My friends warn me of the
perils of moving to the mountains outside Boise, Idaho, in
December, just as winter rolls into the Northwest.
“You’ll get depressed,” they say. “And don’t expect to
see us until spring.”
My friends are city folk. The worst
they can imagine is snow piling in the drive and power failures,
both of which occur frequently my first winter on the mountain.
What they don’t know is that every winter problem has its
solution. For cars there are tires with metal studs. For people
there are skis with skins that grip the snow on the uphill. For
power outages there are candles and backup generators. For getting
the kids to school on time there is Randy in his huge, yellow, very
expensive plow growling up the drive before dawn. Yes, winter in
the mountains is peaceful and dreamy. But nothing prepared me for
the violence of spring.
Spring does not come to the
mountains like lion or lamb but like the sky crashing to the ground
which, in a manner of speaking, it does as soon as the thaw begins.
It’s late afternoon and John and I are cutting vegetables for
soup and suddenly there is a loud scraping sound that gains
momentum like a crescendo of clattering cymbals. We pause, knives
poised above onions and tomato, until the cacophony ends in a thud
of snow piling on the deck. While I wait for my heart rate to
return to normal, John smiles and runs to look at the section of
metal roof he’s been saved from shoveling.
Spring
has broken and it’s not pretty. Snow at least is clean. Now
we come face to face with all that lies beneath, not a forgotten
garden hose or sandbox toys as may have been the case back at my
old suburban home. Here, whole vehicles are unearthed: a “work
truck,” a rusty bathtub. I realize that the toboggan run my sons
had been zipping down all winter was actually a buried junkyard.
Snow, for all its blissful glistening, is just one more form of
denial.
Mud, I learn, does not hold the weight of a car
like hard-packed snow. My trusty Subaru slides into a ditch only a
quarter of the way down the drive. Finally, one afternoon I make it
to the county road. My wheels, caked with mud, shower the car with
brown flecks as I go, like an electric mixer grinding through
too-thick dough, piling clumps of batter under the wheel wells.
When I make it to town, I’m reminded of what spring
used to mean. Music emerges from rolled-down car windows, green
grass blankets the ground and lines wind around the carwash. I pull
in, aware that the stares I’ve been getting at stoplights
have nothing to do with spring flirtations, but rather surprise at
seeing an almost 40-year-old mom who’s apparently been
tearing it up in the backcountry. I finally reach the front of the
line, and the blonde teen in a pink tank top, just short enough to
reveal her belly ring, shakes her head.
“You’re too
dirty,” she says.
“For a car wash?”
“It’ll clog up the brushes.”
“You should’ve
told me before I waited,” I’m not in a hurry, but the way she
stands, hand on a hip, compels me to point this out.
“We
had to get the clean cars through,” she says, waving me out of the
line.
Eighty-sixed from the carwash, I drive aimlessly
down city streets, past stores where people carry flats of bright
annuals to their cars. I am nostalgic for city spring tempered by
concrete culverts and lawns. At our mountain home, earth bears the
whole weight of dissolving winter.
It is almost April
when my friends agree to come up for a house warming. The roads
have been more or less dry. Elk chili simmers in the kitchen, and I
have vacuumed bug carcasses from the baseboards. An hour before
everyone is supposed to show, the skies darken and the rain starts.
Then it turns to sleet, then hail. People start arriving anyway,
though some have left their cars on the road below and hiked
through the trees. They are covered in mud.
“I
can’t believe you live here,” my friends say, aghast but
also, I think, with a certain gleam in their eyes, that might just
be envy. Eventually, 20 cars sit outside, some having made it up
with only radials. The house is full. We eat elk and sushi and
stand on the deck in the late afternoon and watch hail and sun and
rain — watch spring breaking, all muddy and new.
Laura Stavoe Harm is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia,
Colorado (hcn.org). She writes near Boise,
Idaho.
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