let's get a look at it

I am watching birds. American Avocets, meadowlarks, black-crowned night herons, red-head ducks, shovellers, perhaps a least bittern. 

Northern pintails, immature marsh hawks, barn owls, red-shouldered black birds, California gulls, mallards, egrets of some sort. Plenty of Canada geese. Killdeer. 

But mostly, the curlews. In the marshy grasses north of Borax Lake they scream at the dogs and me, protecting their nests and searching around for who knows what on the white salt flats where nothing but black greasewood grows. In the distance, the wind blows down off Steens Mountain and whips up dust devils on the Alvord playa. The dust devils spin, shimmy, and die before reaching the Wildhorse Ranch country to the east.

The dogs vie for a thin patch of shade by the wheels of the truck, and I huddle in a cheap lawn chair with them. The sun burn squares into the tops of my sandalled feet as I peer through binoculars. I contemplate getting up and putting more sunscreen on. Instead, I drink water from a plastic jug. 

A white Isuzu Trooper turns off of the main road and, a half hour later, pulls up to the rusted borax refining vats by the lake and stops. The dogs start up a rolling bark which I do not discourage. The driver and I talk while he waits for a trailing van full of high school students from the Willamette Valley to arrive.

“Aren’t there some hot pools around here for the kids to see?” he asks. 

I point to where a faint road heads out past a series of boiling water potholes and marshy pools. I volunteer, “There’s also the chub in the lake here.”

“Fish? In this lake? Tell the kids when they come along, they’ll want to see that.”

I tell the sweaty kids about the famous Borax Lake Chub. A two-inch long fish whose habitat once stretched out across a vast inland waterway. Then that water dried up and the fish’s range shrunk and shrunk until it learned to make do with a ten acre pond. A pond filled by a hot springs and what a BLM sign warns is twenty-five times the safe level of arsenic for human consumption.

One of the chaperones says, “It only lives here and you might never have a chance to see it again. Let’s get a look at it. Let’s go.” The kids shuffle to the bank and stare out at the water. One or two think they see something.

The kids and the other chaperones wander about while the driver of the Isuzu makes an assessment of the southern sky. “I think,” he concludes, “that I might be able to get the Blazers' game from here.” He gestures to a satellite dish tucked in the trailer behind his Trooper. I agree that he might. 

But now I wish he would leave, so I walk back to the edge of the lake and stretch out on the ground. I ease my chin onto a patch of sedge and focus my eyes beneath the water. It takes awhile, but a minnow-sized chub darts by. And then another. And then another.