People ask where I live and I tell them Zig Zag, and about half the time they think I am making it up.
It is a real place. I live on Zig Zag mountain, above the Zig Zag river, across the highway from the Zig Zag ranger station. The post office will find me if you use the zip code. Rhododendron has mostly eaten the name in ordinary conversation, and the post office here closed in 1974, but the mountain has not moved and neither have I.
The name is older than any of it. It comes from a man named Joel Palmer, who came through the canyon on the eleventh of October, 1845, and wrote down how he got out of it:
The manner of descending is to turn directly to the right, go zigzag for about one hundred yards, then turn short round, and go zigzag until you come under the place where you started from; then to the right, and so on, until you reach the base. Joel Palmer, October 11, 1845
Read that again and notice what it is. It is not a description of the canyon. It is not a description of the river, which does not zigzag any more than any other river around here. It is a set of instructions. It is a man telling the people behind him exactly how to walk so they do not die on the way down.
The people behind him were on the Barlow Road, which opened the following year as the overland alternative to putting your wagon on a raft and taking your chances on the Columbia. They paid a toll for the privilege. The gate was a few miles from here; there is a campground on the spot now.
What happened next is the part I keep turning over. The instructions got used, and used, and eventually did not need to be said out loud, and the word that was left over stuck to the ravine. Then to the river. Then to the mountain, and the ranger station, and the post office, and me.
Nobody here zigzags down anything. The highway goes straight through. The procedure is completely gone and the name for it is still on my mail.
I think about that when I am working on something old. A lamp my grandfather built. A well that seventeen families drink out of. A page of code somebody sent me a long time ago. The thing itself wears out, gets replaced, gets paved over. What survives is the method — how you did it, passed hand to hand until nobody remembers being taught.
A hundred and eighty years is a long time for a set of walking directions to outlive the walk. But that is the address on this house, so apparently it works.