Vision Quest by Terry Davis Page B

standing there.
    Carla and I drove back to Barney’s, crossed the bridge, and turned onto the dirt road that leads to the public access. The sun was high by then and the cheatgrass was dry. Grasshoppers zinged through the air and banged into the sides of the pickup. A dull roar like the rumble of heavy trucks rose ahead of us. It grew into a real thunder as we crested the last hill before the road dropped down to the riverbank. We stopped a minute and looked out. The scene was about the same as I remembered it from ten or so years before and about the same as I dream it now. Where fat lazy Lake Roosevelt had lain in a bed of sand, the Columbia River cut through rock. Northward lay the mudflat that had once been farmland. An olive-drab Dodge Power Wagon was skidding driftwood logs through the mud to dry ground. Its driver and Carla and I were the only folks around.
    We walked down the rocky trail, across the dry sandy beach, through wet sand, and finally through mud before we reached the boulders that gleamed through the driftwood and trash. It looked like a whole lakeful of litter had lodgedwhere the channel narrowed. The heat drew a dead smell from the mud. Carla walked back to the clean sand to lie in the sun while I worked my way across the rocks and logs to a broad ledge parallel to the falls but higher in elevation and about thirty yards away. White plastic bleach jugs floated in the shallow pools and hung like snowberries in the driftwood jams.
    I sat on the wet rock, drew my arms around my knees, and gazed south. Thin and blue, the river rolled through a black band of mud bordered by white sand. Where the white sand ended, green pines rose and blurred in the distance to dark high-mountain blue. On the east ran the Huckleberry Mountains and on the west the Kettle River Range. Some of the land between the mountain ranges south to the great bend in the river still belongs to the Spokane and Colville Indian tribes.
    I felt insulated by the roar of water all around me. I couldn’t hear the cars on the highway, and when I closed my eyes I couldn’t see the trash.
    I was thinking of something Seattle, Chief of the Duwamish Indians, had said about his people and their land on Puget Sound:
    When the last red man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the white man, these shores will swarm with the invisible deadof my tribe. . . . They will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land.
    I was thinking of those invisible dead and of my own as I pulled the cassette recorder from my wrestling bag and set it on the rock ledge. A shower of mist blew off the falls and with it fell a great coolness. I watched the tiny points of moisture brighten the black surface of the machine for a second before I pressed “record.”
    When I got back to the clean part of the beach I found Carla sunning with her shirt off. She opened one eye as she heard my footsteps squinch across the sand. I was slightly crazed by the river I guess, or I wouldn’t have had the nerve to do what I did then. I stood above her and let myself topple from the ankles like a tree. She yelped, but I caught myself before I touched her. My head level with her breasts, I did one pushup kissing her right nipple and another pushup kissing her left. Then my nerve deserted me and I got up and ran like hell for the pickup.
    â€œWait!” I heard Carla yell behind me.
    Aunt Lola was sitting in the rocking chair on her porch waiting for us when we arrived. Since my great-uncle Walker died Lola has had to depend on family and friends for some little things, like splitting wood and rides into New Kettle and Colville. She said the Baptist church van comes around once a week to take folks into town and back, butthat she can’t always catch it because she doesn’t always feel up to walking out to the highway. I don’t know the name of the condition that makes old