Chapter One

A Trip Home

In 2000, at the end of winter break, I packed up the few things I’d brought with me to school: two coats—one heavy, one heavier—sandals and winter boots, a duffel bag of clothes, and my Fender Jazz bass. Colorado State dorm rooms weren’t big enough for the beds they crammed into them, so I had done well to pack light. The colds were real cold, and the hots were real hot, and as long as I had my music, I didn’t need much else. Back then, my bass was everything to me—entertainment, study partner, therapist. Honestly, it still is.

Andy, my roommate, played orchestral percussion for the symphony and had access to a collection of noisemakers from around the world. We were practicing for an open mic at Stir Crazy Café, just two weeks away, and I couldn’t wait to step onto that stage and see how our music landed with an audience.

As I rolled up my instrument cables, I chuckled, remembering a pearl of wisdom from my high school bandmate, Jimmy Chevalier. “In relationships,” he said, “a little kink is fun, but not in your cables.” He taught me to roll them up properly, saying, “Train them up in the way they should go,” borrowing a phrase from his Christ-fearing momma with just a hint of mockery.

When I finished my time at the junior college in Rosmere and left Mill Creek for the big university, I knew I might have to come back sooner than expected. Grandpa and I had work to do in our town. We had taken it upon ourselves to study Mill Creek’s history, searching for clues about what might have happened to my Nana Sylvie. What we uncovered was a tangled history of disappearances and murders, peace-loving heroes, and profound thinkers.

The town had always been home to odd sights and sounds, too. Uncanny vibrational hums, little pockets where everything just felt off—we kept running into them. We even set up experiments around town to record and study the irregularities we found. Grandpa was still deep in research in my absence, and I had a nagging sense not to stray too far.

But this soon? I hadn’t expected to be packing my shit up after just one term.

I was just settling into my new life. I had stepped out of Mill Creek's shadow, and I was sweet on a girl. Andy and I were making music that felt alive. And I even liked my classes—if you can believe that.

But the call came, and I had to go.

Monstrous regret poked at me as I packed. I stuffed my bag and headed to Owl’s Grogshop for a beer and a bite. I needed a minute to absorb the news of this loss, and I had to write some goodbye letters to my friends. The bar was nearly empty, enjoying a deep breath provided by the holiday break. I ordered a vodka tonic instead of a beer, hoping it would loosen my writing a bit, and opened my notebook.

Dear Patty,

I got a call from Florence back home. She told me my grandfather passed away, and I need to take care of his estate. I guess I’ll be back in a couple of weeks...

I stopped writing, scratched it out, and just stared at the page. Nothing—I mean nothing—in my head sounded right. Every explanation fell flat. I was sure my grandpa's body wouldn't be found, mostly because I was pretty sure my grandfather was not dead but just...gone, like Nana Sylvie. If Grandpa was gone, I was truly alone.

…and I knew damn well I wouldn't be back in a couple of weeks. Patty deserved to hear the truth from me, but the truth was way too big for words.

Patricia Diallo was a rare bird. I wasn’t in the right place emotionally for that “quiver-in-my-liver” crush-love. I’d been through too much real life for that, I guess. Maybe I was just growing up. I respected her, and I really admired her… and I’d wanted Grandpa to meet her. We met on the first day of term, and by November, we’d become close friends—the kind of relationship that felt special enough not to rush. She was gorgeous, but it honestly wasn’t about that. I was genuinely intrigued by her interests and her poetic use of language. She knew a little bit about everything, and what she didn’t know, she wanted to learn. She had never read Douglas Adams, and I had never read Sylvia Plath, so we traded books for winter break.

Just before the break, though, she kissed me. I played it cool—at least, I thought I was playing it cool—but then her hand grabbed mine, subtly guiding it around her waist, and I swear my entire body turned to gooseflesh. “I’ll see you in a couple of weeks,” she said with a sing-song rhythm, and she pecked my cheek before pulling away. I mumbled something about her having a good time in New York, and I made every effort to keep my voice steady. She walked away, and my hand fell to my side... with regret.

I didn’t want to leave her; I really didn’t want to leave any of it. But sometimes, life doesn’t ask you for permission. It just casts its magic spell and pulls you back home.

