Winter Passage

            I walked away from that marriage with my clothes, the carryall, my tools, and my camping gear. I had finished arguing about material possessions. I no longer cared about owning anything more than I could travel with, so I packed what I owned into the carryall and headed for Oregon.

            Kids are tough. I couldn’t do anything about them or for them without a court battle I hadn’t the money for, or outlaw tactics I didn’t believe in.

            I drove into a snowstorm just above Yreka. Dry, light flakes blew up and over the carryall, so I didn’t need the wipers when I held it at 40. Snow accumulated on the pavement.

            At dusk, snow floated down in light from my headlights. Snow lay on fields beside the highway. Fence posts and telephone poles staccatoed by in the edge of my vision. I sang my way along the mountain through falling snow.

            Chemult, Oregon. Pavement Narrows. I parked by two freight trucks in front of the restaurant, locked the carryall, walked in, sat down, and ordered steak and eggs.

            The big trucker with the red and black wool coat finished eating and pushed his chair back. He said, “God knows, we all drive too fast, but the people in cars make it dangerous. They don’t know how long it takes a truck to stop, or how long it’s going to take them to stop their own car, if they have to do it fast.” The truck drivers drank their coffee and stood up and walked out. Trucks built throaty roars as they took the road again.

            The short, fat lady came out from the kitchen and put a plate with two eggs, a steak, and hash-browned potatoes, and a saucer with toast on the counter in front of me. She said, “That ought to hold you for a few miles.”

            She cleared the truckers’ table, rattled dishes and silverware, clinked coins into an apron pocket. She took the dishes into the kitchen and washed them and came out again as I finished eating.

             She looked out the windows into the night. She said, “Those truckers been driving this highway through the Siskiyous for thirty years. Every night, you hear the same stories you’ve heard for thirty years, chaining up in the snow, a truck down the canyon, lights shining straight up into the white storm. A station wagon with a family headed for Canada on a one-week trip pulled out ahead of a truck and lost the road in the glare of lights against snow and spun off the road. Snow comes down so heavy it closes the road, and people are stranded. People can freeze to death out there.

            “That night out there, with snow falling, that could be the same night, with the same snow falling that fell the winter my husband died. It’s all the same night over and over again. He could walk in through the front door like always, sit at the counter, and say, ‘Give me a cup of coffee, honey,’ but when he takes his hat off, frozen flesh strips away from his skull. Hollow eye sockets; his finger bones rattle on the glass counter top like memory rattles in my dreams when the wind blows snow off the roof to spiral down outside my bedroom window, and I turn and try to wake and then sleep to wait for light.”

            She brought me more coffee and put the check on the counter. I gave her ten dollars. She pointed out the window, “That’s yesterday’s wilderness out there. It’s a day old now, and you can have it for half-price if you want any.”

            I left her in an empty restaurant holding the change above six dollars and ninety-five cents. I unlocked my carryall, climbed in, and drove farther into mountains of winter wilderness.

            Snow and more snow falls. My headlights reflect from falling snow. White motion, toward my windshield, then up and over, close at 40 miles an hour, tires my eyes, and I start to feel blurry and half-hypnotized.

            About here, more years ago than I can clearly understand, I hiked through these mountains in a snowstorm, heading to court in Eugene. The last ride turned west when I needed to go north.

            I walked for three hours in falling snow, stepping it down the road into snow blowing in a cold wind. Few cars traveled the highway of winter. Falling snow obscured the forest both sides of the highway. Wild thoughts tried to take over my mind, tried to drive me into fear of the wild night, alone in falling mountain snow. I brushed snow off my clothes, off my mittens again and again, trying to keep it from melting and then freezing to ice. I wondered if walking would keep me from freezing to death if I didn’t get a ride all night. I hadn’t dressed warmly enough.

            People going the other way stopped and told me President Kennedy had been shot and killed. I didn’t believe them. Anger at their strange sense of humor, at the dark, lost night flooded through me.

            Voices coming over the radio in the car said it, and again, and elaborated on it. I stood in blowing snow and listened. The driver of the car said, “Get in and warm up. We have a thermos of coffee. Come on around the other side and get in by the heater. We have some sandwiches.”

            I sat in front of the heater and drank coffee. We listened to the radio. Snow fell on the car, on the highway, on wild forest beside the highway. I didn’t want the sandwich the driver offered.

            The people had to continue south. I walked another hour, and then I got a ride all the way into Eugene. The man who picked me up had already heard it on the radio. Neither of us could think of anything to say about it. Snow turned to rain halfway down the Santiam. Rain soaked the Willamette Valley in stunned grief.

            Twenty years later, I drive the same highway. Snow lighted up bright white by my headlights flows in wind created by the carryall’s movement, up over the carryall. Sleep threatens to overcome me.

            I drive down a side road and climb over the back of the seat. I crawl into my sleeping bag and pull my quilt over that and add my canvas tarp, settle deep into my bed and sleep.

            Daylight slipped over eastern peaks and spread out across the Oregon desert, crept in my windows and nudged me awake.

            I started the motor and let it idle until warmth blew from the heater. Eight or ten inches of new snow had fallen during the night. I spun my wheels and couldn’t get going. I jacked up the carryall and put chains on the drive wheels. Cold wind penetrated my clothing and started to penetrate deep into me. I fastened the chain tensioners, climbed into the warm carryall and took to the highway again. Snow still blew down from the grey sky.

            Cars ran out of traction on the mountain and blocked the highway. A man in a light suit stood outside his car in falling snow. He looked up and down the road, snow on his bare head and snow on his shoulders. I said, “You might be here a while. If you stay in your car, you’ll conserve your heat better.”

