A Winter’s Tale

I remain convinced that there are levels of worlds within worlds, seams and crosscurrents in which the old, worn rules shift slightly; that there are levels above us and below us, in which connections are made more easily, and that each of us occasionally passes through such seams. Not long after the grace of Thanksgiving, and the gift of a year’s meat from the hunt, I find myself descending from that high current of great good luck that seems to exist just above the regular landscape of my life, passing right on down through the real, or ordinary, world--as if overshooting my mark--and drawn into a swirling current of other-direction, a place where caution must be exercised.

It’s a Wednesday evening when I first sense the descent. We’re gathering at the Forest Council office for a regular monthly board meeting--trying, as ever, to figure out how to raise some funds to keep our two wonderful part-time staffers hanging on, and to strategize about how to stanch the ecological wounds that are being inflicted almost nonstop upon the public lands. My wife, Elizabeth, is out of town, and I’ve got the girls with me. The plan is for me to drop them off with our friends Bill and Sue, while I attend the meeting in their woodshed office. Elizabeth will get back before the meeting is over, and can pick them up.

And that’s the way it goes, just as planned, except for a little nudge, a little swirling in one of those currents below. On the steep drive down to Bill and Sue’s, my slick summer tires spin a bit on the ice and snow.

I drop off the girls--they’re delighted to play with Bill and Sue’s children on a school night--and then hurry on to the meeting. In typical gluttonous fashion, wanting to have my cake and eat it too--and with extra icing, at that--I made plans to fix a fancy supper for Elizabeth’s return, but have run out of time. On my way out the door, however, I scooped up my preparations, in all their varying stages of half-readiness--diced onions, diced jalapenos, grated Monterey Jack cheese, sliced avocados, toasted cumin seeds, chopped cilantro, etc.--in hopes of being able to work on the dish (black bean huevos rancheros) at the little gas stove in the Forest Council office. I tossed the pots and pans I’d need into a paper grocery bag, as well as our fancy $20 metal spatula with its sleek cherrywood handle: a spatula that makes you want to fry an egg.

Of course, there’s no time to cook during the meeting--the discussion is too intense, the issues too elemental, to receive anything other than the undivided attention of each of us--and just about the time the meeting ends, Elizabeth arrives to pick up the girls.

I’m a little off-balance, world-wise. Part of me is still clinging to the dreamy, snowy suspension of the hunt, and part of me is rattled, agitated, by the demands of the activist. Part of me is wanting to get home and cook that meal too--as if that might be some way of establishing a transition between dreamland and real-land--but part of me remembers that little momentary tire-spin on the way in, and so I tell everyone to drive out ahead of me, so that if I get stuck I won’t be blocking anyone else’s path, and send the girls to ride in Elizabeth’s truck, which already has its studded snow tires. (Ever the cheapskate, I was hoping to get a few more weeks’ wear out of my old tires, and to save a few weeks’ wear on my own studded tires.)

Not quite uneasy, but feeling something--some kind of imbalance--I have the prescience, at least, to grab some firewood to toss in the back of my truck for added weight over the rear axle, to give me better traction on my way up the long hill: the tilted hill that hugs the cliff that hangs out over the river so far below.

It’s snowing hard, and even though it’s piling up over the ice-skin of the road, making it even more treacherous, I’m glad to see it. Except for the one year we got way too much snow, we can hardly ever get enough in the Yaak Valley. Rain doesn’t count--it washes away into the Yaak River, and thence to the Kootenai, and then the Columbia, and then the Pacific. Only snow counts against the greenhouse heat of summer, and the apocalyptic dry winds that seem to increase in both aridity and vigor each year. Even in the winter, nearly every day is a kind of waiting, and when the snow falls like it’s falling tonight, there is very much a feeling of security and serenity that extends beyond just the visual beauty. There is solace, relief, bounty, comfort, promise.

