Behind the house

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 <a style="color:#666666; text-decoration:none;" href="https://www.ndbeauty.com.hk/ND/NDollar/NDollarList">cosmetics
</a>　　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 style="color:#666666; text-decoration:none;" href="http://hk.nec.com/en_HK/global/prod/express/">Express 5800 Server</a>　 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　<a style="color:#666666; text-decoration:none;" href="https://www.cuniq.com/hk_en/data-card/europe/europe-15days-1gb.html
">uk data sim card</a>　 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.