A year to the day since the great flood of ’23, and the rain sweeps in again, hammering down for hours in the night, and when my phone rings at 4:00 a.m., rousing me from a dream in which I’m riding in the bed of a pickup piloted by an unknown woman who steers with a single, heavily bejeweled hand, I know it has to be bad.

It is bad: The bridge above the Rich’s is gone, the bridge at the bottom of the Mountain Road is gone, the Mountain Road from just past the Giles’ old place and upward is gone, Silver Road is reduced to a single lane, the lower section of Gonyaw is unpassable. And those are just the worst parts.

I drive the dangerous, diminished roads of my town in the dark, a pile of Road Closed signs in the back of my car, windshield wipers slapping, window open to the thick air, rain slanting through the opening onto my arm, into my lap, and I don’t even try to stop it. There seems no point to it. I’m already wet. The damage is already done. At 5, I find Kyle at the end of Norway Road and we travel the remaining roads together, stopping every so often to chat with whomever we meet coming the other way, all men, all in trucks, all wearing baseball caps, all greeting us with a smile and a rueful shake of the head, because while there’s nothing funny about any of it, there is a certain dark comedy at play. I mean, seriously, a year to the day of the previous flood, our little town still hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt from that storm, with the long-promised FEMA relief still dangling like a carrot at the end of the longest damn stick you’ve ever seen? Are you fucking kidding me?

Indeed, you are not.

And I don’t know what gets me thinking about this, maybe it’s just the vulnerability of the moment, the sense of being at the mercy of forces beyond my control – natural forces, bureaucratic forces, forces I cannot name and perhaps are not even nameable in any language I know – but all I can think about is the moment exactly one week prior when I’d left Rye standing in the middle of the vast Montanan valley where he now lives, on the vast Montanan ranch where he now works, after a too-short visit that had seemed shorter still, and for the entire three-hour drive to the airport where I’d soon fly 2500 miles in a direction pointing away from my son, I’d felt as if I might literally not survive. As if my love for him could break me into pieces too small, too numerous, too complicated and messy to ever be put back together into anything resembling their original whole.

Even though I thought this might actually come to pass – indeed, I was nearly convinced of it – and even though many times I thought to turn back, I also knew that I wouldn’t, that his life and mine have diverged in the ways they were always meant to. Which is not to say that we are not still connected, or that our lives won’t intersect again, because surely they will. But it is to acknowledge that he himself has become like the weather: A force beyond my control.

So instead of turning back, I kept driving under that ceaseless sky, putting mile after mile after mile between us. Waiting to see if maybe I’d survive.