st. Oilence is a longtime resident of my hometown. It nestles in the valley bottom with the fog. It patrols Tower Avenue going north and Pearl Avenue going south. Centralia’s silence is not the gentle hush of snow nor the awed stillness of dawn. It’s an aggressive silence: debris-filled water in flooded fields, the pause after a threat, the quiet in which the metallic chur-lunk of a cocked rifle resounds. As a child I was aware that the bridge over the Chehalis River at the edge of town was called Hangman’s Bridge. But it was just a name—like Main Street or Salzer Valley.
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