On the way to Harrington Point this past Saturday to visit my dear friend Gail Waldstrom, David Campiche and I slowed at the address where I used to live near Altoona. It’s a couple acres where ten thousand memories still linger concerning early days with my wife and daughter in the 1990s.

Western Wahkiakum County is on the eastern edge of the Chinook Observer’s coverage area. I mostly defer to the Wahkiakum County Eagle, at which Rick Nelson and his dedicated writers do a sensational job. It’s Washington’s smallest county but it is always brimful of news. I loved living there, even though it meant commuting about 45 minutes each way to Long Beach.

While the Observer will have its usual wide array of local news, photos, features and sports this week, I thought you might enjoy this Altoona-based column I wrote back in about 1995:

A new little mystery has turned up on the previously tangled acre of river front below my house. Turning over an old wood beam on a tidal plain, what’s about the last thing you’d expect to find? A guitar has to be somewhere on the list.

It’s only a child’s plastic instrument, with all the metal parts long since rusted away. Not only was it under an eight-inch-thick slab of cedar, but up until 10 months ago, it was under 12 feet of blackberry vines. So it’s been there awhile.

How in the world would a child’s guitar end up in such an unlikely location? Starting with the most likely scenario, we assume the boy or girl who owned it was a typical child. As anyone knows, children have an inexplicable ability to lose treasured possessions as if they had been sucked into an alternate universe.

Probably the next most possible scenario is that years ago a guitar that had outlived its usefulness was left lying along the riverbank somewhere upstream, where rising winter water set it adrift along with other less interesting rubbish. It bobbed along into the estuary where it ran into a rising tide and a hard wind from the west, which brought it far upland, depositing it under a block of wood.

But the first thought that came into my mind was this: A cold rain has been falling for weeks on a small claustrophobic cabin into which are crammed a mom, dad and five kids, age three through ten. Emil, the oldest, got a hand-me-down toy guitar from grandpa and grandma for Christmas.

Hour after endless hour, he practices, imagining himself far from the Columbia River, receiving grateful applause from the crowd at the Grand Old Opry, where it’s bright and nothing smells like mud.

Unfortunately, he’s driving his family absolutely stark, raving nuts. One day dad tells him to go up the way to Saari’s dairy for milk and butter. That evening, Emil searches everywhere for his little guitar. “Where is it?” he pleads. “Wherever you left it,” he’s told.

Meanwhile the guitar waits in the darkness under a heavy slab of cedar as the river of time flows by, as dreams change, as the world rolls into a new place, as the Columbia rises and falls, silent and serene.

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