Rice Creek — craig davidson

The gravel road followed the edge of the woods for a couple of miles. The trees were a mix of white pine, spruce, aspen, and maple, and even at dusk the snowy spaces between them flickered while we drove through. We exited onto a downhill and into a long meandering meadow that Rice Creek ran through. The road eventually flattened out and crossed the creek through a covered wooden bridge then crawled back up the other side. It was picturesque and made me think of the Bridges of Madison County story because covered bridges are uncommon here. It was dark enough that the string lights outlining the large openings on each end, the corners, and the eaves just below the shingles shimmered.

When it got dark the sky was mostly stars. Out there it looked like an image from the James Webb Space Telescope. Everything was in high resolution and the Milky Way felt close and luminescent. If you knew where to look, the disk of Andromeda was probably visible too. This is the biggest reason I imagine living in the country, away from the city haze. It’s easy to get used to the lights and black sky in town, but when I’m out there, I’m reminded that we’re part of something huge and overwhelming. What comforts me is that these stars are the same stars we saw with our daughter night skiing on Burntside Lake near Ely many years earlier, or when I midnight hiked with a friend in the Little Belt Mountains four decades before that.

It was early evening by the time we settled in. We ate our dinner of pulled pork, corn bread, beans and greens under a thick couch quilt and started a long movie. The cabin had electric baseboard heat, but we preferred the wood stove and kept it crackling and snapping all evening. There had only been a handful of times before this that our dog had the opportunity to lay on flagstone in front of a wood burning stove. He was so warm I was surprised his short fawn fur didn’t ignite. He'd already eaten so he only got up to drink a couple of times during the evening and go outside to relive himself twice. Besides that, he only moved so I could load more wood. When we woke in the morning there were still glowing embers and he had since relocated to the couch and the quilt. After our lazy breakfast, lounging, and a lazy lunch, we spent the afternoon walking through the woods and playing fetch on miles of trails that had been cleared by a snowmobile.

Songs :: Always Returning by Brian Eno, Home by Bonnie Raitt, Satellites by Rickie Lee Jones, Buckets of Rain by Bob Dylan, and Sands of Time by Fleetwood Mac