Every so often I digress from writing to share a story.

A few years ago beavers  built this huge dam in the creek on our property. We didn’t mind because, after all, we had moved into their backyard. At the same time though, we didn’t want our place flooded. So once a week my father and I would hike  to the dam. I would walk out onto the dam itself with a hoe, and pull up the new construction, handing my father sticks and branches and small trees. It was a compromise of sorts. They could have their dam, but we kept it at a height that prevented flooding.

So here I was on the dam, hoe in hand, dipping into water that rushed between my chore boots and over the top of the dam. I scooped into the water and came up with a salmon instead of a branch. Amazingly I hadn’t impaled the salmon, and since I was in the middle of lifting upward, all I ended up doing was scooping the salmon up and over the dam. It splashed away into the beaver pond and my father said ‘that’s a fishing story no one is going to believe’. Catching a Coho salmon on a hoe.

With all that work on the dam, though, I never saw a beaver. I tried. I’d sneak down there late at night, I’d sit by the dam for hours trying to be still. Nothing worked. And then one night the river flooded. I’d been working on running the emergency operation center all day, it was late at night, and my husband came to get me because my car wouldn’t make it through the water. Driving home in the big truck, the headlights picked out a beaver. Swimming across the road with a big branch. Taking advantage of the floodwaters to move construction supplies. All those hours I’d spent hiding by the dam and all I needed to do to see a beaver was drive down the road.

A man I knew did an experiment to see what kind of wood beavers preferred for eating, vs. what kind of wood they preferred for building. Using 2×4 lumber, he built a framework that held branches from multiple species of trees and set it up near a dam. In the morning the branches were all there and the lumber had been taken and incorporated into the dam. The beavers prefer milled lumber when available.

This same guy also tried an experiment for sound. Beavers build because of the sound of running water. The more water flows, the more they reproduce to get help to dam that flowing water. So he took a recording of running water and set the tape recorder by the dam. The same dam with the lumber-loving beavers. He wanted to know if they would continue to build even if there was no actual water physically flowing over the dam. If it was purely sound that made them work.

The next day he found the beavers had dammed his tape recorder, packing mud all around it.

Pretty smart.

Even though it’s mid June, the days are cold and wet. I built a small fire just to take the chill off, and thought about the sense of contentment that comes with sitting around a campfire and watching the flames. I’m sure you can remember something similar. The dark night, the cold air at your back, the heat on your face. The sparks hitting the tent roof…I wonder if we feel that because of an inherited memory of prehistory when fire meant safety, security, survival.

And not only that. While we enjoy quiet times sitting like that, listening to the flames eat firewood, most of the time we tell stories. It’s almost a cliché because it’s so common. Why? What is it about that atmosphere that makes us talk in low voices about childhood memories? Or huddle together glancing over shoulders while we listen to a scary tale? Maybe it’s the intimacy, the cloak of darkness.

We all become storytellers sitting near the fire. There’s some odd bond between flames and words. It’s almost spiritual.

Next Friday I am going to join a circle of women around a fire next to the river, for a ceremony of transitions for a few girls I care deeply about and have watched grow and become wonderful young women. I know we are going to tell stories about their childhood, about change, about life. And the fire will sanctify those stories like it has done for thousands of years.

I still want to know why though.

When I first moved to the woods, I lived in a rustic cabin with no running water or electricity. It was summer and beautiful. I would eat breakfast on the old wood beams of a dilapidated deck, basking in sunshine, wind, scents of forest, sounds of the creek. I carried water from the creek, and learned about wildlife. One night I roamed with a flashlight trying to find the woman I’d heard screaming, only to learn later that cougars sound like women screaming…

And then winter came. I learned that it takes a huge amount of snow melting in a stock pan on the wood stove to make an inch of warm water. I learned that what looks like a huge amount of firewood when chopping it, shrinks to a tiny pile when stacked and needed. I learned a whitewater river can freeze if it gets cold enough. Those reading this that are locals will remember that winter of 1988 when the river froze. I quickly figured out that an outhouse in the summer, with the door open to mountain views, is much less romantic when the seat is covered with frost. The infamous words I said to my father still haunt me: “I’m not going to spend $200 on a heater that I’m only going to use a couple months a year!”

Remember leg warmers? An elderly woman made me a pair and she struggled with knitting so they reached from ankle to crotch. Picture that as you read on because this is what I wore, layered, to bed that first winter: heavy wool socks over two other pairs of socks, leg warmers, sweat pants, tee-shirt, flannel nightgown heavy sweater, robe, mittens, scarf, a cat under a big pile of blankets (living hot water bottle) and a dog on my feet, under her own blanket.

I woke up each morning with the blankets frozen to the walls and my breath turned into frost on the blankets. The cat’s water was frozen and the windows had a thick layer of ice on them, on the inside.

I bought a propane heater.

It worked really good, creating a glow that looked warm at the far end of my tiny trailer. It kept the cat’s water from freezing if I put the dish next to it. But it did nothing for the blankets frozen to the wall. I got used to that ripping sound when I got out of bed in the morning.

My parents retired and moved into the tiny cabin that I have been restoring recently, and have posted pictures of on this blog. My father, being a genius, built a water wheel out of pulleys and pipe caps and old single cell batteries, creating electricity. My brother, father, and I, put in 1500 feet of pipe down the ridge to get the flow of water needed to generate the electricity. We still used kerosene lanterns, but the electricity powered a refrigerator (in the summer I had used a small cooler powered by a car battery), and my father’s television. Reception was terrible, and he swore shows came in better when there was snow on the mountain.

And now, many years later, I have come full circle in a way, living there again with my husband and son. I know to stack lots of firewood. I know to have a supply of kerosene. I know to can and preserve and freeze to fill the shelves for winter. I know not to yell at cougars or to look for them with a flashlight alone in the dark. I know when the bears are in my compost. I know the haunting sounds of owls hunting at night, and the sight of stars not dimmed by city light pollution.

But sometimes I miss those days of self-reliance, of knowing how to live without. Well, I don’t miss the frozen blankets.

Here’s a link of last winter, on the road I live on. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB9eN5SCoO0&feature=plcp I’m giving my son a lesson on driving in the snow, and the snow was actually deeper than it looks here. We were driving from our place into town in our big red diesel truck.