Bucket in shower—ready to be filled!
Taps. are. on!
Turn on stove—boil water!
Flush. the. toilet!
Coffeepot ready!
Rice pack in microwave!
But the power did not come on. It got colder, and her nose started to bleed. With the smear of red on her hand, fear bloomed fully and darkly. People in Texas had recently frozen to death while sleeping, and she started crying as she remembered the heartbreaking story of a child who had gone outside to play—snow being rare in Texas and all—and how when he came indoors his parents had no way to warm him up. There was simply no way to warm a human up without a heat source, that was the bitter fact, and they only had thin blankets, and lived in an old trailer, and he had died. The unhoused froze to death in startling numbers. Hikers at the sort-of-nearby Grand Canyon had died in a blizzard in which over three hundred inches of snow had fallen.
And despite the images of cactus, Arizona was high desert. Once, she’d read, it had reached forty below. And then her mind whirred as fast as the sheer white outside, fast and fierce. Every member of Robert Scott’s polar expedition froze to death! Everyone here was going to freeze to death!
She picked at the skin around her fingers. Swiped away tears. Sat in her sleeping bag and fiddled with all the items in her first aid kit. She set out the Scrabble tiles and then spelled the word cold and gave up. She wanted to do something, but it was too cold to do anything. She fell asleep, woke with a bloody nose again, stanched it, then forced herself to sit up, wave her arms around, stomp her feet. She needed to get blood going. She was hungry, despite having eaten. Her muscles were tight, the hairs on the back of her neck raised, a searing tension ran up her spine. Her feet thrummed with sharp pain. And yet she knew: It was cold, but not that cold. It would get colder.
You’re fine, everyone’s fine. To prove this, she listed the scariest moments of the trip. The first night in the Grey Goose, in Iowa, everything disorganized and new. The second night equally bad, somewhere in South Dakota, which she’d gone out of her way to see. She’d spent the night in the parking lot of a church in some small town, scared and unsure of the whole idea, and she’d sat in the car and drunk too much wine and stared at the blues and greens of stained glass lit from the inside, having a hot flash and yet quite cold. She’d slept sitting up and woke headachy and stiff, and when she’d returned to her car after peeing in nearby trees, there was a note on her windshield—traveler, if you need even just one thing, come on in—and a flush of tears had overwhelmed her and she’d turned to the window of the church and waved, unsure if anyone could see her, but wanting to offer a sign of gratitude.
She wished she could ask for help now. She needed heat. She needed a lighted window.
She breathed into it. Tried to focus on what she did have. Fluffiest Red. Dude. Walls. Life. Breath. Water. She was not alone in a desert—and with a pang, she started to cry again for those who were. My god, she thought. There are in fact people and creatures out there, dying.
And then the electricity flipped on. “Glory to the heavens hallelujah!” she yelped, and scrambled out of her bag, tripping and moving fast despite her lethargy. She pushed Start on the microwave and coffeepot and electric kettle, splashed water on her face, all as the pans in the kitchen sink and shower were filling. She flicked the light on and off, on and off. A signal to the others: Come here.
She barely got it all done right before it flickered off again. Then she sat on her bunk bed. A bark of laughter escaped her chapped lips.
By god. Yes.
It had gone exactly, exactly, exactly as she’d planned. And it had resulted in two pans of water, hot coffee, a clean face, a warm rice pack, a cup of tea, and a signal. She’d used her minute of water and electricity as best she could. She put the rice pack at her feet, then stomach, then feet, all of her body parts arguing for it. She sipped at the hot drink and said, Feel this simple good thing, Ammalie.
She hoped the others had used the time wisely too. And speaking of: How to help them? It wasn’t clear. There was no doubt in her mind that the main road was impassable and dangerous—if not from the snow itself, then by the complete lack of visibility. There was no way Rita and Rex could safely get here. She was in charge. She needed to take charge.
Could she get to Dan and Lulu’s? Or to her car, which was closer, to blast the heat and charge her now-dead phone? But really, what good would that do? It seemed increasingly dumb to her that all the humans were far apart, each in their own cabin. Sure, at first anyone would want to stay in their cabins. Privacy. Comfort. The awkwardness of cramming together. But this night could get cold. The situation had changed. It was no longer a night of inconvenience, an annoying trip-changing storm. It was the other kind of storm. A potentially life-changing storm. If they were in one room, they’d at least be generating heat, and checking on one another.
Another memory of a kids’ book floated up. Little House on the Prairie. Pa tying a rope between house and barn so that he didn’t get lost in the snow. At the time, it had seemed unlikely to her, pure fiction. Now she saw the truth of it. Those kids’ books were a damn series of survival manuals!
