surrounding him, a symphony.

We are in some ways similar to this river -- we are, after all, 80 percent water. Deep within me swim many things alive. My cells live, reproduce with their own DNA and die -- recycling perhaps one every second. They are simple things, but even within them other things live: my mitochondria. I don't know if I should even call them mine; they have their own cycles, complete with their own prehistoric DNA. They are born within my cells, live a happy coexistence, then propagate and die.

Impurities are life -- a bit of carbon, a little phosphorus, nitrogen, calcium, a few trace elements and minerals and a whole lot of water. That witch's brew is life to a chemist. Stare into a microscope long enough and that is all you will see. Oblivion in elements and electrons.

We are not so different from a pool. In a way, we could also be called "standing water."

It is amazing that this Chinook got here at all; its own life is a testament to the tenacity to survive. Laws are now in place to control pollution, but even so, rivers have been dredged, diked and dammed. To be fair, we have improved some things in favor of the fish. We have taken predators out of the system. Native groups and predatory animals such as the black bear have been largely displaced. Fishermen have been limited to catch and release. The only predators that still abound are engineers, scientists and fungi.

The fungus was lying in wait for the salmon. A small predator, to be sure, but an effective one. The salmon puts forth a covering of mucus to protect itself, but it can't help nuzzling a few rocks. Any time the mucus is disturbed, for instance when the fish is plucked from the water by Army Corps personnel to help it get past dams, the fungus can gain hold. The resulting fungal attack takes the shape of a human hand.

Matthew stands above the waterfall. The rod gracefully whips back and forth above his head, the motion bringing rod and arm together, all focusing on the fly. Now out front, now back behind him, now arcing out and landing in a riffle. Then reeling, pausing, reeling -- all his muscles, intellect and observations centered on this one act.

I don't think I could say anything to that red-faced biologist. There is nothing to be said to somebody who knows things, who has seen the whole world clamoring beneath his microscope, who has seen his scientific eyeglass reflect his own puny existence. But I could show him something.

I could show him this Chinook that has braved all kinds of natural and man-made disasters to spawn in this river. I could introduce him to Matthew, a man who knows how to leave his penchant for science and understanding beside a river and wade into the water brandishing a rod to wonder, live, learn and love.

I could tell him to quit looking into his beer, give him a fly rod, stand him in this stream and let him have at it -- putting his cells, his arteries, his eyes and fingers all to the task of appreciating the life around him. For truly our blessing, our salvation, is to wonder. That's all there is, and that's all there will ever be.

By Derek Martin
Photos by Laura Goss