Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.
 - Mark Twain

Five in the morning is never friendly. It’s really the loneliest time of any day. Well not as bad as three. Or four. But five is worse when your getting up to drive three hours to move your mom’s stuff out of her own house. The one she sacrificed so much to help build and later live in for twenty years without carpet or practical heating. But maybe my dad’s new girlfriend would help us move. That would be nice.

I had a feeling that by the time we got to noon, we’d feel like we were entering day two of at least a weeklong twenty-four hour period.

And it would begin at five. I thought about all of this while I unleashed an enormous amount of urine. Normally I’d get to crawl back into bed.

Mom was already up. She was humming something happy. It should have taken the edge off. It added one.

I adjusted my boxers and creaked down the wood floor of the hallway from bathroom to living room and then to the top of the stairs. Mom had been staying in a small room in our basement. The room was a perfect fit for her. The basement wasn’t. It was cold and too dark for my mom. Anybody’s mom really, but she had her own bathroom. Or maybe it was that my wife and I could have our own bathroom. Despite the well lit guest bedroom right next to ours.

So I descended, following the happy hum to my mom’s cell.

“You ready for this?” I asked in one long sigh.

“What, you’re not?” she said in cheerful reply.

I wondered if my mom was using sarcasm as a defense mechanism. Like her happy tune her tongue-in-cheek attitude would lighten an otherwise miserable day.

In a manner striking to my father’s I responded with “Let’s get this shit done.”

And then with a renewed vigor of a finish line in sight, I barefooted up the stairs, skipping two steps at a time and launching down the hallway to my sleeping wife.

“You’re loud, honey.”

I could see her hand on her forehead and her eyes forced closed to avoid the hall light leaking into her slumber.

“I know dude. But for the love of everything beautiful we are going to get Mom a new life. I’ll carry armories on my back for two hundred miles if it means we can expedite this deal.”

Sarah, my wife, the realist moaned the underlying sentiment of the day.

“Is she going to be there?”

‘She’, the sharpest a pronoun could ever be. It was the little word that was the point on a pyramid of much bigger syntax. Kind of like a tiny cork in a huge cask.

Sarah popped up to emphasize her question…”Well is she?”

And so we drank the bitter conversation about ‘her’.

“I dunno.” I was sighing to speak again. “Mom told dad to have her go somewhere else. But you know he didn’t”

Men may roam and hunt. Women are solid as trees. But like aspen they are all connected to the same root system. One gets whacked they all feel it. And men wonder why there meat gets cooked when they screw up. It’s because women like my wife either despise or empathize every other woman for the pain or sadness that has been wrought upon their roots.

I walked into it and Sarah snapped back at my obtuse answer.

“She’d better be gone. That ho should be grooming her ponies in another fricken’ state.”

It seemed Sarah was not only talking to me, but the very poignant yet not currently present ‘she’ of our conversation. And she seemed to be scolding any other who ventured similar affairs in the future. She wasn’t going to be soft with this issue. I had to learn too. Get to dogs when they're puppies.

I heard what she didn’t say. “You can hunt honey. But I’ll make sure to get the kill."

I understood.

And so in the minimal light that crept in from the hallway, I felt around the bedroom for some clothes. I didn’t have to feel very far to find my trusty Carharts that I had removed but five hours ago, right before I went to bed for my short stint sleeping.

I got dressed and found mom ‘making’ cereal for both of us. I quickly put a bowl of flakes out of their vitamin-fortified misery.

“Mom, I’m going to count down from two and then I’m leaving,” I said with an annoying annoyed tone in my voice. She took her time doing things. Always brushing her teeth and torturing her children with the time she took to be well prepared and hygienically sound. We always wanted to go, get out, end up somewhere other than where we were (only to be wrought with the same anxiety shortly after arrival.) But no matter how we pestered mom to hurry, she knew it would all be worth it when she could proudly provide us with a PB & J when we complained of hunger or a coat when we mentioned we were cold. Of course none of these goods were provided without first a quick lecture on how we should take note of her proper planning and learn from it.

So, many years and even more little lectures later, I was still wearing no coat and had no food as I rushed my mother to get in the car so we could embark on day long journey into the mountains.

And finally she got in the car with several coats, bags of crackers and sandwiches, two bottles of water, some fruit and her purse. She had yet to close her door and I was backing out of the driveway.

Maybe the only good thing about being up at five is that Denver isn’t a driving nightmare. We headed north on Interstate 25 out of the city, past Longmont where my mom’s mom had once lived, through Fort Collins and into the Canyon.

