Common, common … and singular. Leaves fallen between trunks of trees growing up from the same root mass showing a distinctive eye-catching pattern, that’s common. Trees growing that way in a swamp, stormfallen leaves, common, common.
The appearance of a fish, a salmon that has spawned to be specific, in such a cleft, that happens too, if floodwaters subside in just the right way. I’ve seen that in another valley in Ontario.
This? Astonishing.
One look at the falls where the Rideau River meets the Ottawa River and nobody would expect spawning grounds upstream … but for 180 there’s been a canal constructed for empire expansion … and life finds its own uses for locks like the ones beside the parliament buildings.
There’s a Salmon Sideroad crossing a creek not far downriver from here. And I’ve seen one struggling to get to the rapids just upstream of where the river was spilling over into the canal, in 2017.
The thaw of almost all of December’s snow in this watershed will likely mean that the spring snowmelt won’t raise the river so much in 2023. It looks like the land remembers the Salmon, though.
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