Dear Patty,

I have to leave for a while. My grandfather has disappeared, and the people who notified me say he’s dead. They don't have proof though, so maybe it’s like what happened to my grandma. Most people who die from heart attacks or blood clots at sixty five leave their bodies behind to tell their story. But he didn’t. Mill Creek is a strange town with a history of odd shit, like I told you. So this is going to take some digging. I don’t know what to make of it. A part of me believes he’s okay—out there, somewhere. But I could be wrong. I need to go home, find him, or find out what happened to him.

Please don’t be alarmed. I’ll try my hardest to come back to you, and to Andy, but something about this feels different—like a locked door creaking shut behind me. Maybe I’m just imagining that. But if I don’t come back soon, I need to say now that I love you.

I enjoyed the book. Plath’s prose is elegant.

I’ll call soon. I hope your time off has been wonderful.

—Orin

I slipped the letter into Patty’s paperback, leaving Esther Greenwood to carry the weight of my goodbye. After dropping Patty’s book off at her dorm, I walked back to my own and fell into bed.

The next morning arrived with sharp cries and squawks from a crow just outside my window. I got up, left the note I’d written Andy, gathered my things, and headed north toward Cheyenne and the Interstate 80 junction. Along the way, I marveled at the armada of prairie dogs just off the highway—ten thousand strong—standing tall, practicing their sun salutations.

The route from Colorado to the Oregon Coast is a breathtaking trek, but this time it felt endless. I tend to obsess over the smallest things even in the best of times, but with this giant bugbear climbing all over me, I was overwhelmed. The rhythm of the road didn’t calm me; it became a drumbeat for the endless loops in my head—scratched vinyl, a needle skipping over the same groove…number nine…number nine…number nine. I replayed scenario after scenario, each one trying to predict what I'd find when I got home.

If Grandpa had discovered something—or triggered something—wouldn’t he have called me right away? Well…shit. Not if he disappeared. And no—we'd agreed not to talk about our discoveries over the phone. Looking back, his paranoia was more than justified.

He was my guardian, sure, but since I was ten years old, we’d been partners in this mad pursuit. We only had each other in this world, and he'd only wanted me to go away to school for the quote-unquote experience. Now I wished I hadn’t left him alone. He was healthy, still super sharp, and when he'd visited for Thanksgiving, he'd been the same old Grandpa. But he was getting along in years. Maybe he'd had a heart attack while he was out somewhere? Or maybe he'd figured out something more about the tone generators we built…there was definitely something going on there. Perhaps the right—or wrong—combination of tones had done something new. Something unexpected, something he wasn’t ready for. I just didn’t know.

One thing we did know for certain—Mill Creek was filled with sounds and vibrations that didn’t belong. Sub-aural hums, low frequencies that didn’t exist anywhere else. And they weren’t harmless background noise. They interacted with each other in weird and unpredictable ways. There was an odd hum present at every disappearance site we'd found. It had to be connected.

So, late last summer, we built something to test that theory—a device designed to listen, manipulate, and maybe even interact with the vibrations. It was a cobbled-together contraption we called the Resonance Engine. Just a box of old tackle, really. A mess of tone generators. These generators worked a bit like singing bowls—a woven-together maze of thick alloy forks rigged around a central resonating chamber.

I never thought it could do anything mystical. But strange things happened in Mill Creek, and the sound connection was undeniable. So, maybe the Resonance Engine had done something unexpected.

There was always a strange feeling when you flipped the power switch.

And then—

What?

A ripple, like heat over asphalt, warping the space around him. A vacuum, suddenly pulling him in. Was that what had happened to Nana Sylvie? …Number nine…number nine…

And then—

Nothing.

Or—everything.

The questions wouldn’t stop. Had he vaporized? Dissolved into mist? Slipped into a shimmering fold in time? …Number nine… Or had the dissonance unraveled him at a molecular level? Did he fall into his own experiment, like Dr. Albert Hofmann, the chemist who first synthesized LSD-25, then dosed himself and pedaled home as reality and time folded in on itself during his infamous bicycle day?

Or…was he still here—just vibrating at a frequency we couldn’t hear?

We had our theories about Mill Creek, but nothing set in concrete.

Florence Tanner had just said, “Your grandpa’s gone, honey. I’m so sorry. Nobody has seen him in well over a week…” In that pause, I could practically hear her heartbreak. She was holding on by a thread, fighting to keep out the anguish closing in on her. “Hazel Bell got Sheriff Hollis and Deputy Colton to go check his house after he didn’t show up all week at the diner. They checked the house, and all his stuff is there, but he…they think he’s…dead, or gone…vanished like the others. I’m so sorry, Orin.”

