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By Root 11373 0

water the pool was smooth, with a gravel beach which was their front yard. Into the natural reservoir that was a forecast of the much larger one they intended some day to build there, logs came down on the spring run-off, followed by loggers in sharp-prowed boats. If they needed fence posts or timbers they could sail out in their own black boat, called the Parson, and harpoon what they wanted with picks, and drag it ashore. They pulled breakfast from the pool, the children waded its edges and caught crayfish under its stones, the juniors took icy swims in it before the ladies were up or after they had gone to bed. Through the nights of five years their campfires threw red light on the lava cliffs and touched the moving river with the mystery of transitoriness, and framed the triangle of the tent against the dark in an assertion of human purpose. Even in low water, the rapid below was a steady rush and mutter on the air.

On the beach, while they were still all together, they held their conferences and sang and talked in the evenings. Much planning went on around their fires, much hope went downriver and was renewed from upstream. This was the place where for a while Grandfather had everything he had come West looking for-the freedom, the active outdoor life, the excitement of something mighty to be built.

In Grandmother’s old photograph album with the Yellowstone bear on its cover there is a snapshot of Grandfather, the juniors, and the Keyser son who came out to inspect the irrigation scheme his family was considering. They are standing on the beach with saddle horses and a laden packhorse droop-headed behind them, and an edge of river and the black pillar of Arrow Rock in the background. Across the bottom, evidently at some later time, Grandmother has printed in white ink, in the neat print that is so different from her hasty script, “How Hope looked. Aug. 1883.”

Hope looks very young, young enough to seem dubious to less cautious men than the Keysers. Young Keyser himself, the man upon whose word their future hangs, is a bare-faced boy. Wiley is even younger, only twenty-three, but he is important to them because it turns out that he attended St. Paul’s School with young Keyser, and they have become in this slot in the Western mountains instant friends. Sargent with his dark sideburns and mustache looks like a young actor impersonating middle age, and he bends upon the camera, or upon the person holding it, who was Grandmother, a smile like the smile of a man watching the play of children who are dear to him. And the Chief, in a pith helmet that he must have dug out to impress visiting capitalism, looks nearly as young as the rest of them, so young that I have trouble recognizing my grandfather in him. His skin is burned dark, his eyes look very light. He too is smiling into the camera–a young athlete with a powerful long body and a candid face. But also pukka sahib of the Sawtooths, on his way to prove to careful money men that his scheme is sound and that its creator, young as he looks, is a man of skill, judgment, and experience.

It makes me melancholy to see him so youthful and girded with determination, ready to mount and ride off into the future more than eighty years ago.

I skip over that summer, in which nothing much happened but the passage of time, and jump to a chilly night in September 1883. The four of them sat around a big fire on the beach. Under a wide river of sky the river of water went with wet splashings, sunk in the rock, and above and along the river of water, down the beaches and around corners of worn stone, flowed a river of cold air that was sucked into the draft of the fire and spewed upward as sparks that multiplied the stars. Susan felt it numb on the back of her neck, and pulled up the collar of Oliver’s sheepskin coat and tightened the rebozo around her hair.

Reddened with firelight, its weeds casting black shadows, their path started up the gulch, up toward where Wan’s cooktent was pasted orange on the darkness. On the other side of the fire, lapped with shining, unseen wetness,