I see a flash of my son’s grey t-shirt as he veers into the alders, before he is swallowed into their blotchy white trunks.

“I want something of mine in a museum someday,” I hear him say over his shoulder. We are at the old town and mill site called Fortson, poking around crumbling house foundations and mill remnants. The town is just upriver from our home in the Stillaguamish River valley northeast of Seattle. A valley tucked off in a rural corner of western Washington. I once found a rusted-up crosscut saw stuck in a stump here and tell the boys, my son and his friend, that maybe they can find it. They quickly run into the forest, a second growth one, logged long ago, and mixed up now with thickets of salmonberry, alder, and vine maple trees. Hemlock and cedar and the occasional spruce. The boys zig-zag in and out of tree trunks and cedar stumps. Cedar is the longest-lived wood in the forest, the one best suited to survive the onslaught of damp common to the Pacific Northwest but even these stumps are nearly rotted and covered over with thick green blankets of moss. The sun of a late but balmy October afternoon sifts through falling and yellowed alder leaves. They land silent on the river’s surface and drift downstream. Our river, as we say. The river. Others call it the Stilly or Stillaguamish or North Fork Stilly, or most properly, the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River.

Not so long ago there was a town here. A town that sprang up around the saw mill built to process the old growth forest that once thrived here. Just over a hundred years ago. Right after the train tracks were completed along the Stillaguamish River. Tracks for the train that once ran along the grade we walk. There was a post office, a school and houses, saloons and a Sunday school. Even its own electric power plant. At its height over 300 people made their home here – loggers, millworkers, shop keepers and saloon workers. Single men in bunkhouses, but families too. The mill operated for thirty years before it shut down in the 1940’s. It sat for nearly twenty years before the machinery was bought and moved five miles upstream to a mill along the Sauk River in Darrington – now a town of nearly 1,400. That mill operates still, though it struggles. It too has been bought and sold several times, and is now part of Hampton Lumber Mills. Fortson was one of a boom of mills and adjoining settlements that sprang up along the Stillaguamish River. The rail line creating the possibility of success.

There were big hopes, not only for Fortson Mill and town, but for the entire valley, and especially for the bigger settlement of Darrington, though initially it was thought that wealth would come from mining silver and gold – not trees. Most of the smaller mills and hamlets went bust. Partially due to the coming of cars, trucks and roads. Partially due to economics and dwindling timber sources. An overabundance of mills. The train ran for another thirty years though. Hauled logs and lumber and people down valley to Arlington and eventually to Seattle or upriver to Darrington.

Fortson was left to the rain. To crumble and fall. Its concrete remnants are covered in the same thick, green blankets of moss that covers the stumps. Broken branches and leaves pile up in the corners of building foundations. Some remains of the mill still stand two stories tall though there are grand holes in the floors and missing walls open to forest. Most of the windows and roofs are long disappeared and alders push their way into what was once offices or living rooms. Large and loopy dabbles of spray paint cover the surfaces that aren’t grown over with moss. Bold florescent colors that form dragons, swamp monsters, or stylized names.

When the boys come to what looks like the remnant of a house foundation, they shove their hands through the moss and grab ahold of the top of the wall, pull themselves up to peer inside. Their eight-year-old legs dangle off the ground and swing in the air. I catch up to them and they point to a pile of clear plastic bottles and bits of torn black garbage bags we can see in the leaves.

“What is all that?” they ask.

“Garbage,” I say. “Just plain old garbage.” I point at the remains of an old wood-burning stove. We see an old tin bucket and what looks like broken porcelain dinner plates. “Those are cultural artifacts though,” I say. “After fifty years garbage turns into artifacts.” I know this from my time working as a cultural resource tech for the U.S. Forest Service, doing the mandated reports needed before projects can move forward. Trail projects mostly. Inventorying logging or mining debris, and the associated railroad grades. I learned how to identify glass bottles, types of shoes, the significance of porcelain. I learned when the archeologists should be called in and I think Fortson is long due a visit from an archeologist.

I ask my son what he would want in a museum. “I don’t know,” he says. “Anything, I guess.” He shrugs his shoulders. The boys both drop down from the wall and start off toward another stump. “I just want to be remembered,” he says.

“Oh,” I say. Not sure how to respond.

It is an ancient urge – to be remembered. Drawings on a cave wall. Handprints on rock. The urge to collect, preserve and save, to group and label, equally ancient. The first known museums sprawl backward to Babylonian times though it wasn’t really until the Victorian era that the western ideal of museums took hold. Museums act as egalitarian keepers of shared and valued culture. It’s a little odd this collecting and preserving memorabilia of the dead. It’s odd how much I enjoy poking around in the debris of someone else’s life, and the kids too. Racing around trying to find the left behind.

The last family moved away from Fortson by the end of the 1950’s and the town and mill started its slow revert back to nearly what was. The mill pond is a fishing pond now, though you can see submerged barrels and other debris just below the surface. It is the smaller of several ponds in the area – popular among birders for the variety of species to be found here – herons, mergansers, wood ducks, kingfishers, owls, all the ponds formed by the construction of the railroad grade and the mill. The grade is now used as a trail for walking, bike riding and horseback riding. A few small pedestrian bridges have been built along the trail and guard rails have been added at the pond where kids fish. Mostly the property has been left to deteriorate. Recently, the whole area has been purchased and divided between a number of agencies: the Washington State Fish and Wildlife, the Stillaguamish Tribe, and Snohomish County. The tribe has been working to enhance the salmon habitat, and weeding out invasive and non-native species and replanting with native vegetation. This place was theirs before there were mills, a railroad, or a town. The Stoluck-wa-mish is what they called themselves, or People of the River. That name morphed into Stillaguamish. They and the government entities, and the local community, work to figure out what comes next for this land.

