Barred Owls
The eastern ridge behind my house thickens with bore-stripped ash and resilient hemlock, tangled with the bones of the Ulster and Delaware Railroad. The Stony Clove Creek, now threadbare and awaiting snow, cuts through with its steady erosive work. This clear, teeming body of moss and brookies enlivens the line between the land I call home and two hundred pristine acres held in trust by the state. Forever wild.
Route 214 is New York’s tallest highway, a slender ribbon of north that arcs perfect turns through old forest until it cleaves at Stony Clove Notch—the insistent passage Dutch settlers prised through Hunter and Plateau mountains. They arrived in the 1650s and endowed themselves with an imaginary title to a rough triangle of land one-thousand times bigger than the 2,000 acres prescribed by their law. Before the Dutch and centuries later, the ice climbers, the Mohican and Munsee traveled the rivers up to these mountains, where the glacier’s valley-widening and peak-rounding had opened a small lane to the places beyond them. The Dutch word kill, meaning stream, still appears all over our local maps.
Here in the Catskills, winter doesn’t arrive so much as it prepares. I watch it suggest itself slowly, quietly, from my covered porch. The first frost sneaks in one late October night, but fails to strip the last asters. Leaves fall slowly, like music notes slipping from major to minor keys, along the staves of progressively barer branches. Canadian geese conclave at Colgate Lake. They honk and step around the mud, impatient for the reluctant campfire smoke to die. The city people finally trickle out of the AirBnbs in November. Barred owls fill their silence with haunting, humanlike cries.
“Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all?”
Almost two thousand miles from here, back in Breckenridge, winter is wide awake. Snow guns shoot crystalline spray, and lifts shudder back to life. My coworkers launder their uniforms and slip into them again. Shoulder-season shadow selves dissolve into the cobalt solidity of Gore-Tex, and the ski instructor is reborn. My uniform hangs beside my quiver of skis in a dark garage beside the Blue River, where ospreys cry and the cold, dry air smells of iron and snow. My gear—and the life that animates it—hibernates in uncertainty. When my silent locker is noticed, messages arrive: Where are you? We miss you. Don’t worry—the snow’s no good anyway.
We haul in the Christmas tree the night before my second surgery. I insist on bear-hugging and carrying it in by myself. Pine needles breadcrumb the floor.
I’ve never had surgery before, let alone two. When I go to bed, it will be the last night of sleep with all my organs still organized inside me. When the tree is dressed in lights, J. squats at the woodstove.
“So about tomorrow…”
Logistics mitigate his anxiety. They exacerbate mine.
“I can’t talk about that right now, please,” I say, then exit swiftly onto the front porch. He knows by now not to follow.
My anxiety dangles like a deadened limb left in place, not for fear of the widowmaker drop, but for the nest it still supports. What will it feel like to arc turns or draw a paddle through an eddyline, one organ fewer? How do you fledge your body again?
“Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all?”
Barred owls are a lot easier to hear than to see. I strain for a glimpse of their mottled wings on a nearby elbow of oak but they are swallowed by starlessness. Even their bright, forsythia-wisp beaks evade detection like cloud-concealed new moons. Still, no one in the valley can deny they’re there, scooping up errant voles. Their treed calls have dogged us nightly since September. Somehow subterranean, they emerge like crystals of noise first planted in soil, unearthed like root vegetables with the last of the harvest. The sound shatters into a myriad microcosms that shine like light through the old screens barely affixed to the windows of my front porch. I pull a red flannel blanket tight against the chill they carry in. I try imitating their call, but I sound like a large dog in pain. Our border collie, Sasha, slinks over. Eyes full of judgment.
The owls keep hoo-ing. The Dutch hewed the Notch. Tomorrow, the doctors will hew me.
The end of the last ice age carved the Notch. It took thousands of years for the headlands to bow to the wetlands below. Painter and writer Charles Lanman once wrote: It is the loneliest and most awful corner of the world...in single file did we have to pass through it, and in single file must we pass to the grave.
Dawn hides on the horizon. I am a passenger in my own Subaru, the only car on 214, the loneliest road. J. white-knuckles the wheel. Sasha snoozes in the back, thinking we’re bound for the next great adventure, not an Albany hospital parking. He takes the curve into the Notch too fast, careening like a skier dropped into a turn on his heels. Out of the dark, a shadow sweeps from the trees—wings wide and mottled. An amber beak flashes just inches from the windshield. For an instant, a deep, black eye meets mine. The effect is eddying. The owl’s gaze turns me back on myself. We drive on. The sun lifts over the interstate. My fear lingers, but its shape has shifted.
Drugs flow, and a wall of light closes in. The atmosphere that envelops is warm, like canyon rock in summertime. My body softens into snowmelt, the knife launches, a raft threading the narrows. The organ to be excised suddenly appears like a crux—soft tissue shaped into stone. Snow into water. Water to sea.
I lay like a bobsledder on the chaise section of the couch. I can position myself this way, but not that. A topography of new scars trail across my abdomen. In recovery, time moves like colonists through the Notch, single file. I watch J. do all the chores. The woodpile forms a compass, with the big logs pointing west. It dwindles. Sasha, normally a live wire, curls at my feet, expertly avoiding the impact zone. One evening, dulled by painkillers and a half-watched show, I hear a woman made of pixels say, “We’re all born with two numbers. The dash in between is what you do with your life.”
Night after night, the barred owls cut through the streaming, straight to the fire.
“Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all?”
Early in the new year, J. drives me down the mountain. We take Route 28 to my favorite bakery, where chickens scamper in warmer months but are now stowed away in their toasty coops. B. is a retired English teacher and active writer. He is gentle and wise in the way of old-growth trees—steady, full of quiet rings. His brimmed hat is weathered, and he has a pen on him always, in the same way the local hunters always stash a rifle in their trucks. Grilled cheese—Gruyère, sharp mustard, and onions caramelized to a golden melt—is our ritual. After two weeks of screens and bland recovery food, it tastes like triumph. I eat. I vent. I list my losses: the kids’ team I won’t coach, the women’s group I won’t guide, the private clients consigned to other hands. My complaints echo back, owlish, “Who. Cooks. For. You.”
B. hears the forest in my voice.
“Your loss is real,” he says kindly. “But your life outside is not over. There are students—skiers—you haven’t met yet. And in the meantime, why not get back to your writing? Also…wanna split an éclair?”
In January, my scars diminish into dashes: –, –, and –. The eastern snow drops its icicles, which melt before the plow can shove the piles to the southern side of the house, where the kayaks sleep until spring. In the mornings, before the sun, while the owls still call, I rise before my partner and dog. In the heron-colored light, I make coffee and write.
Dear Skiers I Haven’t Met Yet…
Words begin to fall—at first like stray flurries, then in a white rush. The writing opens a narrow passage I’d forgotten was always there, and I slip through. I pour in what the seasons have given me: stories shaped like river stones, their edges rounded by weather and years. B. is right—it feels almost as good as skiing.
One morning, the owls’ call does not come. The next day, the pre-dawn again folds into silence. Where their voices reached into the house like roots beneath the earth, now quiet drapes the empty branches. Day after day, I listen for them in the dwindling dark, but the forest has absorbed them. The ridge behind the house is indifferent to this absence. It settles into quiet watchfulness, as if the forest itself is holding its breath.
We feed the Christmas tree to the woodstove, my hands on the hatchet, offering each limb to the fire. I walk Sasha around the frozen block Colgate Lake has become, then come home with energy enough to do the laundry. Venus rises a little later now, but Orion still hangs low over the Notch. My doctor clears me to head west.