It was not that bright or happy time when the day or season is new. The best of both had passed. Apples were still ripening, but most of the garden had faded, the lawns were straw, long surrendered by their caretakers. The sun was about to drop west behind the ridge that stood above the house at the bottom of Selah Avenue.

Ogden Wilson rode his new bike – one speed, balloon tires, Sears and Roebuck – to the river, to a place about a half-mile upstream of First Bridge, to a spot on the Little Selah that his mother used to call the shallows, not a particularly unique name since it would describe almost all of the Little Selah and many stretches of the Selah itself, its larger namesake. The shallows were about a five-minute ride from home – Found Street to Mill, across First Bridge, a sharp left down a side street and three blocks to a dirt-worn trail that ran to the water, fenced yard on one side, tall grasses of an abandoned lot on the other.

On Memorial Day week-end, loggers dammed the Little Selah before it ran under First Bridge to create a swimming pool made from a creek. Years before, a combined community effort raised enough money to have concrete walls poured on both sides of the stream in order to contain the Little Selah’s waters, while on the west side they squared up the bank to make a spacious deck that the creek rose to when the dam was in. There were broad steps down to the water’s edge, a place to sit and watch people swim, a life guard stand, and even a wading pool for toddlers.

Each summer city workers, with the help of a local logging company, began by placing a huge log on concrete bulwarks that sat on each side of the river. Sturdy wooden planks – about a foot wide and ten feet long – were stood side-by-side crossing the river, the bottoms resting in the streambed, the tops against the log. Once the stream had risen to a depth of about five feet behind the improvised dam, a couple of spillways returned the water to its normal course. It ran under the bridge and, after about a half mile, into the Selah.

It was an ingenious arrangement that made a pool about fifty feet wide and three times as long. Ogden had never seen another town with anything like it. He didn’t know who had come up with the idea or even when the dam was originally put in, but Ogden had been told that when his father came to Selah after the war, he earned extra money as a life guard that first summer without ever getting wet.

When those who had grown up in Selah came back after years of being away, they almost always drove straight to the pool. They’d turn off Mill Street before crossing the bridge and park in a little lot above the stream. They’d get out of their cars to look down toward the dam – cold, still water on one side, spillway and rapids on the other. At night, it was quiet there. You could look upstream at the manmade swimming hole or downstream to see the creek return to what it had been, hearing only the rush of water flowing over the spillway.

The main drawback was that the water was so cold that most people couldn’t stand to swim in it, except for a handful of the hottest days of summer, then folks would drive up from as far away as Portland for the novelty of swimming in a pool made from a creek. After Labor Day weekend, the city removed the long planks and the big log until the creek returned to its normal depth. If they didn’t, salmon and steelhead would have been unable to swim upstream when the rain came.

When it was in, the dam backed up the Little Selah further than the length of the pool. For a couple summers, Ogden kept a rowboat padlocked to a fence beyond where people swam. When the creek was dammed, he could row upstream and around a bend until he got to this place where the water returned to its normal depth. That was the shallows.

His mother almost never took them to the concrete wading pool when they were young. It was too crowded, which to someone raised on a farm in the windy upper reaches of North Dakota, would have been anything other than deserted. She called the wading pool the pissing pool, although whenever Ogden or his younger sister, Olivia, were playing in the river and had to pee, she always told them go where they were. It was the kind of double standard children are often asked to accept. On warm summer afternoons it wasn’t to the pool, but the shallows that his mom took his sister and him on their first trips to the river.

The stream narrowed there, the water running over a gentle bank of stones and pebbles. It was the perfect place for young children to wet their feet, to build miniature swimming pools with rings of stones, to practice capturing minnows and infant crawdads or collect handfuls of periwinkles. It was not a good place to swim, so older children usually left it alone. Ogden’s mother found it, because a friend of a friend lived in the house that bordered one side of the trail that went down to the water. It felt safe, it was close to home, and usually unpeopled. As proud as the community was of its pool fashioned from concrete, lumber, and the Little Selah, most families in town had their version of this favorite spot, what they thought of as their own personal swimming hole – an old railroad trestle south of town, the logging company wayside about seven miles out of town, a gentle stretch at the bottom of someone’s pasture.

