Sometimes a Great Notion

Ken Kesey (1935 -2001)

Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal 
Range . . . come look: the hysterical crashing of tribu- 
taries as they merge into the Wakonda Auga River . . . 

The first little washes Bashing like thick rushing winds ^ 
through sheep sorrel and clover, ghost fern and nettle, 
sheering, cutting . . . forming branches. Then, through 
bearberr}' and salmonberry', blueberry and blackberry, the 
branches crashing into creeks, into streams. Finally, in the 
foothills, through tamarack and sugar pine, shittim bark 
and silver spruce— and the green and blue mosaic of 
Douglas Hr— the actual river falls five hundred feet . . . 
and look: opens out upon the Helds. 

Metallic at Hrst, seen from the highway down through 
the trees, like an aluminum rainbow, like a slice of alloy 
moon. Closer, becoming organic, a vast smile of water 
with broken and rotting pilings jagged along both gums, 
foam clinging to the lips. Closer still, it Battens into a 
river. Hat as a street, cement-gray with a texture of rain. 
Flat as a rain-textured street even during Hood season 
because of a channel so deep and a bed so smooth: no 
shallows to set up buckwater rapids, no rocks to rile the 
surface . . . nothing to indicate movement except the 
swirling clots of yellow foam skimming seaward with the 
wind, and the thrusting groves of flooded bam, bent taut 
and trembling by the pull of silent, dark momentum. 

A river smooth and seeming calm, hiding the cruel Hle- 
edge of its current beneath a smooth and calm-seeming 
surface. 

The highway follows its northern bank, the ridges fol- 
low its southern. No bridges span its Hrst ten miles. And 
yet, across, on that southern shore, an ancient two-story 
wood-frame house rests on a structure of tangled steel, of 
wood and earth and sacks of sand, like a two-story bird 
with split-shake feathers, sitting fierce in its tangled nest. 
Look . . .