~
(This story originally appeared in South Dakota Review, volume 42, no. 2, summer 2004 under the title “Walls of Our Home”)
Queets
“Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries
—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly
lead you to water.” — Herman Melville
In the early years of our marriage, while living in a small city in west Texas, my wife had a miscarriage five months into her pregnancy. And though our surroundings were not the cause, as far as we knew, it was not long after it happened that west Texas began to feel like grit in our eyes. A few months later, we moved to south-central Idaho where we rented a two-bedroom guesthouse at the end of a long canyon that stretched into the heart of the Smoky Mountains, midway between the towns of Ketchum and Hailey.
The owners lived in the large main house, next to the guesthouse, and though we liked them and they liked us, we each kept to ourselves most of the time. They rearranged their furniture in the main house each spring and fall, and traveled often, riding their Honda Goldwing or pulling their large, silver Airstream to warmer places down south. Every few months they’d buy something new—a new truck, a new motorcycle, a new computer, a new piece of exercise equipment—always some new item to replace another that still was in perfectly good shape. They did these things, it seemed to us, to try to forget they were getting old. And though we found their restless habits amusing, they did not cause us to think any less of them because we knew we’d act much the same way someday. We were still young, but we understood that growing old is difficult and few of us are made to accept it at all, much less accept it with calm, quiet dignity.
The two houses were tucked into the base of a high, pine-covered hill, behind which were more hills and mountains and meadows—long, wide stretches of backcountry that we never quite explored the way we’d intended when we first moved there. It was not until we were near the end of our time there that we spent a night high up on that hill, under the stars, at the edge of all that country.
The guesthouse itself was quite cozy, but we did not always feel comfortable in it because it was not ours and there were things in it that were not ours: the teakwood ukulele we kept tucked behind the door of the spare bedroom; the dry flower wreath on the wall above the kitchen sink; the knotty pine sofa with brick-red, southwestern motif cushions that seemed to take up the entire living room. And many insects—wasps, moths, houseflies—dwelled within the confines of its four walls. In early fall, the houseflies would begin to hatch from the thick, crack-filled log beams that spanned and buttressed the high ceiling in the bedroom. Sometimes they’d emerge in the darkness, buzzing in fits just after our heads had begun to feel heavy on our pillows. We’d lift ourselves out of bed and strike on the light and grab our fly swatters and chase after them, often in vain, when all we wanted to do was sleep.
The height of the housefly hatch was early October, and it would not slow to a tolerable level until late November when the sun would fail to rise above the hill behind the house. We’d be in the hill’s shadow then until a day in late February when we’d be eating scrambled eggs and buttered toast on a weekend morning and suddenly feel the sun on our cheeks and look up to see its bright, shocking rays crackling through the window above the kitchen sink. And it would be as though a distant friend had come back to see us again and stay with us, stirring some repressed force within to keep us around for just one more season of sun.
In late fall and early spring, the owners would disappear for many weeks and leave us with their dog, a gentle golden retriever named Oscar who’d warm to us immediately as if we’d instantly become his caregivers. But we had busy lives away from the guesthouse, working our various jobs, and we’d have to leave him alone for a while during the day. Upon our return, we’d open the door and he’d push his nose up against us, wagging his tail in the dark, and then he’d bound onto the back deck of the guesthouse, expectant and excited. We’d spend the rest of the evening hitting a tennis ball up into the grove of aspens and pines behind the small back yard. Even after a fresh snowfall, he’d find the buried ball, and we’d smile, amazed, and tell him he was a good boy.
On occasion we’d take Oscar to the Big Wood River and he’d scamper along smooth river-worn rocks, stopping here and there to pick up sticks. He’d growl, trying to goad us into playing fetch with him, and we’d play for a while before wading into the river. Then he’d sit quietly along the water’s edge, watching us with curiosity as we waved our rods through the air. Walking back to the car, Oscar would lope along calmly, making no attempt to play, as if his attention were still on the fishing and its mysteries, and so we’d play only by picking up a stick and reminding him of the game.