I wave goodbye to my fellow board members as they drive off into the snow, secure in their four-wheel-drive trucks and Subarus, secure with their new snow tires, secure in their wisdom for not having scrimped or hoarded, and ask Elizabeth and the girls to wait for me at the top of the hill, just in case I have trouble: in case I can’t get up the hill, and have to back down and leave the truck overnight. I hope that’s not how it turns out, for it would mean having to come back and jack up the truck and take off the summer tires and put on the set of studded tires--wrestling around in the snow, rather than in a dry garage--and I’m hoping rather fervently to get just one more run out of those old street tires.

As I start up the hill, I’m feeling pleased with my wisdom, my maturity, at having sent everyone else safely on ahead of me, but there’s an uneasiness also, that niggling little grass burr of a feeling that’s trying to tell me: You’re about to step in it again. Why can’t you be more careful?

The truck makes it about halfway up the hill, wheels spinning, before it can go no farther. It’s not stuck in the traditional sense--it just can’t go any farther. The slick tires are spinning, shrilling, whining against the ice beneath them.

There’s nothing to do but back down. I’ll just take it real slow and easy, touching the brake lightly, and limp back down to where I started. There’s no rush. I’ll come back tomorrow, change those tires, and start over.

Up to this point, I have neglected to tell the reader that there is a bend in the road, a sharp bend, right there at cliff’s edge. The truck has managed, wheel-spinning, to make it around this bend, and to start slowly up that final grade, so close to the top. It’ll be a little tricky, backing down around that sharp turn, but again, I’ll take it as slow as is humanly and mechanically possible. I am not unmindful of the cliff just on the other side of my truck, nor the partly frozen river below.

For a little while, things work fine. I back up a few inches, stop; back up a few inches, stop. Safety first. I’m hugging the inside edge, the uphill-tilted edge, trying to catch a bit of roadside snow with my left tires, for some wee bit of traction, and just about the time I think I’ve got it whipped, the truck begins to slide, or worse than slide, really, more of a skate or a glide, an ease of movement so completely void of friction that for the tiniest of moments, I am impressed by its beauty.

There is terror too, of course--the sickening, total kind, the I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening kind--and a powerlessness that is absolute and astounding, as the thing that once seemed an advantage, the great workhorse weight of a big, big machine, is suddenly reversed to become deadweight liability, a two-ton skateboard, an avalanche.

There’s no sound, only that frictionless, steady backward skate. Ridiculously, I try to turn the wheel to navigate the sharp bend above the river. The truck is moving at a pretty good clip now, things are happening fast and then faster--and when the truck doesn’t change direction, despite the wheel being turned, I decide completely, unambiguously, to part company with it in one of the cleanest decisions I can ever remember making.

I unbuckle and jump out just as it’s sliding over the edge--my door is spread open, and I have to hurry away from it to keep from being swept over the edge like some last crumb being scooped along by a dust pan--and then, just like that, I am standing unsteady on the steep sheet of ice, and the big truck is going over the edge backward, being swallowed into the gullet of the night.

It looks like the Titanic going down, twin high-beam headlights piercing the sky, vertically illuminating the spinning spirals of snowflakes above--and what I feel, standing there clean and uninjured on the ice, is not financial remorse at having just severed myself from such an expensive piece of machinery, but instead, strangely and perhaps illogically, liberated, as if I’d just shed a two-ton burden. I feel light and clean and whole and eminently alive, and the grating, rasping, bouncing sound of the unpiloted truck rolling down the cliff seems only to accentuate this aliveness.

I’m not there. I’m here.

After a while, the crashing stops--the night is immediately peaceful again, with giant snowflakes falling softly and steadily--and almost casually, as if approaching some scenic overlook, some natural landmark of interest, I walk across the road and look over the edge, and see that the truck has stopped about 50 feet downslope, pinned on its side against an immense and ancient and unmoving Doug fir. The crazy, plowed-up trail of snow looks like the staggering last steps of some great heart-shot mythic beast, and, because the headlights are still on, I climb carefully down the slope and crawl into the side-tipped truck and turn them off.