I asked a few questions, just trying to get the picture, but the information was too shallow to dive deep. I was in shock. All I could get out was, “Thanks for letting me know, Florence. I guess I’ll need to head home.” And that was it.

When I think back to that moment, I remember clinging desperately to hope—hope that his research was intact, because he really was onto something. If it survived, it would all be in the shop. I knew I would need every bit of it to find him.

My grandfather raised me, and much of our time was shaped by his obsessions: playing music, reading and talking about novels, cooking, painting, photography, and above all, searching for answers to the mystery of Nana Sylvie. That last one wasn’t just an obsession—it was a storm the size of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, with its own relentless gravity. Facts, fears, and fragments of town history swirled around us in a deafening, defiant hurricane. And who could blame him for continuing to live in its eye?

I’d only known Patty for one semester, and we weren’t even officially a thing yet. But if she vanished off the face of the earth, I’d lose my shit. That kind of loss isn’t something you just get over. No, Grandpa was well within his rights to continue pushing our research to the extremes that we did.

I crossed Wyoming and pulled off the interstate for gas and coffee well before descending into Salt Lake City. There was no way I was stopping in Salt Lake. I'd been there a couple of times before, and—this is rich coming from someone who grew up in Mill Creek—it always felt really creepy to me. And that was years before I'd read—no, come to think of it, it was before the book even came out—Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven. I'd ordered that book without much thought, assuming it was about climbing or borderless wandering, subjects I'd enjoyed in his writing about Alaska and mountaineering. Instead, I took a deep dive into the history of the church and its people: guilty of racism, sexism, polygamy, child abuse, and greed, all of it steeped in blood.

On an earlier trip through Salt Lake City with my old band, my friend Sage and I walked across Temple Square when we stopped to stretch our legs and get some food. I couldn't help but notice the demonic symbols woven into Mormon architecture. It made me think of Dylan: "Well, it may be the Devil or it may be the Lord, but you're gonna have to serve somebody." It seemed to me these folks served at least two masters—and neither of them was good. I felt lucky to be religiously unaffiliated.

Worst of all? They didn't let their people drink coffee.

No, I wasn't stopping there—not even to fill up on gas.

The fastest way home would’ve been to hop onto Highway 84 north—straight up from Salt Lake City to Portland. But I was young, curious, and did need a place to sleep that night. I had just turned twenty-one the previous month, and this seemed like the perfect chance to experience the kind of entertainment legal adulthood offered. So, instead of taking Interstate 84, I stayed on 80. The border town of Wendover wasn’t too far out of the way, and I figured I could cross the salt flats, grab a hotel for the night, and play some blackjack. From there, I’d head straight up to Twin Falls in the morning.

Andy’s friend Darren had shared some casino stories from a weekend in Vegas, and it sounded fun. “Just sit down at one of the two-dollar tables,” he’d said, “or park yourself in front of a nickel slot machine, and they’ll keep bringing you free drinks!” Not only that, but the drinks came on trays carried by women in stockings and velvety, low-cut dresses. That was part of the appeal, of course. I was a bloke, after all. But I told myself I wasn’t like those guys—the ones who leaned in too close. I wasn’t about to turn into some womanizing bastard just because my ID said I was a man now.

I reassured myself I was going just for the blackjack and a good night’s sleep. The rest, I’d try to take in stride. After all, I wasn’t officially spoken for—but I had just left a letter for Patty that ended with, I love you.

Dusk comes early in January, and as the blinding sun danced on the horizon, I entered the striking, desolate remnants of Lake Bonneville. While I drove, I imagined the lake’s former inhabitants cartooned in the lonely, darkening cumulus formations. Giant ground sloth… poof! Columbian mammoth… poof! Mastodon… and, it was full dark before I could find a saber-toothed cat, leaping ten or twelve thousand years into the future to entertain me on my long drive.

And there, ten or fifteen miles from the lights and glamour of a casino-filled border town, I felt the unmistakable Ronk…Thunk…Thunk…Thunk… as one of my tires exploded. I pulled onto the shoulder and came to a stop.

