I was alive like the wind was. I was alive like the ice falling from the sky. I was alive, and I heard the coyote call again into the night.
I was wearing the wool blanket around the house in hopes it would dry faster. I washed it earlier in the day, and brought it in at the last minute of the blue hour before it froze. I went over to the fridge, opened and closed it. Then the freezer, opened it, touched the owl, frozen, dead, preserved, closed it. I stoked the fire and went over to where the feather tossed lightly from the breeze coming in through the space in the pine logs. I could see outside, and felt the sting of cold and a storm coming. I walked into the bedroom and looked at the bed. Doty and the dogs left a month ago to Wyoming to cut trees and make a little money, which is funny because if you’ve ever traveled to Cody, Wyoming, the last thing you would notice is the trees. If you made it down to the banks of the Shoshone to catch the last of the light in the evening, you might notice a cottonwood or two hanging gnarled boughs over the bank of the river. Casting shadows for trout. He said he would be back tomorrow. But I never knew. Tomorrow, the next week, the following Monday.
Maybe what I missed most in these moments was the way the dogs warmed the bed. I lit the gas lamp on the dresser; a little heat and light in the bedroom as I readied myself for sleep. Wool blanket damp and donned like a cape, I’m a super hero I thought as I caught my reflection in the single-pane window. I liked to wash my hands before bed, but since the pipes froze 37 days ago, my nighttime routine was pithy. Brush teeth dry, sleep with dirty hands, put layers on if Doty and the dogs were gone. What would this storm bring with it?
We had spent the week before Doty left digging in the ground with Pulaski and shovel trying to expose the water line to the sun to thaw. I didn’t mind hauling water to the cabin as it was mostly downhill from the spigot, and in the early spring I would find a waterfall to shower in. Carrying a heavy pot full of hot water to assist in my bath.
When I lay in my bed, ready to put out the lamp, I noticed that a ribbon of condoms had snaked its way out of my underwear drawer. I laughed. We hadn’t used those in over a year. We had just stopped loving each other like that. Last time he was back it was lonelier to lay with Doty than without. The body of the wind pressed against the window as I let the last bit of the day slip away to a dreamless sleep.
The storm came and brought with it freezing rain. Real freezing rain. What someone hailing from the East Coast would call an ice storm. Here in Idaho it happened, but not very often. I headed to work leaving in the daylight, wary that my return would be after nightfall. Wary also of Doty’s imminent return.
I usually enjoyed my drive home from work along the old logging highway. It was extra late tonight, though, and the going was slow. Ice was falling out of the sky and glossing the roads in a black sheen seen through my headlights. With one hand on the steering wheel I responded to the blue light on the passenger seat. The one stretch of highway I had service on my drive back from Montana. It was a voicemail from Doty. I listened: Another week or more, he said. Have a couple good jobs I need to finish up, will get us through ‘til spring. I promise. I felt my face slacken with the weight of something like sadness. I thought about what that meant for me and the cabin. I would have to get through chopping the rest of the wood. Did we have enough wood? I would have to haul more water. I would have to shovel the roof. I felt tired. Attention back to the road.
I drove on until I hit Rapid Lightning and turned right. I took the curves slowly as the truck climbed the hills, shifting down instead of braking. I attempted Sugar Mountain in the truck, only to be rejected by the ice and parked some ways down Rapid Lightning. Grabbed my headlamp and started my walk. Working hard to maintain footing on the ice as I made my way up Sugar Mountain through the hemlocks and the cedar. These North Idaho woods are collectively the darkest place I have ever experienced. This night, in this darkness, I felt naked, my eyes wide as I tried to make sense of my surroundings. Sometimes, on a new moon, the stars would shine so brightly I thought I could hear them. Now without starlight or moonlight, I pressed on through the late February forest to the place I have called home the last two years. The Rabbit Hole. The Hodge Podge Lodge. The cabin in the woods. We got our water gravity-fed from a spring; it had an effervescence to it, tasted of minerals, conifers. Now that water was pooling up above the cabin and going nowhere for 37, now 38 days, nowhere except directly back to the earth. I could feel everywhere, and from every direction, that the levee was about to break.
