Crazy for the Storm

I saw something but the light was dappled. I ducked under the canopy and kneeled. It was a boot print. Pocking the snow with little squares. Like my dad’s boots. He was still up there getting battered by the blizzard. My knee felt too heavy to lift off the ground, as if squashed by something. His slumped body that wouldn’t flinch when I shook him blurred my thoughts. I was down here and he was way up there. He would have carried me down with him, no doubt in my mind.

I forced myself to study the snow—bear down and grind it out. The boot prints were fresh. There were more.

Narrowing my aim on the boot prints seemed to tuck me back into my wolfish pelt—more natural to me now than my eleven-year-old-boy skin.

The terrain came into sharp focus. I lifted my knee and crawled forward following the prints down the hillside. A chaotic, circuitous route. Kids playing, I guessed. And there’s a big one. An adult. Their dad. I was on my feet, staggering over their trail. It lured me left and right, tunneling me under the cluster of bush, plants and oak limbs. Each square notch in the snow reached into my gut, guiding me forward. The prints would lead to that road.

I heard something. A voice.

CHAPTER 36

PILOT ROB LED us across the tarmac toward one of several four-seater Cessna airplanes lined up in a row. My dad looked up at the flat gray sky.

Do you think the weather’s okay to fly in? he asked Rob.

Yeah. Just a couple clouds, said Rob. We’ll stay below them probably. Should be a smooth flight.

My dad glanced at the sky one more time.

All right, he said.

CHAPTER 37

THE WIND HAD tricked me before, so I ignored the voice. The boot tracks made a circle and I followed it around until I realized I was backtracking. Ripples of panic set off my adrenaline and my body jittered. It was hard to concentrate. I needed to delineate the chaos of prints before me but my head was clouded by the surging adrenaline.

Hello! Anybody there! echoed in the canyon.

I blinked. The voice seemed to come from everywhere. I riveted my eyes to those boot prints, not wanting them to somehow disappear—they were real but the voice might not be. I yelled back.

Help! Help me!

Hello! someone called back, and it didn’t sound like the wind.

Help! I responded.

Keep yelling, said a boy. I’ll follow your voice.

I kept yelling and I ran down the hillside, toward my best estimation of where the voice was coming from. I darted around the small oaks like racing poles. I came out into milky light at the dirt road.

Holy shit. I made it.

As I staggered down the road I called out for the voice.

I heard it coming from just around the bend. Suddenly a dog appeared. Skinny. Brown. Then a teenage boy, wearing a jacket over a Pendleton flannel. He froze in his tracks. I walked toward him.

Are you from the crash? he said.

It was weird that he knew, I thought. Yes, I said.

Is there anybody else up there?

Yes. My dad and his girlfriend Sandra. The pilot’s dead.

What about your dad?

Before I could stop it, it spilled out of me.

Dead or just knocked out, I said. I shook him but he didn’t wake up.

The teenager stared at me. His stunned expression and my saying dead out loud unleashed the bleakness of it all—my dad is gone forever. He will never again wake me for hockey practice, never again lure me into a wave, never again point out the beauty in some storm. Pain attacked my bones, brittle and cold and easy to crush. An unbearable weight mounted on my back and my legs and feet trembled and I couldn’t look at the teenager’s sad face anymore. He was living proof that it was all real, that Dad was dead.

I looked at the ground and my spine strained to keep me from collapsing.

Should I carry you? he said.

No I’m fine, I said.

He picked me up anyway and I didn’t resist. He laid me across his outstretched arms. They felt like knives and the pain shot through my body and spiked through my head and it hurt so bad that I contorted—mind and body buckling into a pretzel.

As he carried me down the road I stared back at the mountain. Although it was smothered in boils of cloud, I knew vividly what was inside that storm, and for an instant the whole arc of my life was clear to me: Dad coaxing me past boundaries of comfort, day after day, molding me into his little masterpiece, even Nick’s vile fingers of doubt that I was left to fight alone, it was all completely transformed. Every misadventure, every struggle, everything that had pissed me off and made me curse Dad sometimes, rippled together, one scene tripping the next, the pieces speeding forward like falling dominoes into a streak.

I glared at the storm as it feasted on the mountain, hammering on my dad still trapped in there. It did not get me. And I knew—I knew that what he had put me through saved my life.

In the charcoal gray dusk the teenager, who said his name was Glenn Farmer, carried me toward a sawmill that was next to a ranch house. A tall blond woman was standing outside the sawmill watching us approach. She moved into the middle of the road and Glenn carried me right to her. She winced at my black-and-blue eyes, blood- encrusted lacerations, and raw knuckles, but just for an instant, then her heavily hooded eyelids relaxed, softening her gaze.

Are you from the plane crash? she said.

I was startled that she knew too. I nodded.

My name’s Patricia Chapman, she said. You’re safe now.

She called into the sawmill. A man in overalls came out. This was her husband Bob. I told him what had happened and where to find Sandra and my dad.

Then Patricia walked me to her house. She tugged the heavy block of wood open and ushered me inside. An old Native American rug cushioned my feet. I saw two low-slung rocking chairs facing a potbelly stove like the one in my dad’s house. I could feel the heat defrosting my skin all the way from the doorway.

Sit down, she said.

The chair was something amazing, the way it cradled me and let me rest. I reached my hands and feet toward the embers. She asked me if I wanted hot chocolate.

Yes please.

Patricia said she was a mom and that her two sons were playing down at the far end of the road. I stared into the pink-red glow throbbing beyond the open door of the potbelly stove. I wondered if they had bikes or skateboards.

A few minutes later Patricia handed me a mug of hot chocolate. She sat in the other rocking chair and we both leaned forward. My feet tingled and needles shot up my ankles and shins. The hot cocoa and the radiating stove thawed my hands.

There was a crippling pain in my right hand and I noticed that it was swollen so I switched the mug to the other hand.