Nehalem (Place People Live)

Hap Tivey grew up in Portland, Oregon and started surfing at the Seaside Cove in the summer of 1963. During the years following graduate school, he managed to live as a Zen monk at Hofuku-ji and Tofuku-ji Monasteries in Japan; out of a kayak in the Queen Charlotte Islands; in a camper truck in the Mohave Desert; in a variety of snowy tents from Alaska to California, a couple of tree houses, and an assortment of lofts and studios. He is now a visual artist living and working in New York City. His art has been acquired for major museum collections including New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim. He returns to Portland frequently for exhibitions and trips to the Oregon Coast.
His father was born on a stump farm in the Willamette valley, and his grandfather was a farmer who augmented his income by cooking for crews that built the Swift Creek and Merwin dams on Washington's Lewis river. As a child he witnessed the final years of that impressive migration before those dams destroyed the Lewis' salmon spawning grounds. Fifteen years passed before he encountered the marvel of another wild salmon run in British Columbia, where he once again witnessed huge fish moving up the pristine Atnarko river in the Bella Coola Valley. In 2009, only a tiny fraction of those fish returned -- devastating news for a river so rich and full of life that it once supported an entire Native American culture with its own unique language and spiritual tradition. This book was inspired in part by the implication that even remote wilderness rivers may experience extinction of a species due to global degradation of our environment and natural resource.