We’d drive back to the guesthouse and cook chuck steak and big russets or spaghetti and meatballs, or we’d stir-fry snow peas with onions and rice. While we ate, Oscar would sit near our feet looking up at us from under our round glass table. In deference to the owners, who’d raised him with fine manners, we did not feed him at the table, but we could not resist feeding him the dog-friendliest of the food we were eating, so we’d compromise by dropping scraps into his bowl in the kitchen. He’d eat quickly, glancing back at us between head-plunges, and come back to the table to stare up at us again, hoping our generosity had not waned. It never did. He was the best dog we ever knew.
After the owners returned from a trip, they’d take Oscar immediately and hole up in the main house—poring through their mail, taking long naps, catching up on bill-paying—and we’d not see him for days.
In winter, in the early years, we skied a lot, but the number of skiing days declined with each passing season. In our last winter there, we did not downhill ski at all. We worked longer and longer hours and spent our rare spare time engaged in free activities like snowshoeing. Or we’d sit at the glass table in front of the large window going over bills and bank statements. Sometimes we’d look past the bills and bank statements and stare through the glass table to our pants and shoes or, on weekend mornings, our bare legs and slippers.
Friends who came to visit would tell us how lucky we were to live there, the little guesthouse being so quaint, its setting so beautiful. Yes, it is very quiet here, we’d say, very pretty and peaceful. The friends would depart and leave their words behind, words that reminded us of our blessings but made us feel we did not appreciate what we had and did not take full advantage of where we lived.
Beyond our few friends, we seldom saw signs there of anyone. Children never came by at Halloween. Parcel delivery people dropped off boxes only at the main house. Only once did an unannounced visitor come by.
On a Sunday morning, in the early spring of our last year there, a stranger, dressed in a red fleece vest and blue jeans, hopped up onto the back deck from out of nowhere, saying how nice it would be to have enough money to live in such a fine place. His face was tan and thin, and his clothes seemed one size too large. We greeted him, making vague references to our tight budget, explaining that we were renters and that our rent was offset slightly by a few caretaking duties. We wondered later why we’d felt obliged to reveal such details to a man we did not know.
He explained that he wanted to acquire a tent the owners had tried to sell at their garage sale the day before, wanted to trade for a few hours of his chimney-sweeping services. Or maybe we had some thoughts on what they might like to receive in trade. How about washing and waxing their SUVs? Walking their dog when they didn’t have time? Stone therapy perhaps? The combination of hot and cold was wonderful for tired muscles. He had many talents, he said, and was certainly open to suggestions. He handed us his business card.
He talked on, explaining that he liked to go to all the garage sales on Saturday mornings, looking for the items you can return for cash no matter what the condition or passage of time—Orvis jackets, Nordstrom sweaters, and REI tents, for example.
Then he said he was growing tired of the Sun Valley area, tired of expensive grocery stores and restaurants, tourists stomping through town in designer parkas and bright plastic ski boots. Tired of all the rich people flying in at Christmas to their sprawling second homes, their hot tubs already hot, their river rock mantels already draped with garland, their Christmas trees neatly decorated by the hands of strangers. He wanted to move away; a small town called La Push on the Washington coast was at the top of his list. An ex of his ran a bed and breakfast just east of there and had asked him to come out and take a look, maybe stay a while.
Before living in Idaho, he helped run a summer camp in Maine. Before Maine, he worked on a golf course in Mobile, Alabama, mowing greens and fairways, raking leaves and bunkers. Grubbed around six days a week, he said, then cleaned up and played free golf on Mondays. Before Alabama, he worked construction jobs around Bend, Oregon.
And before Bend, back in the 1980s, he lived in Utah, working as an engineer for a NASA space shuttle subcontractor. He asked if we remembered the shuttle explosion in 1986, when the young teacher, Christa McAuliffe, and six other astronauts died. Did we remember where we were when it happened? He was in a large conference room, he said, huddled with co-workers in front of a television. They saw it all on that little screen: the orange blast, the white smoke trails darting and stretching like worms made of foam, dazed and bewildered against that brilliant blue sky. His team of engineers had tried to delay the launch—they were concerned that the O-rings would be too brittle in the cold weather—but company management and NASA officials did not want to hear any of it.
