In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [50]
It would be the last time any of us would ever see the river free, and that, finally, is why we had come—to see it once more before the giant slab of concrete already rising miles downstream blocked the flow and sent the river back on itself, flooding the land.
I could not know what the dam would mean to my life any more than I could have foreseen Matthew’s death, my father’s demon or the physical and spiritual upheaval of the next two years. The cycle of the river would be broken. Salmon would die by the thousands, snouts abraded to bone from their attempts to break through the barrier. As I folded my clothes into the cardboard boxes, I knew things would change, that our move to Lewiston would mean a new house, new people. But I had moved many times as a child and had come to believe that even in strange homes and new schools, some things would always remain constant: the love of my parents, the circle of our family and my belief in God.
When we drove that last time from the house in the hollow, I didn’t look back. We crossed the river at Greer, down to Orofino, where my father pulled onto the shoulder of the road. At first I could not see it, so large it seemed another mountain—but then the sheerness of it, the steep, smooth expanse. Dworshak Dam braced itself between the canyon walls. I had never seen anything man-made so immense, and I stood still, letting my eyes adjust to the vision of something foreign in a familiar landscape.
Even now, when I drive the few miles east to Orofino, the dam catches me by surprise, looming up from the river, towering over the small town below. It flooded my place of memory, my place of birth. As the dam rose, so did the walls that severed my ties to my family, my god, the land. Sometimes, trying to find my way back, I want to go at the concrete and steel with my fists, beat it until the real water flows and I, like the salmon, am raw to the bone. That last summer, the syringa just beginning to spray its heavy sweetness into the air, I hung my head out the window to watch the dam disappear, then turned to the road ahead, the wind in my face.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I trace the road from the dam west to Lewiston, where the mill spews its poison, where, in winter, the Nez Perce once gathered their families close along the joining banks of the Clearwater and Snake rivers. The town itself is not large—thirty thousand, another ten thousand in the sister city of Clarkston, Washington, connected by two short bridges spanning the Snake. But for me, coming out of the woods, the place seemed never to stop, to sleep. Even at night the traffic continued, the stores stayed open and people went on about their business as though they had no home to go to.
We stayed with Nan for the first few weeks, and my memories of that time are heavy with nostalgia, sweet as the lilacs that grew in a hedge outside her door. Early summer in Lewiston couldn’t be more idyllic: crocus and daffodils begin their bloom in March, and by May the valley is rich in color. Morning winds clear the air. People rise at dawn to vie with their neighbor for earliest garden, bragging in June of two-pound tomatoes and knee-high corn.
I luxuriated in the warm weather, burrowing my bare feet into the ground we turned to plant potatoes. I loved my grandmothers house, the worn chair where we cuddled together to watch her soap operas; the kitchen, where something was always baking or boiling; her bedroom, where I slept curled against her back, wearing my Grandfather Edmonson’s T-shirts.
My step-grandfather had been killed the summer before, the summer I turned eleven. Nan had been waiting for him to come home from his sales rounds when she saw