Becoming An Island

A short story

Photo by Randy Laybourne on Unsplash

Winter was late. It was already December and not a single snowflake had drifted groundward. Frank Harris was looking into the clear night sky. He was happy for the beautiful days and warm springish air, but it made him nervous. The illusion. The waiting. 

For the thirty years since he first moved into the tiny mountain town of Gold Leaf, the snow had come before Thanksgiving. Some years it even came before Halloween, and in one particularly bad cold snap, the first day of school had to be cancelled on account of a surprise blizzard that engulfed the town for three days and nights.

Tourists on their way to Breckenridge were stranded on the highway, and the locals opened up the school as a refuge for those poor travelers.

“You never can tell,” and “That’s Colorado for you,” had been offered up as words of comfort to the sea levelers who were in shock at summer snow. Not everyone was made to live at 10,000 feet, and there were more than a few of those tourists that chose not to visit the local real estate office after all.

Frank liked that about mountain living. It kept the tourists coming. They got their ooo’s and ahhh’s in, but on closer inspection, learning of the dirt roads and the deathly winter storms, they went quietly. Smiles dampened by the news that living here was beautiful but hard. In a day when most cities in Colorado were sprawling, demanding more water and resources and mucking up the place, Gold Leaf was still pristine.

Despite the name there was no gold. Nothing of value that demanded you cut down the trees and break up the earth. There was skiing, and white water rafting, and golden aspens in the fall. It was a nice pass through in the summer, a photo op on the way to bigger and better things.

Frank liked meeting people who came, liked to see them at the pivotal moments in their life’s journey. A honeymoon road trip, an anniversary adventure, a first ski trip with the kids. He had even met a few travelers who were carrying the ashes of a loved one, looking for somewhere beautiful to scatter their bone dust. A last hurrah to represent the end of the line. He would lead them to the quiet place along streams and mountain rivers. Give them a place to do their grieving in the places where he had done his.

He liked all that just fine, but if someone asked him what he liked best of all, it was winter. The highway could be treacherous. The flow of cars full of ski equipment and families was steady when the weather was good and the roads were clear, but when storms came, the town was enveloped in misty quiet. Him and the locals were alone in a world of snow and ice, transported out of the modern world into the early frontier days.

On days like that he would load up his wood burning stove with dry firewood and old newspaper. He would drink his coffee black and steaming, and read his books before heading out on snowy morning hikes with Blanche. She was his old black lab that had gone white in the face around two years back.

He never brought her lead because he never encountered hikers there. The woods were empty. He could pretend he was alone in a frost world that had cast a spell on all the people in all the towns. He could see them slumped at breakfast tables. Tea kettles screaming to a silent snoring house. Husbands and wives asleep in their beds, never to wake without a hero. Toddlers drooling with toy cars clasped in their chubby fingers. All in a deep sleep. In a fairytale. 

The woods are lovely dark and deep.

But there were no promises to keep. Frank had retired five years earlier, at the ripe old age of 58. He didn’t have a lot to live on, but the cabin was paid off and the alimony payments had quit just before he retired. In fact, it was the sudden halt of those payments that finally catapulted him into financial freedom.

He heard the news that his ex had died early on a Monday morning. She lived down in the Springs and drove up to Denver near daily for some hot shot executive job she had worked her way up to. Frank never bothered remembering the company name. They had been divorced for near ten years, but they had lived apart for longer than that.

She went out the way she always wanted to, in a blaze of glory. She told Frank in the early days that she imagined it would be in a sky diving accident. Or death by crocodile in a river in Africa. In the end though, it was a sleepy truck driver who wandered gingerly into her lane, grinding her little silver Audi into the concrete barrier for a half mile before he woke up and overcorrected. That overcorrection caused the tanker to slide sideways, the force of friction against the tires tipping the cylinder of gasoline he was towing onto its side.

It was dragged sparking another mile or so before the gas glugged out, and poor Maureen’s car, marred and dragged along with it, went up in flames when the fumes combusted. Frank hadn’t liked Maureen since about a year into their marriage. At times he even hated her. But he was proud that when he heard the news, he took no joy in it. If it had happened closer to the divorce his feelings would have been different. As it stood though, time had made him a better man. The mountains had made him a better man.

That morning, he wandered into the Pikes Peak Ranger Station in a daze, and announced to his boss that he would be retiring. It took a few months. Frank stayed on for the summer and helped train his replacement, but by the fall of 2016, he was done working. He knew some men, and he imagined some women too, had a hard time when they retired. After a lifetime of focus on family and career, a life to yourself could be difficult to start.

Frank and Maureen never had kids. It was a part of what drew them to one another in the first place. She didn’t want any, and he couldn’t give her any. At least that’s what he told her. In truth, he was infertile not because of God or nature. He had a vasectomy as soon as he turned eighteen. Infertile by choice, and that decision never haunted him.

As it turned out, neither did early retirement. Frank valued two things in his life above all else: freedom and solitude. He liked people okay, but he liked being alone better, and retirement in a small cabin surrounded by national forest suited him just fine. He went into town to eat dinner at the local diner, played pool at the bar most weeknights, and helped dig his neighbors out of the snow when they needed. He was helpful and friendly, but he kept to himself. 

It’s true that one thing can mean two things at one time. For Frank Harris, his way of life, which had given him so much in the way of peace, had another edge to it. The friendly man may pick up a hitchhiker. A bad one at that. His goodness can open up a path to badness. An empath unguarded can lay the road for the psycho. Think of all the ladies that carried Ted Bundy’s belongings to his van. Helped a wounded animal (because that’s what he was, just not in the way they thought). Think of how that turned out for them. 

You try to do something nice for somebody. See where that gets you.