The Girl Before the Tides

There are places you leave without realizing how much of them you’re taking with you.

Elk River Fish Hatchery is one of those places for me.

Some of my earliest memories began here, tucked into the mountains outside Port Orford, Oregon. When I picture it, I don’t just remember the house where we lived. I remember the road leading down toward the holding ponds. I remember the trees surrounding everything. The river. The rain. The fish. The feeling that this little piece of the world was enormous because, to me, it was.

I was only a little girl when we lived there, and at that age I had no idea I was collecting memories I would someday sit down and try to turn into a book.

Back then, it was simply home.

Years later, when I began writing The Girl Before the Tides, I found myself returning to these places through photographs, maps, conversations, and the strange little details memory had held onto all by itself.

Some things were exactly where I remembered them.

Others weren’t.

And sometimes what surprised me most wasn’t what had changed.

It was what hadn’t.

I could look down a road like this one and almost feel that little girl again—the one who would have gone racing toward those ponds without giving any thought to the fact that decades later, she’d still remember the way there.

The house was harder.

I don’t have many photographs of the home we lived in at Elk River. What I have now are mostly distant views from the road, taken years later after trees had been removed and the property had changed.

But I remember it.

I remember the long, low house tucked beneath the trees. I remember the paved driveway and the walkway running along the front. Behind the house, the ground climbed toward the road where we had our garden. There was a tall pine tree we climbed, and back then there were so many more trees around us that the house felt hidden among them.

One of those trees isn’t there anymore.

It’s the one I fell from.

Apparently some landmarks are allowed to disappear after trying to kill you.

I remember the light too.

Our house faced north, and in the evening the golden sunlight came from the right side of the house and poured through my bedroom windows. I didn’t know anything about golden hour then. It was just what my room looked like near the end of the day.

And somewhere out in that yard was me.

I had a pink-and-white dress with a pink moose on the front that I wore constantly when I went outside to play. I’d pull on my light pink rubber boots and head out into the yard, usually returning with considerably more dirt and considerably less respectable hair than I’d started with.

When I reconstructed the house, I wanted to see that little girl there too.

Not posed neatly in front of it.

Just spinning in the grass.

Of course, photographs have a way of correcting the prettier version of childhood our memories sometimes create.

This is also what living at Elk River looked like:

I was about three years old here, standing in our living room wearing my brother’s snow boots for no particular reason other than apparently deciding they completed the outfit.

That might actually be a more accurate portrait of the little girl who lived here.

Maybe that’s what I’ve learned while writing this story.

We don’t always know which moments are going to stay.

We just live them.

And somehow, some of them follow us home.