Cabin Fever

“Well,” said my father, staring out at the billowing snow outside our car window, “What you gonna’ do, Boy Scout?”

I sighed, but smiled. For him, those weekly Troop meetings in the dusty basement were about so much more than the merit badges: they were about the spirit of it all, about putting others first. Do a good turn daily wasn’t just a motto for him, it was a lifestyle. I zipped up my coat a little further, opened my door, and walked out into the night.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” I said. “Would you like a hand with that tire?”

The woman had the kind of beautiful lines around her face and silvered hair that only comes with a life long with stories. Her smile bloomed like an orchid as she accepted my offer and I got to work.

It wouldn’t be the last time I felt thankful Dad always made me change our flat tires on family road trips, or for strangers in need, because over the years I would’ve been stranded alone on countless backroads if I had never learned. As much as he instilled the belief in me that when a person needs help, you help them, he made it clear to me that you can never count on some hero to show up for you, so you might as well learn how to change your own damn tire.

I only ever knew one grandparent, and she was the pinnacle of self-reliance. My grandmother was an 88 year old pioneer. She lived alone in her lakeside cabin in rural Montana for as long as I’d been alive. After a long life of seeming immortal, a neighbor of hers told us they were concerned about signs of dementia. When I got the news, I left my job in Missoula and made the three hour drive north to help her through the winter.

Her cabin was near the shore of a beautiful lake, emerald green in the right light, Mediterranean blue in the summer, a frozen sheet of ice covered snow in the winter months. I had spent at least a part of every summer that I could remember there with family, experiencing one right of passage after another.

I learned to swim in the lake as a kid. How to fish and hunt crawdads. How to start a fire and split wood. I learned to drive for the first time on those country roads, how to shoot a rifle at empty soda cans, and then eventually hunted my first deer near the cabin with advice from my grandma on where to go.

The first night I spent at the cabin after the news of her dementia, she came upstairs into the attic where I had set up an inflatable mattress to sleep on. She walked carefully up the stairs at around 2 in the morning, and I heard my car keys jingle as she picked them up off a table.

“Clay?” she called out, sounding confused.

“What’s wrong, Grandma?” I asked, turning on the light.

“Are these,” she said, gesturing with my car keys, “do we use these to turn off the television?”

I knew I would be in for an unforgettable winter.

She nearly burnt down the cabin more than once after I moved in with her. She began leaving the burners on the stove on full blast and the oven on broil with the door open, insisting this was the way she had done it for years. I had to start switching the circuit breakers off when I wasn’t cooking for her.

Walking into the kitchen to make her coffee and breakfast as I did every morning, I watched in disbelief as she dumped powdered bleach into a red hot cast iron pan on the stove. It sizzled and sparked as it hit the pan and a black mushroom cloud of toxic smoke filled the kitchen, burning our nostrils.

I scooped her up in my arms to get her away from the smoke, and by the time we were outside we coughed and wiped our stinging eyes. She looked up at me and gave me a sheepish smile as her nose began to bleed.

I wondered if this was what parenthood had been like for her, raising her four children when she was barely older than a child herself.

We took all of our meals together, and as time went on she told me new variations on old stories, so I tried to ask new questions each time, and always learned something new about her past. My favorite activity together was to put on an old Willie Nelson’s Greatest Hits album she had on her record player and work our way page by page through one of her photo scrapbooks from when she was young.

There were days she couldn’t remember my name, but she could remember all the people and places in those photographs from 50 years ago like it had been yesterday. She spoke with a certain clarity about it that she didn’t have access to in other areas of her life now.

Shortly after we moved her into an assisted living home, she fractured her pelvis in a fall but didn’t remember doing it. My parents were at the end of their rope trying to give her support at the hospital, so I drove over to Helena and spent every day for a month by her bedside while she moaned out in pain and confusion.

She didn’t understand why she was there, or why it hurt to move. She didn’t understand why the physical therapists were making her do things that were painful for her. She had survived the Great Depression, cancer, chemo therapy, diabetes, multiple car crashes, the death of her husband at the hands of some drunk driver on a motorcycle, and endless winters alone in a cabin, but it seemed her own mind was the greatest risk to her health now.

I convinced one of the nurses to let me bring my puppy in to see her in her room, as she had asked me about him every time I came in to see her. When the nurses agreed, I brought in my pup, just a year old or so at the time, and he jumped up onto her bed to lick her face while she laughed one of the most joyful laughs I’ve ever heard in my life.

A few days later, I came into her room to say goodbye for the last time. I put on Willie Nelson’s “Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain” from my phone for her to listen to, although she hadn’t opened her eyes in two days. I held her weathered, calloused hand in my own and let the song play all the way through, watching her chest slowly rise and fall while we listened to the music together.

When it was done, I told her everything I needed to tell her, and then I left the hospital, Willie Nelson’s bittersweet vibrato echoing in my heart.