I was a girl waiting by the roadside for my boyfriend to come in his
car. I was pregnant. I should have been going to high school. I
walked up the road when he didn’t come, over a bridge: I saw a
sleeping man. I came to the Elwha River—the grade school—
classes—I went and sat down with the children. The teacher was
young and sad-looking, homely; she assigned us an essay:”What I
Just Did.” I wrote,

           I was waiting for my boyfriend by the Elwha River bridge:
           the bridge was redwood, a fresh bridge with inner barks still
           clinging on some logs—it smelled good. There was some-
           one sleeping under redwood trees. He had a box of flies by
           his head and he was on the ground. The Elwha River bridge
           is by a meadow; there’s a rocky bar there where the river
           forks…”

thinking this would please the teacher. We handed all the papers
in, and got them back—mine was C minus. The children then
went home. The teacher came to me and said “I just don’t like you.”
—“Why?”
—“Because I used to be a man.”

The Elwha River, I explained, is a real river, and different from the
river I described. Where I had just walked was real, but I wrote a
dream river—actually the Elwha doesn’t fork at that point.

           As I write this now I must remind myself that there is
           another Elwha, the actual Olympic peninsula river, which is
           not the river I took pains to recollect as real in the dream.

           There are no redwoods north of southern
                     Curry County, Oregon.