SECRET SPOT

If you follow the river upstream along its meandering course you will eventually come to a place where it tapers to a thin ribbon in the midst of an ancient hemlock forest. Along the south bank there’s a grove of old-growth trees whose lofty, layered boughs block out the sun. The perpetual shade caused by the hemlocks keeps the ground beneath free of undergrowth. The generous spacing of the massive trunks, uncluttered by brush in between, and the open, park-like feel of the place has invited passersby for untold generations to pull their boats out and pass the night. Even today, if you dig a boot heel into the duff at the base of the old pillars you will find the charcoal signature of the ancient ones. How many thousands of forgotten fires had been lit there? I have often wondered about all of the faces and stories which have been swept away by the unsentimental current of time. If only the trees could talk.


Nowadays the old hemlock grove is an abandoned, lonely sort of place. Only one thing evidences that modern man has not completely forgotten the spot. In a clearing beneath a particularly impressive hemlock specimen there stands an ornate metal bed frame with white marble balls at each of its four corners. The bed first arrived in the grove 65 years ago. Ron Dimple, the town barber, salvaged it from the Grand Western Hotel after it burned. The hotel’s owner, Tom Skerring, lost everything in the fire and shortly thereafter took his own life. So nobody was around to object when Ron dragged the bed free of the debris, disassembled it and loaded it into his truck. At first he intended to clean it up and bring it home as an anniversary gift for his wife, Izzy, but in a flash of inspiration he decided to take it up to the hemlock grove where he had asked her to marry him two years prior. On their first anniversary Ron surprised Izzy by bringing her to the grove where she found the bed set up on the very site where he had asked for her hand. Izzy was delighted by the grand romantic gesture, and for years and years thereafter it became their custom to celebrate their anniversary by sleeping in the hemlock grove. They followed the same cherished traditions every year. While Ron unloaded the box spring and mattress, gathered firewood, and threw a couple of fishing lines out into the river, Izzy set up the clearing. She would make the bed and hang strings of Japanese lanterns from the surrounding trees. Sometimes she would gather wild flowers and arrange them in an empty beer bottle. As night fell, the lanterns pushed back the darkness with a soft, yellow light, and lent an elegant, whimsical air to the clearing. Ron and Izzy would celebrate their union while the moths beat their dusty wings against the lanterns and the wind played its old tune through the hemlocks.

Ron Dimple passed away eight years ago and Izzy moved away to a retirement community outside of Seattle. Occasionally a hunter or hiker will happen upon the old bed and wonder about its origins, but otherwise the grove remains an abandoned, lonely sort of place.

But hanging above the bed in Izzy’s room are some old battered Japanese lanterns.