Marin Smith
We live, my family and I, in a town of wind. When there is a storm, the trees bustle and boil their limbs in gyres, showing us their regal bending, their tops like subtle pendulums against the clouds. Even without a storm, the wind is usually at its business in this place and from April to October, shoves its way through the gorge and across the river all afternoon. The wind batters the side of our house with the sound of swelling string instruments.
People live here for the wind—for windsurfing, kite boarding, other contraptions created to catch its hand. I didn’t move here for the wind, and neither did my friend who, in a wind storm this past winter, had a tree fall and crush her house. The tree was healthy and monstrous, a tower of deepest greens and browns, and its falling has reasons that only the tree knows—the tree professionals were dumbfounded, chalked it up to bad luck. I can’t imagine how it must have been that night for my friend, the calamity of it. I have only heard a pine fall in the forest once—felt the curiosity and terror hearing the cracking proceeding it, the mind catching up with the event just behind its unfolding, then a crashing thud, a finality, a dread.
I don’t live here for the wind, but for the forest. Over the years I learned forest dwelling means living among everything—a doe and her fawn snorting at me down trail, below, in the grass, the ticks that reach desperately for their warm hides. The outpourings of moss across trunk and stone, the chickadees, the burnt orange newt with her soft-beating throat, and the Himalayan blackberry and Tree of Heaven threatening to choke the lupins, snowberries, and miner’s lettuce. The faithfully repeated calls of the robins and the manic chatter of a threatened mother squirrel. All these multitudes. When I approached the base of the tree that fell in the forest that day, I found it rotted and eaten by giant translucent woodboring beetle larvae. Even these. Even the tree that could have killed me, and very nearly killed my cat, who was balled on the bed for the rest of that afternoon.
***
I’ve tried to figure it out with my friend over glasses of wine in her temporary, small house she shares now with her two children, husband, and person-sized German shepherd, who all, by some miracle, made it out alive. We go over and over the facts: The tree had been pruned, inspected, cared for. It didn’t have downed limbs or a split leader. There’s no thread to trace, no series of events to explain its fall. Why was my friend asleep in her children’s room that night, and not her own, where she may have died in the wreckage? That, at least, has a story—a nightmare, a pattern of sleeplessness, a snuggling habit. The randomness, the occurrence, and her choices leading her to sleep just beyond the tree’s reach—is that the same force, neutral as it sometimes feels, that we call chance? The same chance that caused the tree to fall? Or was it grace, or providence, or fate? What to call it? What we both know, my friend and I, is that once something so unlikely has happened to you, it’s very hard to take statistics with a straight face. Something may be unlikely to happen, but it may happen to you just the same.
***
I took my daughter for a walk in the forest one afternoon in May. My son, just four years old, was at home with my husband with a new fever—too soon to know what it was yet, too soon to know it would bloom into pneumonia, then sepsis, and nearly take his life. The mid-spring walk was a cold stillness set against green, stiffening my skin. I remember we wore knit caps and walked beneath the leaf-cover, the infant growth shimmying high above us in the cottonwoods and maples, the creek tumbling in the ravine far below us.
I can write easily about what the forest felt like that day, before it all unraveled, but when I venture into the days that follow, my heart catches. The single body, my little son, on a white bed. A commonplace illness gone very wrong. The curve of my back over a Pediatric ICU bed. The sound of monitors and snapping IVs. All those terrible moments like hanging from a cliff’s edge, my body nothing but an ache. I myself nearly disappeared then, I was nothing but looking at my son. The memories come in feelings, and occasionally strings of words accompany them: “There’s nothing you could have done to prevent this,” said one nurse, now faceless in my memory; “This is like a lightning strike, a very, very bad bug, very bad luck,” said another, or maybe the same one, just a monolithic nurse-presence that presided over those nights and days. Then, after a pocket of air appeared—a black, joyful blotch on an x-ray—”He’s going to live.”
Three weeks later we were back in our house, and I kept getting the feeling I’d just given birth. In a sense, I had: my son was spared death by the genius of doctors and medical technology, and in that way he was born again. I still ached for him, for us. I brought him into our bed the first night home and barely slept, and the hold music from from the PICU phone line echoed in my ears.
I first heard the music when, on the rare occasion that I left the PICU, I called the nurse every twenty minutes or so to check on my son to ask was he breathing, was he steady, was he awake, did he know I was on my way back very soon?Sometimes, though, it would take the nurse a few minutes to answer, and I’d press the phone against my ear and wait on hold while she changed a sheet or resituated a breathing tube. The hold music was something classical, upbeat, and not a song I’d ever heard before or have identified since.
Except now when I wake up at night next to my son’s growing body, now free of that invasion it suffered—then, the music plays in my head again and again and again. The song sings the agony of those moments away from his bedside, but also the randomness of the event, the net we fell into which was the care of people, the specialists, infectious disease docs, and nurses that somehow got up every day to care for very ill or dying children. The song plays and I feel both free and stricken when I hear it in quiet moments alone.
***
Last night, it was two years exactly since my son was discharged, and my body knew in a way my mind had to catch up with. I woke in the night to a thunderstorm and bouts of wind. I watched the pine and the oak from my window do their careening dance in the dark. I wondered about my friend, tucked in her bed across town, and whether the wind is the music that plays in her head, whether it reminds her of the fall, all through the afternoons of spring and summer. If it returns to her the same way as the little song that runs through my mind.
It occurs to me now: the wind is the song of the forest, which seems to extend to us such indifference and such grace, depending on how we listen to it. If you want to live in the forest, you have to live near trees, trees that may fall in the wind. In the same way, to have a child is to choose risk and love together. There’s only catching the hands of grief and gratitude at once, and living here.
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Marin Smith is a wordwrangler, poet, essayist, mother, and an Enneagram 4. She has an M.A. in English from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and her work has been published in Split Rock Review, Oregon English Journal, CALYX Journal, Wild Roof Journal, Sky Island Journal, Hollow and Sky, and others. You’ll find her in the garden, coffee in hand.