Always choose the mystery gift

the parable of the woodsman

A few weeks ago, it was so hot on the mountain that we had run the hose in through the back door and hooked up a patio mister to the fan inside to create an extremely bootleg swamp cooler. It was around 100 degrees on the mountain and 114 degrees in the valley, and I had the weird thought driving around like … what if my tires just melted? Can that happen? There were two fires visible from our house—one much closer, in Big Bear, and one farther away in Hemet. But still, being able to see two fires, being so hot you don’t want to eat anything except frozen grapes … it was a weird time.

And then it rained. Everywhere! It rained for like 12 hours in LA. It rained day after day in the mountains. One night, I drove all the way up Highway 18 in the craziest pea soup fog, perhaps the lowest visibility I had ever encountered. Which is exciting enough on a flat road, but way more unsettling on hairpin curves a mile up in the sky, with a sheer drop off the side.

Sometimes, a fire just looks like clouds.

And now it’s suddenly full-blown fall. Which is weird, because this whole time, the days in Rimforest have felt like an almost unbroken stream of perfect, dry October days. I guess I had forgotten about that extra cut in the breeze when there’s actual cold mixed into it. But now we have those, and also moody clouds that move in and sock the village in gray light. But the clouds are on eye level. You’re breathing them in.

So we just got a delivery of firewood, is what all of that means. I have to admit, I’m a little bit wary of this whole sudden change in temperatures. It feels ominous. Still beautiful, but well. If you hadn’t gathered from the fires and the fog and the spooky highway (for real: It was a top post recently in the r/oddlyterrifying subreddit), things are extreme. I think of the Overlook Hotel, and a haunting short story by one of my classmates from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where a search-and-rescue skier goes out to a remote cabin in January, and you can kind of tell that he’s going to kill himself, but also a storm comes in and that seems to change his mind, but it’s possibly too late …