{From The Northwest Towns of Richard Hugo}


 

While Hugo’s house was almost two miles from the Duwamish River, my childhood home was even closer to the Ohio. Had I traveled the mile to my own nearby river on foot, I too would have crossed a ridge, descended through a spray of deciduous trees where deer roamed, and I also would have come upon a major byway, a four-lane road with fast-moving traffic. My West Marginal Way was Columbia Parkway, a secondary highway that followed the Ohio River through Cincinnati. Crossing that, as Hugo would have had to cross West Marginal Way, I then would have slid down to the riverbank. For me, it would be a steep descent from the fringe of rocks and clay into the water. There, like Hugo, I would have seen barges huffing past. Mine would have been carrying coal, and Hugo’s would have been hauling lumber.

Many times, I’d heard my grandfather say that he’d swum in the Ohio as a boy. It seemed so brave to me, slipping into all that mud with those twirling currents and no rocks or outcroppings to hang onto, that I imagined him clutching for a raft, one he’d fashioned out of logs. My grandfather told me that he remembered the church steeple poking up from the water during the river’s worst flood, the one that happened when he was small. He said that whirlpools were almost invisible to eye level; you could see them only from above. Boys drowned back then, just after the turn of the century. According to my grandfather, canoes of Little Miami Indians regularly came down the Little Miami River from small settlements and journeyed into the open water of the Ohio.

Do I remember this as part of the folklore that I’ve pinned to the triggering place near my childhood home? From that house, the one tucked behind the hill from the waterway, I might have walked up the path all the way to the top so that I could have a view of the magnificent river. But I didn’t. Instead, the little trail disappeared into a wrinkle of clay and rocks between two hillsides. I never ventured that far. I kept to the low-lying trails, climbed trees, and built little shelters out of branches and leaves.

To be sure, my landscape wasn’t like Hugo’s at all. Instead of looking across the river to estuaries and evergreens, we had oaks, maples, and elms and the bluegrass hills. In my place, the heat of summer baked the giant leaves into the clay, and snakes—garters—crawled through the woods, and if the creek had been deeper, water moccasins. But I felt that pull of the river—ominous in its attraction. Because I was supposed to stay away, I was drawn toward it. Over that hill, right on the Mason-Dixon Line, I imagined that muddy river floating the coal and limestone barges along its winding shit-colored passage to the Mississippi. And my whole imagination about my childhood home, what I call upon in dreams and in crafting language, rests on the other side of that hill from the river. My reality was away from the water, nestled in the gentle little valley where my family’s house sat on Grandin Road. In that world, on my side of the slope, mercury-quick salamanders sunned themselves on creek rocks and our dogs barked at strangers. I remember a box turtle, maybe ten inches long, who lived in those woods. Standing above him and then squatting to see his little reptilian face, I’d talk to him. Since eastern box turtles can live to be a hundred, he might still be pawing his way along the creek’s drying trickle. I still dream of him.

Even now, just before sleep, I return to those trails I’d run thirty-five, even forty years ago. There, I walk the loops and dead ends through those woods, seeking always the hard, hollow sound of my feet across the worn dry paths of summer, or the cluck of knee-deep mud in April, the wild overgrowths of late spring. My mother, who grew up in the same house, tells me that sheep pastures once rolled across the hills next to our property and across the road. Our trees, fat-trunked elms and oaks, might never have been cut for fields, and since my grandparents had built the house in 1935-39, there had been nothing else on the land for at least thirty years. Before that? Yankee camps to guard the river? I imagine the Little Miami walking those same trails where my little spotted dog ran, where I ran, shirtless in the heat, whipping against nettles and seedlings, sharp switches that tingled my skin as I tore through the woods. One path ran from a small opening in the yard, through a swath of maple and oak starts, deep into the cover of the larger trees and down to the creek.

What, I always wonder, if I had lived there until now? If I had seen the property’s subtle shifts over the years? On a trip back a few years ago, I’d toured those woods with my daughter Maddy, who was nine then, and the landscape seemed like a set of familiar props, things I’d touched before, and they had been imported into a place that didn’t quite feel like the one I’d known. It felt like a simulation. The hills had worn down, either from erosion of weather or memory; the creek dried up and the little seam where it ran had folded in upon itself.

I grew up and moved away and these places and people turned away from me. But when I write, I can’t help going back there. I am with that rotted elm, that maple with limbs just beyond reach, the oak from which I hung, up high, over the hillside. Behind that ridge, the river moves along, barely an acquaintance, still a stranger to me.