There are few places—within reach—that have less light pollution than eastern Nevada. When I stepped out, not a single pair of headlights or taillights shone ahead or behind me. Instead, my whole being—and the world I currently inhabited—was bathed in the light of the heavens. The Seven Sisters and Orion shone brighter than I'd ever seen them, and the Milky Way stretched across the sky like a cosmic brushstroke, painted from horizon to horizon. Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn—all easily visible with the naked eye—held their steady glow among the twinkling light from, well, everywhere. And from a long-ass time ago. The closest starlight I could see was from Alpha Centauri, just over four light-years away. Beyond the Milky Way, past my blown tire, and past Mill Creek, lay the Andromeda Galaxy—two and a half million light-years away. Vast. Oh my god, it was so fucking big it hurt my head to think about it. A hundred million stars in the average galaxy. Two trillion galaxies in the observable universe. If this were a movie, the cinematographer would have sent the camera spinning around me to heighten the disorienting wonder. And I couldn’t decide if John Williams or Danny Elfman would be the more apt composer for the soundtrack.

For the first time, I saw how utterly populated with light the universe was.

I soaked in that cosmic, peaceful, easy feeling, then drove to a hotel with food and table games, where I could put a few light beers away.

Musica Universalis.

Stopping to change a tire was a small price to pay for a moment of incalculable worth—a gift from the universe to little old insignificant me.

I thought, I need to write a song about this.

And later, I did.

...

“The tires are the things on your car that make contact with the road.” —Phish

And one of mine had just exploded. I was lucky to have a spare, and honored to have caught the Milky Way glitter its broken glass across the sky, but I was nervous about the flat. The little border town was just a blurry glowing speck on the horizon, and might not be big enough for me to make contact with a new tire.

But, as I limped closer, the ill-defined glow sharpened into neon and buildings, truck stops, fast food, and blinking signs. That was a relief. The place looked like it could probably cough up a new tire.

There were also plenty of hotels to choose from, but since I now had to budget for a new tire, I chose the Rainbow Bay Casino—basic rooms for fifty bucks on Sunday nights and weekdays. I checked in, took a shower, then headed downstairs to check out the buffet and take in the free drinks. The waitresses were dressed in low-cut velvety tops, as promised, and short skirts—each a different color of the rainbow. They also wore gartered stockings, something I’d always found lovely. Most of them were pretty hot, too. Especially for being in their sixties.

Grandpa and I used to play blackjack with friends at the Grange during our monthly community game night. We didn’t play for money, but he told me that one day I would. He said to think of the money I put down as a fee for playing the game.

“You’ll pay eight dollars to watch a movie in the theater or eighty dollars to spend the day at Disneyland,” he said—though we’d never been to Disneyland. “If you play at a casino, take fifty or a hundred bucks with you, and leave your wallet in your room. Lock it up. Don’t gamble. Your starting money’s just the cost of admission.”

After pecking my way through a pretty decent crab buffet, I wound through a dizzying parade of money-hungry neon and bells, and headed toward a small constellation of blackjack tables near the cashier cages. I parked myself at a two-dollar table to maximize my game time, doubling down only when the odds were right. I was alone at first, and losing myself in the game kept my thoughts from veering back to Grandpa and the mysteries of Mill Creek. It was a welcome reprieve—until I was about eighty-five bucks ahead. Then a couple joined me at the table; their matching vacation sweatshirts dragged me right back into my skipping grove…number nine.

The woman settled in and straightened her hoodie as she placed her things on the table. Bold letters stretched across her chest: “Where the Laws of Physics Don’t Seem to Apply.” She tossed her hair back, smiled, and introduced herself as Bunny. The man sat next to her and murmured a hello that was almost too quiet to hear. I never got his name, but his shirt read “See It—Feel It—Believe It!” Both hoodies had a black banner on the back reading “House of Mystery.”

I couldn’t help thinking it was funny how John Litster, a mining engineer and geologist from Scotland, discovered this one little off-kilter spot in Oregon (around 1914, if I remember right) and packaged it up as a tourist trap. The “Oregon Vortex” had a long, storied—and vague—history. There were supposedly stories of how Native American horses refused to enter the area, so the people all avoided it too; some said it was haunted. But no one could quite pin down which tribes those tales came from. I’d also read somewhere that the “House of Mystery” was originally just a tool storage shed for an old mining company. Mill Creek had its own freak “vortexes” that snatched people up for real—plus its whole tangled history with settlers and Native Americans—but looking at those souvenirs, I was really grateful my hometown hadn’t been turned into a novelty attraction. I suppose the real darkness of the place—or maybe its underlying tone—kept the circus at bay.

