bags and pillows. But no one was prepared for the sudden drop in temperature to 40 degrees below zero. We were even less prepared for the electricity to go out. We woke Thanksgiving morning to rooms frosted in ice and our breath falling into crystals. Potlatch, in a fit of misplaced modernizing, had equipped each residence with baseboard heaters, and only my fathers boss down the road, Max, had a fireplace. To his house we went, our large extended family snuggling close with his around the inadequate fire.
Whatever prayers were offered for heat failed to bring the desired results, and we must have finally decided that our being brought so intimately together had divine purpose. That purpose became clear when the woman of the house, Sandra, doubled over in pain.
While her husband and my father remained with the children, my mother and Uncle Roland, not so far gone to California that he couldn’t maneuver through an Idaho snowstorm, drove Sandra to the drugstore, where Dr. Kimball promptly and accurately diagnosed appendicitis. The forty-mile trip to the hospital in Orofino seemed impossible given the weather, but there was little choice.
They made their way across the white expanse of the Weippe Prairie, along roads closed by blowing drifts. Max had a short-wave radio in his basement, allowing those left behind to communicate with the four-wheel drive, at least until itreached the icy switchback curves of Greer Grade. Whenever Sandra raised up from the backseat to say with hope in her voice that the pain had stopped, my mother and uncle glanced at each other and then away. They knew that while the pain continued she’d be okay, but once the appendix ruptured, the relief from pain was temporary: peritonitis would set in.
My uncle had seen it before, when they lived in Oklahoma. The youngest brother, Barry, had been diagnosed too late and lay for weeks on his hospital deathbed, brought back to life, they believed, by nothing more than their mother’s prayers and constant presence even after the doctors had told her to go home, they couldn’t save the boy.
This night they made it in time. Sandra was immediately admitted to surgery, and after making sure the operation had gone well and she was resting comfortably, my mother and uncle found their way back to their families, who were done up like Eskimos and eating whatever food could be found not frozen.
I was happy in that place, bundled against the cold, surrounded by people I knew and loved. My cousins and I made a game of it, serving Kool-Aid milkshakes and congealing cereal. Even after the electricity came back on and we returned to our own house, we bumped and huddled against one another for the remembered pleasure of closeness.
The warm spring days passed quickly. My brother and I played with the other children from morning until night, stopping only to heed our mothers beckoning us to lunch or dinner. Weekends, we built forts in the woods behind our yards and pretended the muddy gouges left by bulldozers were pits of quicksand. We walked the two miles to town grouped tight as a clutch of chicks, the dimes and quarters we’d earned selling lemonade sweaty in our palms. Back home we’d come with bags of penny candy, racing one another up the hills,balancing on the logs that bridged the gullies, made brave by our independence and wealth of treats.
But our time left in that place was short. Even as my brother and I filled our days with childhood adventures, something was at work in my father. It was nothing that Dr. Kimball or a hard days labor in the woods could heal or fix, and I’m not sure that even now I understand it. For most of his life, as a sinner and a Christian, my father had felt the workings of otherworldly things through dreams and intimations. His conversion to fundamentalism made him even more aware of the division between the forces of good and evil, and he had come to understand that dreams could be visions, that a sudden and overwhelming sense
Whatever prayers were offered for heat failed to bring the desired results, and we must have finally decided that our being brought so intimately together had divine purpose. That purpose became clear when the woman of the house, Sandra, doubled over in pain.
While her husband and my father remained with the children, my mother and Uncle Roland, not so far gone to California that he couldn’t maneuver through an Idaho snowstorm, drove Sandra to the drugstore, where Dr. Kimball promptly and accurately diagnosed appendicitis. The forty-mile trip to the hospital in Orofino seemed impossible given the weather, but there was little choice.
They made their way across the white expanse of the Weippe Prairie, along roads closed by blowing drifts. Max had a short-wave radio in his basement, allowing those left behind to communicate with the four-wheel drive, at least until itreached the icy switchback curves of Greer Grade. Whenever Sandra raised up from the backseat to say with hope in her voice that the pain had stopped, my mother and uncle glanced at each other and then away. They knew that while the pain continued she’d be okay, but once the appendix ruptured, the relief from pain was temporary: peritonitis would set in.
My uncle had seen it before, when they lived in Oklahoma. The youngest brother, Barry, had been diagnosed too late and lay for weeks on his hospital deathbed, brought back to life, they believed, by nothing more than their mother’s prayers and constant presence even after the doctors had told her to go home, they couldn’t save the boy.
This night they made it in time. Sandra was immediately admitted to surgery, and after making sure the operation had gone well and she was resting comfortably, my mother and uncle found their way back to their families, who were done up like Eskimos and eating whatever food could be found not frozen.
I was happy in that place, bundled against the cold, surrounded by people I knew and loved. My cousins and I made a game of it, serving Kool-Aid milkshakes and congealing cereal. Even after the electricity came back on and we returned to our own house, we bumped and huddled against one another for the remembered pleasure of closeness.
The warm spring days passed quickly. My brother and I played with the other children from morning until night, stopping only to heed our mothers beckoning us to lunch or dinner. Weekends, we built forts in the woods behind our yards and pretended the muddy gouges left by bulldozers were pits of quicksand. We walked the two miles to town grouped tight as a clutch of chicks, the dimes and quarters we’d earned selling lemonade sweaty in our palms. Back home we’d come with bags of penny candy, racing one another up the hills,balancing on the logs that bridged the gullies, made brave by our independence and wealth of treats.
But our time left in that place was short. Even as my brother and I filled our days with childhood adventures, something was at work in my father. It was nothing that Dr. Kimball or a hard days labor in the woods could heal or fix, and I’m not sure that even now I understand it. For most of his life, as a sinner and a Christian, my father had felt the workings of otherworldly things through dreams and intimations. His conversion to fundamentalism made him even more aware of the division between the forces of good and evil, and he had come to understand that dreams could be visions, that a sudden and overwhelming sense
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