The Greening

In the town of East Leven, Oregon the sound of water is everywhere. From east and west every half-mile or so some creek works through the cane berries and bright fields of broccoli to join the Willamette River on its way to the Columbia.

Each creek came to have its ghost. A blood sacrifice was exacted by the water for the privilege of having the town here, as if along with the location of sewer and water there had been some deal recorded in the original plat.

One hundred and fifty years ago only a few settlers farmed along the Willamette because it flooded each spring, washing out among cottonwoods and stands of oaks, then receded and produced fields of blue camas flowers where the Calapooia Indians came to dig the bulbs. Farmers staked out the higher ground and East Leven was little more than a post office and general store on a raised spot with creeks y-ing into the river around it. Then in the 1930s, the Army Corps of Engineers regulated the water coming down from the Cascade mountains in catch dams for hydroelectric. Citizens uneasily occupied the new dry spots as East Leven sprawled across the creeks with webs of bridges, then settled in to listen to the water.

Ann Doucette was one of the children whose story carried the strongest cautionary tale. She broke her sweet neck at the age of twelve trying to walk the wide bridge railing over Inman Creek. If she had fallen to the left that spring just after the camas bloom, she might have skinned both knees and torn her dress. But she fell to the right thirty feet to the creek bed where she broke her neck and – parents paused here in the story to make sure this registered well on a child's graphic sense of danger – she took two days to die, closing her eyes finally on the bad luck to have stumbled to the wrong side.

The wide bridge rails, those invitations to I-dare-you walks, had come with the WPA crews, all men, who poured into town from the camps by day to winch the wide timbers into place. The men sweating and shirtless, the apricot timbers leaking sap, hand forged iron chisels and drills, piles of fir curls – America was finding its way out of the unfortune of the Great Depression. The crews originated from everywhere in the West, and some WPA men took note of this place and its waters as a town to come back to when the hard times let up. You could hear the water at night any place in town from bedroom windows. Water with its price.

After the Green Man came, the sacrifice stopped suddenly. Maybe it was the new railings, unwalkable thin steel. But there was still the railroad trestle, the inner tubing through the rapids on the Willamette River, the rock skipping and creek wading and rope swings strung up to cotton woods so you shot from the trees along the bank and landed in the deep hole just before the highway bridge. Plenty of chances for bad choices, bad luck, but the sacrifice stopped with the arrival of the Green Man and for a while the whole town held its breath waiting for the next death that didn't come. Instead, the Green Man came to live in a cabin that looked out on the Willamette, bound on one side by old firs stepped down the hillside to the flood plain of the river and on the other, cottonwoods and alders that crowded the bank.