We tried and they wouldn’t listen, he said, and that’s how it all happened. It was a hard day, the hardest of my life.
He turned and looked up beyond the small back yard into the aspens and pines as if suddenly he was trying to understand where he was. He turned back towards us, not quite to us, looking smaller somehow, uneasy within his tanned skin. Then his head nodded down, his chin dropping and holding itself there like a ratchet pawl clamped to a gear. We expected him to look up and say something then, something odd and vague like, Choose your paths wisely and keep them in front of you, or, Stay close and fight your battles as one. Instead he said, Please tell the owners I stopped by. He smiled faintly, cast quick glances into our eyes as if seeing us for the first time, then turned and walked away.
We felt depressed for days after the encounter, thinking about the victims of the explosion and the pain the stranger had endured, the non-stop chatter that must’ve clipped through his head in the ensuing years, the incessant second-guessing even though the accident was not his fault.
The following Saturday morning, my wife and I sat down on the back deck of the guesthouse and strapped on our snowshoes and backpacks, Oscar panting and tail-wagging at our feet. The owners had traveled south for a few weeks, and we decided to take him up the hill behind the guesthouse for an overnight camping trip. After tightening our snowshoes and packs, we clomped up and around the main house, heading west across the base of the hill and on through the aspens and pines, crossing over bare ground and snow. The snow was crusty, littered with needles and twigs and pinecones. There were round bare spots surrounding every tree.
We had not hiked or played fetch with Oscar for a couple of months, and we noticed he was not as spry as before. He was limping slightly, his coat was dull, and he seemed to be carrying more weight. He was happy to be with us, though, roaming now from tree to tree, stopping on occasion to watch birds and squirrels.
We found the notch in the hill that marked the beginning of an old rancher road and started the climb up. The road was covered in branches and pinched by trees that had grown so large that no vehicle could make the climb now from the bottom to the top. We traveled mainly on the snow, avoiding the bare spots, trying to make use of our snowshoes. About every dozen steps or so, we’d break through the crust into the soft snow beneath, crack-drops so abrupt and unwanted that we’d anticipate them as if about to receive a mild shock.
We reached the top of the road, then turned around to look down into the canyon and across to the bare brown slopes and up at the ski lodge perched above us four or five miles away. We could see a few pine trees on the slopes surrounding the ski lodge, huddled in shadowed areas between rounded ridges. Where we stood now, out in the open away from the trees, the ground was bare, the snow melted away. We took off our snowshoes and carried them, walking west up a steep wide slope. We turned north down a slight decline, stepping around sage and over sharp shale. Some of the sage plants were dry and possibly dead, their gnarled branches and stems like miniature Joshua trees, twisting and turning in all directions. Most, though, were covered with powder-green leaves, alive but not yet pungent in early spring.
We pitched our tent on flat ground in a grove of young pines. From there we had a grand view. We could see the dark red line of the small creek at the bottom of the canyon, choked by red-stemmed creek willows, wriggling away from us toward the Big Wood River three miles away. Thick pine stands clung tight to the north-facing slope that flanked the right side of the canyon. The south-facing slope on the left, brown and bare as it was, seemed to be waiting for the wet temperate days of late spring when, for a few short weeks, its ridges and shoulders would bulge vibrant green like the Irish hills we’d seen in pictures.
When it got dark, we gazed across the canyon at the lit-up lodge, and we reminisced about the crisp, blue-sky days we’d carved turns up on Bald Mountain.
The skiing was cleansing, she said, and at night we always slept well. I miss that, the sleeping well.
We’ll sleep well tonight, I said. We worked hard to get here.
Then we were quiet as if we expected to find answers to questions that had been with us, questions about what had brought us to that place and kept us there.
Then she said, I know you thought we’d love it here and maybe we did for a while, but I think we’re like visitors now, staring at the scenery.
Maybe, I said.
It seemed like a time to talk about our lost baby and of trying for another one, but I did not have the words to begin the conversation. It may have been that my ability to find the right words fell short of the qualitative standard I had set, as if the results of selection were more important than the two-sided act of speaking and listening. Or perhaps, taking her cue, I sensed that we were not in our proper place. Or it may have been that I was too tired to say what I wanted to say.