In a little while, I know, Elizabeth will come driving back down, worried, and will see where my tracks leave the road and vanish over the edge, and will be further worried, perhaps even alarmed, and so I start back up the slope so I can get to the upper road before that happens. The tracks, the plowed up furrows of black earth and stone, are already being covered up, so heavily is the snow falling, but all over the hillside I’m finding various Ziploc bags and pots and pans for the dish I’d intended to cook.

How fiercely we cling to the mundane, how stubbornly we grasp at ritual and routine. Like some hillside berry harvester, I pause, trying to gather the spilled accouterments--the bag of smashed Roma tomatoes, which were meant to be diced anyway, and the avocados--and I search in vain for my $20 spatula, casting up and down the hill for it and going back to the truck to search for it, all to no avail. And when Elizabeth comes creeping back down the hill in her truck, peering over the edge to see me climbing back up, that is the first thing I say to her: “I’m OK, but I can’t find the damn spatula.”

It’s snowing so hard that if I don’t find it quickly, it’ll be buried until March or April, and so I take a flashlight from Elizabeth’s truck and once more canvass the cliff, though again with no luck.

I ascend the hill one last time, climb into her nice warm truck, safe, and we drive home, through swirling snow.

The girls ask if I’m OK.

“I wouldn’t have gone up that hill if y’all had been in the truck,” I tell them. “We’d have walked up.”

“You’re sure you’re OK?” they ask.

“Absolutely,” I tell them. “Just fine.”

But they’re quiet all the way home, thinking things over, even if I’m not, quite yet.

In the morning, after we drop off the girls at school, Elizabeth takes me back to the cliff. The truck is still there--the great hulk of the Doug fir has not decided, in the middle of the night, to release it, like an angler, perhaps, turning a caught fish back into the river--though because of all the snow that has fallen, it appears at first that the truck has vanished, that it is no different from any of the other hillside boulders.

I’m worried that we might have to saw down that magnificent tree to get the truck out. I don’t see how any engine of man can pull it back up over the cliff, and am thinking a little lane or path may need to be cut through the woods, for a distance of 50 or 60 feet, to reach the little river road farther below that is my neighbor’s driveway. I’ve already called Chuck, have asked if he can take a look at the situation and come up with any ideas--Chuck has both a snowplow and a backhoe and does much of the valley’s heavy work.

Elizabeth heads back home, and I walk down the snowy drive to Chuck’s. The roads are icier than ever, which last night I would not have thought was possible, and several times, even in the simple act of walking, walking on flat and level ground, I slip and fall so hard that I bounce, hit so hard that my teeth are jarred--it’s a bad time of year for vertebrae--and yet I keep getting up cheerfully, the residue of my luck from the night before still so fully upon me that I feel light and unburdened, almost untouchable. The snowy world around me seems to be vested with the full potential of its almost unbearable and overwhelming beauty. Unless it is only my imagination, other people I encounter on this day after, friends, seem to be feeling or witnessing this same little revelation, as if it did not have to be any of them who leapt from the plunging truck and was saved, but that merely knowing of the story is enough to remind them of that larger beauty.

Chuck greets me in his tool yard. “I looked at it this morning,” he says. “We can get it out. There’s a lot of different options we can try, a lot to choose from, but we can get it out. It just might take awhile.” He tells me that he had planned to drive over the mountain to go to town today--to put studded tires on his own truck, in fact, in addition to other chores and jobs and errands--but that, what the heck, he’s running late anyway, so it won’t hurt to put it off another day: a Yaakish kind of logic that makes perfect sense to me.

