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1999 Essay Contest Winners

    For your on-line enjoyment, Tiny Lights presents the winners of the 5th Annual Personal Essay Contest. We hope that you are sufficiently moved by the words themselves to order the contest issue for $3. In this way, you will enjoy the work as it was meant to be presented, and provide vital support to the small press community. Make checks payable to

Tiny Lights Publications, P.O. Box 928, Petaluma, CA 94953
 

First Prize $200

Softball
by
Susan Hagen

     The braces on my teeth were the reason my parents said no to girls' summer softball. Never mind that there wasn't much else to do in our rural valley town while the sun was busy killing off all the grass. Never mind that summer was softball, or how badly I needed to belong. "That's my fur coat you're wearing on your teeth," my mother said. "That's my trip to Hawaii for the next ten years. I won't have it be all for naught." 
     So I didn't beg to play, and I didn't ask again. Instead, I became a lone figure circling the playing fields on my cousin's outgrown bike, the silver in my mouth weighing me down like a debt I'd never be able to repay. 
     Late afternoons I rolled my bike down the driveway and began my rounds behind the backstops of forbidden softball worlds, steering a crooked path over chalky beds of broken eucalyptus and bricks of hardened earth. Past the pop-up fouls and sprained fingers of the fifth and sixth graders. Beyond the line drives and sifting grit of junior high girls sliding into the bags. Around the wide perimeters of the high school, where older girls stretched silk-screened shirts across stiff new bras and wore cut-offs trimmed to the water line. 
     Everywhere I rode were the sounds of me being left out. Even from the silent covered walkways of the primary school I could hear the children I'd known since kindergarten growing up without me. I skimmed past the windowed doors of my first and second grade classrooms, looped around the monkey bars, crisscrossed the buckled asphalt playground where I'd learned to play jacks and shoot marbles with these same girls. I practiced the slalom around naked stands of tether ball poles, traced the foul lines for dodge ball and foursquare with my wide balloon tires. Time had moved me beyond these innocent games of the past, and I was exiled from all relevant contests of the present. Because I couldn't lay claim to softball, I held no hope for a future inside those tight little knots of comrades whose lives intersected on the dying lawns of summer. I didn't belong to them. I didn't belong to anyone or anything but a self-sacrificing mother and a mouthful of costly orthodontia. I rode until the games were finished, the diamonds settled in dust. I rode my tires bald. 
     The summer I turned fifteen, the bands came off my teeth and I was fitted with a plastic retainer that clung to the roof of my mouth like hot grilled cheese. While the other girls were signing up for softball and oiling down their mitts, I applied for a job at the hamburger stand at the four-way stop in town. I had a work permit and a good reference from my school counselor, but what appealed to Floyd most about hiring me was that he wouldn't have to make my schedule around softball. 
     As the days fell away and evenings turned to dusk, I watched whole neighborhoods of kids spill out of station wagons and pick-up trucks to form ragged lines at my takeout window. They pushed and pulled at each other, picked at scabs on their elbows, and whether or not they'd won that night, threw their caps to the sky in a fountain of team color. Their energy broke through the portals of the Frostie like anxious bees breaching the screen to orbit the root beer taps. For that one hectic hour, I too, tasted the sweetness of softball, fielding orders for hot dogs and firing off chocolate-dipped cones as if I were pitching for the major leagues. 
     But then the rush was over, and I was left alone with a tired old man to flush out the ice cream machine and pick up the trash and chase sugar-sick insects with a dirty plastic flyswatter. 
 I was thirty-two years old before I played on a softball team, a women's league in San Francisco that promised "noncompetitive fun for inexperienced players." I borrowed a friend's mitt and bought a pair of canvas shoes with rubber cleats, took a bus to practice and worried about getting hit in the mouth. 
     The women on my team spit and swore, smoked cigarettes, iced down swollen knees with cold cans of Bud. They didn't care that I swung at the ball with my eyes closed, that I was afraid to get under a fly. Never mind that I stood in right field and wept like there was no bottom to my well of sorrow and joy. "A team is a team," they said. "We're glad you're here." 
      As we crowded into the coach's Toyota after our first big game, I burrowed into the warm tangle of arms and legs like a contented pup. A steamy mix of wet grass and women's sweat rose inside the car, brewing in the afterglow of softball. Someone popped the last Bud and as it passed from hand to hand, I inhaled the tangy, fermented scent of a team that finally belonged to me. I ran my tongue along the edges of my mother's fur coat and tasted the beer on her tickets to Hawaii. 
 