Often these places changed as the years passed. Once Ogden and Olivia learned to swim, the family outgrew the shallows, although learning itself took them three summers. Swimming lessons on a cloudy June morning in the pool made from a creek fed by snow run-off were an agony. They didn’t develop any skill until a summer trip to visit their grandparents in North Dakota where they had access, in the small town their dad grew up, to a real pool with warm, heavily chlorinated, water.

The shallows attracted Dr. Chamber’s ducks as well. They normally lived in his yard that bordered and look down upon the far side of the pool, the side opposite the concrete deck, the life guard stand, and the pissing pool. Chambers was Selah’s one and only physician, a position that made him, with the owner of the town’s sole car dealership, and a half-dozen others, a member of Selah’s small upper class. His was one of the nicer houses in town. He installed a putting-green lawn and embellished it with a set of three white ducks, as majestic in their own way as their owner. Divorced, tan, and lean, he liked to have cocktails with his ducks on sunny afternoons after a day of tending to Selah’s ills. On hot days he would, in the late afternoon, appear on his perfect green lawn, bronzed and regal, to execute a perfect swan dive into the creek that civic ingenuity had transformed into a municipal swimming hole.

The shallows were also a good place to fish, and that was what drew Ogden to them on that summer day when he was about to go into fifth grade. He wanted to walk down by the water and check it out. Looking at the water and thinking about fishing there, was almost as enjoyable as fishing itself. After looking and thinking, he’d probably see how many times he could make smooth flat stones slap across the surface before they stopped spinning and dropped to the bottom.

The lawn was for ducks a choice location – the bug-rich grass for sunbathing and dining, the river handy should they want a swim and more to eat. Of course, anybody who owned ducks knew they shit everywhere, but from the other side of the creek, it was the green of the grass and the white of the ducks that impressed the eye.

If Ogden had looked down on the pool and Chamber’s yard as he rode across First Bridge on that late summer day, he would not have seen the ducks. By some avian communication, they had decided to follow the narrow road that ran alongside their yard down to the water’s edge and set out for the shallows. They didn’t go there often. It was a long paddle, but the easy pickings had thinned out in the yard, and at the edge of the shallows they’d be able to poke around in the pebbles for water bugs and other small edible creatures with names a biologist would know. What attracted them attracted trout, and that also drew Ogden.

When he arrived at the shallows, one of the three white ducks was broken and motionless on a little rock island in the middle of the river, another was hurrying across the water’s surface, half in flight, half walking on water, doing its best to make it back to the green yard above the pool. The third was rushing over stones to the cover of low bushes on the opposite side of the creek, one wing twisted and broken, beyond any thought of flight, white now speckled with red. Two boys, one older, one younger, whom Ogden vaguely knew, were advancing on the third duck, determined not to let it escape, throwing stone after stone, feet braced in the shallows, to give young bodies and strong arms the leverage to finish what they had begun.

The pair didn’t see the young boy with a Sears and Roebuck bike looking down at them, stopped half way down the path, shielded by the high grasses of the vacant lot. Ogden didn’t see a third thrower, anticipating the duck’s escape, waiting for it behind a stand of willows across the stream. But the juvenile delinquent recognized the young boy who lived across the tracks and shot baskets at the hoop his father had newly built for him.

Ogden abandoned his bike, turned and ran without stopping to Mill Street, across the bridge, through the center of town, onto the tracks, and up the bank until he stood breathless before a mother and father who were talking to a stranger in the living room. He told them what he saw and then went to his room in the back of the house to lay, breathless, on his bed.

His mother came to him, and sat without talking as his breathing slowed. She placed her hand in the middle of his back, as she had done before when bad dreams came, but this nightmare was different. It would not go away upon waking.

His father said good-bye to the man who’d come to sell them life insurance, then drove Ogden to the shallows to get his bike. As they walked down the path that ran between the fenced yard and vacant lot, it was quiet. The sun had dropped beneath the horizon. Water rippled through the shallows. Only a few feathers remained. On the way home, his father told him that he had called the doctor and told him what Ogden had seen. The next morning, Ogden’s mother said that she and his father had talked it through and they believed he was innocent.

He never thought they could consider him guilty.

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