Marlon boarded the Bridge of the Gods around noon. His tires vibrated over the bridge’s steel-mesh surface. There was a semi behind him, but the bridge was narrow, no shoulder, so Marlon rode in the middle of the lane. He imagined the semi grumbling behind him to be a dragon, nipping at his back tire. He pedaled harder, the muscles in his thighs and calves burning. He imagined liquid flames erupting from the mouth of the steel beast behind him, eviscerating him.

He glanced over his shoulder. As he did, the trucker waved. Marlon knew that wave. It communicated that it was alright, don’t sweat it, I won’t run you off the side of the bridge, I won’t blow my horn to try and scare the shit out of you, I won’t shoot flames up your ass from the mouth of this dragon I’m saddled to. Take your time, buddy, you’re working harder than I am.

With a beaming smile, Marlon refocused his gaze on the road ahead, then raised an arm and returned the wave in the most emphatic way he could manage. A few moments later he was in Washington, where he’d ride along the Lewis and Clark Highway and watch grain barges float toward the ocean for the next six hours. The evergreen woods would slowly give way to white-oak forests, and once he passed White Salmon the forests would concede their shade to the sagebrush and bunchgrass and dry heat.

But he’d get there, he’d reach that bridge at Celilo Falls, and he’d cross back over the rolling Columbia, he’d return to Oregon, and he’d make it to where he’d camp that night: Spanish Hollow.

*

Marlon rested his bike against a beige railing and looked east toward the massive L-shaped concrete structure that ran from one bank of the Columbia to the other: a hydroelectric dam. He was standing near the halfway point of the Dalles Bridge, staring at what once was Celilo Falls but was now a reservoir, inundated by the dam. He tried to imagine what this place had been before, back when the river was narrower, the water more swift and raucous, carrying a volume that rivaled that of nearly any waterfall in North America. He wondered about the ancient, submerged graves of American Indians behind the dam, people from tribes such as the Yakama, Nez Perce, and Warm Springs, who had been fishing those falls on treacherous overhangs for thousands of years. Legend had it the salmon once ran so strong a person could walk across the river on the backs of jumping chinook.

He didn’t know if souls existed, but if they did, he wondered if the souls of those people had been trapped down there in the reservoir on the other side. He wondered if his own lost and rearranged memories were submerged in his brain in a similar way. Maybe they still existed, floating around just outside his ability to consciously recall them, trapped behind a wall of stardust.

Or, maybe they never really existed in the first place, not in a way that a person can actually hold onto. Maybe memories were just former versions of ourselves that were endlessly, simultaneously, being born and killed in each instant. Maybe the separation between life and death was not a binary, but the two states danced on the same plane, divided by nothing more than illusory veils.

In other words, maybe a soul had nothing to do with any of it. Maybe it was all just energy and matter, matter and energy in a constant state of transition, transformation, a secular, spontaneously-occurring form of transubstantiation.

He climbed back on his bike. He didn’t have far to go.

*

“This fucking desert is what’s oppressive,” the shirtless man with skin like leather said to the man with a gray beard and hair like Einstein. “It pushes down on you like a big hot ball of foam, and it doesn’t let up until you find shade.” The shirtless man patted the trunk of a lonely, drought-stricken white oak. It was the only tree on the sun-bleached bluff, baking in the triple-digit heat. “But, if you find shade, you’ll be alright.”

Marlon didn’t know the men’s names, so he’d just been thinking of them as Tanhide and Graybeard. Tanhide appeared to be closer in age to Marlon than Graybeard, who Marlon figured was somewhere between sixty and ninety. Marlon didn’t know his own age. Thirty-six? Forty-seven? It didn’t matter.

“Bullshit! This heat ain’t oppressive. The heat is the heat is the heat. It’s the damn corporations that are oppressive! It’s ExxonMobil and Amazon and Walmart that are oppressive! It’s Soros and Zuckerberg and that spaceship jackoff!” Graybeard stamped at the gravel, threw his hands in the air. “It’s Trump and Biden and the Clintons and the Bushes and all those fucking suits that are oppressive! The goddamn oligarchy! You think they care about you? Do you? They don’t care about you and they don’t care about me and they don’t care about him”—he pointed at Marlon, who was sitting on a rock, plucking at a mouth harp he’d found in the ditch—“and they don’t care about no damn hot foam ball pushing down on your skin-cancered ass.” He took a great gasping inhale at the end of his rant.

