Page 5 of So Far Gone

They watched Mrs. Gaines’s car disappear through the stand of spotted white birches. “Those trees look like the legs of tall,

skinny Dalmatians,” Leah said. It was true, Asher thought. His sister really did have a way of describing things.

They listened to the sound of Mrs. Gaines’s car engine accelerate onto the dirt road beyond, fading toward the highway. The

rain had stopped and beams of sunlight appeared on the misty droplets of low, lingering clouds.

They all turned to face each other, Asher and Leah and their grandfather. “I wonder,” Asher said, “if you might have a chessboard.”

“I don’t. I’m sorry,” Rhys said. “No one to play up here.”

“I play games by myself sometimes.”

“I’ve heard people do that,” Rhys said.

Asher nodded. “I usually open with the Ruy-Lopez. Or the Sicilian Defense. I can only play a few moves in my mind. After four

or five, I either need a board or pen and paper to keep track. I’m not very good at notation. Eventually, I’ll be able to

play entire games in my mind, though. All the best players can.”

“Well, until then, I have plenty of pens and lots of scratch paper,” Rhys said.

“What’s scratch paper?”

“It’s paper with something on the other side.”

“What’s on the other side?”

“Various things. Reports. Bills. It’s just a way to use paper twice.”

“Oh. That’s smart. Can I use your bathroom?”

Kinnick scratched his head. “Well, about that... I have a composting toilet, but I’ve been having trouble installing it and I ordered the wrong chemicals, so it still isn’t working.”

“What does that mean?”

“Oh. Right. It means you can either go outside or try the big drop.”

“What’s the big drop?”

Rhys started toward the outhouse. “Come on, I’ll show you.” He unlatched the door and opened it. “I apologize for the smell.”

Asher walked over and stuck his head in. “It doesn’t stink too bad,” he said.

“I sprinkle wood ash to help with that.”

“What’s wood ash?”

“Ash from the fire.”

“Oh. Right.” Asher came in farther and looked around. It was a toilet seat over a dark, scary hole in the ground. “How far

down does it go?”

“Six feet.”

Asher went all the way into the outhouse, closed the door, unzipped, and gave it a go, dappled sunlight coming from screened

openings on either side of the tiny building. He liked the way his pee disappeared into the dark hole, and he liked the deep

trickling sound of it hitting water down below, but then he started imagining what might be living down there and the stream

immediately stopped. There was nowhere to wash his hands, so he just zipped his pants and left the outhouse.

It was quiet outside. Leah and Grandpa Rhys were standing there, hands in their pockets. The three of them made an awkward

triangle near the back of the house, each waiting expectantly for the next move. Who knew quiet had its own sound? Wind running

fingers through the trees, the burble of nearby water, even the ground seemed to make tiny crackling sounds. Asher looked

all around his grandfather’s place, the sad house on this knob, and the two outbuildings, the hillside behind the house covered

with mountain grasses and thin, scraggly pine trees, mostly green, with a few reddish and yellowish ones thrown in.

“The trees with the orange needles,” Asher finally asked, “are those sick?”

Kinnick turned and looked up at the hillside. “No. They’re mostly tamaracks. Larches.”

“They look like candles,” Leah said.

“They do, don’t they?” Kinnick smiled at Leah’s keen observation. “Like lit matches surrounded by all that green.” He squinted

one eye. “They make good firewood, too, if you catch them at the right time. Just after they’ve died, before the bugs and

rot set in.”

“Didn’t you used to have a barn?” Leah asked.

“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 I allow you to jump over the creek, or do I think you are capable of 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 the bank 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 of scouting out a place to jump. Like an Indian scout exploring the other side. Very cool .

“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 to jump had 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.

“This fire is warm,” he said.

“Warm fires are my specialty.”

While her grandfather put the clothes on the line, Leah picked up one of the spiral notebooks that were spread around everywhere.

Written on the covers were what appeared to be chapter numbers and short descriptions. This one read: “Ch. 47—Vulgar Errors.”

She flipped through the notebook. It appeared to be Grandpa Rhys’s thoughts on books he was reading. On the first page, she

read, in his block handwriting:

In Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646, rev 5X, 1672) Browne sought to identify the “vulgar errors” of his times. This chapter proposes a new era of rational

vulgarity based on our humanistic view of the environment, i.e., how philosophy, morality, wisdom, etal. failed to keep pace

with scientific discovery, reflected, for instance, in Kant’s separation of nature and human experience in Critique of Practical Reason : “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them:

the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” (See also Ch. 36, ontological failures of Cartesian substance dualism.)

Kinnick finished hanging the clothes and looked back to see Leah reading one of his notebooks, her dark eyebrows knit with