Dear Minister of the Environment, Honourable Stephane Dion – Government of Canada,

My name is Nickolas Butler and I write this letter to you from Madison, Wisconsin, not too far from our capitol building’s gleaming golden dome and on the same narrow isthmus that houses the University of Wisconsin. I spent a summer in the Taku River Watershed, and spent perhaps one of the most perfect days of my life in a place called Flanagan’s Slough, not far from where I suppose you’re new mine will be. I know that you are all smart people, which is why I am writing this letter to you; because I hope you can lend me some sage advice. You are after all, somewhat responsible for me now.

My problem is memory. I have never remembered my dreams, and on most days I can’t recall what I ate for breakfast the day before. People tell me about the witty things I’ve said, the stupid daredevil stunts I’ve done and failed at. People remind me of my life and in this way I cobble together my everyday memory. I don’t have any medical problems, my brain hasn’t been afflicted by anything that has diminished my memory. Let’s face it: everyday life is boring, mundane, trite stuff. Why shouldn’t I suppress the hours, the days, the weeks, the months I’ve spent as a meatpacker, a hot-dog vendor, as heartbroken, as unemployed? Do you really warehouse those memories? Do you take photographs of yourself during such periods?

But here’s the thing. I have one summer of memories that is complete, unblemished. It is a Polaroid summer that needed no time to develop - it just was. It was frozen in my mind for all times, a perfect home movie that swims around in my skull happily haunting me. Let me show you my memories. I’ll write you a quick scrapbook:

Uncle Jackie Williams, who can be said to be the last Tlingit elder with all his people’s history still stored in his seventy-year old memory banks, played cribbage with me every day. Cribbage is a game of antiquarian cadence. Old men rap during this game. They say, “Fifteen two, fifteen four, fifteen six, a pair of fives for eight, and nibs for nine.” Their language reminds us of hop-scotch and hip-hop. Uncle Jackie beat me relentlessly that summer beside the river.
A salmon, tired and seemingly breathless, swam into an eddy not from where I stood. I did not think. I knelt down into the gravel of the riverbank and I plunged my hand into the Nakina River, which at that point in the world is as translucent and cold as bottled milk. I caught that salmon with my bare hand. Later that night, I ate the salmon. My fingers are trembling now, recalling that fish, which was not memorable for its size or coloring. But I remember it because it yielded to me and perhaps, I ended its suffering.

Tracy Hruska, who is one of my best friends now, is built like a yeti. He is ponderously tall, and muscle and sinew stretch over his frame tightly, as tightly as I would stretch sinew to make snow-shoes. He smells of labor and smoke and coffee. He is an extraordinary scientist, he holds flowers and plants tenderly, he really sees things. He really looks hard at the world. He saved me one time when I was weak in the mountains around the Taku. He put my heavy pack on his strong back and gave me his. I know him because we came to the Taku to try and save the place. We lived in a diminutive tent together for about a week. Tracy called it ‘The Iron Maiden.” Two grown men in an iron-maiden.

Twenty-six grizzly bears, hundreds of eagles, otters, moose, arctic terns, salmon, loons, swans, mountain goats… These creatures were my neighbors, do you understand?

Don Weir is a painter from Atlin, BC, who paints landscapes of the world around the Taku. For an afternoon I stood in Don’s house, sunlight careening through his windows at 10 PM. I remember the swirls of painted oil, the shelves of paint, the eddies, the currents, the mountains’ folds, the glaciers’ tongues. I remember the strange hallucinogenic paints, the purples and pinks and oranges. I wanted so much to buy one of Don’s paintings, I still do. Now I think of him as a documentarian. We know that the work of dead painters is more valuable than that of living painters. Are paintings that depict dead landscapes more valuable too?

You probably want me to reel off numbers, viability flow-charts maybe? Models, percentages – proof of what I’ve seen, why the land is so relevant, so goddamned valuable. Well, I can’t do that. I lost interest in mathematics the minute one of my teachers told me the alphabet could also represent numbers.

I have these memories now. Memories flapping around in my head like a dove or pigeon inside a barn. Maybe because you’re not from Wisconsin you’ve never seen a dove flying around inside the trusses of a barn, with sunlight peeking through the chinks of the barn’s porous siding. It is beautiful and disturbing. You want to trap the bird and let it loose out into the blue sky. But you can’t take your eyes off it either, you watch as the bird’s wings fly through beams of immaculate light. You listen to the rhythm of its captive feathers. You live lifetimes watching that bird.

Do you understand now, that I lived lifetimes in one summer on the Taku? That my whole life from now on will be duller for living in that momentary splendor? Do you understand that I try to tell people about the Taku, as I’m trying now with you, and they stare at me blankly, like I’m mad, like I’m lonely – like I’m haunted. My memories are your responsibility now, can’t you see that? You hold my memories in your hands now, like salmon roe or river-stones. If you build that mine, punch through your roads, if you take your metal from the earth and leave that land less than it was when I saw it last, then you leave me forever haunted. Because no one will ever be able to relate again to my memories. I will have no hope of ever trying to describe the Taku to that one person who finally says, “I understand, I was just there. And I saw it too. It was like heaven.”

Do you understand?

Nickolas A. Butler

Nickolas Butler lives in Madison, WI with his beautiful fiancée, Regina. He has worked as a meatpacker, a hot-dog vendor, and a telemarketer. His writing has appeared in the “Isthmus” and “The Progressive.”