I make it to Boise at nightfall and manage to get lost downtown while poor Tater has become carsick and is vomiting all over my lap. So far, this trip is not great. Not great at all. Finally, I get my bearings in that cityscape and find myself moving North through the night. All four truck windows are rolled down to freshen my mind and the air in the cab, snow is drifting in from outside and getting in my eyes as I cut a swath through the weather and up the icy highway that runs with the Payette River. Somehow this five hour drive is turning into an eight hour adventure. I’m very tired by the time I reach Warm Lake Highway and the next 30 miles of road take me two full hours to drive. At some point, I consider stopping for the night and sleeping in the truck but I know I won’t be warm enough, even with the dog pressed up against me. I finally reach the Stolle Meadow turn off and the road is socked in with tall, fresh powder. I can turn back and find a hotel room in Cascade, an hour drive away over an icy and snowy pass, or I can creep the final five miles into the cabin and wood stove waiting for me somewhere on this little road.
I choose the little road, drop the truck down into low 4×4 and make fresh tracks into thicker flurries with a deep ravine on the right shoulder of the road I can barely see. The back end of the truck drifts out on me, time and time again, I have a firm grip on the wheel and steer myself out of disasters. My front wheels ride like squirrels through the powder, every inch forward through the snow takes all my concentration and I feel the tension mounting in my shoulders and neck as I hang on tight and keep momentum. I am sure, as sure as can be, that there’s a broad and holy hand on the right flank of my rig, keeping me lined up, keeping me kept. My directions to the cabin read that it is five miles in on this crummy road and I take a wrong and hopeful turn up the mountain at mile five which results in no cabin and a cranky seven point turn on a tight little road flanked by stubby ponderosa pine that are succeeding the forest fire that passed through here a few years ago. The forest around me is blackened skeleton. I think I see white animals passing through the blinding gleam of my headlights. The snow comes thicker than before. I’m terribly tired. Back on the main road, one mile further, I find my cabin on the left, up a little hill. I pull in, punch the combination into the padlock on the door with cold fingers, run for the wood stove, crumple paper with dumb hands, strike a flame with my lighter and watch the dry wood combust into merry flames. I know I’m going to be alright.
Outside, Tater Tot is scratching at the screen door of the cabin, I let him in and feel badly that I lost cell reception two hours ago and cannot let my husband know I am safe and I have a fire. My friends are supposed to join me this evening. They’re making their way to Idaho from Portland. I don’t know it, but they are stranded in Pendleton and have taken a hotel for the night. It’s just Tater and I in our little cabin with our merry fire warding off the cold. I’m too tired to cook. I make hot water and pour it over the dried mint leaves I grew in the garden this summer. I climb into bed with a packet of crackers and read with a headlamp until I am exhausted enough that I know I’ll sleep soundly. Tater curls up beside me and the sweet thrum of his heart is the last thing I remember until morning.
When morning comes it pours forth into my little log cabin and the light is pure as unseen holy things and brightened further by the fresh snow on the ground outside. There’s stretching and groaning and a sore back. Tater goes outside and turns the snow yellow. The fire has gone out. I pop out to the shed and split beautiful, bone dry pine, break a small sweat with the work and carry the wood back to the cabin. I stuff the stove full and conjure fire once more. I haven’t spoken yet this morning and will not speak until later this afternoon when my friends join me. All is quiet. I make a perfect grilled cheese sandwich. I take a walk.
One million wings come striking and the deliciously silly honks of snow geese filter down through the tightness of the sky and the loose weave of tree branches. They swarm so brightly in their undulating homing arrow flight pattern and some pretty trail of black tipped wing beating flutters behind like a banner on an airplane above a beach somewhere in California. The girls arrive. I’m glad they are safe. There is hugging. There is unpacking. There is chatter. I feel merry. We all do. We tend our fire. We go walking. There are snowshoes for floating. There is wine for sipping. There is the chime of laughter, quiet smiles by firelight, something flitting and serious, something solid and kind.
There is delicious dinner, pancakes, breakfast tacos, a discussion about breeding a female goat, a walk to a creek that steams and streams with hotsprings. There is the decent and loving stringing of friendships like Christmas lights on a conifer, sudden and simple covalent bonds of friendships growing like ice crystals on the river banks.
I spend some time watching: I see the water flowing, forming itself as ice when the pulse of the season passes over it. I see the river, white and splitting into crystal fragments, icy feathers, peaceful and stacked tomes of river breath rising. Under the water, the river stones are a choir of chattering teeth and chiming atomics. Something in my soul goes boom. I walk further. I think I am an animal with nothing better to do than live. Survive. Eat. Sleep. I think I am not an animal. I sketch. I make. I read. I pray. I do those wonderful un-animal things that make me special and human.
Then there is the journey home. I’m not ready to go. We creep out down that bad old snowy road. We wave our good byes. I tumble down from the mountains like the Payette River streaming. My phone blinks and winks with the business of life again. My dear friend had a baby while I was away (I laugh out loud when I see the news! I knew it when I woke on Sunday morning before she had a chance to tell me — I had a feeling.). I phone Robert to tell him I am out of the bush and on my way home. He answers with, “SO! You are alive!“