            He said, “You fight your wilderness, Sonny, and we’ll fight ours.”

            Four more cars drove up the highway, until they couldn’t go any farther, and they stopped. Two drivers tried to turn around in the deepening snow, spun their wheels until they ran out of all traction and blocked the road. I wasn’t going to be able to get around the cars behind me and drive back down the highway.

            The man I had talked to had three children and a woman with him in his car. The children waved at me through the back window, and I waved back.

            Snow fell from the grey sky all that day. Most of the people stuck in snow on the highway got together and talked about what to do. Several cars ran low on gas. We put more people into fewer vehicles, so we could run fewer heaters. We put four children and three adults in my carryall.

            The man I first spoke to walked over and talked to me through densely falling snow. The woman with him got out of the car and listened to what we said. The man said, “I’m almost out of gas. Do you have gas in those cans on your bumper?”

            “I do have, but I’m saving that until we need it to survive. Move your family into my rig. I still have room enough for you. Bring your blankets and coats.”

            “No, I’m not going to do that. I’ll pay you for the gas.”

            “It isn’t for sale. Let’s use what we have the best way we can. If we put people in tight together, we’ll keep each other warm.”

            “I’ll pay you double for the gas.”

            The woman said, “Harold, let’s do it his way. This isn’t a good time to try to be independent.”

            “No. We aren’t going to do it his way. Get back in the car.”

            The woman said, “Mister, I don’t know your name, but if you can make room, my children and I are coming back and squeezing in there. Harold, come on. The way they’re doing it is right. If people pack in together, they share body heat.”

            “Get back in the car.” He grabbed her by the shoulder and arm, turned her, and started to push her toward the car.

            The man who transferred blankets from abandoned cars to occupied cars caught Harold’s wrist. “If you want to freeze to death, I guess you can. But you can’t force that choice on anyone else.”

            “She’s my wife.”

            “That’s okay. That’s second priority. Survival comes first.”

            “I’ll have you arrested for this.”

            “Okay. Go call a cop. Here, take these blankets.” Harold got back into his car and started the motor. His children looked out of the car at the people who argued in falling snow about what would happen. I thought the children’s faces showed confusion and fear. Their mother said, “Come on. We’re changing cars. Come on, now.”

            Harold said, “Stay where you are. We’re staying here.”

            I reached in the back door on the passenger side of the car and pulled the three children out and passed them on, one by one. I kept a close eye on Harold. He just watched me in the mirror. We all got into my carryall.

            Snow stopped falling, and the sky cleared just after sunset. Sun shone from below the horizon, through blue sky, far out into the universe. There on the mountain, on the Oregon desert around us, the temperature fell rapidly.

            Harold’s wife said, “He ran out of gas.”

            “He’ll come back.”

            Light faded from the sky, from the snow, from air clear as clean ice.

            “If he doesn’t move in five minutes, I’m going up there.”

            “Would you please?”

            “Stubborn man.”

            “Yes. Sometimes he is very stubborn.”

            When we went to get him, he was so cold, we had to help him walk. That didn’t rest well with him, but by then we weren’t asking him about anything anyway. We just picked him up and stuffed him into the back of the carryall. The people in back took his shoes off, wrapped him up, pressed around him, and tried to warm him up.

            Harold said, “I didn’t agree to any of this. I...”

            His wife interrupted him, “Harold, sing joy and gratitude that we aren’t in this alone, or shut up and pray. We aren’t out of this yet.”

            I started the motor and warmed it up every 15 minutes and got some heat from the heater. It turned into a long, cold, quiet night. We slept all we could, because we didn’t know what the next day might bring. Conversations were brief and quiet.

            Daylight spread across the brilliant white winter mountains. Sun rose into clear sky and shone bright, reflected from clean, silent, white snow. We heard the big diesel engine on the snow plow a long time before it got to us, coming slow but coming.

            The plow driver cleared a space, backed the huge truck, and drove forward again, widening the space. I had two shovels in the back of the carryall, and the snow plow carried two shovels. We took turns digging snow out of the way. We drove all the cars out of snow into the road the plow had cleared. We put gas in some cars and got them all started. I looked at Harold’s wife. As if she knew what I was thinking, she looked across the front seat of my carryall at me and said, “Harold is stubborn and sometimes unbearably surly, but he isn’t cruel. He would never hurt his own family.”

            Sun shone into my carryall and lighted up her face, grey eyes touched by sunlight, slender, bronze face with high cheekbones, radiant in the scant warmth of winter sunshine. She said, “Thank you.” She opened the door and got out.

            Her children slid out of the back, walked around, and gathered close to her. All three of them reached and touched her, held her hands, her arm. They crossed clean white snow to Harold’s dark green car. They got into his car. We sorted blankets and coats and put everyone’s supplies into the right cars.

            Then we headed south in single file, down the narrow lane the plow had opened, with the plow roaring behind us, widening the open road. In the nearest town, highways divided, and people who had been together through the storm on the mountain drove away from each other into the wide world. Some drove east. Some drove west.

            I descended the mountain, alone again in my carryall. Halfway down the Santiam, I stopped and took the chains off the drive wheels. By evening, I rocketed 50 per up the floor of the Willamette Valley, where no snow fell, just heavy webfoot rain. A lot more traffic filled the highways and side roads. My windshield wipers slapped and clicked, beating time for a song I sang about people meeting and working together in desert wilderness.

            We didn’t exchange names during that snowstorm in Oregon’s mountains. I never got the name of the guy who handled Harold. Now, I still drive north, and I find myself wondering what Harold does for a living.