Lemolo

I cannot describe

It is hard to say how

It is unlike a thing you have seen.

If I didn't know then,

Then I know it well now–

some places are true living things.

They're as tender,

as hopeful as we are–

as unfulfilled,

covetous too.

And this place is its own,

what it wants you will loan

if It's got more cunning than you.

“This place is gonna break our little hearts.” I said to the cat on my dashboard, her shining eyes all but pressed flat against the glass. I can still hear, whenever I like, the thundering drone of water crashing all around. Snow-melt came gushing from walls of the mountain range, out between tall crags, trickling in rills right over our little road which slithered for miles alongside the Umpqua river’s rushing white spittle. We were desert babies, my cat and I. Spent our whole lives around one or another. The Chihuahuan, the Great Basin, the Sonoran. To her, this strange place with all of its water may as well have been the bottom of the sea. To me, saddled with the responsibility of our safe passage and that of our trailer home and everything we owned in tow, it was a confounding and treacherous length of road. As thin as though it were cut through the hills with a razor and always pinched on either side, with too few signs too far between. After a week’s weary drive, we were finally scaling into the cascades where I knew a quaint little campground would be waiting for us, nestled away in some fold of that wood.

‘Lemolo,’ the sign post read. The word, still quite new to me but so very old and deeply etched there in wood, gave me strange pause as I turned past it. It sat weighty on my tongue, as though the name had been spoken too many times or else never enough. Gone as quick as it came, it impressed upon me some blurred apprehension that I've since been unable to forget or to explain. Now, all these years later, I'm ready to try.

“We made it, kid!” I smiled wide, scruffling Lizzie's ears before she jumped into my lap, craning her neck out the window as I cranked it open to light a cigarette. Sunbeams washed through towering pines, gently broiling away the remains of little pink snowbanks scattered all around. A-frame cabins sprouted from the ground like two-story mushrooms. It was so unlike anywhere I'd ever been I thought I could cry, so lovely I may also have been sporting an unfortunate erection.

My legs ached for a good stretch. I crept my chevy over the dirt road, looking feverishly for the camp store, which I'd been told hosted a wooden Indian on its stoop. And there he was, waiting for me, proud feathers of his war bonnet standing tall against the face of an A-frame. A small twinkling entry bell both announced and startled me at once.

“Oh! Jesse, you're here.” A short woman in wireframe glasses stood from her seat behind the register and grabbed a walkie-talkie, calling into it as she shimmied around the desk on her way to me. “Jim, we got a live one. Over.” She then wrapped me in a big hug.

“Call me Jess.” I made a face over her ear, the kind you can never quite make again because it’s so ineffably fixed between horror and amusement. “You’re Anita?”

“Jess, I am!" She pulled away, fingers still hooked around my arms, eyes locked on my own. “We’re so glad to have you. Here's our little market in the mountains.” She gestured with one swinging arm at the small but impressive store which must once have been a cabin. There was space enough only for one double sided bookshelf in the center of the room, less than shoulder high and freshly dusted, crammed on either side with non-perishables, travel-sized toiletries and first aid supplies. The paneled walls were thronged in RV accessories. Sitting atop the end of the bookshelf nearest the cash register, there was a collection of hand crafted wine-stoppers. Quality wood, stained and sealed, whiddled into the likeness of animals with retrofitted chrome plugs and rubber attachments. She saw my eyes rest on them.

“Those are Bruce’s. Aren't they pretty? We've got everything you need here, but I recommend making the trip to town every so often for groceries. And look, back there is your bar, be sure to tip.” She raised her brows and pointed at the back wall, which was a floor to ceiling refrigerator, mostly empty for now, save the beer which was relegated to two bottom shelves in the furthest glass door.

“I'm a regular already.” I said, liking her right away.

I was embarrassed to have jumped again at the tinny sparkling noise of that stupid bell when it heralded Jim Hudson and, at his heels, a squat little weenie dog named ‘Bentley’, who I immediately attempted to greet with a flurry of pets. The dog only barked at me and backed away.

“How was the drive?” Jim asked. “We know there are some switchbacks on the way up that can make for a scary tow.” His smile was twitchy, but his handshake assured.

“It was just fine! Only had to change my pants twice.” They were easy to laugh. Happy people, I was so glad to know.

“You’re a brave one!” Jim slapped me on the back before nodding at Anita. “Let's get you put away then.”

They had me reverse my camper into a spot they'd prepared for me behind the store. This was an exercise in humility. When he realized I was entirely hopeless, Jim called over his walkie for someone named Wes.

“Wes, we have an arrival. Can't get his rig backed in, bring the tractor. Over.”

As I unhitched Jim said “Well, it's a pain to get into, but a nice spot all the same. There are perks to being the first one here.”

“How many seasonals did y’all get?”

“There’s two more of you. One should get in sometime next week, the other we’re not sure when.”

