Stuck in the Middle

I can’t get out. I debated coming to the cabin, the weather forecast looked compromising, but then, it was a weather forecast. It was snowing lightly when I left. When I got to Atlas, the last harbinger of civilization near the cabin, the snow turned to rain. The temperatures have been erratic, and the rain is freezing as it hits the road. 

I slid several times, losing temporary control, and then I slipped off the road and into the ditch. There is no escaping. I am trapped in the snow. I decide, being closer to the cabin than to Atlas, that I will walk to the cabin. The rain has formed a crust on the snow that is covering everything with a thick blanket. Tree branches begin to droop and break. I can hear what sounds like a war, coming from the woods. 

Walking through deep snow, with the added hindrance of ice, makes each step difficult, tiring. A walk I take during the summer takes half an hour, took me what seems like hours.  When I get to the cabin, I am exhausted.

I was to call home, a routine developed over the years to inform my partner I have arrived safely, and to let everyone know, I am OK.  To many, if not all my acquaintances, and partner, the cabin conjures the realization of life on a distant planet. None of the creature comforts we have become convinced is civilization. 

The cabin belonged to my father. He’d built it himself, weekends, vacations spent clearing brush, hauling rocks, and little by little pushing the framed rough sawn walls upright. The floor joist consisting of two-inch planks, the enterprise supported by an assortment of rocks hauled from near the lake, the planed flooring purchased from the Atlas lumber mill.

The roof was finally completed as the first of the flakes fell from the sky, early that year. The week before Thanksgiving. It took three years to complete, and my father never lived to see it completed. I guess that is why it is so important to me. It is a legacy of a man, and his cause. They are embedded in my being. A second soul, if I had to describe what it means to me.

I keep a stockpile of wood in a small shed behind the cabin. Always trees coming down for one reason or another. The wood stove was purchased by my father at an estate sale. I remember him telling me how somber everyone looked. A life he had said, “being auctioned off a piece at a time.” Possessions, leaving behind that life, with their inherited memories.

My mother, for reasons of her own, decided to no longer visit the cabin. I believe it is too entwined with memories and los that will only be rekindled by returning. So, the cabin is mine, alone. My partner, wife, questioning our contentious evolutionary experiment, that from a social standpoint, has brought the idealism behind marriage into the realm of a different time. It is at times like listening to one world, but answering to another.

I guess that is why I find this cabin a respite from the non-reality that is being etched into the realities of my time. I know it is the way societies evolve. I know it will follow a path it steals from a past that has reluctantly abandoned a present. 

I forgot to call home from Atlas, the last chance of any services; phones, computers, anything dwelling in that space we now depend upon, but can’t understand. I recognize my dependence upon this mystical magic, but as I watch the fire jump and crackle with the memories of a past that belongs to all of us, none of us, I can’t help but wonder, why?

The rain has reverted to snow.  Frozen pellets that beat on the metal roof like pixy drummers. Now it has changed to flakes that appear like irregular shaped dreams, made by my imagination. The increased weight on the surrounding trees, brings the return of the ephemeral war. Explosions, and gunfire like noise, drive the silence into the open fields that lead to…a nothingness that accepts all it touches, without exception.

I sit in this bentwood rocker, moving in time to music that plays in my head. The sounds collected, choreographed by a history of those that came before, those that will come after.

Escape, is the one word if asked, I would use to celebrate this place. This coagulated mass of wood and stone, that encapsulates the essence of a dream of that escape. Each of us in our own way run from that which we don’t understand, that which we must leave behind for that very reason, before it finds us and lures us back to the place we run from.

These walls are immersed in the plans of escape, as surely as those of any prison. My father’s Alcatraz, is not mine, but lives in a similar vein that courses through a world that has become too overwhelming to comprehend. Its purpose unknown, only a wish away from becoming another dead star. And yet, there are those that deny, destiny is what we make it.

I watch the smoke escape the dissolving wood it has been encased in, for all it knows, an eternity of wishing to be somewhere else, be something else. A something that allows change, without the impediments it always drags along to remind us that everything, everyone, is finite. All we have for sure, are the memories that mean something, but only to us. We have collected them, and now spend our time arranging them into logical lessons the we can only hope, have a meaning we are capable of understanding, and can accept.

I watch the snow through the glass collect like algae on summer’s water, each individual perhaps wishing to be part of something, that they have no way of knowing, will cause their demise. It is a destiny we all share, a time we must accept in our own light, as it is all that we have. We create, knowing it has a limit that belongs only to us. We fill creation with our hopes and dreams, knowing it will all one day, follow the smoke into the vast expanse of an eternity that we can see, even when we know it is not real.

#

“There it is, up ahead. I can see a tail light beneath the snow.

Benson, the old man who lives in that shack down by the lake stopped in the office. Said, there was a car he didn’t know, stuck in the snow out by him. Said it was our job to check it out. That’s what we get paid for. He’s a real sweetheart.”

“Get the shovel out of the trunk. Have to see if anyone is inside. Benson said the cars been here since yesterday’s ice storm. Push some of that snow off the windshield. See if there’s anyone in there.”

“I think I see something, someone. Better get on the radio and get someone out here. Who ever it is, ain’t movin.”

#

Things look different, than when I was last here. I feel different, somehow. It’s like the world has disappeared under this carpet of white. The snow isn’t as cold, doesn’t object to my moving, keeps the music in my head from wanting to follow the geese passing over head, to that place I know exists. Now, if I can only find it.