Temperance Creek. Pamela Royes

how much it’s risen since I last checked. A foot, maybe more. When I look up, Skip’s standing above me on the retaining wall that divides the yard from the river, arms at his sides. Rooted. Two feet below him, the Imnaha rips and churns, and I shout, “That’s probably dangerous, standing up there . . .” then stop myself, knowing he can’t resist. A veritable John Muir, I think, shaking my head, lashing himself to the upper branches of a Douglas fir in a windstorm.

      “What did you say?” he asks. In the last of the evening light, I catch the shine of his eyes, reflecting off the water and back to me.

      I don’t reply, and he turns toward the river, balanced small and lithe as a bird on a branch. His head is bare, and his quilted flannel shirt is open down the front. He faces the water, legs apart and slightly bent, like he’s getting ready to mount the back of a bucking horse from a high chute. Not like a sixty-seven-year-old. If the wall caves in, it’s better he knows I didn’t try to hold him back.

      He’s poised above our summer swimming hole. Last August, dreading the long winter ahead without the feel of river water on my skin, I made myself a promise. Every month, at least once, I would get into the Imnaha, and it didn’t count unless I went all the way under. September was easy, in and out all month; three times in October, the last one diving headfirst into a deep hole eight miles upriver from the cabin; twice in November; December—it was after Christmas, but I made it; January—once after a sweaty afternoon moving gravel; once in February (there was ice); twice in March; and twice so far in April. On the days the river baptizes me, I feel validated, experiencing this fierce kind of pride as I throw myself in and out of the frigid water. An “I dare you” at sixty that isn’t dependent on muscle tone, speed, or coordination.

      Leaving an arm span distance between us, I join Skip on the rock wall, leaning away from the water but unable to take my eyes off it, afraid he’ll try to touch me and break the spell, afraid the wall we’re standing on will give way. I am tensely aware of him as the water sucks and surges below us, and we exchange goofy grins like thirteen-year-olds on a first date.

      Suddenly the warm, steady breeze blowing in from the south shifts to the north, and we nod, knowing cooler temperatures will slow the snowmelt, and the water levels will drop. Already I am thinking ahead to how the high water will have changed the dynamics of the riverbank, bringing in more sand, maybe deepening the swimming hole as the raging Imnaha carves its splendid way north to the Snake.

      We are where we started. April, in the canyons. Him and me, a black-and-white border collie pup, and the sound of water. Right on the edge.

       part one

       daughter of the plains

       Daughter of the Plains

       “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”

      —GRAHAM GREENE

      My parents gave me and my two brothers a rich and respectable Presbyterian upbringing fifty miles south of the Canadian border in Grand Forks, North Dakota, population thirty thousand. The Red River Valley’s high prairie sprawled to the horizon in all directions, stark, fertile, and one of the flattest landscapes in the world.

      Neatly laid out corner to corner and following the strict lines of the township-and-range system, it was a place where Methodists didn’t mix with Catholics (even after Kennedy was elected president), and the barley crop didn’t mingle with the corn. The wooded sloughs and muddy, winding Red River offered the only deviation from unrelenting quadrants of big and little plots.

      My ancestors, part of the 750,000 Norwegians who immigrated to America in the late nineteenth century, settled here. They staked claims, stripped the sod, and scraped a living from the broad sweep of virgin soil that had drawn them clear across a continent in the hopes that this New World, in time, would provide for them.

      My father, a third-generation descendant, was groomed for higher education and a future that didn’t include farming. As a Georgetown University–educated lawyer who ended up running a Cadillac dealership and later a real estate business with his father, he wore dark suits with silk ties, white shirts so brilliant they took your breath away, pants with knife-edge creases, and hand-buffed black shoes. He was careful with his money and subscribed to the Wall Street Journal but never invested a dime. He left for work the same time every morning (after chastely kissing “Mother”) and returned the same time each evening (when he kissed her again).

      Prematurely gray, my dad smelled of spearmint and exuded dependability, like the evening news with Walter Cronkite. He had a great tenor voice, a barbershop voice. He sang “Moon River” along with Andy Williams and listened to Perry Como and Bing Crosby but not Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin, whom he considered lacking in moral restraint. He hummed, was an elegant dancer and a compulsive tickler. Saturday afternoons we shared a whole banana split at the Dairy Queen, two spoons. He called me “Droopy Drawers,” took me fishing in Minnesota, and taught me to hold a golf putter. As an avid sports fan, he exclaimed, “cripes all Friday” or “for crying out loud” when the football referee decided against his team. He had a short fuse and disliked unmade beds and getting lost. Honest to a fault, his face appeared whenever I was tempted to stretch the truth. I never saw him cry but once, at Grandpa’s funeral.

      In his need to protect us, to provide for us, there was a feeling of urgency. He seemed desperate for us to decide our course. As if he’d already lost us to the uncertainty of the future.

      “What will you study in college, Pammy?” Dad asked. I’d just finished my nightly childhood ritual of rummaging through his pockets for spare change and was lying on the living room rug, counting it. “Nursing, typing, maybe teaching?”

      “No. I’m going to be a park ranger.”

      “Hmmm. Where did you come up with that idea?”

      From the glossy pictures and maps of the world included in the monthly National Geographic magazines and our hardcover copy of America’s National Parks, I’d plotted my future as a Canadian park ranger. It was Manitoba’s Riding Mountain National Park, fifty miles due north (where my family spent one idyllic summer vacation and I’d worn both the horses and the wranglers to a nubbin), that filled my head. If all else failed, if they forced me to teach or type, I would run away to Canada, steal a horse, and disappear into the woods.

      “Dad, were there any other babies born the same day as me?”

      “Of course.”

      “Well, are you sure you took the right one home?”

      “Come over here so I can tickle you.”

      My mother, vivacious and resourceful, was the daughter of Idaho dry-land potato farmers, French and Cherokee on her father’s side, English on her mother’s. She rarely talked about her past, ashamed of her rural beginnings, handmade dresses, and the two-room shack shared with four siblings. Her mother and father divorced when she was eighteen. After high school graduation and without the financial resources to attend college, she moved to Monterey, California, and found work as a secretary in a war-supply office. It was there that she met Sergeant Bruce Severson, ten years her senior.

      She loved red. She wore lipstick red as a cock’s comb, red as a wound. She wrapped our house in red. Red wallpaper, red tulips, petunias, and geraniums, and against my youthful protests she clothed me in red dresses, red sweaters, red jackets and scarves.

      She drew terrific alligators.

      From her dresser drawer she produced satin boxes of jewelry for my amusement. Flashing rings and sparkling ropes of pearls, bright beads, gold bracelets, and silver pendants on silver chains. A charm bracelet with clever silver charms including pendants inscribed with the names of her children and their dates of birth, a bicycle whose handlebars turned and wheels spun, a