I’ll spare the blow-by-blow description of the various methods we attempted, but it was like a magic trick, the way an entire morning vanished in the logistics of digging cables out from under the snow, attaching chains and cables here and there, going back down the hill to look for more cables, setting up sawhorses to close the icy road, sliding off the road in Chuck’s big truck two or three times (though never, fortunately, over the big cliff), etc., etc. At one point, we came around the corner in Chuck’s truck--we’d driven to Yaak for a load of gravel to spread on the icy road before beginning our labors, but the gravel pit was closed--only to encounter a tiny two-wheel-drive car coming up the driveway, the kind of vehicle that a car rental company would call a subcompact, or maybe some newer classification denoting a craft even more minuscule than that.

The little car was coming up the hill and around that corner at a fast pace--I think I can, I think I can--and Chuck hit his brakes, and the car’s driver hit her brakes, right at the spot where my truck had gone off. Since they were coming uphill, they were able to stop; Chuck’s heavy truck, on the other hand, locked up and began sliding down the hill.

I could see the people in the little car making horrified faces. It was a family of three generations, all on their way to Bible school--grandma, daughter and itty-bitty baby, half a dozen people squeezed into that little sled of a car--and, certain that Chuck’s big truck was going to slide right into them and thump them over the cliff like a well-placed cue ball, smacking them into some corner pocket, I jumped out and ran alongside Chuck’s twisting, skating truck, running toward the petrified occupants of the tiny car, holding out my arms and yelling, “Give me the baby! Roll down the window and give me the baby!”

Ridiculous stuff.

Chuck’s truck bumped their car and, sure enough, knocked it lightly backward, but only a short distance. So slow had been his skid that there wasn’t quite enough mass and momentum to send them (perhaps Chuck likewise) over the cliff. Baby, mama, auntie, grandmother, sisters--all were safe. Or so it seemed.

Everyone climbed out of their vehicles and congregated around the scene, askew and terrified and joyful. Everyone checked to be certain everyone else was all right, and then Chuck got in his truck to back it up to the top of the hill, which wasn’t so far away.

He was only able to go about 10 feet, however, before his tires began to spin, as mine had the night before--and like some eternally damned time loop, he began sliding down the hill once more, heading straight for the little car and the whole gaggle of us, baby and all. Like alarmed deer, we leapt in all directions--some down the hill, others up the hill--while the owner of the car rushed toward Chuck’s sliding truck and waved her arms at it, as if trying to ward it away with hoodoo alone.

Once again, his truck slid into the little car, and once more, miraculously, it held its ground.

There was nowhere to go but down. Chuck climbed into the little car and backed it down the hill, one inch at a time, and was able to safely reach the bottom, where the family rejoined the car, and decided to turn around and go home rather than attempt the hill that day.

It’s at this point that we give up on our various plans, but just as we have reached this agreement, another neighbor, also named Chuck, who has heard all the commotion, comes wandering down to investigate.

New Chuck has a big old skidder that he sometimes uses for logging, a machine even bigger and more powerful than Old Chuck’s backhoe, and with the hopeful arrogance of a man who thinks his racehorse is a little faster than it really is, New Chuck says, “I believe I can get that truck out.”

By now other neighbors, as if drawn by some mystical communication in the blood or summoned by dreams, are beginning to appear to watch the big show--not just for the spectacle of it, but to be on hand in case they’re needed, and to offer advice, as if we might need to take a vote on our dwindling options, a vote in which we hopefully can achieve consensus, and as if--in perhaps the same manner as the instinctive hand-waving hoodoo from earlier in the day--such agreement might serve as an intangible but somehow real added layer of protection or assistance.

Trees and deer: the foundation of our lives up here. With a jury-rigged assemblage of mismatched chains and hasps, we fasten New Chuck’s belching skidder to a giant Doug fir that leans out of the slope above us--Chuck’s anchor, it is hoped, to keep him from being pulled over the edge of the cliff during his labors. I ask out loud the question nobody really has an answer for--”What if he pulls the tree out of the ground?”--but the opinion, if not quite consensus, is that he probably won’t, that the power of roots is sufficient for the task, if not quite the miracle requested.

