Grandma and Grandpa had arranged a surprise for me in the morning. My parents’ forest-green Subaru drove up to our campsite. Stunned, I watched as the driver’s door opened. My parents’ friend Susan stepped out.
I ran toward her, and she wrapped her arms around me in a bear hug.
“Cara Carabiner! Wow, look at you. Your hair is so long. You look gorgeous.”
I smiled, embarrassed.
She dangled the car keys in front of me. “The Subaru is yours now. I’ve just been taking care of her for you.”
I couldn’t find my voice to thank her. It didn’t feel right, to have my parents’ car. It made it seem so final, like they were never coming back.
“Your grandpa told me you were learning to drive. You might as well use the car until your mom and dad come back. Don’t get too used to it though; they will come back.” Her voice was light and firm at the same time.
I grinned and hugged her again.
I had been wondering how we were going to get the RV down the narrow rutted path to the cabin. I figured we’d have to park off the main road and walk, but I wasn’t sure my grandparents could hike that far into the woods.
“I’m sorry, Cara. Your parents asked me to take care of the Subaru while they were away, but we left Max’s van by the cabin. The fire—”
My smile disappeared and I dropped my eyes.
“I’m so sorry I couldn’t save it. We … It’s gone.” She pulled me into another hug, and I let myself melt into her shoulder.
Another car drove up behind the Subaru. I pulled out of her embrace and sniffed and blinked. Susan wiped the tears at the corners of her eyes with her fingertips.
“There’s my ride.” She squeezed my hands, then peered closer— my rough callouses, short nails, ragged cuticles. Her lips curved into a soft smile. “Glad to see you’ve still been climbing. You have a big day ahead of you. Be careful.”
I finally found my voice as she drove away. “Thank you!” I called out.
After breakfast, I drove Grandma and Grandpa to the cabin.
“I’ll stay at the campsite with Nick,” Kaitlyn had said. “It seems like something you should do with family.”
In some ways I had wanted her to come. I didn’t know how to talk about how I was feeling; it would have been easier just to show her. But she was right, it was something I needed to do with family.
We drove up above the tree line, wind whipping the Subaru, then down and off the main road onto a dirt side road. Dust rose from the parched earth. I drove slowly for Grandma’s sake, and the car crawled over the rutted tracks.
The cabin peeked through the blackened remains of the trees ahead. The cedar-planked walls should have been hidden, tucked away in the dense forest, secluded from the road. Most of the alders were gone, disintegrated into ash. Smaller pines stood like ghostly black skeletons, stripped of their needles. Last summer I had looked into deep layers of green, brown, red. This was a gray moonscape. Pitted earth, lumps of coal, charred stumps, timber strewn in haphazard piles.
The green of Douglas firs deep in the forest beckoned, and I inched the car closer to the house. My sycamore tree had survived. Long thick branches reaching out like giant monster arms; I would climb up and sit in its embrace, disappearing behind its curtain of leaves. Now my tree was bare as winter.
I killed the engine. I knew a fire had raged through our forest, but I wasn’t anticipating this desolation. In my mind, the cabin and our land had remained the same, a welcoming home. And Uncle Max’s little VW van would be waiting for me.
I couldn’t look at Grandma or Grandpa. We sat in quiet for a moment.
I opened my door first and trudged across the sandy, rock-strewn yard to the cabin. My heart and stomach squeezed together like a fist. My throat closed so tightly I couldn’t swallow.
My cabin. My home. It was still here. Vacant, neglected, charred. The windows had blown out on one side, glass littered the ground. Someone had boarded them up, fresh new planks golden against the soot. I tripped over a hard misshapen object; our wind chimes, twisted and melted.
I glanced behind me. Grandpa and Grandma hadn’t moved from the car. I didn’t wait for them. I wanted to enter the cabin by myself.
One step up onto the low porch, the front door unlocked. Blood rushed in my ears. I couldn’t hear. Everything was silent, still. My home. Our favorite reading chairs by the window with a view of the mountain’s ridges at sunset, the futon that should have been over there but was gone. The bookcase remained, but emptied of books. The pegs on the wall for our climbing gear, a rope still coiled. The wood was blackened, the kitchen half-melted, the heat from the nearby fire had caused the most damage on that side.
Watery light spilled through the grimy windows that remained. Speckles of dust claimed the air. I was holding my breath. My throat felt parched. My eyeballs burned.
Outside, the car door shut with a bang, and I gasped.