Susan Hagen is a freelance writer and volunteer firefighter in Freestone, California. 

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    If you walk with me through my comfortable California neighborhood of 1950's Eichler homes, you will see many yards which are neat to a fault, many entirely landscaped with little zones of different colored landscaping rock. You might even encounter, as I once did, someone in protective clothing, holding a small tank of pesticide and leaning over to spray a solitary rose bush growing amid a sea of landscape stone. But you will still see wild acreage, too-a large modern cemetery and a smaller pioneer cemetery where the town's founding fathers and mothers lie. Forty acres of flood-control buffer, dotted with California live oaks, lie right next to my home. These are plots of land which will never be developed. 
    Deer roam here. So do raccoons, skunks, and possum. At dusk a pair of foxes streaks through my yard, headed for the field. Hawks wait high in the wild oaks, scanning for prey in the grasses below. I love the incongruity of it. I love standing at my sink to wash dishes when something unusual in scale passes by-too large for a dog, no, it's a doe and two yearlings gliding soundlessly past my window, noses pointing toward the field, unhurried. I rest better at night knowing these deer are sleeping up by my kids' old playhouse, exhaling softly in their grassy nests on the hill. I never tire of this gift and the small stab of pleasure it gives. 
    My grandmother had a favorite saying: "The eye wants something, too." She said this when she met a person whose homeliness was just too much to overcome, when she craved something aesthetically pleasing, with symmetry. I have adapted her proverb to my own use. What my eye wants in my town life is that flash of wildness or animal beauty. I need it for my survival, like water. When I drive home after dark, I take care to cruise slowly up my street, my eyes watchful, because I know I'll get a payoff, maybe a buck standing in my front yard with a mouthful of hydrangea. I ease into my driveway so I don't turn any of these nocturnal prowlers into roadkill. 
    For several years now I've enjoyed seeing this flash of wildness near the Mom and Pop market in a small cluster of shops near my home. TC (for Town and Country) is a cat who was likely born feral in the pioneer cemetery before she came to lurk behind the market to glean scraps in the dumpster. Eventually, the merchants and the waiters from the Italian restaurant grew fond of her. Forgotten Felines heard about her and provided food and water dishes under the newspaper stand in a quiet corner. 
    "TC is smarter than most people I know," said the pimply clerk in the market when I inquired about her. We realized she'd never become domesticated enough to become an actual store cat, perched on the counter, schmoozing with customers. 
    I won TC over slowly, stopping by with paper cups of kibble and a kind word whenever I needed one green pepper from the market, or a jar of capers. She'd sniff my tires and sit under my car, realizing I was a cat-friendly person. I valued the TC sightings, and if I saw her stretched out, sunning herself on the warm pavement, I'd pull over and whisper, "I'm glad we're neighbors." 
If my daughter was along, she'd say, "You're crazy," with that mix of alarm, embarrassment and love that daughters reserve for their mothers. Eventually, TC let me pet her, but she always cringed when I reached for her. She was that wary. 