With a clatter of ancient valves and a burst of black diesel smoke, Chuck lowers the stability legs of his machine onto the ice, planting them two-square. From the skidder, we wind a long choker-cable, which--surprise! it’s not quite long enough, we have to knot another one to the end of it--we attach to the back end of my truck.

The plan is simple--elegant, to me, in its reliance on brute strength. First, Chuck will pull the tail end of my truck up the hill, unwrapping it from the tree and lining it up so that it’s aiming straight down the cliff, dangling from the end of the cable like a plumb bob. Then, after I climb in behind the wheel, Chuck will employ a kind of reverse Yaak logic and unspool the cable, letting the grasp of gravity pull the truck down the cliff (one spool-click at a time, hopefully), as I steer it in slow motion through the trees, over stumps and boulders, to the lower road far below.

And that’s how it works. Once he gets the back end pulled off the tree and the truck is straightened out, I climb in and buckle up, and it’s like a carnival ride, one of those Ferris wheels where the cage spins upside down so that you’re staring directly at the ground.

The little audience is now gathered at the bottom, watching. If the tree Chuck is anchored to cracks, or if one of the jury-rigged cable knots breaks, or if the winch fails or the cable pulls free of my salt-rusting old truck, things will get considerably more interesting than they already are. With the river looming below me, I’ve prepared myself to leap from the truck again, if need be--though for the time being I will keep my harness snug around me as I try to navigate the last of the 60-degree slope.

Up above, Chuck lets out the first spool-click of cable, and the truck shudders as it eases roughly down its first foot of terrain. Coins, plastic forks, sections of unread newspaper, gloves, baseball caps and wrenches go hurtling past my ear and fall against the windshield, then slide into various dashboard apertures like small rodents ducking back into their burrows--some perhaps to disappear forever, others to trickle out through the carriage to the ground below, so that it might be possible, if we ever get the truck out, to come back some years later and track the strange path of our descent.

Another spool-click, and the truck lurches another foot. I can see a little lane that has opened slightly to the left, and I crank the wheels that way, and Chuck lets out another length--we slide into that gap successfully--and then, perhaps emboldened by his success, he begins letting out the line more steadily. It’s more frightening that way, and yet it’s also bringing us closer to success faster, and so I hang on tightly and try to steer the vertical truck, feeling supremely awkward and yet ridiculously, vaguely hopeful.

The last part, of course, is the steepest, a little 3-foot sheer ledge, like a ski jump. There’s a pretty good thumping and scraping beneath me, and I’m careening through brush and dry branches, and then suddenly, like a deer bounding out of the woods, I’m out onto the icy road--and then am crossing the icy road, my brakes useless once again, and out into the snowfield that lies between the lower road and the river.

I reach the end of my tether, though, and now all Chuck has to do is reel me back in to the road, which he does.

Chuck refuses to accept any payment for his day’s labors, saying that he likes the feeling of doing a good deed every so often, and so in the end all I can tell him is that I was happy to be of service. Another neighbor, Geoff, has helped us shovel a load of his own gravel into Chuck’s truck, and the three of us spread it up and down the long, icy hill, and then it’s time for me to drive home.

It’s nearly dusk, and though I’ve finally put on the studded tires, and we’ve got the new gravel on the road, there’s still very much the feeling of climbing back on the horse that threw me--but this time the truck makes the bend and climbs on out, slipping and spinning only a littleright at the top. The engine is running a little rough--some crankcase oil evidently spilled into the old worn valves during the night while the truck rested on its side--but by nightfall, I am safe and warm and dry in my home, alive and well, and still drifting in that current of lucid grace where the world’s full beauty is revealed in every glance, and every moment.

The distance between what is and what could have been is as vast and yet as hairline-minute as it ever is, as it always is; it is only that on this occasion, I have been permitted to walk all the way to the edge of that constant breach and peer down into it, and witness, with all of my senses, how narrow it is--almost always a span of just seconds or inches--and yet how infinitely deep, also, it is.

To witness it, and turn away; to turn back.