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“Yes,” Kinnick said. “Good memory, Leah. I took it down. I’m trying to take it all down, one building at a time. The outhouse is next. If I ever get that toilet installed.”
“Why are you taking it all down?”
“Well.” Kinnick rubbed his head again. “This was my grandfather’s land. He bought it from a guy who’d built it ten years earlier. Before that, it was pretty much wild out here. A few years ago, I had the idea to erase my presence here, slowly return it to its natural state.”
Asher looked all around, trying to imagine it all gone.
Beneath a single row of solar panels, the roof of Grandpa Rhys’s house was rusted metal, brown streaks staining the gray cinder block where water had run off. Across the driveway was the narrow wooden outhouse with the quarter-moon on the door, and, beyond that, a pump house. An old rusty flatbed pickup was parked next to it, cracks spiderwebbing the windshield, two flat front tires settled in the dirt. A small stream ran through the grassy field beyond the house.
Asher asked: “Can I look at your stream?”
“The creek?” Kinnick asked. “Sure.”
Asher clomped toward it in his boots.
“When I was a kid,” Kinnick said, “that creek ran year-round. We used to visit my grandfather up here and it ran like a small river this time of year. Probably had three times as much water as it does now.”
Asher turned back. “What happened to the water?”
Kinnick explained that years of logging, drought, and development, along with decreased snowfall each winter, had reduced the creek to a spritz of spring runoff—five or six inches in its deepest spot—a flat series of esses that flowed past the house to the gully below, where it joined the larger Tshimakain Creek, which ran along the highway back toward town and the reservation, and eventually, to the Columbia River.
“What’s a reservation?” Asher asked.
“It’s the land where the Spokane Tribe lives.”
“An Indian tribe?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“And this water goes there?”
“Well, it passes through. On its way to the ocean. Where all water goes.”
Asher looked back down at the babbling stream. “Do you think I could jump over it?”
Rhys walked over and stood next to his grandson. “Do you mean would Iallowyou to jump over the creek, or do I think you arecapableof jumping over the creek?”
“Both, I guess.”
“Then I’d say yes to both.”
“Don’t do it, Asher,” Leah said. Then to Rhys: “He’s not very good at things like jumping.” She hadn’t followed them the twenty paces to the creek and now stood sternly with her arms crossed near the back of the house. It drove Asher crazy: whenever Mom wasn’t around, Leah acted like Professor Expert about everything.
Kinnick crouched next to the boy. “You can jump over if you want, Asher. But here’s a little tip.” He pointed to the banks. “A creek tends to be narrower but deeper in the straight part. See? And on the corners, there are two sides to a creek. There’s the cutbank and the point bar. Cutbank is the outside corner. Do you see how water cuts against thebank and makes that little cliff? Water runs deeper there. Other side is the point bar. It’s shallower and flatter. So, before making a daredevil jump like this, I’d scout out a place to jump from cutbank to point bar, not the other way around. That way you won’t cave in the bank or come up short and fall into the deeper water. See? If you land on an inside corner, it’s easier.”
“Cool,” Asher said. It was a word he’d been thinking of trying out. “Cool,” he said again. Yes, he liked the sound of it. And he liked the idea ofscoutingout a place to jump. Like an Indian scout exploring the other side.Verycool.
“Asher,” Leah said.
He waved his sister off without looking at her. “Watch this.”
***
Kinnick wasn’t quite sure what he’d just seen. It was like watching a bird try to fly with one wing. His grandson had jumped with only his left foot, the right boot dragging behind. Or maybe he’d changed his mind before the command tojumphad reached his second foot, but whatever it was, he’d made a half-step-leap-fall-stagger, and then had simply fallen, face-first, into the creek, getting far wetter than Rhys could’ve imagined was possible in four inches of mountain runoff.
Leah’s assessment was even harsher, a sigh followed by: “That’s why you don’t jump in snow boots, Asher.” Then to Kinnick: “He wears those stupid boots year-round.”
Rhys stoked the fire in the woodstove and hung the kid’s shirt, pants, and socks on the winter clothesline he’d strung in the kitchen. Asher was all bony edges: clavicles and neck vertebrae jutting out of the long johns Kinnick had loaned the boy until his clothes were dry enough to put back on. Thankfully, his nose had stopped bleeding. He sat there staring at the fire, his light brown hair a collection of cowlicks too unruly to be called curls.