Wes arrived atop a ten-foot tractor whose diesel motor shook the ground beneath it. He’d secured a ball hitch on its bucket to back my trailer in himself. Jim shouted at me over the incredible din of it that Wes was their employee of the month every month of the year, even in winter when the snow could get six feet deep. He lived here year round, upkeeping the place in its off season all alone. I saw he wasn’t much older than me. Shy, I supposed, as he hadn't looked me in the eye, hadn’t said a word even when he was beckoned on the walkie. When he’d finished parking my home in the dirt, he gave a small nod to no one in particular and rode off again, taking the mechanical roar with him.

“Come with us, we’ll show you around.” said Jim, pointing. “The RV park will be your main stomping ground, but the lake will be your favorite.”

Absently, I scooped Lizzie from the driver's seat of my blazer and met Jim's eyes by mistake.

“Forgive us, Jess. Actually, there’s a lot needing done before the light goes.” Anita took Jim by the arm, gave Lizzie a little scratch under the chin and cooed at her “You two won't think us rude if we leave you to settle in, huh?”

“Not at all.” I smiled, “You've made us plenty welcome.” And just then Lizzie leapt from my arms, skittering over damp pine needles, bewildering poor Bentley, stopping and starting and pivoting direction, searching urgently for our camper. She ran to it and, finding the door unopened, flitted underneath to hide.

“Way to go, Jim!” Anita batted a playful hand at him, “You've scared poor Liz.”

“Me?” he laughed at her.

“Oh, she's alright. Bad stage fright, that one.” I assured them while jimmying the lock on the door. Then I stopped, “How'd you know her name?”

Anita laughed harder than it seemed she ought to, “It's on the tag, sweety. Make yourselves at home, we'll see you bright and early.” And they left.

Just before sundown I set out to tour the grounds alone, Lizzie purring in a ball next to a little electric heater back at our place. The trees were leagues taller than any I'd stood beneath before. The lake, half full, was a looking glass. Its surface untroubled but for the inverted reflection of a bald mountain with a handsome craggy peak. I would learn to call it Mount Thielsen, and that it was once an active volcano that blew its top, carved right off in such a way that from the boat dock it looked keen as a spearhead.

It was then, blinking up at it and holding my breath, that I began to feel a sort of claustrophobia. It came as a lump in my throat that would stay as long as I. My whole life I'd spent on flat earth, able to see the horizon all around me. But at Lemolo one can only look so far ahead in any direction for the mountains and the trees. I could shake the feeling when it occurred to me, but it would come creeping in if ever my back was turned, always descending upon me like some stalking dog.

I was happy at least to be employed, and gainfully despite the pay. Cost of living was slashed nearly away, paying nothing at all for my lodging or utilities. When I secured my position in December the year before my arrival, Jim and Anita Hanson warned me on the phone that this location wasn't for the faint of heart. They had problems keeping workers through the end of a season. ‘People get lonely,’ they said. ‘I don't,’ I replied. I was between jobs and living off a sum I'd saved that fall working long night shifts in a California warehouse. There, in an awful San Bernardino trailer park where the manager told me once that people came to die and meant it, I idled alone through the winter. I didn't celebrate the holidays and neither did my neighbors. We kept to ourselves, tucked neatly inside, hardly ever looking out our windows. The new year padded in unannounced. In February I returned to Texas where I spent a few months laying low in that swath of mesquite country between the desert and the plains. I passed the nights by drinking until I was sick, the days by stewing in my sheets and by so looking forward to getting away from myself. Dreaming of a hard day's work at Lemolo Lake. I was young, lonesome, unkempt and off-course. Home was no place in particular. But I knew who I was then.

There's something wrong. Something peculiar about the whole place. In the light of day it breathes, and there's no end of beautiful things to be found. Life feels louder in the forest, more natural. But if you look long enough you'll see it: an illusory and nearly imperceptible slant of the lake line. Sunsets come strangely here. The mountains will cast a deep azure shade over the lake and its wood so they're in darkness before the sky can quite turn. And nights when they've settled are deathly quiet. For all our time traveling in that camper, Lizzie and I had grown accustomed to sudden winds that would rock us as if to sleep. But there is no wind in the lee of these pines, no cricket song so high in the mountains. At night there's only a troubling quiet. A preposterous stillness in the dark that makes one wonder if the firs haven't all turned to glass, because their needles never budge lest they clink against one another and send the whole place shattering down on itself. Suddenly there's no life but your own. This particular solitude belonging to the lake at night allows a great deal of room for profound and unfamiliar feelings. A stranger's thoughts, creeping inside of you, always changing shape so as not to be seized. These can be put to bed if you manage to rest, but sleep is hard-won. Its dreams disorienting. When you wake here it is almost always at dawn, and with only the faintest recollection of your night before.

I'd later be told that Lemolo is a chinookan word. Something akin to “wild”, or “untamed”. I may have thought it fitting then, seeing how we were almost a two hours' drive from the nearest town. But I couldn't have known. I'll admit there were attempts made to teach me. Still, I hadn't learned what Lemolo means, truly.