Hello, and thanks for spending some time here at Tabs Open. I have been encouraged to use this space to remind you, or perhaps tell you for the first time, that my book, A Good Place for Maniacs: Dispatches from the Pacific Crest Trail, is available for purchase online wherever books are sold. You can also just click that button below! ⬇️
In remote Wyoming, nestled deep in the Teton Wilderness, one can find a place called Two Ocean Pass. Running into the pass some 8,000 feet above sea level is North Two Ocean Creek, a stream of water which would be unremarkable save for one fact: because it branches, tumbling across both sides of the Divide (where it meets a major river on each side), the water from this little creek flows continuously out to reach both the Atlantic and the Pacific. It is the only such body of water in North America.
It is existentially distracting to contemplate such a place, to consider all the ways the world has been made different by this little bifurcated stream. All the times a broken branch went one way and not the other, perhaps wedging in a rock pile to make a weir on one side (but not the other), trapping fish who had been carried by a slight variation in current or breeze or food down that same side (but not the other), allowing a certain grizzly bear to stake out that spot for her own meals, who in her biological drive to protect her cubs killed a particular unfortunate man traveling along that fork (but not the other), feeding the worms and mushrooms with his blood and bones and ending one particular human genealogical line that might have become who knows what. Eons of branching decisions twisting and forking and compounding to alter the unfolding of life in who knows how many ways.
Ken Jennings writes of the place:
A helpful wooden sign on a tree reads "Atlantic Ocean 3488" next to an arrow pointing east and "Pacific Ocean 1353" next to an arrow pointing west. Those are the mileages to the oceans being divided here. Splash where the two branches meet and play god: The tiniest motion of your hands will change the fate of individual water droplets forever.
Miraculous, the myriad nameless ways water shapes the world. Miraculous, what the creatures of those waters can will themselves to when necessary.
A few summers ago, some friends and I took a weekend backpacking trip to Rachel Lake in Washington’s central Cascades. With all the obvious camping spots at the trail’s end taken, our group picked its way around to the far shore, crossing a little talus slope, a marshy field, and a waterfall creek to get to some durable ground that looked suitable for pitching tents.
We hadn’t paid the waterfall creek much mind. Sometimes it’s like that, when you’re in the woods with friends. You don’t pay certain things any mind. Mary Oliver wrote about this, because of course she did.
Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single
friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore
unsuitable.I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds
or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of
praying, as you no doubt have yours.Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit
on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds,
until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost
unhearable sound of the roses singing.If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love
you very much.
Anyway that’s no knock on those friends, who I do love very much, and it’s not as though I was trying hard to notice the waterfall and they were getting in the way. It was just there, another pleasant feature in a day that had been full of them, until some non-waterfall movement caught our eye.
A series of German brown trout were, at that very moment, splashing their way down the falls, which ran the full height of the mountain ridge bounding in the lake on one side. This being high summer, the falls were little more than slick rock ledges in many places, and flat marshy trickles in others, and so we also bore witness to these fish using every fiber of muscle in their sleek bodies to whip and churn and fling themselves across great waterless distances before splashing safely into the lake at last.
I don’t know enough about the brain of a trout to say how much of this act was frantic biological imperative and how much was a free-willed choice. And who knows how much rested on their journey from one alpine lake to the next. How the gene pools of the trout were forever swirled and altered by the accident of one fish living through the trip, and another not. How generations on, there will be more or fewer herons or kingfishers or racoons or otters than there were on that day because of the cascading effects of one summer day’s trout run.
There was one of those viral Twitter prompts going around the other week, asking how many of your eight great-grandparents’ jobs you could name. I think I could hit three with confidence and make a shaky guess at another two without calling up my parents. I don’t know if this is high or low or just average. But the larger point is that fact fades into mist and mystery for all of us when we try to look back in time.
And here, again, we face a precipice of existential terror. If any of those eight people had made just one or two different choices in their lives, I wouldn’t be here, at least not in any form I would recognize. Nor would you, had one of your eight. And to boot, the fact that you and I are here means that a whole lot of other people never materialized, their existences foreclosed upon by ours, us happy products of cosmic happenstance and the outward rippling of stones dropped into the waters of time.
Somewhere in the wilderness, there are streams pouring over both sides of a mountain, flowing endlessly on, beyond our comprehension. Perhaps we are not meant to understand. Perhaps we are simply meant to be carried, and to pay attention to where they take us.
Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.
-Chuck
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Splash Where The Two Branches Meet And Play God