The Canyon is a highway. It’s also two opposite faced sheer rock walls created by the Poudre River winding through its eroding bed. But the million or so year-old geological marvel was now just our path home. An old wagon trail turned into asphalt-traveling luxury, and one that had become extremely popular over the last decade or so. College kids from Fort Collins and adventure seekers with thoughts of Keanu Reeves movies clamored for the rock walls and white rapids of The Canyon.

My mom’s 2000 Subaru didn’t seem to mind the haste at which I drove through the tight turns. My mom did but she probably figured that her 28-year-old son’s driving habits were just that now, habits, and she opted for constructive conversation instead of criticism. Except for the occasional elongated version of my name as we whipped around a corner. “Jaaaaaarrrrrrreeeed” she’d say with accompanying car-sick groans while hanging on to the Jesus handles above her window.

And up we went. From around 6000 to 11000 feet of elevation. And then back down to just over nine. Normally this would be yet another trip for groceries or maybe a part to a bulldozer or pick-up. But now this was the great pick-up, of so many years of marriage and motherhood.

I asked mom about her timeline from growing up in Chicago to this year’s most recent brain surgery. She had much to say about her dad. Smiling, she described how he would come home from working at Sears in the City and ask how her day at school had been. To me he sounded fictitious, almost like a television father from the fifties--a dream dad. Yet to mom he was real and so warm, a symbol of more innocent times.

He died in 1974. She was 23 and had already secured her tenure as a mom with two children. It wouldn’t be long after that when she’d move to the desolate mountains of Gould, CO. Where she, three children and her husband would toil against nature, hungry bears and insurmountable bills. Then she’d commute several hours to go to school and get certified to teach, become a lifeguard and eventually emerge from five brain surgeries, radiation and some kind of failed experimental treatment administered in the hot summer of Houston, Texas.

The little girl from the Windy City was a survivor.

The Canyon loosened up a bit, straightening upward towards the ascent of Cameron Pass. On our way we stopped to see the recently burned remains of Glen Echo Restaurant and Resort. It was decimated, even the sign by the highway had melted—tendrils of once-proud announcements emblazoned on all-weather plastic oozed off of its metal frame.

We just sat there in awe of the fire’s destruction. Industrial kitchen accessories still stood, blackened by soot and fire. Everything else had collapsed to the ground. Someone had just purchased the place too. So either they lost their dream investment or, once vested in the business, panicked and torched the relationship.

My mom wouldn’t be getting any insurance money from the institution that my dad had burned.

With the reality of our journey solidly placed in our heads, I pulled back onto the highway and continued to Gould. Only about forty-five miles of twists and turns ahead.

Snow was awaiting us as well. We hit it about twenty minutes from Gould. Most drivers, all-wheel-drive or not, would have slowed down out of respect for the whiteout. But we pressed ahead, kind of like there was a string reeling us home, and nothing could impede our rapid progress. Even a fishtail or two around some of Cameron Passes more treacherous curves weren’t enough to draw my mother’s ire. She had become rather introspective as we neared her home. Or, what was her home up till a few months ago.

The snow tapered off and we carried on down the mountain and into Jackson County. Once we’d get to the sign that said “Walden 27” miles we’d feel like nothing could stop us. After winding through the nauseating curves and emerging from roads either thick with deer or snow, that last stretch was always welcome but only as long as we could make it a quick visit. I imagined someone standing next to the ‘Walden” sign and experiencing the Doppler effect as the Sub whizzed by. Their view would look like those TV shots of racecars; coming, making quick time of distance and then zzzzzzzzzzip we’d make the hitchhiker turn his head too quick for his vision to gather our passing. And then our going would only be a perceptible marker of the long road ahead.

The “Gould” sign is posted across from the Tenderfoot Lodge, which once was the Pair-a-Dice cabins, yet even with a more sensible name was still just a clump of old rotting cabins. No one could ever keep the rentals open. Of course it didn’t help that local kids would break out the cabin windows.

“Mom, see the big plywood covers? That’s because me and the Polzin boys broke out those windows,” I said after a snowstorm of silence.

She hated to hear about the destructive escapades to which her children seemed susceptible. But we always shared our nefarious doings. Mostly because we liked her reaction: One part shock, two parts disappointment and a spicy splash of rather humorous interrogation.

“Whyyyyyyy?” was always the elongated cry of a weary mother. “I didn’t raise my kids to do things like that. Where did you learn to do those horrible things?”

And this is where dad would become the easy answer. But he didn’t do much to negate mom’s genetic hypothesis.