    I understand wary. It suits my temperament. I have five misfit cats whose nasty habits would gladden the heart of Mick Jagger. They race through the house hissing and sniffing each other's bottoms. They're either feral or were dropped off in the field, and have good reason to distrust humans. One of them spent the entire holiday season sitting with his back to us on the felt Christmas tree skirt, staring at the wall. He's the same one who occasionally sprays the wall phone. Burl, an old tom with ears serrated from too much fighting, is the friendliest. He watches me dance with something akin to devotion in his eyes. Then he slinks outside to stalk, pounce, and kill. A gray female, edgier than an addict, lets me scratch her flat little cobra head but grabs my wrist in her sharp teeth if I go on too long. I find it endearing that my pets strenuously avoid eye contact and struggle when I pick them up. It's as if they are saying, "Too much love. I can't take any more than that." The metaphor is not lost on me. I'm honored I can touch them. I'm a bit edgy about love myself. 
    Last spring everything changed at the neighborhood market. A local grocer bought it, gutted it, and started rebuilding it with fixtures that were Wonderful and Upscale. It was clear the market was moving beyond Sedate, beyond Swanson's frozen turkey pies, beyond customers who strolled over from nearby homes, leaning on their canes. I resented this change and worried about the impact on TC. With roofing contractors working all night, cement mixers whirring, and backhoes careening around like bumper cars, how would she fare? I never saw her when I drove by, although her dishes were still there. I consoled myself by thinking about how smart the clerk said she was, smarter than most people he knew. 
    The market reopened in the fall. I went to check it out, along with a whole new energetic demographic. Gone were the dowagers still emitting a faint beep of 1940's glamour who had accounts there. Gone was the pimply clerk, replaced by some pretty, preppy ones. I suspect I was less pleased with the remodel than some of the curious new customers, who were wearing Very Good Shoes and ecstatic expressions. The deli cases were filled with polenta and lasagna and crab cakes and pasta salad and even tuna wiggle, comfort foods I would never buy because I find joy in making them myself. A woman customer was buying a roasted range chicken for herself, and a second roasted non-range chicken for her dog. I felt I had touched down in the Land of the Spoiled. 
    TC sightings remained rare. Late-model cars, minivans, and sport vehicles with huge tires whipped in and out of the parking spaces at all hours of the day and night. When I visited the market right after Christmas, I saw men wearing new shirts their wives and girlfriends probably ordered from one of the better catalogs. Shirts of good flannel, many with a moose motif. I felt the familiar derision I reserve for things too cute. I know these men as the movers and shakers of my town, but I had to warn them inwardly not to move it or shake it in my direction, because I'd begun to feel hostile and offended by their jocularity. 
    Outside, TC's newspaper stand and dishes had been moved to a more heavily trafficked location on the other side of the market. When I called her, she approached me with her plaintive meow. She cringed, but let me scratch her. I noticed her winter coat had grown in thickly to protect her from the winter chill. 
    But the next time I drove by, I saw little jars of flowers and folded tributes where TC's feeding dishes had once been. This is how I learned that she'd been squashed by one of those late evening shoppers, perhaps picking up some sushi or ready-to-eat baby back ribs. I went right home and broke down. I cried a lot over the next day or two, and I suspect the grief goes deeper than TC, but she's a good place to start 
    "TC was the only good thing about that market," I said to my daughter. 
    "You're crazy," she said softly. 