The howling and clanking seemed to lessen, so she stood up and looked again. She could make out the dim outline of the other cabins through the orb of muted sunlight and the sideways-blowing snow. Maybe she could make it over to the cabins? She jogged around, opening and closing doors and cabinets, looking for rope, but only found bits that were too short. Even tying them together wouldn’t work—the cabins were too far apart. She couldn’t see how much snow had accumulated, so she opened the door quickly and saw that the wind had created a drift as high as her kneecaps. Not terrible—certainly she could walk through it—but walking through deep snow would be exhausting and get her wet.
What to do?
Let everyone fend for themselves in their cabins? Perhaps that was the only thing to do. Cabins scattered across an acre—there’s no way she could get to them all.
From her Survival Bucket, which she’d brought inside when she cleaned out her car, she took the space blanket, the flares, the heat packs. It was possible she could get to Dan and Lulu’s cabin, and with two adults there would be more options. Maybe, for example, she and Dan could take turns braving the blizzard and get to a cabin and lead the occupants back to the lodge, with the other adult on alert for emergencies and to watch Lulu.
Night would come soon, and with night, the temperature would drop even more. Before she could think much about it, she bundled up with every possible bit of layering and charged out into the snow, straight across the common area and in the direction of the picnic table where she’d once shared a meal with them. She could barely see because of the storm and because of the dimming light and because it was hard to keep her eyes open in such wind. And oh, god, what was that? Her heart stopped. A bear? But no. It was two figures coming toward her, one stumbling.
Dan and Lulu.
She pushed on, lungs searing from cold, gathered Lulu in her arms, turned back toward the office. She didn’t have the energy to look back, but just had to hope that Dan was trailing with the jumble of sleeping bags she’d seen in his arms.
When they got in the door and slammed it, they fell back against the wall, gasping with effort and cold air.
“Oh, hallelujah!” she managed, and turned to Lulu, covered in snow. In a flash, she had removed anything on Lulu that was wet—hat, scarf, coat, boots, socks—because anything wet was a real danger. She then bundled her up with new, dry clothes, all of which were too big for her, and plonked her near the fireplace. She could see Lulu’s face, ashen and tear-streaked, but her attention was directed at Lulu’s fingertips as she looked for hard, white flesh and signs of frostbite. Satisfied, she guided Lulu into Fluffiest Red, shoved the rice pack and thermos near the girl’s feet, warmed another pan of water near the fire, put her own hat on Lulu’s head. She put another log on the fire, then placed her arms around Lulu and rubbed her spine up and down, and then did the same to Dan, who had just situated himself on the floor near her, gasping and pulling on a dry sweatshirt from the pile of lost-and-found clothes. He was scrambling to get covered, which she helped him do, pulling a big blanket across his shoulders.
“I’ve never been so happy to see people in all my life,” she said. “What about the others?”
Dan looked at Ammalie with eyes that meant he did not know either.
So she scrambled up, opened the door, lit a flare, and sent the blazing orange ball into dusk before slamming the door again. “It’s better if they come.” She lit another, and another, put a log on the fire, and then another.
And then there was a knock. A couple from Tucson, then another from Germany, and after a pause, others trickled in. A mother and teenage daughter, breathless and white-faced and scared. Then three women, one limping badly. A man who’d been in the farthest cabin, his beard crusted in white. Each time the door opened the cold and snow came in fiercely, though Ammalie did her best to pull them in and slam the door as quickly as possible. They lined themselves up around the fireplace and attended to one another, helping each other peel off wet clothing, rotating boots around the fire. One person was sniffling and seemed spookily lethargic, but others were checking on her, and one of the Germans clearly had medical training and was taking charge. Everyone was wrapped in an unsettled quiet born out of real fear.
Soon they settled themselves side by side, under whatever blankets or coats they had brought with them, and on top of couch cushions and blankets, so as to separate themselves from the cold of the floor. For a few moments, there was a hum of chatter in the dark, but eventually, the room grew quiet.
Dan and Ammalie were lying on the side closest to the door, Lulu squashed between them, with all their bags unzippered so that they could share body warmth. Lulu was asleep, murmuring something indecipherable about Tonto National Forest, and Dan whispered from his bag in the dark, “She always repeats what she learned that day. But also, she’s…”
“None of us are okay, I think,” Ammalie whispered back in the pause.
“Crazy, this is crazy,” Dan was saying. “Is everyone here? This is a more serious storm than we thought.”
“It’s everyone, I think. I’m not sure.” Here, her voice broke.
She heard rustling in the sleeping bag and realized that Dan was reaching across Lulu, searching for Ammalie’s hand. She put it in his, and he squeezed. She squeezed back.
“What I find ironic,” he said after they had settled into silence, “is that you seem to have a strong desire to be alone. To distance yourselves from others. Which I get. I like being alone too. But you called everyone to you.”
“What I find ironic,” she whispered after a heartbeat, “is that I came here to these cabins to get more comfortable. And this is as uncomfortable as I’ve been on my whole crazy-ass trip.”