He was home when we bounced up from the County Road to our rather porous driveway. Smoke petered out of the makeshift chimney that he had plans to replace some fifteen years ago. The house is impressive though. Three stories of solid log with a garage almost as big as the home attached to it—a structure the family had suffered greatly to build. We even moved in before the roof was finished. And from what I could tell it still wasn’t as we pulled through the mud and past ‘her’, standing at the bed of a truck cutting the head off of a duck. ‘Her’ first impression on a day that would make me envy that poor bird.

“Well she’s here,” I said through another exasperated exhale.
Mom didn’t say anything, just shook her head at dad’s disregard for her visit.

“Hi Jennifer,” I shouted through thoughts of things I’d rather say.

“Your dad’s inside. You want some lunch?” she asked as if I couldn’t just open the fridge and eat in the same flippen house in which I grew up.

“No, we just want to get some stuff moved.”

Mom was out of the car and fending off an elated Custer Bear, a large malamute mix of some sort. He was a great dog but now had to fight ponies, ducks, and Jennifer for attention. He jumped all over me too. Something I didn’t mind when I was growing up but found myself to be irritated at actually getting some mud on my clothes.

“Custer! Crap, doesn’t dad love you anymore. He has issues with that you know.”

Mom smiled at what I had inferred and with tired steps headed into our house ‘o chores.

She had to walk around a huge structure being constructed in the garage. It looked like some kind of animal keeping contraption. I walked behind mom and squeezed through the minimal space allowed by the monolithic project. 

Dad rumbled down the supposedly temporary wooden stairs that had been built in 1983. Anyone who walks on them is temporary as well.

Mom stood by the wood stove in the basement as I entered the dingy entrance to the basement. Dad finished his descent and asked if we were ready in a voice that was way too enthusiastic for a man seeing his wife leave his house for good. Or maybe it wasn’t enthusiastic enough.

Mom turned from the heat and asked “how are we supposed to get my stuff around that, that thing?” she asked, pointing to the construction going on in the garage.

“Ohhhh, we can get it. My boy is strong.” His boy also thought he had incurred a hernia while lifting boxes of flyers for the Democratic Party.

“So, do we go for the big stuff or pack up boxes? I asked, skipping any conversational pleasantries.

“I’ll pack.” Mom said with a resignation that needed a nap.

So dad and I went up both flights of stairs to mom’s dresser. It had sat in the very same position for twenty years. Pictures of my siblings and myself adorned it’s top and other family photos were neatly placed on the trim and walls above it. My dad never took a family picture. The sentimental moving might be fairly easy.

One drawer at time we moved the dresser. And then the dressers hulking skeleton, down two flights of planks and past the hulking wooden frame in the garage.

We did this for the next two hours with the entertainment center, pictures, kitchen accessories and the boxes my mom quietly packed.

“You want some of Jennifer’s angel food cake?” asked my father as we took a break in the kitchen.

“I’m not that hungry, but I’ll give it a shot.”

It took a lot of water to get it down. Jennifer is a healthy eater, chomping on twigs and herbs and this horrid dirt-tasting angel food cake. I wanted to apologize to some angels.

“You like it?” my dad pressed as I continued to chew through its hardy fiber.

“I don’t know if I’m a big angel cake fan” I fibbed as I turned on the tap for more relief.

My dad laughed. I thought he was laughing at what he construed as naivety in an eater who couldn’t appreciate real honest to goodness health food.

“It’s not like I don’t eat healthy,” came my retort. “I, uh, just don’t take kindly to misrepresentation of cake. Cake is cake. It’s not supposed to be healthy. This stuff looks like cake but it’s lying.”

I wanted him to understand that I was disgusted in more than just dessert.

I guess I had sugarcoated my protest too much.

“Well, see what’s in the fridge then.”

And I wanted to see what was in there.

When my mom was home the fridge was usually well organized. To keep a family of five fed, one might find lunchmeats, cheeses, lots of milk and a pot full of ham and beans or a pan brimming with lasagna awaiting its microwave manifest destiny. But Jennifer’s kitchen skills were less refined. And the last time I looked in the refrigerator I had almost wretched.

So with the curiosity of rubberneckers leering at a car wreck, I opened it again.

And, oh boy, the lettuce had taken over. The fridge was packed and vegetation ran from the bottom, around each shelf and clear to the top. Mason jars half-full of browns and reds way past their glory days of whatever their original colors might have been sat in neglected rows. Tubers, herbs and vegetables seemed to clamor for position in between re-used milk jugs of leftover soups.

I was thirsty and took my shot at what I thought was milk. I grabbed the carton and shook it. Nothing shook back. I wasn’t about to make the intestinal commitment to whatever it’s contents.

“Dad the refrigerator is a little gross” I decidedly understated.