“What the heck is this?” one of the boys shouts. It is my son’s friend and he has found something that looks a lot like a piece of chewed up leather. He waves it in the air excited. I hurry closer to get a better look.

“Logger boot,” I say when I get close enough. I take the piece of old leather from him.

“See here, corks,” I point at two tiny points of metal left in the tattered sole of a boot.

“Corks, so you can walk on logs,” I say.

“Cool,” he says and sets the piece of boot down, picking up an older looking and more delicate bit of leather.

“Oh,” I say excitedly, “this is from a lady’s boot.” I point out the stylish, patterned stitching, and tiny lace holes that climb up the neck of the boot.

“Probably early 1900’s,” I say.

The boys have found a pit dug by treasure hunters. Those that come to pilfer the little that is left here. Some of the pits are over six feet wide and three feet deep. Some are fresh but most are covered over with layers of leaves. We find bits of dinner plates, broken glass, pop and beer cans with pull tabs – a few whole glass bottles. Small and delicate bottles for medicine or perfume. I find a piece of a porcelain doll, a leg, barely two inches long and a dulled white. I can see the pattern of her flowered anklets. The shoe color is a faded but deep maroon and there is a strap across the ankle where a bit of foot extends before its jagged broken end. On the upper end of the leg is a knob which surely attached it to the body of a doll. I lay it back down in the dirt and cover it up quickly, unnerved in some strange way. A child owned this doll. Grown up now and gone away from here. Who knows? So little remains of them. Of this little town that came and went so quickly, so many of their stories lost to us.

The boys wander away from the pit and yell out in unison when they see a glint of something in the moss, rush to a stump and kneel down before it, twist their heads this way and that to better see. They lift the moss to find a chunk of thin and rusted metal, barely a foot long, embedded into the near-rotted wood of a stump, the teeth of the saw dull and chipped. Not exactly the sword in the stone but magical in its own way. Mysterious enough that we all sit down and touch the metal and the scar the saw has made in the wood, as if it might tell us something.

The cedar stump rests in what once was a grove of cedars. As we look around, we see there are nearly a dozen or so stumps that circle round from this one and I wonder out loud what the grove of cedars might have looked like before they were cut. I wonder why the saw is stuck in the stump. I look upward at the sky and the few clouds overhead and see the afternoon starting to slant toward evening. The boys ask questions too – who left this, and why? Does anyone know? I shrug my shoulders. They make up a few stories. Laugh. Has anyone else seen it, they ask? I shrug my shoulders again. I really don’t know. I’ve asked around town after I first found it. So far no one has said they’ve seen it. Can we take it? They ask all excited – talking over each other. That would be cool and they start to squabble over who would get to keep it – shoving to get at the best spot to see.

Then an owl calls out from somewhere behind. Startles us. Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all? Another owl from the opposite direction answers. Caterwauling. Or the back and forth between owls that sometimes turns guttural or high pitched or just plain strange. Sounds that can unnerve even the most seasoned visitor. That’s what we hear next. A low and guttural bark.

“What the heck is that?” the boys ask and stop their tussling. Stand still and look around.

“Barred owl,” I say. It’s what owls do, I say. They’re just talking, and add that maybe they’re being territorial. Guarding their home turf. Better leave that saw.

The boys look up into the trees trying to find the owl, see nothing but branches and the drift of a few alder leaves. They look at me and say they’re ready to move. I say ok and tell them to put the moss back like they found it. And they do mostly, pull it forward and over the stump. I watch their delicate hands busily scatter leaves and throw branches over the top. There are a few clumps of dirt and some misplaced leaves but the crosscut saw is hidden again like it was, or better even, and the stump looking like any other rotting stump, disappearing slowly into the ground. We look back as we walk away and see no glint of metal.

“Think we’ll ever find it again?” they ask. I shrug my shoulders. Well cool, they say and high five each other, and are off to the next thing, forgetting about the owls. They spy a rusted but ornate bedspring poking out from under the dirt, then a hubcap, rusted too, on the top of another stump, there in a clump of vine maple at the base of a slope. The owls call again. We hear them just after the boys shout out, as they take the hubcap off the stump and hold it above their heads, each grabbing one side, like victors. They cock their heads to listen – who cooks for you, who cooks for you – and then that short, descending note at the end of the volley – all. We can hear barely the last note. The owls seeming to have moved downstream and away from us. Into the west. The call settles into a quiet. In the distance is the sound of water tumbling over rock. The river, the Stilly. The Stillaguamish. The North Fork of the Stillaguamish. Stoluck-wa-mish. People of the River. The boys put the hubcap back on its stump and we make our way out of the alders and hemlocks and thickets of salmonberry and onto the railroad grade. It is getting on toward dusk and a chill has spread in the darkening woods. We all sense it’s time to start the walk home. Away into the evening, together on the railroad grade above the banks of the river, where we have walked so many times. Where so many have travelled. So many. All of us out of that dark slab of time and into the light of being for our brief moment. To create what we will. Our stories. The things we’ll leave behind. For others to find and gather up. To sift through, like fallen leaves. To hold with care. With wonder. All our longings, ancient as the river. To be remembered, like water maybe, flowing over rock and sand, dawn until dusk and into the next day, always there and a part of the living.