Jane Love lives in Sonoma County, CA, with her children, and works for an independent bookstore.

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    Sometimes I think I want a chance to do it all over again. To go back thirty years and start anew with those four boys who grew up with me as their mother, to see if I can get it right this time. This time, I want to sit on my front porch while they run through the sprinkler, their sopping hair plastered flat against their skulls, water dripping off their faces as they shout at me to watch them. I want to wrap a shivering boy in a big dry towel, rub it quickly across his skinny arms and over his wet head before he squirms away back to the sprinkler, his nose running and his lips turning blue despite the August sun. I want to feel the cold dampness on my T-shirt where he has just been leaning, and I want to never turn off the sprinkler until they are all through playing in it. 
    I know there aren't any second chances, and most of the time I don't really want one. Most of the time I'm ecstatic that it's over and done with, that we all came out of it alive. But I wonder why the regret still rattles around inside me after all these years, refusing to go away. I wonder just what it is I can do about any of it now. I wonder if that isn't the worst of it: knowing there's nothing I can do about it now. 
    You will ask, and I will tell you, "Yes, I did raise four boys by myself." Then with a little chuckle I will say something rueful like, "Kids! God, I wasn't sure I was going to live through it." You will nod your head, smile, and make your own chuckling sound. It's about then that I will want to lean in a bit closer to you, put my hand on your arm, and say this: "No, listen. I really mean it. I wasn't sure I was going to live through it." Of course, I do not do that. It would be so impolite to tell you about the fear that sat on my chest suffocating me for twenty years-the fear that was so like grief it woke me in the middle of the night and held me gasping for air until morning. 
    You do not, I am sure, want to hear anything about that fear, or the world it lives in. The world with the hidden chasms and the sharp precipices where sheer perseverance is the only thing keeping you from skidding right into the danger and over the edge. Where, for just the briefest of moments, you think it might be just fine to careen over the edge and float gently free, but then you imagine your children hurtling past you, arms flailing, and you remember that it is you who must keep them from spinning out of control like that, keep them from disappearing. So, at the very last minute, you fling out your hands and hang on. 
    But what is it you hang onto when everything is crumbling and disintegrating and falling away from you, no matter what you do? What do you grab then? What do you clutch for when you run into the house with the screaming two-year-old who has stepped barefoot onto a chunk of broken glass, while his twin, left unattended, wanders into the garage, picks up the plastic cup of kerosene and drinks it, and the other children see him turn red and sit down crazily on the paint brushes, his mouth open, but no sound coming from it? How do you hang onto the boy with the bleeding foot while you scoop up the one who has stopped breathing? What do you cling to except this child's limp body as you scream your address into the telephone, and they ask you for the nearest intersection, but that word means nothing to you; your mind will not settle on it, and you know that means this boy will die while you try to figure out "intersection," and it will be all your fault. It will be all your fault that you're twenty-four years old and have these children to take care of, and it's your fault that you don't know how. It will be your fault that you will have to spend the rest of your life saying, "I had twins, but one of them died." What are you going to hang onto after the paramedic grabs your son and drives away with him, sirens wailing and lights flashing? 
    In this world, the problem isn't simply what you're going to hang onto, but how to keep everyone else from hanging onto you. Like the twin with the cut foot who wants to hang onto you all day long, wants to be carried everywhere, whose whimpering causes little cords of anger to tighten in your neck. Or the other twin, who did not die, who did not even have his stomach pumped, but who did develop chemical pneumonia forty-eight hours later, just as the doctor said he might: "Watch for lethargy, a fever, excessive tiredness." The child who, right on schedule, has a fever and falls asleep eating his lunch, a piece of peanut butter sandwich still in his mouth. This boy who also wants to hang onto you, wants only you to comfort him, reaches his hands out for you to pick him up, and you feel the hot, dry skin of his face and hear the breath rattling in his chest. 
