Fall River

I am in love with a girl I met many years ago. I do not remember her name. I want to say Mandy, or Amanda, or Marissa. It doesn’t matter. I met her at a place called Fall River. Fall River is in Central Oregon. I was 16, I think, and this was the first and only time I had been there, and so I could not have met her at any other time or in any other summer.

In that place, the land is as dry as paper in late summer and spring-fed Fall River tumbles and bubbles between the thirsty banks, eternally quenching the dry throat of those eastern slopes as they descend to the desert beyond.  I had a broken big toe that summer and it was taped to the other toes on that foot and pressed into my tennis shoe. It was a great, a crippling injury, as teenage injuries tend to be, and sometimes would make walking, when inconvenient, quite impossible. But the cold water felt good on the toe and so I did a lot of fishing, wading through the shallow rapids from one fallen tree to the next, fishing just across the trunks where the water pooled and quieted and gave the trout a place to rest.

Fallen trees were typical in that stream. Maybe their roots grew weak from the unfed soil such that a stiff wind might cause them to fall. Maybe that’s why it is called Fall River. I fished upstream, casting parallel along the break in the water caused by the trunks, and had caught perhaps a half dozen trout by the time I saw the girl on the far bank. She was speaking to an older woman, her grandmother, I thought, and then looking my way. I was sitting on a rock, tying on a new fly, and I watched the girl begin to cross over the river atop a half-submerged log.

Being a chivalrous boy, and one skilled at walking on half-submerged logs, I rushed to her assistance (which she did not need).

“Some of these logs sink,” I warned. “Here, take my hand.”

In fact, her balance was better than mine. Lithely, she hopped past me, and reached the shore far in advance, where she waited with her arms crossed.

“My toe is broken,” I explained, limping tragically onto dry land.

And she smiled.

How do I describe this smile? Is it sufficient to say that I still see it even now, in my mind’s eye? That it entered my very soul and curled up therein like a small, soft, warm animal to live forever beneath my skin? Is it enough to say that in this girl’s smile the day, the sun, the breeze, the scent of pine and of wildflower, the cool of the water, the sparkle on the surface were all contained, and moreover, somehow, explained? Her hair was light brown, a honey brown, unpredictable, eccentric, having something in common with the wind. Her high cheekbones were each decorated with several strategically placed freckles, as if she had placed them there herself, just so, and her eyes were brittle and quick and lively and sleek and were the rich, burnt color of a sugar glaze.

And though I was a shy young man, a painfully shy young man, unaccustomed to talking to girls, here I was in my element, strengthened by the camaraderie of the forest and the river and the impossible blue sky, and we talked for hours, this girl and I. We talked about school and home and friends and enemies and likes and dislikes. We talked about everything. And to my surprise—to my unspeakable, triumphant, incredulous astonishment—I found that this girl was just like me. Just exactly like me, but for her beauty, but for the pure budding soft moist freckled and glimmering bubbling over of her soul.

I was in love.

Finally, her father came along the bank of the river and said he had been looking for her for hours. He said it was time for her to return to their camp. He chatted for a moment, and shook my hand, and asked whether I’d like to come back with them.

Stupidly, I said no.

“We might come again tomorrow,” the girl said.

Mandy, Amanda, Marissa? It doesn’t matter.

She did not come back the next day. I rose early and hiked straightaway to “our spot” on the bank, and there I waited while the morning simmered and the afternoon burned and then slowly wilted away to evening. With the tip of a long stick, I wrote her name in the black soil at the edge of the water, and felt the marks of those letters on my heart—not just a name, and never again a name, but a wound, a brand, a scar, a treasure known yet ever unattained.

She would be an old woman now, just as I am an old man. We are still the same. Sometimes I think about how she must be—a wife, no doubt, a mother, a grandmother. I wonder if she remembers me, and I think she does not. Such girls do not remember old things. Such girls are creatures of a thousand moments, and creators of a thousand dreams.