[lamchopz]

Chapter 4: Rhetorical pedagogy

When I was a little boy, my father used to drive me to the river upstream, some twenty miles away from home, and showed me the face of nature in its purest state – “wilderness”, he said, rightfully ruled the place.

He laid me on his broad shoulders, and pointed at the school of salmon darting upstream.

“Do you know why those fish are swimming up, instead of down with the water, my little Einstein?” his head rubbed my belly joyfully.

“Because it’s their breeding season”, I replied, “Teacher told us last week”.

He then turned to the bears splashing the water, where occasionally, an ill-fated salmon haphazardly parted from its companions and served itself to the famished predator.

“So why are they going in the way of those bears? Surely they know they will be killed”, my father enquired.

“Maybe they did not know the bears were waiting…”

“Did you see the bears here last year or the year before?”

“I think so”, I answered innocently. Just then, I realized something I had never thought of before.

That particular day was my first lesson about life – it was part of a plan that my father had devised since my first audible exclamation sounded in the delivery unit. The salmon migration had been a bitter experience, but it made me who I was, and how I was.

At the age of seventeen, I revisited the place. I wasn’t as cheerful as I had been – the first realization still sat sharply in my memory. We took a look at the salmon’s travesty just like we had previously done, but this time, I was the one who raised the question.

“Dad, do you know what those salmon went through before they reach this place?”

He looked at me, and smiled. His hands lifted slowly, gently, and landed on my hair. Words were superfluous in that very second. His pride was unspoken, but apparent in the way he rubbed my head and the ever growing happiness in his eyes.

“You have grown, son, but there is one final upcoming which I think is about time”. He walked me to the upper end of the stream, where the remaining salmon attempted their last deed: breeding. Then their life faded away in exhaustion, wounds and bruises.

“What do you see, son?” he asked.

“New life”, I said with no hesitation. It was a new life that I saw and it would always be. The salmon had fulfilled their purpose. A new generation was destined to rise and the old to fall. The cost was tremendous, the loss was colossal, but compared to the future which they had sacrificed their lives to create, death was miniscule.

“What about the falling salmon themselves? Do you think they were prepared to die?”

“Yes, they were”, I lamented, “and they always are…”

The life of a salmon is a sad one. One is born only to die giving birth to the young. It does not matter, somehow, to the creature itself. Perhaps, it has accepted what it is, what it must do to allow its own species to survive. Perhaps, it has accepted its destiny, accepted what its life is. Perhaps, that is what life sometimes is.

“I got it now, dad”, I turned to face him, graciously, and kissed him on the cheeks.

“I always enjoy a son’s last childish kiss for his old folk”, he gazed down upon me, radiating a loving smile. Our hands circled around each other, and my head rested on his right shoulder. Affection was mutual and intimate. We both knew that it was the last time I was his little child, that he had shown me what I needed to know before bidding farewell to my adolescence and entering the world of maturity and responsibilities. From then on, my life would be my own. My decisions would be ultimate and final – efficacious or ruinous outcomes would be mine to enjoy or suffer.