    The uninjured other boys, wild-eyed with jealousy and fear that you have forgotten them, clutch at you, and you think you feel small bits of yourself scattering around the room. You wonder if it's possible to literally fall apart, but you understand there is no time to do that, and you know that no one would ever find all the pieces if you did. 
    That world. That's the one you don't want to hear about. Because eventually it doesn't matter whether there's time enough or not: you grow weary and do, in fact, scatter all over the place. The first time it happens, you search frantically for the pieces, certain that you must scoop them all up and put them back into just the right places. But, soon you forget what it is you are searching for; you fumble, astonished at how easy it is to let go and feel the bits drifting away from you. 
It is not as easy for the children. They have a harder time believing they have a mother they cannot hang onto, one who sifts right through their fingers when they reach for her; they are not willing to quit clutching at the empty space where she is supposed to be. The din of their protest is deafening, the clamor of outrage is everywhere, and it crashes into you endlessly. 
    You do not know how to find any peace, any quiet in this life, or any way to stop struggling endlessly with one child or another. You do not know what they want, and even if you did, you do not know how to give it to them. You do not know how to keep the world from teetering like this, and you do not know anything any longer about joy. 
    Until the day you suddenly do know. The day they are fighting and screaming and hitting and pushing and punching and yelling, and they will not stop. The day you slap whoever is close enough to slap, and they throw things and smash things, and the older ones hurt the younger ones and smile when they do it. You order the oldest to his room, pushing him, batting the back of his head as he twists away from you and stands defiantly in the hall, refusing to go. You grab that boy, wanting to hurt him, to make him do what you say, to stop resisting, to go into that room before you beat him until he cannot twist away from you, cannot defy you any longer. He is eight years old, and you see the hatred in his face. You feel it in your own. 
    You are absolutely certain you cannot keep that despair, that anger, that sorrow in your belly any longer. You understand, suddenly, with a clarity so intense that it is the only thought worth thinking-the only thing that makes any sense at all-that you can stop doing this: you can stop raising these children. The sharp jolt of happiness makes the fear leak out until you are light and airy, until you are completely empty and can see clearly how easy it is to fix everything. You turn to the boys and say, "I'm not going to be your mother anymore." 
    If you had not stopped to wonder who would cook the hamburger thawing on the counter, or who would take the laundry from the dryer, if you had simply picked up the car keys and walked out the front door right then, you would have made it. You could have been hundreds of miles down the freeway before you thought about the looks on their faces or registered the alarm in their voices. If you had been brave enough and quick enough, you would never have seen the confusion in the eyes of the four-year-old, would not have noticed that he was sucking his thumb and looking at you with such longing that you recognized the pain of his loss and knew it was worse than your despair. 
    But that was all years ago. Maybe you're remembering it wrong, maybe these young men with children of their own, homes in the suburbs, degrees from graduate schools-maybe it was all just fine for them. It would be good to know that it was fine for someone, that one or two, or perhaps all four of them are perfectly content with their childhoods. Maybe they never worried for a moment that you would vanish completely, maybe they believed you would always be able to fling out your hands and hang on. Maybe they thought you could do that forever, thought that you were supposed to do that. 
    You will not ask them what they thought. You will not talk to them about those years. It is, you know, best to leave it alone. You will continue to invite them to Thanksgiving dinner, and to bring the walnut brownies to the barbecues. You will give them their baby shoes from the box in the basement when their first sons are born, and you will hold those babies and remark how much like their fathers they look. You will watch them playing with their children-see that they have time to love their children-and you will think about those little bits of you that got lost back there somewhere. You will think again about how foolish you were not to have hung on tighter or longer or with more determination, what a mistake you made not to keep looking until you found all the scattered pieces. You will feel the regret rattling around inside you, and you will realize you still do not know what to do about it. 
 

