Poem: "Carried Away Piecemeal"

This poem is spillover from the April 20, 2021 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired and sponsored by ng_moonmoth. It belongs to the Daughters of the Apocalypse series.

Warning: This poem contains intense and controversial topics. Highlight to read the warnings, some of which are spoilers. It includes dire climate change effects, the ruinous impact of dams on anadromous fish like salmon, an apocalypse that kills millions of people, survivors struggling to survive in the Aftermath, and a tribe deciding to destroy a dam to restore the river system. If these are sensitive issues for you, please consider your tastes and headspace before reading onward.


"Carried Away Piecemeal"

[0 A.E.]

Even before the End came,
Washington wasn't doing well.

Climate change wreaked havoc
all over the ecosystem. Wildfires got
worse every year, and violent storms
battered the bare hillsides, causing
erosion and sometimes landslides.

One such landslide took out
the Bonneville Dam facilities in
the year before the End, causing
the river to divert by over a mile.

With that blockage gone,
the salmon were able to swim
as far up as the dam at the Dalles,
reopening their spawning access to
the Hood River, the Klickitat River,
and the White Salmon River.

On the Yakama Reservation,
the old people hid their smiles.

"Men may dam it and say that they
have made a lake, but it will still be
a river," they said. "It will keep its nature
and bide its time, like a caged animal alert
for the slightest opening. In time, it will
have its way; the dam, like the ancient cliffs,
will be carried away piecemeal in the currents."

Then the bombs fell, wiping out major cities
and larger towns all across the state.

Yakima was completely destroyed,
spilling over onto Selah and Union Gap.
Ellensburg, Sunnyside, and Grandview
got hit too, along with many other towns.

Moxie, Tieton, and Naches got flooded
with refugees from the fringes of Yakima.

Some Yakima refugees headed south
to the Yakama Reservation, but Parker had
no room for them and Wapato rebuffed them.

The reservation itself suffered no bombing,
as even its largest towns were too small.

There was nobody left to tend the dams
or put out the wildfires in the dry season.

Since much of the Yakama Reservation
faced moderate to high risk of wildfires,
the elders sensibly directed the youths
to set controlled burns in the wet season.

They did their best to protect the towns
and the best croplands by reducing
the fuel available in the dry season.

The tribe did tolerably well; they had
cropland along much of the Yakima River
and rangeland filling the rest of the eastern half
of the reservation. The western half of it was
mostly forest, good for hunting and firewood.

They had grains, beans and peas, vegetables,
and all sorts of fruit growing in the orchards.
They could press seeds for oil and trade
hops to people who wanted to brew beer.

There were beef and dairy cattle, hogs,
sheep and goats, and chickens for
both meat and egg production.

Thousands of horses roamed
the grasslands, and soon
after the End they spilled out
into the surrounding areas.

The tribe did tolerably well,
but they knew their history too:

It should have been better.


[1 A.E.]

Many of the refugees
had died off because they
didn't know how to survive
outside of the cities, which
were no longer survivable.

On the Yakama Reservation,
life went on. People farmed
crops or livestock and cut
wood in the dense forests.

The rivers were ... holding on,
but they weren't really healthy.

Some of the biggest dams were
still manned and running, but
many of them were not.

There were no spare parts
to replace anything that broke,
and no shipments of groceries
to the smaller towns that remained.

Most of the people had to spend
their time growing or gathering
what food they could secure.

Some of the cities had found
time to shut down their systems
for waste treatment and water control,
so as to do less harm unsupervised.

Others had been hit without warning,
or lacked an effective standby mode.

Some sewage retention ponds
had ruptured in the rains, letting
the sludge run free where it would.

In many places, drainage systems
were already starting to fail for
want of regular maintenance.
This resulted in more flooding,
especially after heavy rains.

The reservation beavers,
already more numerous than
in surrounding areas, quickly
took advantage of the changes
to investigate new marshy areas.

The fish were still struggling,
though, especially the salmon.

They were doing better after
the Bonneville Collapse, but
others still blocked the way.

So the Yakama Nation
made a desperate decision.

If they could manage to destroy
the John Day Dam, its release
should take out the Dalles Dam
that stood some miles below it.

The elders spoke with veterans who
had trained at the Yakima Firing Center.

Military facilities had been hit hard by
the Grunge, but the whole point of
the place was weapons practice,
so there were caches all over it.

A group of teens made a daring trip
to search for usable explosives.

They returned with enough arsenal
to do some serious damage, although
nowhere near enough to destroy
the whole huge John Day Dam.

They didn't need to destroy it,
just weaken it enough for
the river to handle the rest.

So one group of Yakama
began chipping away at
the top edge of the dam.

Others fanned out to visit
nearby communities and
warn people that the dam
wasn't in good shape, so
moving off its floodplain
would be advisable.

Soon the Columbia River
began to spill over the lip,
whittling away at the dam.

The Yakama Nation
stepped up efforts to warn
folks in the Dalles, Dallesport,
Hood River, and Wishram.

Those living downstream
noticed the water slowly rising
and began backing away.

As a major storm front
approached, the tribe set
charges at the base of
the John Day Dam.

With a great thundercrack
and a cloud of dust, the concrete
gave way, releasing a spurt of
dark water thick with sediment.

As the rain began to fall,
the river rose furiously,
water turning white with
speed as the sediment
started to clear away.

Their work done, people
retreated from the waterline
and took shelter from the storm
far away from the growling river.

By the time the storm had passed,
the middle of the John Day Dam
was gone, the top notch joined to
the bottom blast hole, thus freeing
another stretch of the Columbia River.

Scouts went downstream to check
on the surviving communities there,
and found that most people had
taken refuge uphill in the storm, so
while buildings had washed away,
there were few human casualties.

The Dalles Dam was a total loss,
though; little remained of it except
for gnawed flanges along the sides.

That opened up the Deschutes River as
far as the Pelton Dam, the John Day River,
Willow Creek as far as its dam above Hepner,
and the Umatilla River, though its tributary
McKay Creek still had a dam in place.

It was a huge gain for the Salmon People
and the humans who depended on them.

The Yakama looked at the maps.

If they could take out the McNary and
Chandler dams, maybe Ice Harbor,
then that would help even more.

They had used up all the explosives
that they'd found, but perhaps more
of those could be located later on.

With a little luck, other tribes would
pitch in and free their rivers, too.

The Yakama had worried,
a little, that people might object
to the dams coming down, but
there was hardly any protest.

The people of Cascadia were
beginning to come together
as a new culture of their own,
rising out of the ruins of the past.

Everything would be different now.

As the runoff continued to flow,
scouts at the new John Day Rapids
saw more chunks of concrete break off
to be carried away piecemeal in the currents.

* * *

Notes:

This poem has extensive notes, so they appear separately.