Scott Elliott

Temple Grove tells the story of a clash between a father who is a logger and his son who is an environmental activist and a chase in which they become involved into the wilds of the Olympic National Park in Washington State. The novel will be published by the University of Washington Press in spring of 2013.

from Temple Grove...

She stopped mid-bridge and could not control her trembling as she pulled his dimpled legs through the legholes of the papoose. Her arms continued to tremble as she held his body—so much sun-soaked produce in a cloth sack-- over the thin-aired vacancy answered, in vertiginous zoom, by river. Mist from the roaring water rose to cool the air. Her fingers and toes swarmed with tingles. She stood for some time, mid-bridge, holding him out in quivering arms. Then, shaking arms. She tried to make herself release him.

And could not.

Paul regarded his mother evenly. He fidgeted but did not cry. He wiggled his arms and legs, enjoying the increasing warmth of the sun, the coolness of the rising mist. He squinted up at the blue sky where a few clouds, adrift and evaporating at their outer edges, looked to him like giant diapers. A plane trailed a white plume, its passengers oblivious, in the pressurized, antiseptic fuselage, to the drama of mother and son thousands of feet below.
When she tried to reposition him, a sudden gust caught him.

He slipped from her grasp and fell toward the river, feet first, at a slight angle, away from the bridge, his shadow moving with him, bumping over depressions and irregularities in the western cliff-face as the sun shone over the high eastern ridge to cast it there.

And then he was lost in white water.