Author’s Note: This is an autobiographical horror story.
The log rolled under my feet. I wheeled my arms for balance and leaped to the next log before I sank into the cold Columbia River. Seven years old and invincible.
We lived in Pier 99’s caretaker house on the riverbank, close enough to the I-5 bridge that it cast an afternoon shadow over the brick exterior.
West was the Portland Expo Center, where a smart kid could slip into car shows and comic conventions. South was Delta Park, where I’d spend whole days fueling a boy’s curiosity when the Klamath, Paiute, and Warm Springs tribes held their summer powwow with dancers, drums, fry bread, and art.
But the real adventure? That was in the other direction.
The I-5 crossed from here to Hayden Island, then into Washington. Our house was close enough to chip rocks into the river from my bedroom window and watch the heavy industrial and recreational traffic passing day and night.
The whole area was no place for a kid, and I had the run of it. Especially in the summer days, which meant freedom and get the hell outside and don’t come back till almost dark.
I spent endless days exploring the area.
An old man rented part of the first floor of our house out of which he ran a river shop. Maps, canoes, kayaks, books. He was kind and his quiet shop full of things made my curious eyes sparkle. He knew a lot about the river and would patiently answer my questions between sweet earthy puffs on a pipe.
I met him a week after we moved in. I didn’t know anyone was below us until I emptied the vacuum canister out my bedroom window. It rained dust over his walkway.
After my mom’s boyfriend made sure I understood my mistake—one more reason to stay away all day—he sent me down to apologize. That’s how I met Charlie.
Logs collected between the docks and the embankment. Old Douglas firs stripped smooth, slick with algae and moss. Some were thin, others thick as a barrel. Some long as a man is tall, others like telephone poles. They floated in a packed formation, riding every undulation together. If you were brave enough and quick, you could hop from one to another and make your way from one side of the dock to the other.
If you weren’t careful, you could slip between them and you wouldn’t resurface. The current would sweep you under the dock, slam you into a piling, trap you in the dark spaces. You’d disappear.
I didn’t think about those things when the owner’s son showed up with his little fiberglass skiff. It wasn’t big enough to fish from, but it carried one or two people from point to point with its weak outboard motor.
He was maybe twenty-five. One of those guys who seemed impossibly adult but still cool enough to hang out with a kid sometimes. His dad owned Pier 99, which meant the marina, showroom, our house, and Charlie’s shop. His dad also coached our wrestling team at the athletic club he owned across the city.
“Hey.” He grinned. “Want to go out to the sandbar?”
Hell. Yes.
You could see the sandbar from the docks if the river was very low. It was a pale strip of sand right in the middle of the shipping channel, half a mile away. Charlie had explained it once when I’d asked about it. “That’s a sandbar, not an island,” he’d said. “The tide comes in from the ocean and the river rises. When it goes out, the river drops. That’s why sometimes you can see it and sometimes you can’t.” I’d nodded. I thought it was neat that land could appear and disappear.
He pulled up to the dock. I stepped in, careful not to tip it over.
The engine coughed back to life with a wisp of blue smoke and the sharp smell of two-stroke oil, like a chainsaw. We skipped across the water, slapping against the surface. The river felt enormous when you were on it.
I watched the green back-end of a big dry barge moving away from us and under the bridge. It pushed between the massive pylons which rose out of the water like concrete redwoods. The barge shrank to a small rectangle.
To the north, Hayden Island’s Jantzen Beach sprawled where the old amusement park, once the largest in the nation, used to be. “Coney Island of the West,” the old-timers called it, though it shut down fifteen years earlier. Wind flashed through my hair. I felt cool as all get out.
We approached the strip of land. It was shaped like a long teardrop and mostly sand with a small tuft of grass at the far end. As long as a football field, but fifteen yards wide at its thickest.
He cut the engine and the boat scraped onto the sand.
I got out and took a few steps. A grid of old pilings stretched from the sandbar toward Jantzen Beach. Rotting stumps, ten columns wide and spaced in rows. They formed a creepy underwater forest of remnants from something long abandoned.
“Cool, right?” He grinned. “I gotta go, but I’ll be back in a bit.”