I split a pair of eights, won one hand, and lost the other. Bunny was comely and could talk the hind legs off a donkey, while Mr. Mumbly just offered the occasional polite nod. Still, their Oregon Vortex shirts had me thinking: maybe there really was something to these other strange places—whether or not physics actually misbehaved. When my luck started to feel stagnant, I cashed in and went up to bed.

Around noon the next day, I rolled west onto Interstate 80—now down a hundred and fifty bucks in new steel-belted rubber—heading toward Wells to catch Route 93 to Twin Falls. I was a bit tired—the four free drinks—but my wallet was more or less the same size as when I’d arrived, so I counted that as a win.

By the time I got to Wells, I was chewing on the grounds from the bottom of my coffee cup, and the rhythm of the road had once again become a percussive accompaniment for my looping scenarios. I pulled onto Route 93, heading north toward Twin Falls—and toward finding a big piece of the incredibly odd puzzle Grandpa and I had been working on for so long.

It was nothing more than chance—and a bit of rumbling in my gut—that led me to Gordon Thomas. My blackjack detour and the delay from my flat tire had brought me to the nowhere-town of Jackpot, Nevada, at exactly the right moment. Hungry and craving something slower than fast food—a category I avoided altogether—but not as exhausting as braving another casino buffet, with its nauseating carpet and hidden dangers, I spotted an old-fashioned diner, teal and chrome. I parked myself on a two-toned vinyl stool at the service counter. When the waitress came over, I ordered a Reuben sandwich with all the fixings, some of those waffle-cut fries, and a coffee.

It’s funny to think about those major life events that could so easily have been different. Life really is a game of chance.

Gordon Thomas was two seats down, monopolizing the available counter real estate with what looked like blueprints. In front of him sat an open notebook. I took a few curious glances in his direction, noticing the blueprints didn’t look like plans for a house—or if they were, it was an odd house. The walls on the blueprint were out of square.

“What is it you’re working on, friend?” I asked.

“Finalizin’ plans for a brave new recordin’ studio.”

“I kinda thought that business had moved into bedroom corners and garages.”

“You ain’t wrong, my friend. But plenty o’ businesses still need professional recordin’ services for advertisin’, movies…audiobooks, y’know… So, I’m still in business—for now.”

He put out his hand.“Name’s Gordon.”

I introduced myself, and we chatted for a bit. I guess my string of questions ratted me out, because he asked, “You one of those ‘bedroom recordin’ artists?’”

“Guilty as charged!”

“And what’s it you play, Orin?”

I told him I played bass and sang. I explained I’d been making music since I was a kid—first with my family, then in high school, and then on the road. I mentioned playing double bass in the youth orchestra and told him about Sage and the Long Shadows, my alternative-rock band with my closest friends, Elliot Harper and Allison Crane—whom we called Sage because she could always be counted on for really solid advice.

For nearly an hour, we lost ourselves in pleasant conversation. Hell, it was stimulating conversation. Gordon spoke with a fetching southern twang and told me about his work designing spaces for recording sound and music. He was heading south towards Wells to meet up with a client.

“This guy—a former record-company exec—bought some land about forty miles south o’ here, closer to Wells,” he said. “He’s buildin’ one of those fancy resort studios, a place where artists can vanish for a while and really focus on a record. I’m designin’ the recordin’ rooms. I don’t quite get it, ’cause there’s not much out there but dirt and casinos…oh, and, uh, whorehouses.”

He paused, as if something had just dawned on him.

When I asked about the out-of-square walls, he launched into an explanation of sound waves with behavioral problems.

“Parallel walls catch the sound waves an’ bounce ’em back an’ forth. It can make a muddy ol’ mess o’ your recordin’. You get all kinds o’ resonances an’ overtones that’re a nightmare sometimes, when you’re mixin’.”

That part made sense to me. I was a musician—I paid attention to how musical, and non-musical, sounds hit my ears. Grandpa and I had studied the events in Mill Creek for years, and a lot of its oddities were tied to sound waves. I followed along when Gordon talked about “standing waves” and “sound diffusion.” But when he moved on from “comb filterin’,” I fell behind. He was deep into “flutter’n echoes” and “phase cancellation,” going full speed ahead on nearly inexplicable theories of time alignment when I interrupted.