“Oh, that’s all of Jennifer’s stuff. She’s one heck of a cook.”

And with that I left the kitchen and picked up my moving boxes to a feverish pace. I’m not sure what a Subaru can hold but a kind of packing genius emerged in me that day. I was going to get it all. I didn’t want any more encounters with the kitchen in which I grew from small, pasty kid to overfed, husky man.

Dad packed his truck too. He was to drop stuff off at mom’s new apartment in Fort Collins.

The last part of the packing was tying tarps over his pick-up bed. The Cameron Pass storm had settled over Gould and trounced us with hard pellets of snow and hail. The wind frustrated us both and our similar tempers flared.

Just as we were tying the last corner of the tarp to the back of the truck, a gale force blew it out of my dad’s hands and to the other side of the bed. Now this was no big deal and most people could handle such an obstacle. But growing up with my father I knew that it was often the little annoying adversities that set him off. And this was it.

“You fucking bitch!!!” blurted out of my father. He was shaped like one, and really could be considered a veritable barrel of offending epithets. But just when I expected more poetic strings of the angry anthems on which I was raised, Jennifer spoke up from her sanding the garage obstacle.

“Don,” was all she said. But it was said to scold my father’s language. And this is where I thought I’d get to see him let her have it. I mean that’s what he’d done for years now.

But he made the most disgusting noise I’d ever heard come from a man who made flatulence commonplace at the dinner table.

Here this large, lumbering logger-for-a-living had been admonished by this strange woman in front of his own son and all he could say was “Sawwwwwy.”

He said ‘sorry’ like Elmer but with further speech impediments. He said sorry.

And it was the saddest thing I’d ever heard. I hated his yelling and cussing. It made me quite a nervous little kid. And now all I wanted to do was apologize too. Apologize for his being verbally castrated in front of family.

It was time to go.

“Mom,” I hurried my voice to add some urgency, “I don’t care about your National Geographics or those board games or plants, lets get the hell out of here.”

And then we were actually going to leave. Unlock the parking break and gently roll into welcomed acceleration from my mom’s previous life. I was getting sentimental.

My mom was too. But only for her favorite water bottle. A plastic vessel like millions of other water bottles but this one she had purchased at a restaurant in Maine. It had a picture of a crab on it. It was cartoon-like and cute. Maybe that’s the reason my mom insisted I run back into the burning building and retrieve it. So I did.

My dad was clearly relieved to see us go so his face looked like a vexed question mark when he saw we had stopped. But Jennifer was still as cold and aloof as before when she saw me get out and go back into ‘her’ house.

“I gotta get her water bottle,” I said in a tone that might suggest I was rolling my eyes with indignation at such a ridiculous chore. And I was mad at myself for sounding like that. For that would put me on their team. “Oh, yah, Ann and her silly little belongings,” my dad probably thought, thinking that we were connecting. But I didn’t want to sound like I thought Mom’s water bottle was a stupid thing to stop and retrieve. I did, but I didn’t want to. Getting that water bottle seemed to mean something to me too. It wasn’t theirs to find and thoughtlessly discard like so many years of marriage. That’s why I went into get it.

But that was not worth what I was about to encounter.

Now, as far as mom knew, she had lost the water bottle when she fell off the chest freezer in the basement. Something she mentioned rather nonchalantly for a woman recovering from her fifth brain surgery. "By the way, I toppled five feet onto solid concrete…could you go get my water bottle?”

But according to her recollection the bottle rolled behind the freezer. Meaning it would be amongst cobwebs, dirt and the molted fur of so many pets, living and dead.

And she was right. After I had strolled past my father’s interrogating look and through Jennifer’s icy ozone, I weaved through the giant duck pen and into the basement. One right turn away from the wood stove and a quick left past the foot of the stairs and I found myself at the freezer—and before what would be one of the most horrific experiences of my life.

But benign is often terror’s beginning. As it was for me, peering behind the massive cold storage I saw the red marking of mom’s beloved Looney Toon lobster. And, of course, the bottle had not landed in any place that would make reaching it an easy endeavor. I would have to get on the floor, with my head squished against the wall looking one way as I pressed my opposite arm and shoulder between the freezer and wall. Thus risking whatever biting and stinging and infecting can take place in a dark crevice in an unkempt mountain home—with dogs, cats, ponies, ducks and Jennifer.