The only water I had tasted that was better than our spring was runoff directly from Shoup Glacier in Prince William Sound. Nothing so pure as water off that glacier. There was one hot summer up there and a day that reached 90 degrees. The warmest day on record in Valdez. On those hot days, bobbing on silty turquoise waters, I would paddle my kayak right under the waterfall and point my face towards the sky and open my mouth, catching droplets like fat spring snowflakes. I remember the first September night up there when I saw stars again. It was like the feeling of leaving an exposed ridgeline and coming back into the trees. It restored some of my other senses. I could smell the earth again. That first summer up in Alaska, Doty and I wrote to each other almost every day. He was fishing in Kodiak, and I was sea kayak guiding. We were in the same state and could have been on opposite ends of the planet. He sent me heart-shaped rocks in salmon cans, and drawings from the bay where he was set netting: “Moonrise on Olga Bay”; “A Dory For You”; “Juvenile Bald Eagle Feather”. He wrote me a song, “Distance and Time”, and sent me lyrics and a necklace he made from a jade-colored stone he found on a beach that had the most fetch on the island. I wrote poetry I never shared, slept with the drawings splayed on the bed, carried hearts in my pockets. I wrote to him in one long sweeping thought and sent it out with feathers and treats from the mainland.
I approached the noise which seemed to be coming from the freezer. It was as though something in there was trying to escape.
The cabin was dark. No smoke from the chimney. I walked into the cabin, and grabbed the wool blanket. I had hung it next to the fire on a 12-point elk rack we mounted on the wall. I turned on a couple lights and finished the last of my evening tasks. I didn’t start the fire. The blanket was dry enough. I lit the oil lamp in the bedroom. I turned off the other lights and put a sleeping bag under the blankets on the bed. Tonight was one of the nights I would need extra warmth since I hadn’t spent all day warming the house. And the dogs weren’t here. The ribbon of condoms glinted again in the last bit of flickering lamplight as I turned the dial to snuff it out. Ice rain hitting the roof. A thatched roof would suit this style of cabin. I wondered if it was raining this hard in the highlands. I was pacing my thoughts for sleep when I heard water. Not from outside the house but from within. I made my way in the dark to the record player and put my hand out to feel a steady stream flowing in from the ceiling. I almost laughed. And then I ran to get a pot from the kitchen. The pot filled so quickly that I realized I had to get on the roof; break up the ice dam.
Ice falling from the sky silenced the forest in a different way than nightfall did. Everyone bedded down. But as I made my way from snow drift to low-hanging eave, ice pick helping to steady myself on the roof, I heard a lone coyote call out from a clearing up above the house. This is not something I typically heard in a storm. I pictured her eyes closed as she tossed her head back, snout to the sky, howling into the mean and lonely black. The last time I had been up here, Doty and I cleared snow three feet deep. We took respite in laughter and sips of whiskey from the bottle.
I began making my way to the place on the roof where the ice had built up so thick that it was causing a leak through the old porous roof. Beating it with the ice pick and sloughing it off the edge with my feet and a shovel. I should have started the fire. Water dripped down my back. I felt as sodden as the roof was, but refusing to bow to the weather the same way. I was alive like the wind was. I was alive like the ice falling from the sky. I was alive, and I heard the coyote call again into the night. I paused, looked in her direction. I wondered if she felt the silence the same way I did. Or if she, too, felt like she could hear the stars on clear new moon nights. I wondered who she called for. I kept on, working, sweating, drenched from the inside out and the outside in. Maybe I was bowing to the storm, maybe I was losing form.
When I finished I went inside. I looked at the overflowing pot. All of Doty’s records drenched from the continuous stream. I imagined his reaction to this. Slow and steady and sad and quiet. He would have helped me. I remembered the first time I saw him play. The warmth of the venue. My inside haughtiness over getting put on the guest list of a sold-out show. The smile on my face as I watched him flatpicking in the stage lights. A friend had called me out in front of him later. This was you, she said, and looked into the corner of the room where the lamp shown brightest with her eyes wide and her mouth hanging open in a canine-like smile. I burned red until I looked over at Doty to see him beaming.
