Upriver

by Elizabeth Grey

Melanie’s phone vibrates with a notification and she looks at the screen and says, "I have to finalize my order today," and I know she’s talking about her bulk order—fifty pound bags of flour, beans, rice, and other staples. "Every crew needs a prepper," I say, and I’m not kidding, but I wish I was. Earlier, we attended a conservation film festival, watched stories about the earth and our relationship to it, about the ways people and wildlife and the rivers and the sea depend on one another, and I tell her my favorite was the one called hitoláayca (Going Upriver), the one about Devin Reuben, an indigenous 18-year-old who is training to be the first nimiipuu (Nez Perce) whitewater guide of his generation, though the nimiipuu were of course the original guides on the rivers of their unceded ancestral homelands. Before Devin, hiring a guide to explore these rivers has mostly meant paying a twenty-something man with skin the same fair shade as mine, outfitted in gore-tex. Melanie asks what I loved about the film, and before I can reply, she answers for me, more eloquently than I could manage anyway. "I’m buying fifty pound bags of flour so we won’t run out of bread," she says, "but the apocalypse arrived a long time ago, huh?"

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Elizabeth Grey is the author of the memoir Migration, forthcoming on Milkweed Editions. She lives in Portland, Oregon.