I realized I was floundering around on the end of my presentation for Oregon. I’ve done the beginning of the many millions of times, but the end of the story keeps changing and I haven’t really wrapped my head around all the moving parts yet. I thought that when the kits died and the parents left it was the end. And the story of the mural helped soften the end. I thought when the new dam got built and Moses filmed them mating that was the end. Or maybe even the beginning of new story. 
But then the pile driver drove them upstream and mom disappeared on her due date and we didn’t know where they were. That sure seemed like the end. I was so relieved when the neighbor started seeing them from her deck on Arreba street with a little mysterious animal beside them. I thought that was where they would be for a while. But then they went farther upstream from her and we haven’t seen them since. I imagined maybe when the hard rains stopped they would stop going upstream and come BACK.
But obviously the hard rains are never going to stop.
So does that mean Martinez has no beavers? Or does that mean we can’t see the beavers we do have? How can I know? We haven’t seen sign of the beavers downstream. No chewing or damming or sightings at the marina. So what does it all mean? Is it the end?
Here’s what I have decided. Beaver stories don’t have ‘ends’. They have ‘CHAPTERS’. And our particular chapter has been a helluva read. No one knows what will happen next, or if anything will happen at all. But we softened the soil in Martinez so if they turn up they will have better odds than most beavers because of it. We also showed a heck of a lot of people in Northern California how to coexist, and along the way we changed the population of beavers in the entire Bay Area for years and years to come.
Anything is possible.