I put two wet hands over my face, rubbed my forehead with one and started peeling my clothes off with the other. Eventually using both, I managed to deliver all my clothes into a wet heap on the wet floor. I looked at the slowed stream still coming in from the roof. Filling the pot again. I turned my back to it. I walked into the bedroom, wrapped my naked body in the wool blanket again, and crawled into my sleeping bag. Heaps of dry blankets above me, drowning me in another formless, dreamless, mist of a sleep.
When I awoke, the rain had stopped. There were spots of exposed grass in the horse pasture, and everywhere else the snow made all the same shapes and forms but they were all at least a foot shorter than they had been yesterday. I sat up on one elbow and took in the light and the picture outside my window. I said a small prayer for thaw, and heard a varied thrush respond from the cedar stand to the east of the cabin.
I wrapped the wool around me. I wanted to get the fire going before assessing the damage. I walked through the living room floor-turned-muskeg, water pooling in the depressions my feet left as I made my way towards my boots. This changes everything. I imagined a bear loping through this boggy mess unperturbed.
I ran my fingertips along the records. Could they be saved? The stereo was fried, no question. And a small drip still found its way from slanted ceiling to the full pot. I did nothing to save this. I touched the copper wire Doty had rigged onto the antenna of the stereo so we could get the radio down here. I pulled it off and twisted it in my hands. I gently tossed it onto the record player. I let the blanket drop and brought both hands to my temples, squatting, naked, the only words that came to my mind take me back take me back take me back and I think, as my eyes closed and I burrowed my head in my knees collapsing into the bog, that I was speaking as audibly as I could manage, to the earth. I didn’t even want to fill body with breath. I felt myself stop my inhale and exhale too soon. With eyes closed, I restored my other senses. I heard something. An inexplicable noise in the kitchen.
I pulled the blanket off the boggy floor and back around me. I was still a muddled mess of hair and wool as I approached the noise which seemed to be coming from the freezer. It was as though something in there was trying to escape. I froze in place. The owl.
Last spring on my way back from Montana I pulled over along the Clark Fork when I noticed an owl lying on the side of the road. I admired its plumage, and looked towards the sky because it had no life left. I picked it up and put it in the back of my truck, not knowing what I would do with it later. When I got home, I put her right in the freezer. Doty laughed at me and loved me again for doing it. I knew he would. I had brought the owl into the house the same time Doty was returning for the summer with the dogs. They all joined me in a springtime celebrated by Swainson’s thrush and morels aplenty. It was good to not be alone in the cabin anymore. And tree work was picking up in Idaho again.
I was depriving myself of breath again. I let out an exhale and walked over to the freezer, wrapping palm and fingers around the handle, ready to open and release whatever was in there. I paused. Ran over to the kitchen door and opened it up to the forest. Came back. Readying myself for the release. The audible opening: the water rushing, and the owl. She flew out violently, almost attacking me as she did. Beating her wings above my head. For a moment, I stared into the no longer frozen coffin of my making. The meat was thawing and smelled rank. The owl hit the window above the stove with frightening force. Fell, took another charge, hit the window again. The window cracked this time where the owl hit, a sponge mark of blood at the crack’s center. Another hit, and I instinctively tried to get in the way. I wanted her to stop, but I didn’t know how to stop her. She flew above me, mighty in her display of talons and wings. I ran over to the door, tripping over the threshold and landing on hard snow, just boots and blanket. I scrambled to get up, to see if she had made it out, but she just stopped at the threshold. Intensity fading from her yellow stare. Her breathing slowing. I watched fresh air penetrate her. Her eyes moved past me towards the cedar stand. She bobbed on her knees a couple times. She tucked her chin and then threw her head back sending a ripple of feathers down her back. She spun her head and fixed her gaze on me one last time, wings nearly untucked.
Megan Campbell has made a life for herself in the Bay Area with her dog and the ocean. She considers herself to be a jack of all trades working as a carpenter, surf instructor, wilderness guide, and educator. Meg is also a candidate for the 2023 MFA program at UC Davis.
Header photo by Angyalosi Beata, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Megan Campbell by Leanne Kriz.
