Chapter 2

Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal Range... come look: the hysterical crashing of tributaries as they merge into the Wakonda Auga River . . . The first little washes flashing like thick rushing winds through sheep sorrel and clover, ghost fern and nettle, sheering, cutting . . . forming branches. Then, through bear-berry and salmonberry, blueberry and blackberry, the branches crashing into creeks, into streams. Finally, in the foothills, through tamarack and sugar pine, shittim bark and silver spruce—and the green and blue mosaic of Douglas fir—the actual river falls five hundred feet . . . and look: opens out upon the fields. Metallic at first, seen from the highway down through the trees, like an aluminum rainbow, like a slice of alloy moon. Closer, becoming organic, a vast smile of water with broken and rotting pilings jagged along both gums, foam clinging to the lips. Closer still, it flattens into a river, flat as a street, cement-gray with a texture of rain. Flat as a rain-textured street even during flood season because of a channel so deep and a bed so smooth: no shallows to set up buckwater rapids, no rocks to rile the surface . . . nothing to indicate movement except the swirling clots of yellow foam skimming seaward with the wind, and the thrusting groves of flooded bam, bent taut and trembling by the pull of silent, dark momentum. A river smooth and seeming calm, hiding the cruel file-edge of its current beneath a smooth and calm-seeming surface. The highway follows its northern bank, the ridges follow its southern. No bridges span its first ten miles. And yet, across, on that southern shore, an ancient two-story wood-frame house rests on a structure of tangled steel, of wood and earth and sacks of sand, like a two-story bird with split-shake feathers, sitting fierce in its tangled nest. Look . . . Rain drifts about the windows. Rain filters through a haze of yellow smoke issuing from a mossy-stoned chimney into slanting sky. The sky runs gray, the smoke wet-yellow. Behind the house, up in the shaggy hem of mountainside, these colors mix in windy distance, making the hillside itself run a muddy green. On the naked bank between the yard and humming river’s edge, a pack of hounds pads back and forth, whimpering with cold and brute frustration, whimpering and barking at an object that dangles out of their reach, over the water, twisting and untwisting, swaying stiffly at the end of a line tied to the tip of a large fir pole...jutting out of a top-story window. Twisting and stopping and slowly untwisting in the gusting rain, eight or ten feet above the flood’s current, a human arm, tied at the wrist, ( just the arm; look) disappearing downward at the frayed shoulder where an invisible dancer performs twisting pirouettes for an enthralled audience ( just the arm, turning there, above the water) . . . for the dogs on the bank, for the blinking rain, for the smoke, the house, the trees, and the crowd calling angrily from across the river, “Stammmper! Hey, goddam you anyhow, Hank Stammmmmper!” And for anyone else who might care to look. East, back up the highway still in the mountain pass where the branches and creeks still crash and roar, the union president, Jonathan Bailey Draeger, drives from Eugene toward the coast. He is in a strange mood—owing, largely, he knows, to a fever picked up with his touch of influenza—and feels at once oddly deranged and still quite clear-headed. Also, he looks forward to the day both with pleasure and dismay—pleasure because he will soon be leaving this waterlogged mud wallow, dismay because he has promised to have Thanksgiving dinner in Wakonda with the local representative, Floyd Evenwrite. Draeger does not anticipate a very enjoyable afternoon at the sometimes a great notion Evenwrite household—the few times he had occasion to meet with Evenwrite at his home during this Stamper business, those times were certainly no joy—but he is in a good humor nevertheless: this will be the last of the Stamper business, the last of this whole Northwest business for a good long time, knock wood. After today he can get back down south and let some of that good old California Vitamin D dry up this blasted skin rash. Always get skin rash up here. And athlete’s foot all the way to the ankle. The moisture. It’s certainly no wonder that this area has two or three natives a month take that one-way dip—it’s either drown your blasted self or rot. Yet, actually—he watches the scenery swim past his windshield—it doesn’t seem such an unpleasant land, for all the rainfall. It seems rather nice and peaceful, rather easy. Not as nice as California, God knows, but the weather is certainly far nicer than weather back East or in the Middle West. It’s a bountiful land, too, so it’s easy as far as survival goes. Even that slow, musical Indian name is easy: Wakonda Auga. Wah-kondah-ah-gah-h-h. And those homes built along the shoreline, some next to the highway and some across—those are very nice homes and not at all the sort one would imagine housing a terrible depression. (Homes of retired pharmacists and hardware-men, Mr. Draeger.) All this complaining about the terrible hardship brought on by the strike ...these homes seem a far cry from terrible hardship. (Homes of weekend tourists and summertime residents who winter over in the Valley and make enough to take it comfy near the up-river salmon run in the fall.) And quite modern, too, to find in a country one might think of as somewhat primitive. Nice little places. Modern, but tastefully so. In the ranch-style motif. With enough yard between the house and the river to allow for additions. (With enough yard, Mr. Draeger, between the house and the river to allow for the yearly six inches the Wakonda Auga takes as its yearly toll.) It has always seemed odd, though: no houses at all on the bank—or no houses at all on the bank if one excludes the blasted Stamper home. One would think that some houses would be built on the bank for convenience’s sake. That has always seemed peculiar about this area. . . . Draeger bends his big Pontiac around the riverside curves, feeling feverish and mellow and well fed, with a sense of recent accomplishments, listlessly musing about a peculiarity that the very house he muses about would find not the least bit peculiar. The houses know about riverside living. Even the modern weekend summertime places have learned. The old houses, the very old houses that were built of cedar shake and lodgepole by the first settlers at the turn of the eighteen-hundreds, were long ago jacked up and dragged back from the bank by borrowed teams of horses and logging oxen. Or, if they were too big to move, were abandoned to tip headlong into the water as the river sucked away the foundations. Many of the settlers’ houses were lost this way. They had all wanted to build along the river’s edge in those first years, for convenience’s sake, to be close to their transportation, their “Highway of Water,” as the river is referred to frequently in yellowed newspapers in the Wakonda Library. The settlers had hurried to claim banksite lots, not knowing at first that their highway had a habit of eating away its banks and all that those banks might hold. It took these settlers a while to learn about the river and its habits. Listen: “She’s a brute, she is. She got my house last winter an’ my barn this, by gum. Swallered ’em up.” “So you wouldn’t recommend my building here waterside?” “Wouldn’t recommend or wouldn’t not recommend, neither one. Do what you please. I just tell you what I seen. That’s all.” “But if what you say is so, if it is widenin’ out at that rate, then figure it: a hundred years ago there wouldn’t have been no river at all.” “It’s all in the way you look at it. She runs both directions, don’t she? So maybe the river ain’t carryin’ the land out to sea like the government is tellin’ us; maybe it’s the sea carryin’ the water in to the land.” “Dang. You think so? How would that be...?” A while to learn about the river and to realize that they must plan their homesites with an acknowledged zone of respect for its steady appetite, surrender a hundred or so yards to its hungry future. No laws were ever passed enforcing this zone.