The river provides the din of the story. Not just the violence, but every action I describe, every step that we take from the end of this long driveway to the valley by 117. It is the noise that plays through every moment I revisit. If it weren’t important it wouldn’t endlessly run through my memory. Trust that it wouldn’t.

When I was 8 years old, my mother crashed our car into a telephone pole. She was going fast and she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, which makes sense for the sad woman I remember. When we returned from the coroner’s, my father took my hand and walked us to the river. He helped me down along the bank, and then set me on the driest boulder—where I had seen him sit many times. He sat beside me, down in the loose pebbles and mud, and had himself a quiet cry, feeling good and hidden underneath the tumult of the water. “This has been here for a long time,” he said. “Thousands of years. Tens of thousands, maybe. I don’t know. A long time.” Sometimes it’s nicest to feel small and insignificant and the river could do that for you. It could do the other too. It could render you beholden with all the bigness and smallness it contained. I spent my weekends and summers unsupervised, unparented, and gleaning wisdom that spilled forth from the rocks.

The river took from me twice, making it hard to remember whether it’s something I loved or hated—making my memories a murky mess, with the steady sound of crashing water barreling perpetually through. The first time, there was a tree. A maple. It hugged so close to that river, each year creeping closer and closer. I would climb through the branches and jump into the deepest well of the river, allowing the water—mercilessly cold even on the hottest day—to surround me. Really, each year the river tore a bit more of the bank away. It was the river that moved closer to the tree, and there it stayed, miserably rooted.

My father and me went to the river to be alone. Sometimes we were and sometimes we found each other. Sometimes that was enough to diminish any feeling of sacredness, but other time it was nice. It was there that my father made his first attempt to advise me on matters of love and support. I was 10 maybe, and I said something about the river taking the tree. It had dug a considerable cave out from underneath it, and roots pitifully dangled from the podium of dirt.

He said, “The river provides what it takes away. The force of the water digs away at the tree and then it keeps it held up.” He wasn’t drinking at this time, I don’t think. “Like how we do to each other,” he said. “I barely have enough money to feed just me. But everything you take you give back to me in other ways. Dependency is what it is, and it’s not a dirty word, it’s just a way of living.” The wax poetics of a father can shake the world of a 10-year-old boy, and it did to me. I tried to look at the tree and understand that the water held it up. I convinced myself that it could—that my father was wise.

The bank continued to disappear, and I watched it happen fearfully, saying to myself whatever the river takes away, it will provide. And when one night the mountains shook with thunder, when the sound of rainfall nearly drowned out the increasing rumble of rushing water, I stayed awake in my bed. I knew the storm was too much for the tenuous relationship between tree and river. I walked outside in my underpants and rain jacket, trying to demonstrate bravery in the face of absolute terror. The river shook right along the edge of our lawn, barreling through and over the tall grass. And I watched it happen, as if the river had been waiting for me the whole time. The river wasn’t supporting the tree. It surrounded it; it clawed higher and higher at the bark, reaching tirelessly for the lowest branches. The tree shifted and slipped, just like a person going carefully down too steep and wet of an incline. The river swallowed it, as if they had known no time together, as if the river had never thought of the tree as part of itself (as I had), as if it were mean and personal. I watched. I cried and I felt small and insignificant in the worst way, in a way that made me want to be away from the river and nowhere at all and just somewhere where for once it was absolutely quiet.

The second time the river took from me I was in high school. Kids at school had learned that I didn’t have much, but I did have a river; they took to spending their afternoons along with me on the muddy banks. Now and then I could hear my father open the back door. I would turn my head to look at him. But he would stay in the shadow, having realized that we were there, and after another moment or two he would gently shut the door back closed—so as not to make a noise. He was drinking at that point, I think.

I sat with my friend Matt along a jagged rock and he said, “You probably have everything you would ever need right here by this river. Think about it,” he held up his hand and counted off with his fingers, “You have your drinking water, you have fish, berries, leisure,” he waved his hand at the trees, “firewood.”

“Yeah maybe,” I said.

We had taken to chasing after the greatest thrills. We took increasingly long dives from the edge of the banks into the safety of deep water. The distance and speed, along with the stinging slaps that accompanied a poor landing, were terrifying. It was my river, though, and I embraced it. It gave me a sense of self, and a sense of being no one, like nothing else ever has.

Matt slipped on a particularly daring dive, from the distant edge of the opposite bank. The ground was damp. We had made the leaves wet with our coming and going and all of our theatrics. Lewis and I watched from behind, where we ourselves had been preparing for that same dive. Greg was dangling his feet in the water. When Matt’s foot shifted on the wet leaves, he lost all momentum and his jump was cut short. His body was already thrown forward, ready to dive. His face was dashed open on the rock platform 20 feet below.