b'But most of us have lost or been cut off from the skills of system-atic attentiveness that open us to the natural worlds instruction. We have forgotten how critical our connection with particulars of place are to our social and cultural well-being. We have forgotten, or been deprived of, our history as human beings.Like most places in the American West, the Mattole River basin has experienced three waves of change in the last hundred and fifty years, each of which has carried with it a different set of relationships between the life of the place and the lives and livelihoods of its human population. The details vary from place to place, but the pattern remains uniform: Occupation of the land by various people acting out of the Euro-American doctrine of Manifest Destiny so rapidly and violently as to effect a nearly total break in the cultural continuity of the human presence; quickly exhausted economies based on centralized extractive industries in the century that followed; and, more recently, a wave of new immigrants fleeing the failures of urban centers to provide them with security and community. In different ways in different places, this latter, most recent pulse of settlement defines the arena for a struggle to learn at last where we are and to under-stand the terms of obligation such recognition might entail.The knowledge of the continuous presence of salmon in this river allows me to know myself for a moment as an expression of the continuity of human residence in this valley.True immersion in a system larger than oneself carries with it exposure to a vast complexity wherein joy and terror are complementary parts.Now the individual fish move as if from a single impulse; the water between them is like the spaces between electrons, between planets. Some force or knowledge or signal moves between the fish, as powerful and as invisible as gravity itself, to 132'