Wait, what?
But he had already pushed off and was ripping the pull-cord of the motor. The engine caught. He gave a little wave and headed back toward the docks. The engine’s sound faded until it was me and the river. The constant rush of traffic on the bridge faded into white noise. Little wakes slapped against the sand where I stood.
I closed my eyes. Breathed in. No stench of a wrestling mat with years of sweat ground into the vinyl. No chlorine and naked bodies everywhere in the locker room. No sauna heat burning my nose, cooking me in two layers of sweats sandwiching a plastic suit.
Just air.
My shoulders rolled off a tension I hadn’t known they’d been under. Nobody watching. Nobody waiting. For once, I didn’t have to be ready for anything.
I stood.
After a bit, I opened my eyes. Alone or not, I decided it was an adventure. My own private island. I was Robinson Crusoe. I was Tom Sawyer.
I walked to where the pilings met the sandbar. Most had collapsed or snapped into jagged stumps. The tallest stood about fifteen feet high.
At the water’s edge, I found the graveyard. Waterlogged logs, too heavy to surface. Rotting planks. Whole trees trapped by the current and drowned against the pilings. A sunken tangle of slimy wood in shades of green and brown. It all faded to black in the depths. It looked like the entire pier had collapsed and sank right where it stood.
I stepped back from the water onto dry ground and looked around me. Other than these old pilings, there actually wasn’t anything here. No driftwood, no rocks, no plants. Nothing. Sand and dirt. I found a spot to sit and drew boobs in the sand.
As evening turned, the sun dipped behind the bridge. The sky turned a muted blue-grey. That’s when I noticed the water. Once at the far end of the sandbar, it now engulfed half. The sand was disappearing under the rising tide. The only completely dry place was the high spot I had chosen to sit and wait on.
I had expected him to return by now. He said “in a bit,” right?
The water crept higher. Inch by inch. My shoes were wet. The visible sandbar shrank to a strip of about twenty feet.
Fifteen.
I lost myself in water and sand meeting at the edge. My knees wobbled and that about-to-puke feeling rose in my throat. The dredged shipping channel was right there. Here. I’d been playing on the edge of a cliff, oblivious to the five-story drop to the mud and black one step away. I stared down, into it.
The water reached my calves.
It was dark enough that the street lights would be on any moment now. The universal signal that it was time to come home. Whatever was delaying him, he had to be back soon, right?
Headlights streamed in both directions on the bridge. So many people going somewhere. None of them had any clue a kid was standing on a disappearing piece of nothing as the river swallowed it up.
Any straggler just peddling into their driveway would have long since violated the “home when the street lights come on” rule.
I looked down at my legs disappearing into the water. I looked back up. A deck-barge appeared in the distance. It had red and green lights at each corner and yellow-white lights blinking out of sync along each edge. The explosion of light from the tug boat pushing behind silhouetted a huge tractor on the back end and a large pile of something on the front end. When it neared, I made the pile out to be a massive hill of boulders caked in half-dried mud.
Should I try to get the pilot’s attention? Or should I stay and wait? I didn’t want to get in trouble, but I was scared now. He must have forgotten me.
I made up my mind. I waved my arms above my head. No acknowledgment. I waved them wider, more frantically. Nothing. It was all but dark now, and I was a small unlit thing at the edge of his vision.
I’d never been this close to a barge. It kept growing as it closed distance. The bow cut past, splitting the water with barely a sound. Then, a faded dark grey wall.
Those yellowish lights twinkled on and off, independent of each other. They cast a soft light. Enough to see two tight lines of rivets stretching from bow to stern. Rust streaks bleeding from their thumb-sized heads.
I arched my head back further and saw old truck tires dangling overhead, strung on rope loops just below deck-level.
It dominated my vision, with only room above to see a thin purple-black band of sky.
I wanted to climb out of myself and escape. This behemoth looming over me, blocking out the world. It dwarfed me and seemed too close. It could drag me under. Suck me beneath it. Churn me up in the dark water where I’d never find my way back to air.
