Light on the Devils: Coming of Age on the Klamath

Deep Waters

74 Deep Waters johanna mostovoy didn’t have to leave her husband, after all, to escape her creepy little apartment in Happy Camp.(That would come later.) What got her out was the uprooting of another family, when Trella Loquet’s husband was transferred by the highway department to southern California.Trella, an Attebery who had never lived away from the river,cried as she watched her furniture stuffed into the moving van. But now,early in the summer of ’64,Hank and Johanna would rent the spacious house on Deer Lick Creek, half a mile up Indian Creek from us. While Mother and Dad helped them move in, Philip, Jimmy, and Ronnie played softball with Liz andTommy and me in the big backyard of their new house. Deer Lick Creek ran past the woodshed and down into Indian Creek, and we waded up its gravelly bed. Philip was Liz’s age,Jimmy a year younger,Ronnie an annoying six.We led them down the road and showed them our swimming hole. Good swimming holes—deep, with a slow current—were rare on Indian Creek;in ours,the creek foamed around a bend and poured into a depression, twelve or fifteen feet deep at its upper end, two feet deep at its lower, where gravel kicked out from the depths formed a riffle. Framed by the smooth canyon rock,sculpted over millennia by the high water of winter, the pool grew clear as the summer turned hot. The summer before,a new log stringer bridge was built across Indian Creek just downstream from our pool,balanced on the rim of the gorge. Across it, on an old homestead property, the Buchanan family built a new house.Mr.Buchanan was a retired Air Force non-com with a wife and six children. Mother rolled her eyes, as she always did at excess fecundity. Of course they could afford all those kids, she snorted, with the military paying for everything. Dewey, the oldest, was in Liz’s class. The Buchanan kids all came down to swim.The little ones splashed about in the shallows and refused to drown,despite the fact that no one paid much attention to them. DeepWaters 75 With the thermometer stuck above a hundred degrees, the water was still shockingly cold, and we took that first daily plunge with gasps and shivers, then pulled ourselves out onto flat boulders to bake. Indian Creek was born below the great ridgeline that separated the Klamath River drainage from the Illinois River in Oregon. Dropping south from that land of hemlock and Brewer spruce, it picked up two major tributaries, the South and East Forks.The South Fork headed below Preston Peak,highest in the Siskiyous.From its summit,the ocean could be seen.The East Fork flowed west fromThompson Ridge. Both drainages,in those years,were mostly unroaded,their dendritic channels shaded by groves of Douglas fir,Port Orford cedar,and Pacific yew. Below the East Fork, all the flat places along the main channel of Indian Creek had been settled for a hundred years. The stream itself was still healing from the effects of early mining. But along the ravaged streambed, dogwood and mock orange, serviceberry, alders, cottonwoods, and live oaks flourished.The last big flood, in December of 1955, was far enough in the past that the creek pools had scoured themselves clean of silt and gravel,and in their depths the cold of melted snows lasted all summer. We borrowed face masks and eye goggles from the Mostovoy boys and wore them as we cruised along the surface or dove deep to peer at colored rocks and snatch at crawdads. Now and then we came face to face with steelhead that sheltered in the deeps and waited for the safety of darkness to resume their journey upstream.We hauled old inner tubes up through the riffles above the home pool,until we reached the foot of Puppy Falls, where the creek fell into a constricted rock formation carved out of the canyon, and where even the sluggish flows of August foamed and roared. As we paddled furiously to keep from being hurled back downstream,we turned our faces into the mist,senses overwhelmed. Puppy Falls is now called Buchanan Falls, and it flows within rustcolored walls,the result of a flood of arsenic-laden water—long trapped in an abandoned copper mine upstream—that poisoned the creek for several years in the 1970s. But we first saw...