We crawled into the tent and into our zipped-together sleeping bags and folded up two towels for pillows. Oscar curled up at our feet. Then we kissed goodnight and fell asleep and slept hard. When we awoke in the morning, we felt the sun against our cheeks and heard Oscar whimpering, anxious to be let out. We broke down the tent and packed it up and hiked down the hill, groggy but awakening in the chilled air.
Are you ready to leave? she asked as we opened the guesthouse door.
I am.
Then let’s go.
We were restless in those days, perhaps more like the owners than we realized. The next day we let them know we’d be leaving and gave notice to our employers. Two weeks later, we rented a U-Haul and filled it with our belongings. We hugged Oscar and said goodbye to the owners. Then we drove off, out of that canyon, out of that valley, leaving behind nothing but the things that were in the guesthouse the day we moved in.
We received a telephone call on a Sunday morning, about six months later, while we were drinking coffee in the brightly lit kitchen of our bungalow in Boise’s north end. It was one of the guesthouse owners calling to say that Oscar had been missing, that they’d just received a phone call from a strange man who told them Oscar was alive and well. He’d meant no harm in taking the dog, the stranger had said. His life had been rather difficult these last few years, and he just needed to move away and settle down somewhere with a friend. He’d come by the owners’ house one afternoon and found Oscar lying out on the front deck of the main house, all alone, looking sad. The man coaxed him into his truck with kind words and Milk-Bone dog treats. At first, he was planning to take him away only for a short time, but then he decided to keep him. He had driven out of the valley to somewhere else. He hadn’t said where. The two of them got along great, the man said. (The owners were skeptical.) Someday he’d find a way to make it up to the owners; he’d think of something. But they shouldn’t try to find him, he said. That wouldn’t do anyone any good.
The owners wondered if we had any thoughts about the man who’d called them. Had we seen anyone suspicious-looking roaming around the premises in the days we lived in the guesthouse?
Not that I can recall, I said.
After the phone call, my wife and I talked about the NASA contractor chimney sweep man. We recalled that he’d mentioned La Push, Washington, and a woman running a bed and breakfast. Later, we found his business card in a desk drawer rubber band-bound within a stack of other long forgotten business cards. It read:
Sun Valley Chimney
and Concierge
Sweeping away soot, stress, and
all the dirty details.
Strom Lively, Owner
We researched La Push lodging establishments on the Internet, discovered that there were a few inns and B&Bs in and around that town. I began calling them, asking for Strom Lively. On the fourth call, this one to a place called the Sol Duc Inn, I reached a woman who said Strom wasn’t home. I asked if he’d be gone long.
He’s gone up north with the dog, she said; be back on Friday.
I’ll call then, I said. Then I said thank you and hung up the phone.
We enjoyed seeing new places and had long wished to visit the Olympic Peninsula. More than that, Oscar had been loyal to us, had perhaps even loved us. We had to see how he was doing. On Friday, we left work early and drove west, hoping to come up with some plan for reclaiming Oscar. It felt good to act then, as if in traveling to La Push we were going back in time to make corrections and change the course of events. We discussed possibilities and planned for contingencies. Then I said I’d probably beat the crap out of Strom if we found him, after first making sure Oscar was safe. My wife said I was talking absurdities. I said I could take the guy for sure. She said we weren’t absolutely certain Strom had taken Oscar, and if it turned out that he had we’d do nothing more than call the police. I reminded her that I’d been in a few fights in the past, that the damage inflicted had generally outweighed the damage received.
Then she said, You need to calm down, Sam. Anger won’t help us.
Fine, I said.
Most of the time we got along quite well, but I had a temper left over from my childhood, one that she did not like, and on occasion it would show itself and we’d find ourselves in separate places for a time. She had a way of calming me, though, and bringing me back to her. She had a way, too, of understanding the past and of seeing things that others might not see. She may have felt at that moment that our lost baby was watching us with interest, making it especially important now to act with grace.
