In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [98]
As I came into Orofino, the sight of Dworshak Dam stunned me. No matter how large I remembered it, its enormity didn’t seem real. I had felt the power of the river, had seen it tear away trees and float entire buildings during spring thaw: I tried to imagine the workers detouring the water in order to pour concrete and anchor steel. It seemed an impossible task.
I crossed the bridge at Greer and wound my way up the mountain. The grade ended abruptly, spilling out onto a flat expanse of cultivated fields, already green with new wheat. In the distance the trees formed a protective circle and the hills rose even higher into dense forest and alpine meadows. Even if the river and its canyon had become something foreign, the Weippe Prairie had not.
I rolled down my window and breathed in the rich smell of damp earth and early flowers—balsam root, dog fennel, lupine and camas—that floated on the heavier perfume of pine. The tears that stung my eyes surprised me, and I let out a loud “Hah!” It was a good noise, a sound of skepticism and control. It worked. I shook my head and tried to remember the road I would follow through Weippe and on into Pierce, the series of turns I would need to take in order to reach Reeds Creek.
At first, Pierce didn’t seem much different. There was Kimball’s Drug, the Confectionery, the old Clearwater Hotel. But as I drove slowly down Main Street, I realized what I wasn’t seeing: people. No old-timers sat in the hotel window, pinging empty Folger’s cans with spit. No women stood in the doorway of Durant’s Dry Goods, testing the warm weather with bare arms and pinned-up hair.
The school, I knew, had been closed and condemned, the children bussed to the new building, halfway between Pierce and Weippe, pledging allegiance with the Weippe Gorillas, the team we had once considered our arch rivals. But the post office—it should never be empty. Just then a dog barked and a woman bellowed for it to shut up. I relaxed my grip on the wheel.
Everyone is at work, I thought. Later, on the way home, when I come back through, it will be different. I picked up speed, heading toward the hollow, fighting the sense of urgency rising in my chest.
Pole Camp was gone. Only the shop remained, a dustier shade of red, but still standing. I pulled off the road and stared at the clearing where our circle had been. I looked closer and saw the house that Clyde and Daisy had built, the one with a genuine foundation. The forest had closed it in, but the windows were curtained, the burn barrel still upright. I searched the clearing for the stumps our trailers had rested on, the outhouse, anything that might verify that my life there had been real.
There—behind the lightning-struck yellow pine, we had had our secret place. There my cousins and I had eaten thick butter-and-sugar sandwiches, quarreled and made up, come for solace and pity after a whipping. I wondered if at twilight the elk still came into the meadow—beyond where the wash shed had stood—to eat the marsh grass and whistle their calves in.
A few miles farther, I passed the Jaype mill, whose name I had always heard as initials—J.P.—still huffing out its smoke. A solitary loader swung its jaws over a deck of logs, lifting six or seven at a time and placing them precisely between the hard metal ribs of a rail car. The familiar activity was a comfort, and I drove on toward Cardiff, where the church and parsonage stood skirted by a bog of mud. I did not slow to look. I wanted the woods. The creek would be there, the meadow where I had seen the fawn, the hollow with its sheltering trees. No matter what I did,