That dizzy, unmoored feeling. I’d felt it at the top of the Astoria Column, too. They tell you not to look down, but I always found looking up to be so much worse. I’d backed against the wall at the top of the column, pressing my palms flat against it. I wanted to fall to my knees and crawl.
Out here, there was nothing to back against. Nothing to press my hands to. At the Column, I’d felt like my head was filled with helium, floating from my shoulders. Here, this massive thing could swallow me. Pull me down into the depths.
My balance wavered. I fought buckling knees.
The barge slid alongside me. Water started to gently rise and fall. It rocked me. The sandbar beneath my feet felt smaller.
Diesel exhaust from the tug hit my nose. It smelled like a gas station. Metal groaned. White letters marked the hull but I couldn’t make out their pale shapes. My heart thudded as the boulders, then the middle section, then the tractor passed overhead.
Behind the barge, the tug strained forward. Running lights much brighter than the barge’s dim markers. The tug was low and blocky, like a bulldog with a skirt of tires around its hull and a massive wedge of black rubber on its nose. Its deep diesel engine rumble almost growled like a bulldog, too. Beneath the rumble, a consistent high pitch whine.
The rear of the barge passed, the string of tires swinging out and back in against the hull with an echoing thud. While the front had sliced almost softly and quietly through the water, the rear, pushed by the tug, was a bubbling, churning, heaving cauldron.
A roar rumbled from the engine that vibrated in my chest. Thick black diesel exhaust billowed out of two huge exhaust stacks, slanted backward behind the wheelhouse. It puffed out black then settled to gray. It punched the air with the smell of a semi-truck. Running lights hit me in the eyes, bright and blinding, splashing the barge deck but leaving me in shadow.
The front-loader was a sleeping mammoth. Fading yellow paint. The bucket arm curled down like a trunk. Hydraulic arms rose on either side like tusks. Massive wheels. Steel cables holding it to the deck.
The wheelhouse rose up with windows glowing a subtle dim red. I could just make out a bright orange life ring hanging below them. The stern squatted low in the water, engine grinding within it.
Beneath it all, the propeller whipped the water into disorienting white caps.
The tug moved on and then its wake hit.
First wave plowed into my waist and I stumbled.
Another hit before I could get stable.
Then another.
The water came in pulses, faster and faster, spreading from the thrashing propeller.
Waist.
Chest.
Shoulder.
I tried to plant my feet wider, but the water was too high and the sand shifted.
A wave caught me full in the chest.
My feet launched from the sandbar.
I wasn’t standing anymore. Just floating. Kicking. Trying to find bottom. My feet hit something and then another wave rolled over me and I was moving fast and uncontrolled. Flailing.
Toward the pilings.
The old rotting stumps. Some with jagged tops. The underwater tangle of logs and branches I’d seen earlier.
I didn’t have time to worry about getting impaled on a piling or swept into that underwater tangle.
I paddled hard, arms slapping the water. The wake lifted me and dropped me. Lifted and dropped. Each surge pushing me closer to those pilings.
I whipped my head side to side, finding one of the taller pilings coming at me. Too fast. No time to think. I reached my arms out to brace against the impact.
I hit hard.
The corner of my head cracked against the piling. Pain drilled through my skull and rattled through the rest of me. My vision went white, then blurred at the edges. Tears came.
I looked around frantically, blinking through the tears.
The next wave slammed into my face. Water rushed into my nose, my mouth. The water stung my eyes. I shook my head, trying to clear it, but everything swam.
I struggled to grab anything, but found nothing. Decades in the river had smoothed the pilings slick. I ricocheted off and drifted toward three shorter ones with jagged tops. The wake softened, but the current still pulled me toward them.
I slipped out of my long-sleeve wrestling shirt. Soaked and heavy, I hoisted it above myself. As I reached the first piling, I whipped it out as high and far as I could. One sleeve in my hand, the other snagging the jagged top.
I pulled myself toward it and reeled in on the shirt, careful not to let it slip loose.
I sucked in air hard and bit down. Made myself stop crying, even though nobody was there to see. Crying is for—
The pilings were too wide to wrap my arms around and too slimy to climb. I wrapped the sleeve around my wrist and held on, treading water. My soaked shoes and socks made each kick a struggle. I tried to use one foot to strip the shoe off the other, but they were tied too tightly.
