Billy Marlow

Billy Marlow was a seventh-generation North Carolinian.  He stood on his porch on a sunny morning, smelling the odor of ice and wood chips.  It had snowed a bit the night before, and everything had frozen solid by morning.  The water pipes that kept his chickens and rabbits hydrated had stopped up with ice, despite his various inventions meant to keep them dripping.  He had been up for two hours already, tending to that situation, and was ready for breakfast.

Funny thing about wood chips is that they stay warm.  A pile of them at the edge of his yard was constantly breaking down, composting, a process of any biological substance.  Even though the night had done its best to turn the world into a Popsicle, that pile just kept steaming and melting it away.  As any accumulated ice thawed and the water seeped into the middle of the pile, it just fed the process of breakdown.  One of Billy's cats, the orange one, was laying curled into a divot in the pile.

Billy was known by many to be a sweet fellow, and a practical farmer.  He had managed to turn his family's hilly land, with its mediocre soil, into a productive farm.  Every acre was packed with fruit and nut trees, berries, small crops, and animals.  The goats had been slaughtered for the winter, filling his freezers and providing a good chunk of winter income, but not before he used them to trim his raspberry canes.  Most of the rabbits were still in the barn, getting fatter every day, and his two dozen chickens were just layers.  He figured that everyone and their mule was selling chicken meat these days, but rabbits and goats were harder to come by. 

Billy turned forty-five that day.  His wife was probably just waking up, and he was sure that she was all set to make him some surprise cake.  She had made a different kind for him every year since they were married.

His niece was coming back to town that day as well.  She had been visiting her brother, the money one, up in Seattle for a couple of weeks.  Billy wasn't sure what had happened to that boy; all the other kids in the Marlow family were...well...practical.  But that one was a hundred thousand dollars in debt for an education that allowed him to get a desk job that allowed him to spend the next ten years paying off his debt.  When he fell from the tree, he must have rolled down a hill and been picked up by a racoon.

The sky was pink and a sliver of silver sun began to fill the gap in front of him.

"Hey, buddy," came the voice of Sharla from inside.  He turned and saw that the windows were steamed up; she must have been up for awhile already with the stove heated up.  He realized that his fingers were completely numb and he had rabbit droppings all over his shoes.  His long hair was a tangled mess.

He responded, "I must look like a truckload of manure right now."

She drew a heart in the condensation on the front door window and stepped back into the shadow of the house. 

Billy sucked in one more breath of woody air and smiled at the valley that lay before him.  The orange cat stretched its four limbs out into the world and snuggled deeper into the warm pile.  

Promenade

"Long lines, forward, back!  Swing your neighbor, back on track!  Men, turn by the left, once and a half...swing your partner, face across."

Avery swung Rachel around one time too many, getting slightly off beat with the rest of the dancers.  They laughed sheepishly through the fiddle notes and stomps as they ducked under each other back into position to grab the hands of the other two dancers. 

"Circle four, once around.  Come back with a left hand star!"  The caller, a slight old man with suspenders, paced across the makeshift bandstand.

With Rachel on his right hand and Anya on his left, he caught the eyes of Martin, across from him.  They kept eye contact with big smiles as they spun around, the ladies flinging their skirts with each step.  

"Promenade across the set!  Ladies chain, into lines!"

He twisted Rachel with a half-spin into position in front of him and they stomped on past Anya and Martin.  All four dancers waved their shoulders to the beat.  The fiddle stopped and the banjo player carried the next few measures with an amazing series of rhythmic notes.  The guitar kept an off beat, boom-Chuck!, boom-Chuck! boom-Chuck! boom-Chuck! As the ladies shifted across the set, the music sped up.  Rachel's hair was slick with sweat and Avery felt his heart speed up as the round began again; in their long lines, the dancers tromped towards their partners, tromped back again, swung their partners, and Avery nodded farewell to Anya, found the hand of another man, a stranger, who twirled with him and sent him back into Rachel's arms again.

On up the line they worked, reaching the band and the caller, and bouncing back.  The gym's polished wooden floor vibrated with a hundred synchronized feet slamming down upon it; the vast ceiling bounced notes and hollers over every dancer's head and, if someone were to look up, they'd see the basketball nets shake with the excitement.

The dance ended with a long, strong swing, Rachel and Avery spinning each other and winding up in a low dip as the fiddle hit the last, sustained note, a high A.  Her back was damp and his hands were sweaty and they nearly toppled, but he managed to get her upright again with a stumble.

There was nothing to say, so the two of them smiled and sighed and shared a second of euphoria; Avery took a deep, deep breath.  "Hoo!  Thank you!"

