The clear, cool water that still flows in wild rivers is the clean blood of history, and now in the summer you can hear voices there, old voices, sometimes whispering in the slicks and eddies, sometimes shouting in the rocky, roaring rapids.
Sometimes the voices are so distinct that they make you stop and listen. There is no one there, of course, or is there?
There is a place where cedar trees brush the rushing water with dark boughs and great boulders defy the power of the rapids. A small jut of flat land lies at the foot of the rapids, and still discernible beneath the thick trees is the outline of a structure, its deminsions set by the decaying logs that formed its sides.
It was used a century ago by the lumberjacks who cut the great trees and then tended the spring log drives to float the wild land`s first crop to a consuming civilization.
Part way up the rapids, a huge gray stump sits solidly on the rocky riverbank. Its sides are gouged by ax marks, made long ago when it might have been used as a fulcrum to help break up the logjams that were terrifying in their power and capriciousness. Or perhaps it held a rope that a calk-booted man clung to as he tried to maneuver the ponderous logs, a futile lifeline of sorts in a business and time that would trade a man`s life for a log in a minute, and often did. A brief scream in the grinding crunch of logs and thundering water. No body. No funeral. Just a wooden stake beside the river to mark the spot.
The stump is there like a monument to that time of brave and foolish young men and to long-suffering women who waited in vain for them to come home in the summer. It is a decaying altar where you can pay homage to a brief and passionate page of history.
You cannot come to the stump or the rapids without hearing the voices. There are mumbling conversations of loves and dreams, businesslike commands to accomplish the work of the day, and shouts to horses and companions. Then, suddenly, for no apparent reason there is a scream, or is there? Was it just the summer wind, or the twist of a branch against the hissing water?
Now we come to the wild country to play, to canoe and fish, and the rushing stream puts us in our place: A hundred years from now, no one will ever know we were here, unless our whoops of fun are somehow added to the summer voices of the river.