Temperance Creek. Pamela Royes
journey that led to this moment in time?—is the smallest of queries and also the largest, and as we accompany this personal exploration of a most unusual life, we will undoubtedly have insight into our own.
The storm hasn’t hit us yet, but it’s coming.
Three unseasonably warm April days, and now our son calls from the high Wallowa Valley to tell us it’s been raining since early morning, predicted to rain all night. Flood warnings for the Grande Ronde River and also here, along the Imnaha. I stand on the rock retaining wall that separates the garden from the river. Below me, the Imnaha plunges down the narrow canyon, brown and full of itself, the uproar of the water deafening. Burnt logs—darkened by a summer fire and flushed from snowmelt-swollen draws upriver—surface, twist, and disappear.
Alive to its danger, I rush to finish the last of spring planting and step off rows for next winter’s potatoes. With my pocketknife I cut ten pounds of Yukon Gold and ten of Kennebec Red into thirds and space them in the furrows. Marge, our half-grown black-and-white border collie pup, wanders from potato to potato, licking them, watching me. She’s waiting for the opportunity to sneak one into the orchard and tear it to pieces. When I catch her doing just that, she drops, rolling onto her side, the potato imprinted with delicate teeth marks.
“Darn it, Marge!” I scold.
Ten minutes later I glance up, and she’s lying in the same position, dolefully watching me. “You’re not in trouble,” I say apologetically. “It’s that river.” She wiggles forward, snuffles my face, and then returns to rooting through the compost pile near the garden gate.
Emerging snap peas, beets, spinach, lipstick chard, and yellow onions line up in exuberant green rows, and the air is heavy with the fragrance of purple lilacs, lily of the valley, and apple blossoms—abuzz with bees. Drifting in from the hills, serviceberry, and the sweet smell of something that isn’t easily recognizable—too early for wild rose or syringa. I smell beeswax, honeycomb, and hope. Paradise—albeit a paradoxical one, especially today.
After lunch, the rain arrives, light at first.
Working quickly, I dig staggered holes and jerk plastic-wrapped packages of strawberry and raspberry plants from the Meeks Nursery box, planting under a warm, steady drizzle while the river rises. Two merganser ducks flap silently past me, inches from the water’s surface on their way upriver. The rain descends in sheets as I heel in the remaining plants, shut the garden gate, and dash for the shelter of the cabin.
My husband Skip has abandoned his hillside fence-building project and joins me inside. I tackle the morning dishes while he starts a fire and prepares a mid-afternoon popcorn snack. He seems distracted. Can’t find the butter, forgets to turn the burner on, and complains that the popcorn isn’t working; it’s taking too long to pop.
“You’re not worried about the river, are you?” I tease. We’ve already been through the worst, I think, remembering the hundred-year flood of 1997. That year, we were celebrating New Year’s Eve with friends (our teenagers safely away at a sleepover) when a telephone call sent us rushing home to find the river flooding our low ground. “It will go down,” I predicted, straining to hear the river’s familiar script. “It always crests by one, two in the morning.” When he told me his plans to stay up and keep an eye on it, I said (with supreme confidence), “You’re overreacting.”
During that night, while Skip mounted the tires back on the Chevy flatbed—up on blocks the last three weeks—and prepared for disaster, I pulled the covers over my head, certain everything would work itself out. After twenty years of watching the river come up and go down, but stay within the banks, I was counting on that predictability. He roused me at two a.m., saying, “You’d better get up if you want to save anything.”
No, it’s impossible, I thought, pulling on my clothes. In the other room I could hear Skip on the phone, alerting our children. With a fair amount of dread I approached the cabin door and opened it. A great roaring filled the air; the river was at our threshold. In the porch’s light I saw dark waves rolling and coursing through the yard, and I could make out the shape of things in the water, boards and debris, logs and trees. Someone’s propane tank floated by. Everything turning and twisting in the current. Horror-struck, confused, and yet filled with a strange exhilaration, I stood, riveted, in the open doorway of a world without order while Skip telephoned for help.
Quickly we tumbled the cherished artifacts of our lives into sheets, pillowcases, and blankets, because there were no boxes. Framed art tossed in with books, photo albums with quilts and table lamps. Grandpa’s glass figurines stuffed into a dresser drawer with clothing, shampoo, and cowboy boots, while the electricity surged off and on like some old black-and-white reel-to-reel. Together we rolled the Persian rug and carried furniture through icy thigh-high water to open-sided trailers while the rising river filled the house. We worked to save what we could while our winter wood, our freezer filled with elk, and the carefully stacked and stickered timbers from the dairy barn we’d torn down the previous summer were lifted and borne away. Our daughter’s corgi, first in the 4-H obedience trials, the one dog who never failed to come when called, went missing and was lost.
Minutes before the road caved in, we slammed the pickup doors and fled.
With his back to the woodstove, Skip reads a chapter at the kitchen table while I lie on the couch intending to read but dozing off. When I open my eyes again, he’s still reading. I see rain on trees, a narrow wedge of gray sky to the east, and hear the muted, rumbling thud of river rocks rolling under the waterline.
My eyes roam the bright and comfortable room, and I think about what has been given us, what we have taken, and what has been required. Like the river, I think, our marriage has known the calm water, the summer water. And we’ve known flood stage, surging over the banks. No two days the same. I look back at Skip, and it seems no time at all since I followed him into the wilderness on a perilous adventure, everything we owned on the back of two pack animals. He feels me watching him and looks up from his book.
“You’re awake,” he says. “The river’s still coming up.”
“The sky’s lighter,” I say, willing the rain to stop, the river to back down, so we can resume our afternoon plans of building fence. He looks at me over the top of his reading glasses, smiles, and then peers through the window.
“I don’t think it’s going to quit,” he says. “Want to go out anyway?”
We dig out raincoats and straw hats, crossing the lawn, clipped twice this week, a vivid contrast to the turbulence beside us. We pass through a gate, entering the buckskin yellow textures of the bunchgrass and rock-strewn hillside, and retrieve Skip’s fencing tools. From the horse pasture we watch the river tipped with whitecaps and surging with debris as we carry poles from the utility trailer to the new fence line on the hill. In between the whine of his chain saw and the sharp ring of my hammer, the turmoil of the water intrudes. I step to the edge of a rocky bluff. Below me the river bends, and I can hear the dull sounds of impact. Of big wood hitting stone. A lone Canada goose passes me flying upstream, against the current.
We manage to hang the fourteen-foot metal gate but quit when the downpour forces us inside. Skip stokes the fire in the woodstove to take the chill off, and while I make dinner, we drink a beer and watch the lights flicker on and off, like they did the night of the big flood.
What, I wonder, will the river take this time?
Just before dark, we feed Marge and cross the wet lawn barefoot. Because it is quieter, the river is more menacing. The sheer volume of the water moving down the center channel has obliterated the sound of rocks rolling against one another, against the river bottom and the shrinking banks. Loose and agile it stretches, still staying its course but, I fear, almost out of control. The center, like a spine, crests five feet higher than the banks, bounding and