"And you," she replied.  He rubbed his hands over his face and turned to track down the drinking fountain.  The caller instructed the room to find a new partner for a waltz, but Avery decided to sit this one out and recover for a few minutes.  He wanted to ask Anya for the next dance after that, but saw her across the gym as she nodded to another fellow, a friend of his.

Martin met him in the line for water.  "She's a great dancer," said Martin, referring to Anya.  "Where did you find her?  I haven't seen her before."

"I found her in the woods, actually," said Avery.  "Last week.  I was hiking up on the Peninsula with Scott, coming back from Blue Glacier.  We got off the trail a little ways, kind of taking a shortcut, and just suddenly found her in the middle of nowhere.  She was totally lost.  First thing in the morning; hadn't even had coffee yet."

"Is she from here?"  Martin looked back across the room at her, where she was waltzing gracefully.

"No.  She's from North Carolina.  Just up checking out the rainforest while visiting her brother in Seattle."

"Carolina!  No wonder she's such a good dancer.  Lots of contras down there!"

Avery reached the water fountain and sucked in the cool stream.  His heart was still beating from the last dance.  He splashed a bit of water on his face and dried it with his already-wet shirt.  "I feel gross," he said.  "I'm going outside for some air."

He left Martin at the fountain and went through the big metal double doors that led to one of the many campus lawns.  It was late in the year, and the temperature was dropping quickly.  As a student, he had spent far too much time on that campus, but he'd never seen a campus so worth spending time on.  Between classes he remembered darting down the trails that surrounded the college, taking ten-minute jogs through the trees.  He had collected lichen and learned about forest ecology in those woods, been taught to stare at a tree for hours to learn about the countless interactions that happened upon it.  He never had appreciated beetles until he spent his four years there.

He still lived near Olympia, and only came back the campus periodically for contra dances, public seminars, and to utilize the free printers in the library.  He had only been out of college a few years and still looked like he belonged there.  He kept a short beard, wore flannel shirts, and could speak at length about mycology, beer brewing, and farming.  Just like three quarters of the twenty-somethings that he knew.  But he was getting tired of living the seasonal life helping out on his friend's farm, Nightshadow Nursery.  Winters were hard, and he did his best to pick up low-wage, low-commitment work in the service industry.  At twenty-seven, he was thinking harder about what he really wanted life to look like.

The look of life, though, was vague and foggy to him.  He had ideas.  And some skills.  But that was pretty much it.  In his mind, he needed to find a partner first, imagining that, whoever she was, she would give him direction and they would support each other.

After seven years in Washington, with only brief spurts of travel in the slow seasons, he was ready to explore a new world.  He dreamed once of farming on the moon, but he suspected that it would be too expensive to ship as much compost on a rocket ship as would be needed to get started there, so he set his dreams on more obtainable locations.

Sometimes, while waiting for inspiration to hit, he would realize that months of relative stagnancy had passed in his life.  Inspiration had a way of sneaking up when he wasn't paying attention and he had vowed to himself that the next time it entered his life, he would follow it.  Just last week, he had been telling a friend of his that he was hoping to find that direction out in the forest, maybe buried beneath the ferns or etched into the bark lines of some great Cedar.

And just last week he discovered Anya.  Well, he thought as he heard the waltz wind up inside.  Maybe Carolina needs farmers this time of year.  He re-entered the gym to find a partner.

Lost In the Hoh

Anya, lost in the forest for the second time in her life, could not think straight.  Every logical thought was dispersed into a fog of emotion and panic.  The evergreen forests of the Pacific Northwest were foreign to her, and her Carolinian core was begging for deciduous flora.  Late November, and such tiny places in the canopy to see the sky.

      “Where is North?” she asked her broken compass.

      The compass did not respond, luckily.  She was sound enough to know that if it spoke back to her she shouldn’t listen to it anyway.  Three days with no real calories; a few hours with no fresh water.  She was not yet starving or dehydrated, but the mystery of how long she would remain lost was enough to make her desperate for food and drink.

      She was not running, or even moving around too much.  For the past 36 hours or so, once she realized that she had lost her way, she had remained in place, wandering from her campsite only to explore for food and keep herself occupied.  Anya had fasted before, several times, so knew the routine of withdrawals, but when it’s not intentional a lack of food can be uncomfortable, then disturbing, then frustrating.  She was already past frustration.