The air grabbed the sound of my voice and held onto it, filling the empty cabin. I sank down to the floor and rested my head on my knees.
Footsteps entered the cabin and paused. I didn’t look up. Grandma and Grandpa shuffled around, surveying the damage, I guess. Glass crunched underfoot. A hand paused on my head, light pressure, and then I was alone again.
When I stood up, my feet were numb. I stumbled over to our reading chairs. I curled up in my chair, dust rising around me, smelling like campfire smoke. I gazed out the hazy window at the destruction of the surrounding woods. The mountain peaks and valleys were ablaze with the yellow morning sun.
The forest was dead. Tears fell until I closed my eyes, shutting out the loss. I tried to recall the memory of our healthy forest, the way it used to look. At the sound of snapping twigs, I opened my eyes and watched Grandma and Grandpa wander past the window. They didn’t come back inside.
I sat and stared out the window. And finally I noticed. The forest wasn’t dead. Yes, many of the trees were definitely goners. But moss crawled over the rocks and slivers of feathery green poked out of the ground. A tiny clump of wild onion bloomed. Songbirds trilled. The forest was healing. It had been hurt, but it was growing, healing. And I realized it would take a long, long time.
Dad had talked about that poem “Diving into the Wreck.” That’s what I was doing here today, what he wasn’t willing to do, couldn’t face doing. Yet.
The cabin hadn’t begun to heal. It had stayed still, damaged, but it too could be repaired. Not yet, but sometime. Uncle Max would never be here again; I didn’t know if my parents would ever be here again. I looked out the window. They were out there, where there was life, growing and healing.
In my bedroom, my bulletin board of postcards dangled by one nail, the cards crinkled, warped, dusted with soot. I straightened the board on the wall, the pictures and quotes from Dad a blur. Uncle Max’s rock gifts were still lined up on my windowsill. I ran my hands over their shapes and contours, and breathed easier. I rolled a cracked geode between my hands, its amethyst interior winking, then set it back down. They belonged here. But then I had another idea for just one of the rocks. Which one? I slid the slice of smooth metamorphic rock off the ledge and carried it out with me.
I closed the door on my way out and found Grandma and Grandpa waiting by the car.
We didn’t need to say anything.
“You going to climb today?” Grandpa asked.
“Not today. Tomorrow.”
Tomorrow, I’d be ready to climb. Tomorrow, I’d need to climb. I didn’t know how to do anything else.
“Look what we found,” Grandma said, holding out her hand. “Morels.” I reached out and took one of the funny shaped mushrooms, its oval top creased and ridged like a miniature brain. “Uncle Max was great at foraging, but we never found them here in our woods before.”
“Those little shrooms are worth a small fortune,” Grandpa said. “Looks like they’re just starting to sprout up. We could gather some more for dinner.”
I nodded. “Fire is actually good for some plants. The soil heats up and seeds germinate. The burnt trees release a lot of nutrients into the soil.”
I handed the mushroom back to Grandma. “There’s something else I need to do here,” I told them. “You want to come with me? And then you can show me where the morels are hiding.”
They followed me across the yard to the edge of the fire-singed woods. I found the spot I was looking for, marked with the cairn. Tahoe’s tree. A majestic, big cone Douglas fir. Its thick, fire-resistant bark had protected it through the firestorm. It had been attacked by the heat, but it stood tall, where the smaller, surrounding oaks had collapsed. Its trunk was fire scarred, lower branches blackened, but it wore a crown of vibrant green.
I sat down at the base of the tree, and Grandma and Grandpa joined me. The cairn marking Tahoe’s grave was blackened from smoke, but the stones held their place to form a perfectly balanced, squat tower.
“This is where we buried our dog, Tahoe.”
Grandpa and Grandma nodded. We sat for a while in silence, letting the forest work its magic. I knew there were fairies out there somewhere.
I set the rock from my bedroom aside and scanned the yard for others. I began to gather them up, holding them in my hand, feeling their individual shapes, sharp and angular, smooth and rounded. Grandpa joined me without a word, then Grandma. We each added a new stone to Tahoe’s cairn, then began the work of building another. Stone by stone, gently, mindfully, balancing.
When we finished, we had created two pillars joined at the top by the smooth slice of metamorphic rock. Strokes of gold and copper melted into the stone’s shallow, gray ridges. It would have made a good skipping stone, hopping and skimming the surface of a lake, alive, defying gravity, before sinking to the depths of another world.