Windthrow

I could feel the storm in my body. The spinning energy generated by that colossal pinwheel of wind and moisture coming onshore moved through my being the way a willow rod bends in the hands of a water dowser. Then my battered left knee began to ache. The gusting exhalation began sometime in the late-December night. It was a warm storm, and I opened the bedroom window a few inches to give this animal of wind-driven rain space to slip its fingers in and massage my sleepless ears.

Daylight. More wind and rain. I found myself in no hurry to leave for a three-day venture to Smith River, a trip I had been planning for two weeks to decompress in the middle of the holidaze. Finally, the truck was loaded with the all-important chainsaw, tools for the house renovation, a box of food, and the utility trailer to salvage down wood. We headed southwest into the teeth of the gale. The pickup felt the storm, too. Wind pummeled the cab on straight stretches where normally I would let out the reins and lean my right foot into the accelerator. We rarely made highway speed.

The road snaking over the ridge from the Siuslaw River was littered with a reckless cast of Douglas-fir boughs. Someone was ahead of me; a large windthrow fir perhaps 150 years old had been bucked into six-foot pieces and rolled off the road. Further along, a pair of young western hemlock trees leaned across the pavement at a 45-degree angle, their fall arrested by a cut bank 12 feet high on the right side of the road. Enough limbs had been removed so that the truck and I could slide beneath the trunks.

Below the two unfortunate hemlocks, a second-growth fir snag blocked the road. Sheets of rain hurried me into full rain gear. The saw cooperated, and the chain was mercifully sharp. I bucked the trunk into firewood lengths and chucked them haphazardly into the trailer. My gloves and raingear became plastered with a stucco of wet sawdust. I left everything on and climbed back into the cab, strewing woodchips across the steering wheel, seat, and stick shift. In all of this arboreal carnage, I’m seeing a warm woodstove and finish wood for the interior of the Johnny Gunter place. Owning a chainsaw and portable sawmill has transformed me into a storm-chasing salvage logger.

With the road dropping mercifully out of phone service and into the Upper Smith River valley, I remembered that the house was electrified by about 13 miles of aerial line. My chances of having power at the place were roughly the size of a winter gnat’s ass. Just before entering the driveway, the truck and I dodged another hemlock that partially blocked Upper Smith River Road. Thankfully, the driveway was mostly clear, and only required chucking a few large limbs over the bank.

True to expectations, all switches inside the house were dead. The convenient flow of kilowatts was blocked somewhere upstream. Given the strength of the storm and the small number of people serviced by this line, the prognosis for power was dim. I fired up the woodstove, glanced at an oil lamp and bottle of fuel on the living room shelf, and shrugged. At least the refrigerator would be silent.

My designated task on this trip was to replace the rotting bathroom floor. Rain sang on the metal roof while I dragged the old toilet, tub, and vanity into the yard. Pieces of decayed subfloor and plywood were dismantled and extracted, and a trace of guilt for spending too much on cordless power tools during Christmas sales evolved into smug satisfaction. From the gaping hole in the floor, traces of the storm blew upward in cold drafts that carried the smell of mildew and unceasing entropy. Most of the time I manage to steer clear of delusion. This party was not going to last—not the batteries in my newfangled tools, not the storm, not the house, and certainly not I. Ironically, aging has removed any trace of nihilism. In these winter-shortened days of my ever-shortening years, even replacing a cracked toilet has become a compelling enterprise.

Late afternoon. I could feel the storm in my body, the way it chased its own cold tail eastward, the way the music of rain ceased and overcast became cracked with turquoise. I jogged and walked to the crest of the ridge rising above the north side of the valley, gazed down on gray pockets of fog nestling like nursing kittens into green needle canyons. Wind gusts dissipated into small breezes that huffed across this emerald jumble of mountains. A smidgeon of phone service dribbled in, and I used it to call Kim and tell her I had arrived without incident. She asks little else of me on these wild-eyed solo adventures.

Back at the house, darkness rose from every pore of the rain-soaked earth, coalescing into black arms that enveloped the meadow and collapsed outbuildings. A click of the red Bic lighter set the oil lamp flaring in the living room. It exhaled a faint whiff of petroleum vapor. I used the lamplight and woodstove to cook a butternut squash-bacon-kale stir fry, and ate it out of the cast iron skillet. My journal captured a few words in sloppy cursive.

Drowsiness overtook me far too early in the evening by normal electric light standards. I extinguished the lamp. Time ceased when my eyes could no longer register the difference between open and closed. For an unmeasured moment I sat on the edge of that tiny immensity of darkness, grateful for legs dangling over the edge of infinity.