We drove in silence through the grasslands and farmlands of southwest Idaho, eastern Oregon and eastern Washington, and on through the fruit orchards of central Washington, then up into the Cascade Mountains—pines giving way to firs—and over and down into the lush green forestlands of western Washington. We spent a short night in a motel in North Bend. We left early the next day and arrived in the Sol Duc Valley, just east of La Push, late morning on Saturday.
In the lobby of the Sol Duc Inn, a large fern hung in a corner next to four large windows. The two upper windows vaulted up to the ceiling. The two lower windows descended down to the floor. Green-tinted light hazed in, mutely illumining books on low shelves, framed art on high walls.
A woman greeted us. She appeared to be in her late forties. She was dressed in clogs and a denim skirt and a white V-neck sweater. We said we’d like to see Strom. She said he wasn’t around at the moment. Could she help us? No, we said, we just wanted to stop in and say hi. And then we began asking about the art on the wall. Have a look, she said. We began to tour the entire room, saying nothing, just looking at the framed pieces, each one of them named after a river, names such as Bogachiel River, October 2001, Upper Elwha River, June 2002, and Dungeness River, July 2002.
The woman said that each piece had a small topographic map tacked onto the back, the map marked with an “X” showing the section of river where the work was performed. We were looking at framed river imprints, she said, river sediment glued to canvas. From a distance they looked nearly the same, but up close they were subtly and beautifully varied in pattern, in hues of silver, gray, copper. Locals were beginning to appreciate them, she said. And folks were driving from Portland and Seattle, and one couple from as far away as San Francisco, to look at them and buy them. An art gallery in Seattle was taking a few on consignment next month.
We read the artist’s statement on the wall, just to the left of the main door. It said that every river lives its own life. The man behind the work, Strom Lively, wanted to record the hand prints and heartbeats of rivers and streams on the Olympic Peninsula. He wanted to remind us of the beauty of these rivers through the most direct means he knew. There was a business card pinned up next to his statement. It read:
Strom Lively
River Printer
The woman said that for each piece Strom captures a long and a short imprint. To do the long one, he finds a place in the river where the water is relatively calm and sinks to the bottom a cotton canvas sheet stretched taut by a square wood frame. He secures the framed canvas with rocks and ropes tied to trees. He leaves it like that for a few days while the river deposits its signature onto the canvas.
To do the short imprint, he takes a large seine—one he developed for this task, with a sticky tight netting material—and plunges it down vertically into the river in a place near the canvas. He calls to the dog, and the dog wades into the river ten or twenty yards upstream and starts pawing at the river bottom. Aquatic nymphs and silt get stirred up and float down and stick to the seine. Later, Strom stretches the netting over the canvas and dries it all in the sun—that is, if the sun is out—or, more often, with a blow dryer. Then he sprays the whole thing with acrylic shellac. The netting is made of a special material that dissolves over time.
A small part of us wondered if this wasn’t just a scheme—albeit a creative one—in a place where people often had to scratch and scrape to earn a living. But the river imprints were gorgeous, haunting. The more we stared at them, the more we were drawn in—sand, silt, twigs, a few sparsely scattered nymph husks put to canvas not by the hand of a painter but by the life force of a river. We wished we’d had the time that weekend to visit each of those rivers. We felt as though they were whispering to us—something cautionary, something deep and ancient—and we were called upon to find time someday to sit still long enough to hear what they were saying.
The woman apologized and said she’d forgotten to ask us how we’d come to know Strom. We told her he’d stopped by a place we once lived in near Ketchum. She opened up to us more then, saying that she and Strom had met in Oregon but had been apart for a long time, many mistaken years.
Soon we were standing in front of four imprints grouped as one on the wall opposite the main door. There was a caption underneath that read, Sol Duc River, September 2001. That was his first, she said. He began preparing to do it just a few days after 9/11. That morning, as they were watching the tragedy unfold on television, he kept going on about the structural integrity of the towers. He could not believe how quickly they came down. It didn’t make sense; there should’ve been more time. He packed a bag that afternoon and left for a few days—didn’t say where he was going—and, when he came back, he was wading in the Sol Duc River just behind the inn, experimenting, doing preparation work.
