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.

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.

Just as she had not been able to do it the first time she had tried--another story he or anyone else would never hear-- only a week after his birth when she had taken him to the trail at Cape Flattery early one morning and held him over the boiling water of the Pacific. The wind ripped in that day over Tatoosh Island, driving spears of rain and fog into her face. Gulls cried mournfully and the swelling Pacific begged her for him, spumed fervent requests against the rocks for a sacrifice. A bald eagle on a wind-ripped shore pine jutting precariously out of a section of moss on a hundred foot stack, seemed to stare at her for a time, then lifted off into the wind. She lost her resolve and went home clutching him to her, surprised at herself for even entertaining this possibility for a second.

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.