Sometimes I think about how strange living where I do really is. Stopping to think is sometimes a mistake that puts things in perspective.
I feel relatively secure in my home of 8000, but it’s dead silent by 9 pm. It’s eerie. It’s beautiful. The same people walk down the same streets at the same time every day. The same voices ring out through the streets.
Drive 20 minutes in any direction and you’ll be in the middle of nowhere. Even in the heart of town, you can hear the foxes screaming. Your landlord is gouging you, probably, but you’re thankful for the utilities being included both in the blisteringly still and hot summer and in the winter nights when the wind howls.
You go into the national forest for research, and time stops. It’s too silent, then it’s too loud. Your car won’t start. The service is so bad that even an emergency call won’t go through. You’d better hope a satellite phone will work.
The lake sometimes spits out logs from the fever pitch of the logging era. They are always identical. If you talk about the lake, mention that you love history, everyone has stories. Everyone talks about the one November storm, and you think it’s a gimmick until they say their brother, husband, best friend was on that ship. You witness your first November storm and suddenly you respect the lake as an entity.
The tourists come for a few months, then the town goes to sleep for the rest of the year. They all ask the same questions, trying to hide their unease. Is this local? Where’s the ranger station?Do we need bear spray? Does the weather really change that quickly? How do you survive in the winter?
They say, wow, I could never live up here. They say, it’s so old fashioned. They say, we have to get out of here before we can’t leave.