I continued to kick. I could keep myself afloat, but for how long with my feet in anchors?
My ribs, arms, and shoulders started to ache. A bruise striped down my forearm, where I’d absorbed impact with the timber. The knuckles on the hand grabbing the shirt were scraped and red.
I had four dark marks on the same bicep, but those weren’t from the piling. Pilings didn’t have fingerprints.
I couldn’t stay like this. Nobody was going to see a head bobbing in the water in a field of murky timber.
Should I swim for it? The Columbia River had a fierce current. You weren’t supposed to swim near docks. The river could pull you under, trapping you in the support structure.
Could I make it to shore? Not a chance. It was so far away and was a steep muddy bank that couldn’t be climbed. Between here and there? The shipping channel dropped to over forty feet deep.
Hayden Island wasn’t much better. Even if I cleared the old docks, the current would rip me away.
My head throbbed where I’d hit the piling. The pain stacked up waves. My heartbeat drummed.
The current could pull me down river. Nobody would see me at night. Would I smash into the bridge supports? Would it carry me safely around them? Then what—eighty miles out into the Pacific Ocean?
I tried to picture it. The current pulling me past the bridge. Past everything. All the way down the Columbia and out. Eighty miles to the ocean.
At least that would be away.
I clenched the sleeve tighter, digging nails back into my own palm. Water squeezed from the fabric. Had to hold on. One more minute. Just had to make it one more minute.
The other way would take me toward the Jantzen Beach side. A maze of docks, moored boats, and houseboats. My only chance was to stay afloat long enough to grab something—anything—before the river dragged me under. Then, maybe, I could pull myself to safety.
Something brushed against my leg. Then something else. Brushed or nibbled?! Probably just trout. Those little guys were nothing to worry about. Yet, my mind flashed to the surfaced sturgeon we found floating by the docks under the bridge last season.
A prehistoric monster with ridged studded sides and a protruding bony back. Its lifeless fins flopped with the movement of the water. Bigger than any fish had a right to be.
I saw the running lights of a boat in the distance. As it neared, I could see it was a recreational fishing boat. The kind you see mobsters throw people off in movies. Music playing. They were close enough. If I screamed, really screamed, they might hear me over it.
I opened my mouth.
Nothing came out.
What if they brought me back and he found out I’d needed—that I couldn’t handle—
My throat closed up.
The boat went by. Its wake hit me, water filling my mouth. It tasted like dirt, moss, algae, and fish. The boat slowed, pulling into a dock at one of the marinas.
Too late. I’d waited too long.
I still wanted to scream for help, but they’d never hear me now. And if they did, they’d have no idea where the sound came from.
In the distance, the enormous red “Waddles” sign glowed with white and yellow neon announcing “EAT NOW!” Close enough to read, too far to reach. From this angle, I could not make out the hands on its big clock. Across from it, the Pier 99 sign glowed, marking home. The tall sign lit up every night through my bedroom window. A spire protruded from the top of the atomic-age style 1960 sign and had a large red orb spiked onto it.
I scanned the shore for Charlie’s shop, hoping against hope to see a light. Sometimes he stayed late, stepping out to watch the river while smoking his pipe. Maybe tonight would be one of those nights. Maybe he’d scan the water and catch a glint of white skin and dark hair bobbing with the waves.
But the shop was dark.
Something I could see never felt so far away.
My head still ached. I touched the knot where I’d hit the piling, winced at the stinging pain, then felt it split with each heartbeat. The water had gotten colder. Cold enough that it felt like fire. My teeth chattered hard enough to hurt.
He’d forgotten me. Simple as that. He went back to doing whatever twenty-five-year-olds do on summer evenings. Forgot he left a kid standing in the middle of the river. Nobody could see me. Nobody could hear me. Nobody knew I was here.
The shirt cut deeper into my wrist. My arms shook from holding on. I tried to adjust my grip but couldn’t find a better position. Each kick took more effort than the last. My calves cramped. The cold fire was in my bones now.