      The Olympic Peninsula is famous for its rainfall.  Anya was somewhere in the Hoh Rainforest, sitting at the base of a Sitka Spruce.  She watched a string of ants crawl up the tree’s trunk and stared at a patch of Wolf Lichen, marveling at its structure and color, while she tried to imagine the topo map that she'd reviewed before setting out.  Around her, hidden behind the pine and fir and cedar were peaks as high as five Blue Ridge mountains stacked atop each other.  It was baffling that the earth could heave up such monsters, as if, during the early days of geology, it were trying to grab the moon and pull it back to the oceans.

     Her campsite was at the base of a beautiful, naked tree.  It was a madrone, alone, in  forest of fir.  Due to the coming winter it had shed most of its bark, revealing a smooth, dark brown surface that comforted her.  It was small enough that she could wrap her arms around it and it felt like a friend.  The larger trees, while attractive, had become looming, rough, and threatening as her predicament became more obvious.

     As Anya went to sleep that night, feasting on slightly fermented salmonberries that she had found clinging to branches on a nearby slope, she thought about her life, the future part if it.  In her stained old sleeping bag, in her tiny old tent, her brain played tricks on her throughout the night, alternately waking her with false hope of rescue and lulling her with visions of her utopian dreams.  She saw herself in the Prairie, or back in Appalachia, or snuggled up with a handsome man in the Willamette Valley with goats outside.  Then her eyes opened with the false sound of footsteps.  Then she dreamed of summers in garden beds and winters with books and springs at farmers markets and autumns on tractors.  

     She rose with the sun the following morning, both inspired and tired.  She imagined footsteps again as she unzipped her tent.  Emerging into the predawn, she found fresh inspiration in the moss.  If moss and lichen can survive out here for generations, I can too, she thought.

     Then the imagined footsteps became real and two men rustled through the ferns behind her, looking as surprised as her to find themselves with company.

    

Prologue

Will the water, will the rain

          To dry the sky and ground again.

  Ask of angels, ask of God,

          Save our cattle, save our sod.

 Will the flesh and will the blood

          To tell the story of this flood.

     Avery and Anya stood on the roof and watched their Jersey cows drown in the flood.  Anya’s black curls were straight and flat against her head and neck in the heavy rain.  Neither of them spoke.  The sun had appeared through the clouds in the west, sending seams of color into the grey storm but the downpour continued around them and eastward.  In that intense light every tree shone brilliant, crisp green against the featureless steel backdrop of the ongoing disaster.  

     For nearly an hour they waited there with no emotion.  Avery imagined that, below them, all of their belonging were getting calmly picked up by the rising water and drifting into some corner of the living room.  His photographs, his banjo, Anya’s books, and all of their tools, floating around like so many lost boats pulling into a marina.

    
     He was wearing rubber boots and could feel his socks bunched up and soaked inside them.  He couldn’t believe how quickly the puddles had turned into lakes.  At the peak of their roof, held up by the coarse shingles, Anya leaned into him and stared at the pasture, not quite focusing but unable to look anywhere else.  She noticed that there was no field.  The barn out there no longer had a floor.  Members of their community were bobbing about in boats, bailing out rainwater, or else they were standing on high ground and other roofs, looking alternately awed, sorrowful, and patient.  Ladder Creek was taking away their earth and animals in what would soon be the worst flood on record.   

    
     Avery wondered if he should just swim to St. Louis right that moment and never think about the Mason Jar community again.

In A Time of Exodus

Avery stood on the red gravel parking lot of the James Boys Saloon, which was not a saloon at all.  He walked around his truck and leaned against the tailgate.  The wind was blowing, as always.  The wheat in the field across the road was about ready to be harvested.

In his mind, as he looked out at the dust-covered farmland, he could see the year 1860.  He shifted his eyes to the store, its faded signs, broken shingles, and desperately elaborate statues of cowboys and bison.  He could see people inside; they were of a time before the Internet, electricity, refrigeration, heaters.  They drew their water with windmills from wells, and they busied themselves in the winters just to keep fed and warm.

Jesus, he thought.  What am I doing here?

The wind lifted his cap up, trying to send it flying into the wheat.  He caught it before it left his head; he removed it and held it.  The air was fresh, but on its wings came the smell of tar from roadwork on the highway a mile away.

He could see the year 1860.  He saw his red Chevrolet truck as a home-built wagon.  He saw the highway as ruts, the telephones as pens and paper, and the people as weathered-but-hardy men and women who were trying to survive in the relentless prairie.  He saw the wheat, too.  It was still wheat.

What am I doing here?  He was a homesteader in a time of abandonment. 

He was a pioneer in a time of exodus.  What am I doing here?