Ashfall

I sat up, buttoned my shirt and pants, and pulled the blanket over my shoulders. The blizzard continued to vent its fury on the world outside our bridge. As I watched, Darla materialized amid the white flakes, carrying an armload of wet wood.

I helped her feed the fire. We started with twigs, adding them slowly so that the ice and snow clinging to the branches wouldn’t extinguish the embers. As we worked, I said, “You saved my life. Again.”

She shrugged.

“Thanks.”

Soon we had the fire roaring, and I’d warmed up. I wrapped myself in the blanket and stepped out into the blizzard. Every few steps, I looked back. The scene under the bridge grew dimmer and dimmer as I walked away. After twenty steps, all I could make out was the hazy orange glow of the fire. I decided not to go any farther. It would be too easy to lose my way in the snowstorm and wind up lost or in the river again.

I peed against a tree. It was freezing cold out. I felt bad for Darla, who had to expose a lot more of herself to accomplish the same thing. I looked around and found two long, Y-shaped tree limbs. Back at the campfire, I used the branches, some rocks, and our rope to rig up a clothesline. I had to rotate the wet clothing several times because the stuff hanging nearest the fire steamed and dried, but everything at the far ends of the clothesline froze solid.

Darla and I both gathered wood. There were a lot of dead trees, bushes, and driftwood near the bridge. By lunchtime, we’d amassed a huge stash against the bridge abutment—far more than we’d need to feed the fire for another day.

That afternoon, the wind changed. It had been out of the northwest, so the bridge abutment had protected us from the worst of the weather. Now it howled straight from the north, driving down the river and through our little camp. I had to hurriedly take the clothes off my makeshift line so they wouldn’t blow away.

Darla threw more wood on the fire. We sat huddled with our backs to the wind. Still, we were freezing. I worried about surviving the night, exposed like this. We waited more than an hour, hoping the wind would shift. Instead, it got steadily worse.

Something had to change. I thought about it for a while, trying to figure out what to do. Then I got up, wrapped myself in a blanket, and walked out from under the bridge into the icy teeth of the wind.

I bent and formed a snowball with my hands. The snow was too cold and fine to pack well, but with a little force I got it to ball up. I rolled my snowball around on the ground as if I were making a snowman. It was difficult at first, but as the ball got heavier, the snow stuck better.

When I got about as big a snowball as I wanted, two feet in diameter or so, I rolled it back to the bridge. I jammed it into the corner where the bridge abutment met the ground at the north side of the bridge.

My hands were icy. I walked to the fire to warm them. Darla was watching me with a puzzled expression on her face, but she didn’t say anything, so I didn’t bother to explain.

As soon as I could feel my hands again, I went back out into the blizzard and made another big snowball. I jammed it in next to the first one. Pretty soon Darla caught on and started helping me. Using snowballs, we built a wall stretching about eight feet out from the bridge abutment toward the stream. It took all afternoon because we had to stop constantly to warm up, but when we were finished, we had a corner between the abutment and our wall that was sheltered from the wind.

Darla dragged a couple of branches from our fire to start a new one inside the shelter. We gnawed on frozen strips of rabbit meat for di

When I lay down to sleep, Darla’s rabbit nestled against the top of my head. For some reason, it seemed to like that spot. Darla curled against my back, so we were spooned together for warmth. We slept with our faces toward the fire.

* * *

The blizzard still raged the next day. It was easily the worst snowstorm I’d ever experienced. I wondered how much longer it would blow. Our food wouldn’t last forever. At some point, we would have to leave to find more. If the blizzard abated. If the snow wasn’t too deep to move through.

The new shelter was okay—it had kept us alive overnight, but gusts of wind occasionally swirled under the bridge, blowing cold snow into our fire and our faces. Darla and I spent all day improving it. We built two more walls, so we had a roughly square igloo under the bridge, about six by six inside. I left a small hole at the top of one of the walls to let the smoke out and used our plastic tarp to cover the entrance. I worried that the fire would melt the walls, and it did, a little, but the melted snow quickly formed a hard ice layer that seemed to want to stay frozen.

It was warm inside the igloo. Short-sleeve-shirt warm. Wonderfully, heavenly warm. I slept great that night, although there was one disadvantage to the shelter: Darla didn’t need to cuddle against me. She laid her blanket on the other side of the fire.

* * *

The blizzard hadn’t slacked at all the next morning—it was into its third full day. We ate breakfast and gathered a little more wood in the morning, but then there was nothing to do.

We sat in the igloo. I tried to start a conversation, but Darla only stared at the walls. The silence slowly grew oppressive between us. Eventually, I just started talking. I’m not normally a talkative guy, but something about that day, holed up with nothing to do, got me started.

I told Darla about my bratty little sister, Rebecca. How she’d always run screaming to Mom whenever I did anything even slightly questionable. What was wrong with putting Tabasco sauce in her tube of toothpaste, anyway? It added flavor, right?

I told Darla about overhearing my mom when she scolded Rebecca for losing so many pencils at school. Later that week, I saw an eighth-grader, Joh

They were standing at the far end of the hallway. By the time I got to them, Joh

I got in so much trouble. Suspended from school for a day. Even my dad lectured me—and that never happened. Mom called Mrs. Parker at taekwondo. She demoted me a belt and suspended me from the dojang for a month.

But it worked. As far as I know, Joh

I talked to Darla all day. I told her about my dad, the way his face would glaze over when I tried to talk to him. Oh, he’d nod and make the right noises, but I could tell nobody was home.

I told her about Mom. How she was always pushing: “Why’d you get a B+ in French?” or “Why don’t you volunteer for the school play, Alex?”

I told Darla how much I missed them all.

After a while, it occurred to me that I was being cruel. Darla’s mother and father were dead. She was an orphan, an only child. If she had any living relatives at all, she hadn’t told me about them.

She didn’t say anything, hadn’t said anything in days. She stroked the rabbit in her lap, staring at nothing in particular.

I dug through my pack and found a bag of cornmeal. I got a handful of it and crawled around the fire to Darla. I held out my palm to her rabbit. He nipped me while he was eating the cornmeal, but it was only a little pinch, so I ignored it.