The air was frigid as we stepped on the patio to smoke. My good friend, my amigo from times before, had arrived back in town from a summer spent in Idaho doing trail maintenance and sustainable forestry work, and we reminisced on old times. Eventually the question arose, “How was your summer?” He asked me.
Summer, for us mountain folks, is essential. The forest comes to life with beauty, the rhododendron look like wild fires on the edges of the creek beds, and the tourist come to town. We are isolated here, and we like it that way, but when winter rolls in and the snow starts to fall, the loneliness of it all can be a bit a daunting.
Thinking back on the summer, it breaks my heart. The long nights spent with bottles of rum, and the air so hot that you can feel it on your skin, that all you can think about is taking your clothes off.
I think about him all the time.
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We were worried about the chickens because they had been left out the night before and lately a bunch of dogs had been hanging around the garden. It was eight in the morning and I already had sweat dripping from beneath my arms, and already had the desire to drench myself with ice water. We pulled up at the garden, and there she lay, the biggest hen of them all, missing her head. She couldn’t have been there long but already the blood had coagulated on the grass and the ants nestled in for a summer feast. As we looked for her head, we discovered that all of our chickens had been massacred, except for one. The smallest of the birds managed to escape with just a few feathers missing from her ass.
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We had drank way too many Pabst that night, and of course we were naked because the late July heat was unbearable. Eleven in the evening and it was still eighty degrees outside. Despite the time, we knew that we if we could escape into the forest, down to the rock face on the edge of the property line, we could escape the humidity. It was dark, and I was relying on senses other than sight, and I could feel to forest around me, and hear it moving in the late evening, and it was exhilarating. We drank Pabst and made love on that rock. When the decision was made to take another toke back at the house we began to make our way back up and out the forest.
As we got closer we noticed the roommate standing on the porch, and there we both were, naked as birth, coming back from misadventures. Without saying a word, we both lowered ourselves to ground, hidden behind the tall grass, not saying a word.
” Hey,” he hollered to the other roommate, ” I think I hear that mountain lion again!” He pointed to where we were hiding in the grass, and my laughter was muffled by the hand of my lover.
“Im going to get my gun!”
At the point we looked at each other, terrified at the prospects of shots being fired and someone finding our naked bodies in the tall grass. As soon as the the roommate turned his back, we grabbed each others hand and made a run for it.
The next morning over coffee we were informed that the mountain lion had been in the yard again.
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My experiences with a canoe had been limited to my time at girl scout camp, but that didnt stop up us from loading the huge aluminum canoe to the top of the truck and heading to the river. We put in next to the cow pasture, and I took the bow of the boat, and left him to paddle. It wasnt long before we picked up a friend. A herring, of medium size, that flew ahead of us. It would stop on a branch or on the bank of the river, and wait for us to catch up with him. Then it would fly ahead of us, and wait. That herring followed us until we reached our destination.