Marsha Weese, native Seattle-ite, accountant, mother of four, and grandmother of five, recently realized a life-long goal by completing an English degree at the University of Washington. This is her first publication. 

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    November 1929. The month, the year of the birthing of the Great Depression. Harsh times, fearsome times, with no end in sight. The house in all its pretensions stood idle, alone on an empty Ohio plain, the glass of its facade aglare, orange and red in glancing moments when the descending sun shot through the heavy winter gloom. Once finished, the contractor packed it up, packed it in, and fled into the unknown uneconomy; his carpenters and masons gone too, on their long wait for the good times to roll again. Years would pass before men took up tools again. 
    Because of the times, the house, with its sweeping circular stair and air of distinction, sold at less than cost to my optimistic father and houseproud mother. A bargain, it satisfied my mother's craving for substance and style, and my father's rosy projections. When winter broke and the earth began to thaw, we set to work with bulbs and seeds and young trees, the beginnings of  new life for the three of us, parents and five-year-old. A row of poplars to the south, small trees and tall trees joining in the east, with honeysuckle and spirea and such interspersed, enclosed the land. Across the lawns, graced by gentle willows in long tearful weep, and more spirited Queen Anne cherries, grew a scatter of white birches, dogwood, lilac, and lesser flowering shrubs. Iris and low-growing shrubs braced the flag stone paths and pranced across the front. Sweet beds of lily of the valley framed a doorstep at the side. Nothing could obscure the rise of the house-our house, our land. 
    Later, from the woods and creekside not far away, I brought violets, Johnny Jump Ups and other wild flowers which flourished in the soft spring. I found Indian arrowheads, ax heads, left behind by the wandering tribes in the boggy fields. More than once I brought home baby mice, and tried with warm milk to nourish the pulsing, translucent beings, their whole life shining through to me. They did not thrive, and I forgot them as quickly as I could, but I've never lost the magic sight and the mystery of their struggle for life. 
    Heavy fogs sometimes rose from the damp ground in the humid autumns, or in the mix of seasons.    Riding home in the Essex one night when I was seven or eight, I could barely see my talismanic sign, a green billboard with a smiling man in a hunting cap and red and black shirt. Around him was the legend "Nature in the Raw is Seldom Mild. Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco!" His legend was my mantra. This giant, good-humored man looked to hold nature at bay and assured me of safety and privacy, my freedom and power through the wintry brume. When my mother and I could see nothing of the road ahead, I leaned out the window, to catch sight of the curb and direct my mother in our homeward creep. 
    We did not know that we would live there in our lonely way, that the house in its green grove would stand alone on the empty plain for fifteen years, nor that early on the house would come to creak and groan, subsiding fraction by infinite fraction into the living marshy soil. Hairline cracks appeared in the walls, now here, then everywhere. 
    During these years, lightning shattered a willow tree and came inside another time to char a lamp in my bedroom, awakening me into the thunder clap. A puff of smoke, then silence and the reek of ozone. A bluejay drilled a wound in the shoulder of my cat as he clung high in the locust tree, sawing away at the gaudy plumage of the savage bird. The circular wound did not fester, but closed only gradually, a small mouth growing into an ever smaller O over moving muscles. 
    Meanwhile, poplars and willows in subterranean ways abetted the early Roto-Rooter industry. Snakes nested in the ivy on the north and south sides of the house; the terrier was invited to catch those that tumbled into the fireplace. We held the door wide for her to carry them outside to whip and splash their insides in a bloody arc high in the air. The cat brought home damaged goods, terrified rabbits, quail, only a few of which I could save. 
    The house continued to slip upon its moorings. My father brought house jacks and steel beams, summoned his National Guard troops and paid them to heave and haul upon the house and its fundaments. The dog worried, fast clicking and scat dancing back and forth across the tilting floors. The cat went out to watch in safety as the floors pitched and yawed above the sweating men. For a moment, the antique organ in the dining room looked caught in space, gathering itself to attack the piano in the living room. My mother wrung her hands. She with all her chattels, those cherished defenses, found herself helpless in the grip and gritty determination of my father and his troops. More a mediator than the cat, I remained inside. Below, the men inserted steel beams across the fundament to support the floors and then, coming upstairs, re-applied plaster and paint. But we sensed in silence an impermanence to our cosmetics and amendments. Ever less sure-footed than sailors, we three never trusted our footing again. 
    After my father and I were gone to war, my father in 1939, called by duty, and I, just twenty, by a yearning for a free world in early 1945, the parallel of the failing family came center front. Belated depositions of divorce began, for there were no steel beams across the fundament to reinforce the marriage, the family. Soon thereafter, like one of the costs of war, my mother sold the house and moved to an older neighborhood within the city. Truth to tell, my father and I were in the throes of rampant idealism, while all three of us hoped, worked and looked forward to new lives and a better world. 
    It may be that the new buyers brought a harmony, which attuned the house to the land, for the house neither sank nor collapsed. On my last ever visit, in 1978, to bring my aging mother to live with me in California, I drove by the house. It still stood, nearly fifty years old, crowded by smaller houses in an inelegant suburb, where the ranch-style newcomers sat far more lightly, made fewer demands on the land. I can see it still. 
    For years after the sign was gone, the legend that "Nature in the Raw is Seldom Mild" comforted me, supported me in my assumption that we had, so to speak, "cooked nature," regulated it, allowing us to maintain our ignorance of the questions posed by the land and our society. I did not understand that the three of us in that house were receiving lessons on life's power and capacity for chaos, lessons about our small colony, our family and consciousness, on society's misorderings, and our own blindsides. 
    Today, more than ever, in my bones I sense a living presence beneath that house, the presence of native Erl Kings, Native American bog men and women, turning quietly now and then in their long sleep, generations dead but still in their powers, perfectly preserved in ancient swamps beneath the house and beneath the fields and woods where I found the infant mice, the arrowheads, the stone axes, and the wildflowers. My bogmen and women, these fierce Chippewas, wandering Sanduskies, Wyandots of the Huron tribe, noble men and women of the Scioto and Olentangy rivers, may rise again, exert their prior claim, and put an end to our illusions of power and prescience and control. 

