Juandering Works

January 2002
First Draft
Nonfiction

Spawned Crush

We bathed with the occasional salmon vigorously jetting past our red water roughed legs. With each green rippled flash of their body, it struck me odd they spent so much energy avoiding us with such eminent fate. This stream poured from the forest wall rounded past a lagoon until it came to feed from the ocean lapping at its salt. It was knee high except for a section close to the forest where it bowled into a perfect swimming hole, or since there was no running water at St. James bay, it became our bathing hole for the summer.

I was there to help my best friend’s parents build their cabin or by many people’s standard, their dream home. Each day we spent working, its splendor became more obvious as its multileveled and octagonal shape inconspicuously grew under the sifted canopies of Sitka spruce and Western Hemlock.  That summer, I learned how to use a handsaw, drive a nail in two or less hits but most of all I fell in love with girls or really just Shaun’s sister Katrina.

I never really noticed her before, at least not as a girl, until that summer. Before she was always there but more as a liability to our fun. The year before going to St. James, I spent much time jigging for link cod.  I was pulling them from the sewer infested harbor bottom when water suddenly found its way into my lungs.  Terrified and confused as to what had happened, I righted myself according to the direction of the bubbles that fled from my body. Through the white clouds of rough water that encapsulated me, I could make out Katrina’s face pitching with enjoyment as I pulled myself from the murky green depths to the air I was rudely cheated.

St. James made her into a goddess.   She was no longer a shadow but a beautiful girl with a bounce in her stride that physically gave Shaun and I a run for our money. My infatuation began after spending many hours hauling rolls of fiberglass from a drop at the beach to a site nearly a half-mile away.  Our skin singed with the microscopic fibers that nestled into our bodies.  At the end of the day, we headed for our hole and jumped in uninhibited by the fact we were all naked. I dove under the water pretending to catch a glimpse of spawning salmon only to see her bare legs blushing as they waved broken by the destination of the stream. Through the summer, we continued our ritual, cloth less and I found myself looking forward to spending time with her closer, watching her. I was in love with her and at age ten, was convinced I would spend my life with her, right there.

I now realize how innocent, how simple it all was back then.  My gaze dropped from the sequential pictures of spawning salmon that hung from the wall of DIPAC. I quickly scanned over the people dressed with inhibitions permeating from there bodies.  I secretly wished their black clothes stripped from their bodies so that we could return to our pool one more time blushing.