Graybeard wore a threadbare t-shirt that had an infamous photo of Woody Guthrie screen-printed on it, the words “This Machine Kills Fascists” scribbled on the face of the guitar in Woody’s hands.

Marlon continued plucking, only half-listening to the two men he’d met an hour ago. He’d camp with these men tonight—these fellow societal opt-outs, these dirt-smeared, ditch-riding philosophers—on this sagebrushy bluff where dry, stiff-stocked ryegrass stood waist-high and slowly starved out the rabbitbrush.

He had arrived at Spanish Hollow in the late afternoon. The signs at the freeway exit read Biggs Junction, but “Biggs” was just the name of a man who had named a place after himself. Marlon knew it as Spanish Hollow. He knew a story of how it earned that name, long before the name of the settlement was changed to Biggs Junction. He didn’t know where he’d heard it, but it was one of those memories logged in his brain, a memory that kept him returning to this place.

The story went that a Spanish ox had died there. A wagon train of pioneers on the Oregon Trail had a run-in with a rattlesnake den, and the ox had been sacrificed to a throng of vicious, venomous serpents. So the pioneers did the only sensible, European-minded thing they could think of: they immortalized the beast by naming this nameless, godless place in its honor.

Maybe the story was true, maybe it wasn’t, but a story about an ox killed by rattlesnakes on the Oregon Trail was a good one, and Marlon wondered if that was all that mattered.

“—it was an old-timer telling me about it. He was from one of the tribes around here. Umatilla, I think.”

Marlon turned his attention back to the talking men.

Graybeard went on, “He was talking about this big waterfall used to be there at the Dalles Dam. Can’t remember the name of the falls, though.”

“Celilo Falls,” Marlon said, the mouth harp still pressed to his lips.

“Yeah, Celilo. But before that it was called something else…Wyam. Yeah, Wyam. It means ‘water crashes on rocks,’ or ‘sound of water on rocks.’ Something like that.” Graybeard shook his head. “But see, that’s what I’m saying. I been livin’ in Oregon all my life, and I’d never heard any of that. No one knows. They just know the dam. Don’t think about the salmon or them tribes who fished there for however long, none of that. Don’t care. Progress, they call it. They kill folks and flood their homes and they block the fish that keep the forests and oceans alive and they call it progress.”

“What do you mean they don’t talk about the salmon? Folks are always screamin’ about the salmon,” Tanhide said.

“Yeah, and they get laughed out of the room!”

“What about the fish ladders?”

“Fish ladders ain’t doin’ enough!”

“I don’t know. The dams brought a lot of good,” Tanhide said. “Prosperity.”

“Prosperity? Good? How prosperous are you? Livin’ on the shoulder of a highway.” Scoff. “You think forests dying upstream are good? Them trees ain’t got no salmon to eat!” Graybeard set in on another lecture.

The sun fell completely below the hills of the Gorge in the western distance, turning the August sky into a layered, pastel cake. Powder blue at the top, morphing into a light ginger, then to ochre, and to pink; a deep burning red settling at the bottom. The heat, the place, the warble of the harp, all of it, combined with thoughts of names and dams and the land having its blood drained and ceremoniously drank by its occupants, it all led to a sadness that formed as a heavy ball in his gut.

Then, the stranger in his mind emerged, stepping out of that dark alleyway. Marlon pulled the harp from his mouth, stared at the saliva on it for a moment.

“Hey,” Marlon said in the direction of Tanhide and Graybeard, who were still arguing. They didn’t hear him.

“Hey!” Marlon said, a bit louder this time, to no avail.

He flung the mouth harp in their direction. He intentionally missed, throwing it between the two, the instrument cracking against the trunk of the white oak. The men paid him their attention.

“This place.” Marlon got to his feet. “Its name isn’t Spanish Hollow.”

“Yeah,” Tanhide said. “It’s Biggs Junction.”

Tanhide and Graybeard stared at him, looking confused.

“Before that. Before Biggs Junction, this place was named Spanish Hollow. Not just the canyon down there, this whole place. But before that, it was nothing at all.”

Tanhide shuffled on his feet, frowning.