“Uh…what exactly is c-o-l-m filterin’…er, filtering?”

He drew a quick sketch of the overlapping sound waves, showing me how some waves cancel each other out when they are out of phase.

Later on, Gordon became my source of knowledge on all things audio—and a close and dear companion. Though at that time, he was just a guy I met in a diner. I needed to keep moving, so we exchanged contact info—he lived in Eugene!—and I got back on the road toward Twin Falls.

I kept my eyes locked forward as I drove across the Perrine Bridge, which connects the two halves of Twin Falls, Idaho. The bridge hovers nearly five hundred feet above the Snake River—a marvel, but a marvel that holds no interest for me. I have a crippling fear of man-made heights. I tremble and sweat just climbing an eight-foot ladder to hang Christmas lights or clean the gutters—both chores I prefer to delegate to someone steadier.

From the corner of my eye, I caught a base jumper preparing to dive off the bridge into the canyon. My heart raced, and my foot hit the accelerator like I was Evel Knievel barreling toward the earthen ramp built for his ill-fated canyon jump in the nineteen-seventies. Like him, I wanted to get across as fast as possible. Unlike him, I made it to the other side.

I didn’t stop again until Baker City, Oregon, where I filled up on gas and coffee. A couple of hours later, I reached Boardman, where Interstate 84 meets the Columbia River—my companion for the next stretch of the journey. As I passed Boardman, I remembered a different trip…

I’d driven through there a few years earlier with Sage and Elliot, packed into a white Dodge van crammed with music gear and sleeping bags. We took a no-budget tour during winter break, playing coffee shops, a few clubs, and whatever open mics we could find along the way. The only reason we pulled it off was thanks to what we called “punk rock hotels”—good people across the country who hosted house concerts and let traveling bands crash on their floors for the night. Without the generosity of music fans, it wouldn’t have been possible.

When Sage and the Long Shadows came through this corridor, we hit black ice and met real fear as the van started to spin. I remember the landscape whizzing past the windows—once, twice. Time became stretchy; it slowed way down. Our Powerpuff Girl car freshener, Bubbles, defied Earth’s gravity, holding fully to the right. Three times… I turned to say goodbye to my dear friends, sure we were an inch from death. I was muttering, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, and catching up on a life’s worth of prayers to whoever it was people prayed to. Four times… Then, suddenly, the van—and time—righted itself, and we came softly to rest in a field just off the shoulder. We sat in silence for a long while before bursting into nervous, terrified laughter.

“God,” I said, “I think that’s the first time I’ve prayed…just a gut response or something.”

“That was praying?” Sage questioned. “What church do you go to?”

“Yeah, you were just muttering, ‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck…Fuck…’” said Elliot, still laughing.

After composing ourselves, we hugged each other and carefully made our way back onto the road, adopting a more laid-back pace for the rest of the tour. We moved slowly along the highway, seeing a few more souls sitting in their cars just off the road, all looking grateful for their lives—even if they had just crapped their khakis. For years afterward, whenever the weather turned, I’d white-knuckle the steering wheel, get vertigo, and have to re-learn how to breathe. This time the weather held, and the thermostat on my dash never dipped below thirty-eight degrees.

I passed the Bridge of the Gods, a utilitarian structure that looked like it came straight from an Erector Set instruction pamphlet. I used to play a festival on the Washington side—a small gathering I came to love because of the people. The performers at this three-day shindig outnumbered the attendees, but nobody seemed to mind. It was a wonderful hang, and everyone really seemed to enjoy my songs, so I kept going back. I learned a lot from the other artists about being a good performer there.

During my downtime, I’d wander the small town of Stevenson, chatting with locals or pausing to read the historical plaques. They spoke of an ancient “Bridge of the Gods,” a grand stone arch that once spanned the Columbia. Tribes met there to exchange news, share stories, and fish for salmon. Then there was a feud between two jealous brothers over a beautiful maiden named Loowit. Legend says that the Great Spirit destroyed the great bridge to end their fighting, and the rubble created rapids there to mark the spot.

But I also heard that it was  , the two brothers—both powerful chiefs—who struck down the bridge with their fighting. Then the Great Spirit turned them into mountains…no, volcanoes. Loowit became Mount St. Helens, but I don't remember which ones the jealous chiefs turned into.

I got through Portland, made my way out to the coast, and arrived home late—but intact.