Then she said, Strom’s working some canvas in the Sol Duc a couple hundred yards upstream, if you want to go over and say hi. Just cross the parking lot to the far side and head down toward the river. You’ll see the trail. Can’t miss it.
We crossed the parking lot and found the trail and followed it down to the river. Drizzle was falling from low gray clouds that touched the tops of Western hemlocks and Douglas firs. When we reached the riverbank, we looked upstream and saw Strom. He stood in a broad, flat pool in green chest waders, one strap hanging loose, wearing a floppy leather Australian outback hat. Oscar was there, too, standing along the edge of the river watching Strom. After a while Strom whistled. Oscar stepped into the river and waded over and stopped at a spot just upstream from Strom. Oscar stared down into the water and began shifting, shimmying—forward, backward, side-to-side—and we imagined his paws scraping over rocks and sand, stirring up river bottom. Strom dipped a seine into the water and waited. Then he rose up all at once, lifting the seine out of the water. He held it straight out in front of him. We wondered what he saw. Small bits of dark water-soaked bark? Stoneflies? Mayflies? Pebbled caddis casings? Strom turned and waded to shore. Oscar followed.
We began walking in their direction, not sure what we were going to say. Oscar recognized us and ran to us. We stroked his head, patted his flanks, told him it was great to see him again, and kept walking toward Strom. When we reached him, we asked him if he remembered us. We explained that we were the couple from that guesthouse near Ketchum, asked if he recalled stopping by one day. He said yes in fact he did remember that.
We asked him why he took Oscar away. He stared at us for a moment, and then he said he used to think he did it for a noble reason, but in fact he did it because he was jealous of the owners—they seemed to have everything—and wanted to take something away from them. His head wasn’t clear then, and he was very lonely. The dog is happy, though, he said; hopefully that counts for something.
It does, we said. His name used to be Oscar. What do you call him now?
The same: Oscar.
There was something about hearing that Oscar was still Oscar. It seemed to confirm that we didn’t want to disrupt his present life, and we said so, and Strom seemed pleased with that. There was a moment of silence, and then we said, Someday maybe we’ll buy one of your imprints; they’re nice.
You should buy one now. The prices are going up.
The only places earning our money right now are home stores: Sears, Lowe’s, Home Depot.
Why don’t I just give one to you?
No, we can’t do that.
Please, I’ve got one from the Queets I’d like you to have.
You’re sure?
Yes.
Okay.
We followed Strom up the trail, talking to Oscar, keeping him close. We crossed the small parking lot, followed Strom around back of the inn, through a narrow door, into a small workroom. In the workroom, on shelving along the far wall, river imprints were stacked upright between wooden slats. Wood frames and framing material, seines and canvases were stacked and scattered around the floor. There was a workbench, also against the far wall, upon which lay a handsaw next to a cast iron vice and a hammer and a small box of nails. The room smelled of mildew and varnish. Strom leaned over the workbench and pulled out from one of the shelves a framed river imprint.
We did this one on the Queets, as I said, a couple of months ago, our second one on that river. Came out pretty good.
He handed it to us.
It’s yours, he said. Then he said, Let’s call it hush money . . . or hush art. He laughed.
Though we did not laugh at the joke, we were touched by the gesture. We held up the imprint and looked at it—peppered, powdered swirling grays, winking silver, coffee ground-like wood bits, a few scattered nymphs—then said thank you. We turned and walked outside, clutching the framed river imprint, feeling slightly out of place there, wanting to leave Strom and Oscar to their work. They followed us out, then Strom stopped and said, When I saw you two that first time, did I tell you I used to live in Ketchum many years ago?
No.
I was there for about a year back in the early seventies, between college and grad school. I went out there to ski Baldy, of course, like everyone, and never wanted to leave. We used to say back then that there were no grownups in Ketchum. It didn’t matter how old you were—you could be like me and my friends, in your early twenties, or you could be in your fifties, sixties, seventies, it didn’t matter—we were all the same, partying hard, having fun. You’d see people snorting lines on the bars, no big deal. They had plastic to-go cups stacked at the end of the bars or near the exits, right there, nice and convenient, so you could take your cocktail with you. You could drive home drinking, drunk as a skunk; cops would escort you home.
