Bone Creek

Michael McGriff
· in ,

Bone Creek runs east of the house. In summertime, a cracked dry mud covers it for a quarter of a mile, looking like an imitation of a desert floor or the weathered skin of a dead drunkard someone finds in a ditch. Step on it, however, and you’ll find your rubber boots full of water and yourself up to waist in a cold black mud. Stuck up to the axels, as my father would say. The smell of skunk cabbage, the music of ferns. Mineral-red clay. The creek carries on its music year round, even when it fades to a hidden trickle like a single string that someone remembers to pluck every so often. Forty years ago, I saw a cow and her calf panic in that summer mud, die from exhaustion—first the calf, then its mother—and sink down into a very particular kind of nothingness. Over the years, I’ve returned there to dig up the bones but have only found brown glass pill bottles whose lids have all but rusted away. I’ve found old tractor tires. Chains. Glass flasks. Oil cans. From time to time, during the long hour of some task, like fence mending or tying off hay bales, I question whether these are my memories or the memories of another.

Michael McGriff is the author of several books, mostly recently Our Secret Life in the Movies, which was listed as one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, Poetry London, and Tin House. Honors for his work include a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice selection, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Eugene, OR.