As always, the first sign was the disappearance of the rapids near stateline, where the river dropped to reveal rocks as white and shiny as cleaned bone—rounded boulders and fingered slabs picked up ten thousand years earlier by glacier and deposited dumbly along the gravel and dirt riverbed. A few miles downstream, the receding water brought three old men with metal detectors to a calm stretch of midriver, where there were rumors of a sunken ferry boat and lost mining treasure. The old men combed the newly exposed banks, each listening to his own progress through headphones, each playing in his mind some version of the story of old coins and silver nuggets, each willing to settle for a narrative of old plows and car parts—for anything containing mystery, really, since that’s what their lives lacked. Like all people, they realized too late that mystery was the key to staying interested in the whole business, to distracting themselves from the surety of what came next; that a man strives and settles and strives and settles and this pattern eventually kills him. But the old men didn’t acknowledge the affliction, not to one another. Instead, they passed on the glistening riverbed with nods and raised eyebrows, sweeping their metal detectors before them like blind men with canes, oblivious to the deep water at their backs, where life goes on—swimmers and fishers and boats carving the river into sheets and beads that explode in tiny prisms and rain back on the river.
All along the Spokane, for twenty miles, for a hundred years, people came down to the tame July river, shadowing it from Lake Coeur d’Alene in the rich Idaho woods to the channeled scablands to the west, where the river paused to note the end of the forest and the return of the great, hard western desert. Smack between rock and forest was the city’s center, where a low river felt more like desperation than recreation. Here the rocks weren’t white and shiny, mere ripples in the flow, but black and hard: volcanic basalt columns flaked and knapped by the current into giant arrowheads, into massive Clovis points. Here the rock battled the water, bending it through tight channels and around craggy islands, beating it onto each ledge of the falls. And if there was another surety in the water’s eventual victory, each summer these hard black stones promised it wouldn’t be any time soon. But with the falls dried up to a deferential trickle, the spectators stayed away. After all, who takes pictures of rocks?
So maybe that’s why they just didn’t notice the drought. Whatever the reason, it snuck up on the city, this lack of rain. Fifty-four days, by the time the newspaper recorded it with a color photograph of a second-generation wheat farmer rubbing dry dirt between forefinger and thumb, as if that meant anything. The people saw the photograph and read the story about the drought as if they were watching a program on television—something detached and theoretical, marking time between dinner and bed. Did they actually believe that water came from the sky anyway, that farms still existed? Taps still ran. Cans of food were replaced on grocery shelves. What did a drought matter when every morning the sprinkler system greened the lawn?
These things were the true measure of water, not some exhausted river limping through the falls, shuffling out of downtown and lying down to die in the flatland between Peaceful Valley and Nine Mile. With the dams closed, the water beyond downtown pooled and became mostly still, a series of lakes safe enough for drunk rafters and whining Jet Skis and dogs chasing tennis balls. What was left of the river was allowed to squeeze through the turbines and past the wastewater treatment facility, where round ponds of sludge were separated from water, past housing developments, horse and cattle ranches, until it was just a stream, curling past the Spokane and Colville Indian reservations until finally it fed the Columbia, which had long since stopped being America’s great river and had itself become just a series of dams and lakes.
In the mythic river of the west there is balance and peace, a fly fisherman harmonizing with the water. But the streams had all been toileted by cattle or muddied by roads. The rivers had all been broken. What rocks failed to do, dams accomplished with disappointing ease, turning the big rivers into pools of beaten and still water.
It was in one of these dam-formed lakes, just twelve miles from downtown Spokane as it turned out, that the water pulled far enough back to reveal the skeleton of an old horse-drawn swather, which had been abandoned by a farmer and overtaken by water eighty years ago and which emerged from the river during periods of drought, every ten years or so, to be discovered by someone poking around the riverbed. The swather was discovered this time by two boys making their way upstream with sticks, stirring the mud flats for frogs. Long metal railings like ribs stuck out from the swather just above the water level, along with a cab seat that looked to the boys like an exaggerated bicycle seat.
They picked their way out to the rusted tractor; the boys would tell TV reporters that there was a funny rotting smell. Then they both saw what appeared to be a man constructed of balloons tangled in the metal ribs of the swather, his body bloated and unrecognizable, his clothes long since torn away, his flesh washed clean of features and bleached the color of the mud flats. Anyone who had known him when he was alive would have had trouble believing that all the head-busting and pussy-chasing and law-breaking would amount to this, that a young man who had been so feared and desired had become nothing but a dilution of his own parts, a watered-down soup of the complex recipe of chemicals and compounds that make a man. It was the river’s oldest trick and now it was done. Three months after taking Burn, the river had finally given him back.