The Bolshevik Beavers of Bybee Boulevard

They gathered at dusk where the babbling brook known as Crystal Springs flowed through a culvert under a roadway. They would hush and shush each other around the decorative stonework and wooden foot bridge, quiet down, and then wait, wait, wait, as the water trickled and tumbled past cedars and willows to Johnson Creek, the Willamette River, the Columbia River, and finally the Pacific Ocean. Down, down, down a mighty and degraded watershed.

Yes, they waited on fine summer evenings until the Bolshevik beavers of Bybee Boulevard emerged to perform their industrious and adorable work of maintaining their magnificent dam stuffed inside the south end of the culvert. It was this dam that impeded the flow of Crystal Springs and infrequently led to minor flooding of the nearby fire department’s parking lot. No matter. No Portland official would dare order the destruction of the dam, because if they did, all holy hell would break loose and someone might lose their job, if not their head.

The beavers wielded major star power, although they were completely oblivious to it. Beavers are like that. But the Bolshevik beavers of Bybee Boulevard were certainly aware of something else related to their nightly beavering in Crystal Springs and that was: by virtue of how they lived their lives with simple purpose, economy, equality, dedication, collaboration and artistry, they were modeling how to live better and practice a bit more communism in a corrupt capitalist society.

They came from near and far in the Sellwood and Eastmoreland neighborhoods to witness the spectacle. Just to name a few: golfers, firefighters, retirees, Reedies, plutocrats, yoga-pants-wearing mothers pushing toddlers in sleek strollers, denizens of zombie RVs, and even dancers from the strip club downstream who had set up a special tip jar at the rack to support more beaver reintroduction into Portland’s salmon-bearing streams.

Oh what marvel it is to watch beavers work, chinking and notching sticks and logs so they snugly and securely fit together in the construction of dams and lodges like so many frontier log cabins. Their nutritious needs then transform into building materials and also unique works of art. In their beavering, they are foragers, engineers, builders, architects, artists, craftsmen, and creators of vibrant ecosystems such as sloughs, ponds, and marshes that foster and nourish all kinds of life, including wild salmon, not the hatchery fakes.

Indeed, it was quite a show for the residents and transients of the neighborhoods! But the fans didn’t know the beavers of Bybee Boulevard were Bolsheviks. How could they? They didn’t even know the critical role beavers played in the ongoing health of watersheds, and thus in the ongoing health of human beings. Most Oregonians didn’t know anything about these extraordinary creatures, such as their real name, castor canadensis, American beaver; or that it is the state’s official animal; or that lunkhead legislators refuse to protect them from lethal trapping; or that Oregon is known as the Beaver State; or that Oregon is the only state with a two-sided flag and one is a scratchy yellow illustration of a beaver. There is a lot to know about beavers in Oregon and the more you know, the better Oregonian you will be.

The beavers were Bolsheviks because they owned no private property, lived in a society without classes, wanted to nationalize the internet (because the American government initially built and maintained it) and believed labor should always master capital. They also had a similar motto: wood, peace, freedom. Beavers were quite unlike Bolsheviks, however, in that they didn’t make long speeches or murder those beavers who didn’t follow the party line. In this way, they got the best of economic Bolshevism and avoided the worst of its politics, which was ruthless and psychotic authoritarian power and you get that pretty much anywhere, especially in America.

The beavers’ performance at dusk lasted about half an hour. Rarely did their fans stay longer than five minutes. It was a lot of labor posting photos and videos to social media stupidity platforms. But even in a mere five minutes, they would have observed beavers working together and living each according to their bucktoothed abilities and each according to their bucktoothed needs. They shared. They ate organic. They played. They glided. The beat the brook with their tails if interlopers dared venture near and take a selfie with them. They often rolled lily pads and digested them as if smoking fine cigars. They even inspired a homeless man surrounded by squalor to give up his tent and tarp on concrete and relocate to a crude creekside lodge he constructed from castoff beaverwood. And whatever the beavers did, they often left behind wonderful choice cuts distinguished by their signature gnaws and bites that highly eccentric yet attuned human beings collected and admired like so many baseball cards or Hot wheels.

Building dams, building lodges, raising families, recharging groundwater, improving salmon habitat, entertaining human beings, making art, gnawing here and there. The beavers were certainly busy! But in their own way they were clandestine homebodies like Mr. Beaver in The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe, the bespectacled, porter drinking beaver who really was a secret revolutionary waiting for the return of Aslan. They differed somewhat, in that their waiting was not for the return of a savior, (Rachel Carson had already come and died,) but waiting for the glorious day when Americans accepted the obvious fact that they were ruining the planet with the insane consumption demanded by capitalism, and must change course toot sweet or disaster was imminent, if not already here. When that day arrived, the beavers would rejoice because Americans, especially rural bumpkins, would finally leave them alone and let them build their damn dams in peace!