To Time Travel, One Must First End Time

Friday, 27 June 2025, 12:37 pm
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

On a beautiful summer morning, two young women with a local environmental group had set up a table at the entrance to Lower Park. They were educating and gaining community support for a salmon ladder their group is building in the canyon beyond town, a large semi-wilderness area called Upper Park.

After 30 years in this city, I learned a few new things. During native times, and before the area was overtaken by “civilization,” five species of salmon made their way upstream to spawn during the rainy winter months. They were so numerous during spawning season that it’s said you could practically walk on top of them from one side to the other.

In recent decades, there are no more than 100 salmon of a single species that make a successful journey to spawn each winter. The local environmental group is working to remove man-made impediments and increase their numbers.

I also learned the name native people gave of the creek that has played such a big part in my time here, a stream that becomes a small, raging river during the wettest months of winter. It was called Otakimsewi.

Indigenous California had some 300 distinct tribes or sub-tribes, a few of which held out until the 20th century. I happen live in the area where what used to be called “the last wild Indian in America,” Ishi, walked into the nearby town of Oroville in 1911, after the last of his tribe had been murdered or died of disease.

When I first moved to California as a young man, I took a hiking trip into a remote area north of here in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, with the destination of Kingsley Cave, where settlers had slaughtered at least 30 Yahi people.

The cave, which is more like an overhang of rock, is named after Norm Kingsley, a participant who expressed the need to switch to a smaller caliber pistol for killing the babies because of the destructive force of his larger rifle.

(Pause and reflect for a moment on that mentality. Is it any different than many in the IDF in Gaza, where 15,000 children have been slaughtered?)

I recall someone in the group finding an arrowhead and shell casing. Needless to say, the physically and emotionally grueling hiking trip left a strong impression on me as a young man.

Talking about the salmon and indigenous times with the young women brought back an experience of what seemed then, and still seems today like a timeless moment of salubrious time travel.

It was dusk after a heavy rain during winter. The rains had made the stream into a slender river of white-capped waves. I sat on plastic and pads, layered against the chill and wet, and looked across to a flat area dotted with leafless oaks, barely discernible through the failing light and a light fog.

That deep sense of mystery at dusk, tinged with primal fear in a man-made place made wild again by a series of storms, was intense. I remained still and passively aware, and the mind fell completely silent.

From deep curiosity, a question arose, without expecting any answer: How did native people live through the rain and the wet and the wind of winter here?

Suddenly a huge salmon, slicing upstream against the powerful current, shot by, its upper half exposed without leaping out of the roiling water. At that moment, there was a rip in time, and I found myself staring into the camp of people that lived on this land before the Europeans came.

To this day, 20 years later, I feel it was not an illusion or imagination, but a gift. Contrary to all my conditioned, white man ideas of how Native Americans lived, what I saw was a place of considerable physical comfort and great social warmth.

The people were well fed, and their shelters, fires and animal hides protected them from the inclement weather. There was little detail, just an overall scene of prosperity and tranquility that produced a deep ache in the meditative state.

It was the ache of a rapacious, hollow culture contrasted with an imperfectly harmonious culture. Without fear or loneliness, I recall feeling incredibly alone.

In the meditative state, in which time had ended, did my question, immediately followed by one of only 100 spawning salmon that year, actually create a rip in time?

I feel so. And if so, the paradox is that we can momentarily step back in time, but only if we completely end time in the present.

We almost always look at the present from the past, but it’s become imperative to look at the past from the present. Indeed, only when we’re mentally completely still and therefore fully present in the present, can we see the personal and collective past clearly and accurately.

As far as the future, it’s partially written. To see what part is inevitable, and what space remains open is difficult, but essential, because the piece that isn’t written is ours to write.

Global collapse is occurring in our time, but humanity is not doomed. The individual is a microcosm of the whole of humanity, and the whole of humanity is a macrocosm of the individual.

Martin LeFevre

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Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scoop Contributor

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher.

His sui generis “Meditations” explore spiritual, philosophical and political questions relating to the polycrisis facing humanity.

lefevremartin77@gmail