This weekend's postcard, and the story of my visits with the Spokane River's wild redbands

September 16, 2023

Native Redband trout, “Oscar,” feeding in rapids upstream from “The Big Eddy…”

Swimming with “Oscar” & company

This weekend’s dispatch will be shorter than usual because I can offer you this link to my cover story in the Pacific Northwest Inlander’s weekly edition which hit newstands in eastern Washington on Thursday.

As some of you already know, on most days from June to mid-October I take off on my bicycle in the afternoon and dive in at “The Big Eddy” a deep opening in the Spokane River just below the Military Cemetery on the Centennial Trail in west Spokane, about a mile downstream of the T.J. Meenach Bridge. I started doing this fifteen years ago when I was training for the 1.7 mile “Long Bridge” swim across Lake Pend Oreille and trying to reduce my carbon footprint at the same time. It was transformative in the sense that I had to learn to let go of my training brain (my dad and uncle were both national class competitve swimmers and I was programmed to become one too) and also my busy-person mindset where the demands of being a worker bee create the template for how we live and interact not just with other people but with the world around us.

So the story in The Inlander is largely about that, about how I had to re-program myself to be present to this water wilderness and to this beautiful, amazing fish which somehow survived the callousness with which Spokane used to treat its namesake river.

At this time last year, I’d made two new friends at The Big Eddy aside from the humans and dogs that frequent the rocky beach where I jump in. One was “Emily” a very engaging and talkative mallard whom I actually met in the winter of 2021-22 when she was leading a unbearably cute string of downy ducklings around. Of course, I was wearing my winter vest and not my swimsuit at the time but she would literally seek me out to visit. And then, when it became warm enough to swim, she would most often wait for me to finish my swim and just follow me to the shore, quacking away. (I wasn’t alone in this, there were several people who got to enjoy Emily’s company that year).

The other friend was “Oscar” the redband. That’s him in the photo above. He is one of the very few wild trout who would let me swim alongside which is something I very much enjoyed but cannot explain. Humans eat trout, and so, of course, do river otters, which is why wild trout are naturally wary and nearly always bolt when you try to approach them in their domain.

The bowl of the Big Eddy in early autumn

Oscar didn’t survive the winter, or if he did, he moved to another part of the river. I’m not sure what happened to Emily. I wasn’t having much luck finding another redband swimming partner until a month ago, when I met “Gordo” about where the photo above was taken and he let me swim with him for several days. That’s him in The Inlander promo above.

I think about my dad, a lot, when I swim, and it wasn’t that long ago that I spread my share of his ashes beneath a tree that overhangs the river about a quarter mile upstream from the Eddy. The Connors were very much working class Irish and my dad and his brother were the first in their families to go college. The stopwatch was key for them both because it doesn’t lie, and allowed them to be recruited and offered athletic scholarships, sight unseen, to Washington State and Oklahoma respectively.

My father, Don, at Gamboa pool in the Panama Canal Zone, ~1950.

By the time my dad was forty he had no desire to compete any more as an athlete, and I couldn’t understand why. But now I’m sure one reason is that he’d discovered photography, set up a darkroom, and gave me one of his cameras so that we could hike into the jungle and swamps together to take pictures I think it taught him patience and a way to experience time differently, being in harmony with his surroundings rather than trying to beat the clock, so to speak. I’m sorry he’s not here to read The Inlander story and appreciate the photographs. I think it would delight him.

—tjc