Edge Effects: Notes From An Oregon Forest

Excursions

The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map through our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.-Proust It was Fourth of July, and hot, when my brother and I watched the man drown. I was horne for a vacation, and Ted and I decided to go bike-riding in Riverside State Park along the banks of the Spokane River just outside the city. It had been one hundred degrees for a week and the ponderosa woods by the river were brittle and dry. Blasts of pine-smelling woods hit us as we rode. We had gone farther than we intended and were soon at the Bowl and Pitcher, a bend in the river where a large cylindrical rock and a squatter, flatter rock sit side by side among the eddies and rapids. The water is very swift there. We left our bikes in the brown grass and stood on the footbridge, dipping and swaying as we talked, the sound of the rapids swallowing half our words. About two hundred yards downstream I saw a group of five or six people partying on a small strip of beach and then, out of the corner of my eye-I was turning back toward Ted-I glimpsed a man slip into the calmer water along the beach, floating and splashing on his back. We grew up in Spokane and know the reputation of the river. People drown right at that spot, at the Bowl and Pitcher, every year, and I said something like that to Ted. Gradually, as we talked, I began to realize that the man was in trouble. He had drifted from the calm water by the shore into the swift current and had started to struggle, waving his arms and apparently fighting against the pull of the rapids. His friends on the beach hadn't seemed to notice, or weren't reacting. There may have been one or two people standing there watching. The roaring of the water kept us from hearing the shouts, and the group was far enough away to make faces unreadable. Looking back now the E X CUR 5 ION 5 77 moment seems frozen, a split-second freeze-frame: the beach, the friends standing, the man suddenly in the current, his arms upraised. We kept reminiscing. The scene in the corner of my eye was at first simply an irritant, hardly impinging on the flow of conversation . On the periphery like that it was hard to interpret exactly what was happening. Even when we stopped talking and started watching the event unfold, we were still uncertain what to make of it. From that distance, and in the enveloping sound of the river, we couldn't separate out the elements of the scene, isolate the details. There was an air of unreality about the man struggling, then panicking, then going under and back up. The rituals of death are cliched to us now: the villainous cowboy clutches his chest and spirals down to the street. I thought for a moment that the drowning man was pretending to drown. His gestures seemed exaggerated for effect. He flailed and gasped and sputtered like a cartoon character. Someone tried to swim out to help but got caught in the current and had to cling to a rock several yards downstream. A few minutes later a -girl in the group on her way up the trail told us that they were trying to get the drowning man to give in to the current and float to the rock, but apparently he couldn't hear them or was too terrified to surrender himself. Several seconds after we finally accepted the reality of what was happening, the drowning man went under for the last time. It wasn't dramatic. He just didn't come up again. His friend on the rock seemed to be shouting; the rest of the group was by now standing on the edge of the shore, leaning over as far as they could. We weren't sure even then that he hadn't surfaced somewhere else or made it to shore. Only the sudden...