One more minute. If I could just hold on one more minute. Maybe he’d remember. Maybe he’d come back.
I counted to sixty. Started over. Lost track. Started again.
Just one more minute.
My arms shook so hard I could barely hold the shirt. The sleeve was slipping. I wrapped it tighter around my wrist, but my hands were too cold to grip right.
One more minute. That’s all. Just one more.
I was so tired. I needed to rest. Close my eyes for a second. Gather strength before I tried to swim. Just a second.
The pulsing in my head distorted my vision. I couldn’t think straight. Couldn’t remember if I’d already counted to sixty or if I’d just started.
One more minute.
I knew I’d have to try to swim. I knew I wouldn’t make it. But clinging to this piling by the tether of a shirt, waiting to pass out from exhaustion or cold felt worse. At least swimming was doing something.
But I couldn’t let go. Had to hold on. Can’t isn’t a wo—Had to hold on.
One more minute.
The high buzz of a small outboard motor cut across the water. Distant, but getting louder. I stayed as still as I could, afraid that if I lost my read on the sound, it would veer away. I listened for it over the rhythmic lapping of water, my chattering teeth, and the blood pounding in my head.
The engine cut to idle. A flashlight beam scanned across the water. I let go with one hand and splashed the water over and over, trying to scream. The light swept back across.
It stopped.
Found me.
He navigated between the pilings. Cigarette between his lips, beer bottle wedged between his knees as he worked the tiller.
“Grab on,” he said, steadying the boat against the current.
I reached for the edge. My arms shook so bad I could barely grip. He had to grab my wrist and haul me partway over before I could get my legs in. I collapsed into the bottom of the boat, water pooling around me. When my lungs stopped fighting for breath, I pulled myself up and leaned back against the side of the boat.
He picked up his beer by the neck, took a pull. “Sorry man, lost track of time.” He nodded the bottle toward another one wedged by his feet. “Want one?”
I shook my head.
I couldn’t get words out. My head still pounded. Every part of me ached. My eyes were still blurry. My throat hurt.
He reached into a cooler and tossed me a Coke. “Here you go.”
I don’t remember what else he said. I don’t remember what I said. I remember how warm the cold metal can in my hands felt. I remember climbing onto the seat, my legs numb and calves aching. I remember water dripping off of me, pooling on the floor of the boat.
We rode back in silence. The engine noise and the wind. I was shaking from the muscle exhaustion and cold, but trying to control it. Trying to figure out if I was in trouble. But he wasn’t angry. Wasn’t anything. Just drove the boat, one hand on the tiller, taking a pull from his beer.
The docks materialized from the darkness. We pulled up, tied the boat to a cleat. He held on to the dock so the boat would steady. I stepped out onto Pier 99’s worn planks. Finally, something solid under my feet. He got out after me. I flinched when he reached out and patted me on the back.
“Sorry.”
I nodded and flashed a thin tired smile.
We walked the gangway. It seemed steeper than normal and the backs of my legs stung with every step.
He went his way and I stood alone, feeling myself lean in one direction, then pull in another. I closed my eyes and breathed. That’s when I realized I left my shirt behind, dangling limply from the top of a piling. I hoped nobody would notice it missing.
I felt like a zombie, lumbering across the bank, down to the house. I cautiously took the stairway down the other side of the bank and sat on the bottom step of the stairway that went up two stories, to the utility room next to my bedroom.
I took off my socks and shoes and waited until I was dry enough to slip into my room.
We never talked about it. Not that night, not ever. I didn’t tell anyone.
What was there to say? I was fine. It was over.
He probably forgot about it by the next day. Just another summer evening.
It’s been forty years.
I don’t think about it much. Not every day or every month. Maybe not even every year. But sometimes, lying in bed in the middle of the night, staring up into the darkness, it hits. I swear I hear water lapping against my ear. And I remember. Then, that cold slither down my spine. Not from the memory of the cold or the water. From understanding how close I came. How easily the last forty years could have never happened.
How easily I could have just disappeared into that dark water. But I learned that you don’t need water to drown.
Coming next month: The Horror of Consensus