Pat Rea is a WWII veteran with expat. time in Frankfurt, Paris, Mexico D.F. 
Longer stint in San Francisco as librarian and political progressive. 
1994: licensed herself to write. Magic. 

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    Since the baby came along, my dog, Blondie, a sixty pound Chesapeake Bay Retriever, has become jealous and mopey. Seeking to patch up our relationship, I take her on a circuit of the Scott's Bottom nature park. We walk on old snow criss-crossed with animal tracks. Blondie bounds through the underbrush, following deer and rabbit scents, while a conspiracy of magpies squawk and scissor in the nude cottonwoods. We bask in the January high pressure. The previous night was bitterly cold, but by late afternoon, the still air warms to thirty-five or forty degrees -tropical for Wyoming. 
    Last summer's dried grasses compliment the hues of the buttes and palisades that rise along the Green River. The nineteenth century creeps up behind me and catches me daydreaming-imagining how it might be to live in this bottomland in a stone or sod house, raise livestock, and practice the virtue of self-sufficiency. Such is the beauty of the afternoon that it obliterates the patent insanity of this idea: within a few hours the mercury will dip below zero; Blondie and I have no business with cows, chickens, hogs and goats; and old-style husbandry would mean even more hard work. 
    On the way back to the truck, we amble along the river. The surface is largely frozen now and snow-covered, although in a few open mid-stream stretches it flows almost black in the afternoon 
light. Old snow and dark water mimic the two-tones of the raucous magpies. The chromatic contrast also shows up in the heads-goofy white eyes on a curved inky field-of a pair of grebes that dabble and float in the open water. Ever the gun dog, Blondie deer-bounds after the grebes, hits the water with legs outstretched, and sends up silvery spray. The grebes scatter. 
    Stupid headstrong dog! I shout after her but she ignores me. The open water stretches two hundred yards long by fifteen wide. She then hears my whistle and tries to slither, walrus-like, out of the water and onto the ice. No use. It's been frigid for three nights; the ice is diamantine. 
    The dark current carries her along. At the foot of the open reach the ice curves around, and I hope that maybe the ice shelf will be wide enough that she'll be able to climb out. But the curving shelf offers no purchase, and now the current threatens to pull her under the ice. 
    I've floated this stretch of the Green many times, and I know how deep it flows. Out there where she's paddling, the river would be over my head. 
    "Come on, Blondie! Come on!" 
    My voice feels small and tight. Helpless, I watch. A couple of vehicles pass on the one-lane river bridge-but it's a long way away, and I'm sure they think nothing of my predicament, just someone staring at the river. I think about what I have in the truck: not enough rope-even if I could lasso her-a roadside emergency kit-no help here-and no cell phone. I recall a recent newspaper story and photos in which two brave souls from the Game and Fish rescued a deer trapped in similar straits, but there's not enough time to go for help. And anyway, who would risk his life to rescue a foolish dog? I want to yell for help, but there's no one around, and although I can see two hundred houses and an elementary school up on the palisades, down here at the river's edge, I am alone with my panic and fear. 
    "Blondie. Blondie, come on, girl." 
    She whistles and whimpers as she vainly paws and claws the ice. I sense that she's losing strength and warmth, and that I'm going to be forced to watch my dog die. 
    Not knowing what else to do, I run up and down the bank looking for something. I think about my newborn son, my daughters, my wife. This situation reminds me too much of the other times I've danced with Death and gotten away with it-the list is long, and I don't even want to think about it. I simply can't risk crossing the ice to pull out a dog. "Green River Man Dies Trying to Save Hound." I lost a friend to hypothermia as a result of a boating accident on Great Salt Lake ten years ago-I know what cold water can do. Yet I also realize that if I do nothing, the memory of this sickening spectacle will haunt me always. 
    Now it's happening. Her muskrat-brown head is all I can see against the ebony flow. 
But all computation, all factoring fades when I find a twenty-foot gray cottonwood snag on the bank-maybe I can do something with it. I slide the snag along the bank and point it onto the frozen river. Blondie is maybe forty-five or fifty feet out. I stomp on the ice, all ears. It holds; it means nothing. Hating every second of it, seeing the headline, I skid the snag toward the dog. 
    Yes, I am aware that if I go in, no one will see me, and I will not survive. I am aware of that. This is not the time to think. This is only the time to react. I am watching myself. I am watching myself inching along. One foot on snow, slide, one foot on tree, slide. At least by straddling the snag my weight is distributed-it might give me something to grab if I go in. 
    Finally, the top end of the snag reaches the edge of the ice and dangles over the open water. I try to hook it around her collar. Branches snap-nothing doing. Her golden eyes show dully with fatigue. She tries again and again to free herself, thumping the ice with her front legs. 
    Having come this far, I now feel the cold caress of commitment clench me up all over. What difference does a few feet make? I slither to the edge of the ice, reach out, grab her ear, then her collar, and yank her out of the current and onto the ice. I then drag her along the tree, toward the bank and safety. 
    Her hips have seized up from the cold-paralysis accompanies hypothermia. Shaking and listless, her dewclaws and paws are bloody from the ice. I carry her to the truck. Once inside, with the heater blasting, her soak and my sweat turns the cab into a steamroom. Though still shivering, Blondie begins to revive somewhat and lick her hurt paws. I decide to skip the vets and give her a hot bath and rubdown at home. I need to be home right now. 
    An hour later she's stretched out on the kitchen floor, eyeing some Fig Newtons on the counter. Her shivering has ceased. I want somehow to explain to my solicitous daughters, as they pat the curly-haired, thick-headed dog-"Oh, poor Blondie!"-and to my wife, who doesn't need to know all the details, how it is that sometimes we take a slim and sudden chance to be a fool for love. 

Kevin Holdsworth lives in Green River, Wyoming. He teaches at Western Wyoming College. His work has been published in Petroglyph and Owen Wister Review.

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