“This place didn’t need a name. It was just water and dried-up lava and sagebrush. And there was the big waterfall downriver where people fished and fed their families. It wasn’t new and people didn’t get lost trying to find it, because they never really left. They’d leave for a while, but they always circled back. They always came back. This place was just…here.” Marlon blinked hard. “Everyone who knew of it already knew of it and they didn’t need to name it because it was just another part of themselves. The separation between them and where they lived, it didn’t exist. Doesn’t exist. That separation, it’s an illusion.”

“Are you high?” Graybeard asked.

“No.”

“Then what the hell are you talking about?”

“The Indians. They didn’t need to name those waterfalls. They just called it what it was. ‘Sound of water on rocks.’ That’s just a description. It’s, ‘that spot over there where we do this thing that feeds us.’ They weren’t apart from it. They were a part of it.”

The men stared at him, expressionless.

“Look, you don’t have to name parts of your body, right?” He reached down and grabbed his own knee, flexed it. “You don’t have to give this a name. You just borrow it for a while, and it gives you what it can, you use it as long as you can, then someday, you give it all back.”

“That’s got a name.” Tanhide pointed at Marlon’s knee, then crouched down, cradling his chin between his thumb and forefinger in a way that looked absurdly contemplative for a wild-haired shirtless man with leathery skin. “It’s your knee.”

Marlon shook his head. “No, my knee is a knee like this bluff is a bluff and that sagebrush is sagebrush. Just parts of something bigger, something collective. Not a name.”

“Hmm,” Graybeard said, leaning against the white oak. “I think I’m pickin’ up what you’re throwin’ down.”

“See?” Marlon said to Tanhide. “He gets it.”

“I get it, I guess.” Tanhide stood back up. So did Marlon. “But…who cares?”

“I think…I think it speaks to something deeper. Something bigger.” He thought for a moment, fingered the cigarette burn on his chest, the pain not registering. “I think there’s some difference between people who name things after themselves, versus people who just call things what they are. Says something about how important they see themselves.

“I think people who name things what they are, people who call a waterfall, well, essentially, Waterfall, maybe those people don’t really see that separation between themselves and that place. Makes them, you know, makes them care about it in a different way. It’s not their waterfall to do with what they wish, they don’t own it like I own this shirt. It’s a part of the system, this system that’s bigger than them, bigger than just their community. A system that holds everything together. Keeps life flowing.”

“Ok,” Graybeard said. “So what about the others?”

“Well, I think, maybe these other people see things a little differently. Feel entitled, entitled to keep things for themselves. If they name a waterfall or a mountain or whatever after themselves, or name something in a way that says, you know, I own this thing, then maybe they don’t treat it the same way. Maybe instead of living with it, they use it. Maybe they’re like, ‘I’m gonna use this thing in a way that’s good for me, and it doesn’t matter if it’s good for anyone outside my little circle, because, you know, it’s mine.’” Marlon winced, the pain from the burn on his chest finally registering. “Maybe they see themselves as more important than the system. Bigger than everything around them. And maybe that just serves to hurt them, because it hurts the system, breaks a link in the chain, and if enough links are broken, maybe someday the system will, sort of, collapse.”

The men sat and thought in silence for some time. Eventually, the crickets began to chirp. Darkness enveloped the bluff. Night fell, and the men began to stir again.

Graybeard and Tanhide started a fire, cooked a can of pork and beans. They asked Marlon if he’d like some. He thanked them, said no. He turned from the men, sat down next to the boulder, leaned into it. The sky slowly turned to an endless basket of stars that hovered in the desert night. Marlon watched more and more of them appear the longer he stared into the past.

*

At a different point in space and time, Marlon stood in a light-rail car as it slid through the city of Portland. He was on his way home from his 9 to 5. A man stood nearby, wearing a tattered yellow t-shirt with a coiled snake on the chest, the words DON’T TREAD ON ME written below the serpent. The man stepped close to Marlon, and Marlon could smell the liquor on his breath, and the man told Marlon he would drive a knife into Marlon’s ribs if he didn’t hand over his wallet. Marlon, a young man, full of pride, refused, and he pushed the man, and they fought, and in the struggle he fell, and his head struck a seat ledge, and his brain bounced off the sides of his skull, and he was asleep for many days.

When he opened his eyes, Marlon was no more, and for the first time, he was awake.