It’s changed, we said. It’s not like that now.
You’re right, he said. He paused and then he said, I used to think that that was just resort towns, but later I learned it’s the whole world: there aren’t enough grownups. We’ve got children in positions of awesome power, some running entire countries, thinking they’re God or know God, making stupid and evil decisions, hurting people, getting their hands on all sorts of nasty devices. They’re playing global video games and we’re the targets—ten points for him, twelve points for her—but you can’t let it get to you or it’ll swallow you up. You just have to do your work, try to do something decent in this world. My problem for the longest time was I didn’t know what that thing was.
What you’re doing is great, we said, trying to add a touch of hope to heavy words.
Is all this as important as oil or acrylic brushed onto canvas? he said, nodding toward the workroom. Maybe, maybe not. But it gives me satisfaction, and I wasn’t doing this world much good when I was a complete mess. And it sure beats the shellacked elephant shit they had hanging in the Brooklyn Museum a few years back. Might’ve crossed the line there, don’t you think?
No need to defend your work; it’s beautiful.
I’m glad you like it, he said. But don’t feel you have to hang it in your home if you don’t want to.
We watched a car pull into the parking lot, heard its tires scrunch over gravel, then looked at Strom again, his eyes staring beyond us toward the workroom into some comforting space of his own. Despite his many completed river pieces and his growing notoriety, he was not quite confident in his purpose. Our acceptance—confirmed, it seemed, by our driving a nail into one of the walls of our home, by our hanging his art on that nail—mattered to him. He wanted a small piece of the rivers he loved—indeed, a part of him—permanently placed in our home. It was ritual, a shared feeling as old as humankind, and we sensed it immediately.
We’ll hang it, we said. We want to.
Great, he said, looking at us now.
We said goodbye and crossed the parking lot and heard Oscar bark in our direction. We stopped and waved to him. He barked again. We wanted to run to him and let him nuzzle up to us and lick our cheeks. And we wanted to hug him one more time. But we didn’t. It seemed prudent, less confusing for everyone, not to. We felt especially concerned about decorum in those days, about setting the proper example for our lost baby, a life that seemed to persist wholly within each of us.
We climbed into our Subaru and began the drive back to Boise. Instead of hurrying, though, we decided to stop and visit the Queets. Our map showed Route 101 crossing over that river about fifty south of where we were now.
On our hike down to the river, we stopped and stood in the dormant shadows of towering coastal trees—cedars and spruces—trees that were new and awesome to us. We sat along the bank and listened to the water purling by, then waded out into the river in our shorts and sandals and turned over smooth river rocks to see what we could find. We did not have our fly rods with us, but that did not matter.
We spent the night not far down the road in the state’s capital city, Olympia, and made the long drive home to Boise on Sunday, back to the first real home we shared together. We still had plenty of open wall space in our home—high, wide tracts of it, newly painted, clean and white—and we had no problem finding a suitable place for our river imprint, Queets River, June 2002. We each held it up for the other in various locations throughout our home and talked about it and settled on the right spot and pounded a nail and hung it. Then we stared at it for a while and marveled at how it changed in the shifting sunlight, subtly, solemnly, and we began to see Strom not as a troubled stranger but as a friend. Then we saw Oscar again, standing in the river, head down, eager, a happy dog in the last years of his short dog life.
We never told the owners of the guesthouse about our discovery, never explained what had happened to their dog. They were pleasant people and we liked them well enough, but we neither saw them nor talked to them nor heard from them again.
Months later, while admiring his work, my wife said that Strom was like a riverside branch that broke away in a storm, one that floated and drifted and finally found bottom—not the down-and-out kind but the solid kind, the kind you anchor to. After letting her eyes wander over the piece a few moments more, her hands clasped against her hard melon belly, she said we were a bit like him, and I told her it was the strangest thing I ever heard her say, strange but possibly true.
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Eric Aaserud grew up in the Pacific Northwest and now lives in Maryland. He has published stories in Gray’s Sporting Journal, Third Coast Magazine, In Posse Review, and South Dakota Review. “Queets” is a part of his recently completed collection, The River Printer.