Barred Owls
SKI SEASON STARTS before I can. Nearly two thousand miles from here, winter wakes abruptly. In Breckenridge, snow guns fire crystalline spray, lifts shudder back to life, and my Ski School colleagues launder their cobalt uniforms. The membrane of autumn gives way to Gore-Tex. The ski instructor is reborn. Normally I’d be there, slipping into my own routine of cold mornings and beginner lessons. Instead, I’m bracing for an operating table in Albany Med, feeling winter begin without me in both directions: the one I usually chase, and the one gathering quietly under my ribs.
The eastern ridge behind my Catskills home rises in a thicket of bore-stripped ash and resilient hemlock, tangled with the bones of the old Ulster and Delaware Railroad. Stony Clove Creek runs through it—a clear, quick body of water that enlivens the border between my land and two hundred pristine acres held in the state’s Forever Wild trust. A backyard of public commons.
Route 214, New York’s highest highway, arcs north through old forest until it reaches Stony Clove Notch, the narrow seam Dutch settlers forced between Hunter and Plateau. I’m never sure which came first, the clove or the creek. The colonists arrived in the 1650s and immediately claimed a tract a thousand times larger than the law allowed. Long before the Dutch—and centuries before the ice climbers—the Mohican and Munsee traveled these rivers into the mountains, following glacial valleys widened and softened over millennia. Their word kill, meaning stream, still marks the map.
Catskill winters don’t arrive so much as assemble themselves. From my covered porch, I watch the season suggest its intent: the first frost failing to fell the last asters, leaves trembling into the gutters from major to minor key, geese staging at Colgate Lake. By November, the Airbnbs empty out and the valley settles. When the human noise lifts, barred owls take over—Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all? Their calls echo off the ridge like a question directed at no one in particular and at me most of all.
My partner, J., works mostly remote, commuting to Manhattan by Metro-North three times a week. My own uniform hangs 1,600 miles away in a Breckenridge garage, folded next to bone-dry skis and the Blue River’s scent of iron and early snow. When my locker stays empty, messages arrive: Where are you? We miss you. Don’t worry—the snow’s no good anyway. They mean it kindly, but the longing in me answers louder than the reassurance.
The night before my surgery, we haul in the Christmas tree. I insist on dragging it inside myself, shedding pine needles across the floor. J. crouches at the woodstove, trying to talk logistics—parking, timing, what to pack—while my mind refuses to step into the next day. I slip out onto the porch instead, where the owls are already calling, their voices rising from the dark as if rooted in the earth.
What will skiing feel like with a piece of myself gone? What will paddling feel like? I’m not the first to wonder how a body, once altered, relearns its own map. But on that porch, flannel blanket pulled tight, Sasha, our border collie pressing against my leg, I feel the question arrive with a kind of quiet force. The Dutch once hewed the Notch; tomorrow, the doctors will hew me.
Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all?
The owls call into starlessness—never seen, only heard. Their cries rise like something unearthed: root-voices pulled from soil. Even their bright, forsythia-wisp beaks evade detection. 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. Sasha slinks over. Her almond eyes brim with judgment. The owls keep hoo-ing. The Dutch hewed the Notch. Tomorrow, the surgeon will hew me.
I try not to scoff anymore when New Yorkers call these moraines mountains. Nothing here is pointy; oxygen is plentiful; the ocean is hours, not days, away. There is no tundra, no ptarmigan, no elk. And yet: geologic time makes and unmakes what we think of as permanence.
The Catskills are a dissected plateau—Devonian sandstones lifted and carved, sediments shed long ago from the Acadian Mountains when they stood near-Himalayan in scale. Glaciers later combed the edges and left their tidy piles. These mountains are older than the jagged peaks of my childhood—softened, like me now, by years.
Except in one place: the clove, an absence cut so deep it reveals sky. The Dutch later called our clove the Devil’s Notch. Charles Lanman, a nineteenth-century painter, described it as “the loneliest and most awful corner of the world…in single file did we have to pass through it.” And, on the appointed morning, in single file we pass again, J. driving me through the Notch toward Albany Med. I am a passenger in my own Subaru. Sasha snoozes in the back, thinking this is another adventure.
J. takes the big curve too fast. From the dark, an owl sweeps across the road—wings wide, mottled. An amber beak flashes inches from the windshield. For an instant, a deep black eye meets mine. The effect is eddying, as if the mountain briefly looked back.
The sun rises over the interstate. My fear lingers, but its shape changes.
In the OR, the drugs flow and a warm light gathers around me. My body softens like snowmelt. The incision feels abstract, a raft threading narrows. A potentially hazardous organ becomes a crux, then is gone.
Recovery is a slow geography. A topography of new scars runs across my abdomen. I lie like a bobsledder on the sectional’s chaise, able to move one way but not another. Time advances single file, Dutch through the Notch. J. skis at Hunter without me. Tasks accumulate. Sasha curls at my feet, careful of my new terrain.
One night, dulled by painkillers, I hear a woman on TV say, “We’re all born with two numbers. The dash in between is what you do with your life.” The owls cut through the streaming and answer with their unwavering call.
In the new year, J. drives me toward Woodstock, the opposite direction from the Notch. We go to my favorite bakery. Mr. B.B., retired English teacher and local writer, meets me for grilled cheese—Gruyère, mustard, caramelized onions. After weeks of bland recovery food, it tastes like triumph.
I list my losses: the middle school team I won’t coach, the women’s group I won’t lead, the private clients entrusted to others. The owls echo in my head. Who cooks for you?
Mr. B.B. knows melancholy’s timbre. He has taught generations of it.
“Your loss is real,” he says. “But your life outside isn’t over. There are skiers you haven’t met yet. And in the meantime—write. Also, want to split an éclair?”
Over the next weeks, my scars resolve into dashes. Ice drips from the eaves and melts before the plow can push it toward the southern side of the house, where the kayaks sleep. Before dawn, while the owls still call, I rise first. Coffee. Words. At first they fall like stray flurries; then in a small storm. Writing opens a narrow passage I’d forgotten was there. In the ink-dark edge of morning, the blank page feels like Claimjumper’s first corduroy, the run I used to take before work. Speed, silence, a moment alone. The same recognition of myself moves through my hands now instead of my feet.
Then one morning, the owls are silent. The next day too. Their absence drapes the ridge in a watchful stillness.
J. and I feed the Christmas tree to the woodstove branch by branch. I begin walking Sasha around frozen Colgate Lake. I can lift laundry again. Venus rises later each day; Orion still hangs low over the Notch.
My doctor clears me to head west.