Summer Stories: ‘Below the Dam’

By Shawn Vestal

We peel back the chain-link fence beneath the rusted sign that reads No Trespassing! Area May Flood at Any Time! Beside the words on the placard, a cute, curvy wave bears down with deadly intensity upon a stick figure, arm raised in stick-figure desperation.

“That guy’s dead,” one of us says.

“Mega dead,” says one of the others.

We laugh and slide through the fence and head down the path toward the stony channels below, pebbles skidding beneath our feet. A few hundred yards to our right, the concrete wall of the dam stands gray and implacable. A motorboat buzzes on the placid water above. At the far end of the dam, one neat, glassy sheet of water spills over – a tidy waterfall – but here there is just the bleached stone and twisting channels that have made canyons of the former riverbed.

It is these channels we have come for – deep and green and cool and 30 feet deep.

We are 16. We are rough and untended, set free in a pickup that wobbles when we drive faster than 50 miles an hour, and we always drive faster than 50 miles an hour. We race the engine and slam the brakes. We ride in the corroded bed, sit on the wheel wells, throw cans at road signs. We have come in our cutoffs and tennis shoes, our shaggy haircuts and tank tops – starved for the banquet of our young summer lives.

We have come to leap, to fly, to plunge, to fall.

We walk down, down, down to the edge of a stone cliff and peer at the dark water below. We had not imagined how far down it would be. We have come to the bottom of the world only to find it goes deeper still. Up above, along all the hillsides, little waterfalls weep crookedly down the walls of the Hagerman Valley, traceries of white nourishing lush patches of green.

Here on the rocks, the blackened remains of campfire surround one ashy stump of log and a half-burned Pringles can. Broken bits of green glass scatter. A single tennis shoe, without laces, lays on its side, tongue out like a panting dog.

Our teenage forebearers have been here before us and they have named this place – The Drops – and they have passed down its lore. Sometimes, it is said, the dam operators free the river and send cascades of water onto the channels below. They sound a siren beforehand, it is said – one minute before, or 90 seconds before, or 45 seconds before. No one has heard this siren, but everyone says: If you jump from a cliff as the siren sounds, you are doomed. You are dead.

“What if the siren sounds right now?” one of us asks.

“We’d have to haul ass,” another says

“We’d have run for our lives,” says still another.

“We’d be dead,” says the one who asked.

“Mega dead.”

It is so far down. We know, standing in the parched heat of the afternoon, that it is cool down there between the canyon walls, chilly even, down where the slanting afternoon sun does not reach and ancient water flows.

People die here all the time, the legends say. Eight kids from Twin Falls, swept to their deaths, it is said. Mikey Pope’s cousin from Buhl heard of a guy who slipped when he jumped and broke his back landing on a rock. A girl from Hagerman was bitten, it is said, when she surprised a rattlesnake coiled in a crevice. Every story has the same theme: It is perilous here where the river once was, here in the ghost channel of the Snake River, where death lies warming its scales in the bleached heat of the afternoon.

That’s what makes it good. That’s what makes it great.

People die doing all the best things. Drinking beer and speeding through the summer night, windows down, arms out to catch the mist from the wheel lines irrigating the hay fields. Riding motorbikes across the desert, bumping through the sage. Climbing inside the tippy, slumping haystacks.

Jumping down, down, down into water.

Our parents tell us their own stories – to warn us, scare us, save us. Stories of the tragically reckless, stories of the world’s dangerous treachery, and we race toward all that we are warned against.

One of us knows what to do. Stand here, he says, on this outcrop. Take two steps and push off hard. Aim for that wide spot in the water.

We have thought about this so much.

Keep your feet together, he says. Point your toes. Press your hands to your sides. You have to go in straight – the surface of that water, from this height, is like concrete.

But this is so high, now that we’re here. Now that we’re really seeing it.

The first, the one who tells us how, stands near the ledge. Takes two deep breaths. One step and another and he’s off – he falls for three long seconds and goes in with a crisp burst. Five more seconds and he surfaces, swings his long hair from his face. His whoops bounce up the shadowed canyon walls.

The next of us steps up. He looks and he looks and he waits and he looks and he steps back and he hesitates, and below, the first one urges him to go, to go, to go, and he does. Two steps – and the distant splash.

Then the next one goes.

Then it’s just me up here.

Below, in the shadows, three pink faces bob in the dark water, white arms waving beside them just under the water’s surface. It is so far down. I think about leaving, running across the stones to the pickup and driving off – to Canada or Mexico or Wisconsin, to live the rest of my days married to my cowardice – but I don’t. I stand. I take deep breaths. I tremble. I listen as they call from below.

I take two steps back. I stop. I wait. Fear fizzes and tingles throughout me. I look again, think about my steps, gauge the long, long fall. They are calling, cajoling, jeering.

I feel, absurdly, that what I do now will be who I am.

The one who did – or didn’t – do this.

I take a step and launch, and in the final push, the sole of my tennis shoe slips in the silty dust on the stone. It is only an instant, less than an instant, a tiny slip and then the shoe catches, but in that flash – one foot uplifted, one on the ground, arms raised, already moving beyond the ledge – I live out the versions of my coming death: I bounce down the craggy canyon walls below, or: I go in too close to the shore and strike the rocks lurking just under the surface, or: I tilt sideways as I fall and land flat on the water, breaking bones and bursting organs.

I would not be the one who did or didn’t – but the one who tried and couldn’t.

But my shoe catches and I launch. I drift outward, angling toward the open space in the water, and it’s happening very quickly, and it’s happening very slowly, and I hit the water feet first, a roaring in my ears as I am swallowed, and it is cold and deep, so cold that it erases the day and all that came before, a cold that reaches back to a time before me, a time before everyone, and I pull toward the surface, and break through to the shouts of my friends bouncing off the canyon walls, and I am electric, I am sparking and flashing, and the white heat of the day is so far above that it can’t touch us now, it will never touch us, we have come here and done this and we will never die.