So, grimacing with face smashed against the dirty textured paint, right arm propping me off the floor and over some stainless steel bowl of water, and left hand crawling into the dark, I reached as far as I could. And my stubby middle finger just caught the butt of the bottle. I flicked at it, hoping the flicking would encourage its encroachment instead of pushing it further under the ice chest. It did neither. So with useless stabbing of the target and further stretching to reach it, I put my head closer to the floor, and eye level to the rather inconspicuous stainless steel bowl. And this is when my last push to squeeze further between the wall lent my fingers just enough clout to move the bottle towards me. However, what should have been unbridled elation was quickly diminished by disgust of an even lesser corralled manner.

You see, with my left arm and shoulder doing their part to move the water bottle, my right jammed between the concrete floor and my leaning torso, my head was rendered flatly parallel to the wall and at a ninety degree angle to my body and, therefore, completely immovable with the exception of my wincing at the improbable stretch. Since I had reached a point of confident comfort that allowed my to stop stretching and simply concentrate on dragging the bottle to me, I was able to survey my point-of-view. The dryer was looming above me and a stainless steel bowl was right next to my head. Through my grimaced facial contortions I studied its contents. Water and some cleaning agents, yes, but there was the floating object. I took in its detail—the contours, perforated quilting and padded center—I gathered its purpose and previous location. It looked hygienic. And it looked reusable.

It was taking a well-deserved bath between jobs.

I began to panic. I squirmed like the cute little lobster had grabbed my hand and was dragging me to my doom. But my sudden full-body flagellation had only worsened my grasp on the bottle. It slid away from me and I nearly lost my right hand support. My head dropped closer to the environmentally friendly napkin of nasty floating like innocuous driftwood in it’s little sea of sterility. I wretched. And with the force of the reverse peristalsis I harnessed enough fear-inspired strength to wedge my entire body behind the freezer. And there it was, the water bottle in the wanton grasp of my entire left hand. And in the widened gap between the wall and freezer I saw some loose change and a roll of duct tape. All treasures, yes, but all paling in comparison to my mother’s water bottle, and my freedom from the apparent gravitational pull of a used sanitary napkin. I leapt up from my lying position, crashing my head into the same cabinets my mother was digging around before she caromed off of the freezer and lost her lobster. Despite the pain and imagined gushing of any minor head injury, I kept my gaze locked onto the floating femme filter, as if my turning away would give it the opportunity to leap onto my neck and do it’s vampire duties.

And then a small seizure shuddered me to move. I tried to run but caught site of more napkins. They were hung all over the room, like gathered prey of a fierce hunter. All I could do was jump around and shout profanity. Thankfully, enough forward momentum carried me out of the laundry room, past the wood stove and into the garage. Where my dad’s girlfriend, the master of her pelvic puppets, calmly sanded 2 X 8’s.

I spat. And again, thinking of what I might have inhaled. She looked up and told me to watch out for her archaic birdcage. Unfortunately it was a nice ‘watch out’, one said for my well-being and not just for her fowl shelter. I’d hope she’d say something to trigger the outrage boiling only an epidermis away from my congenial “no problem”.

So she left me with that--a duck pen warning and years of nightmares.

I ran past her and my newly emasculated father. He worked in the spring snowstorm to secure more of mom’s stuff in the back of his truck. He popped off a quick obligatory “need anything else?”

Now if I am to live again I will turn and say “yah, a long shower and an incinerator,” but I said, “no, we’re out of here” with the perky politeness of a game show host.

And then, like so many times from so many people, my mom had to hear what I had really wanted to tell my dad and his patchouli Princess.

“I need a long shower and an incinerator.”

And my mom laughed. She too had been in the laundry room and knew exactly what I had seen. And the Subaru accelerated with our laughter.

Teary-eyed, with relief and joy that some of the strangest few hours of our lives were behind us, I did my best not to hit the potholes in the half-mile or so dirt driveway.

And then we turned onto county road 21 which would take us back to highway 14.

The scenery from the road is awesome. Heading east you see the jagged Nokhu Crags towering over endless foothills filled with trees reveling in the greatness of being so undiscovered. The Michigan River runs in that valley, into Ranger Lakes, wetland moose habitat and eventually finding a way out before having to tumble down the canyon with the roaring Cache La Poudre.

The little Subaru moused its way between the lodge pole pines gathered under the lofty heights of the Seven Utes Mountains. From up there the Subaru would be just another car ascending the west side of Cameron Pass. A hiker basking in the glory of his climb might look down with distaste at seeing our internal combustion in this natural realm. Growing up I had often felt that way. I didn’t like seeing all of the new people arriving to hike and play in my woods.

But now I was content to have my mom and all of her belongings safely tucked away in our trip to the city.

Jared Ewy is a stand-up comic, writer, radio dropout and surprisingly sympathetic individual. He lives in Englewood, Colo. with his highly tolerant wife and a good garden - both of which provide him reason to live.

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