Clearwood

clearwood

Alex and I drive the back road into town, the one people take when the main road is flooded or snowed over. Clearwood feels like an island sometimes, like Juneau, barely held to civilization by a thread of escape. We lose power for days at a time, all of us crowding into the kitchen to sleep around the fireplace. We are bound to this place by weather, bound by the Nisqually River and inaccessible logging roads to the south and east. Poverty to the west.

Some of the most traumatic calls bear no physical injuries, but reminders of what a lifetime of abuse will bring. Doors, locked within houses, within rooms, smaller doors, locks and closets, the marks of chair backs underneath the knobs when the deadbolt won’t do, holding out the drunken fists and stealing hands.

When the main road is flooded or snowed over, there is only one way out of Clearwood, our makeshift Juneau. One way out shouldn’t feel this free; it should close in around you and draw out your fears. But this one road out rivals alcohol and infidelity; it’s a lovely escape.

“They keep taking my money.”

She keeps repeating this even though I asked her long ago why she had a deadbolt on her bedroom door. Her son and daughter having assumed the mantle discarded by a husband who got so tired of beating his will into her that he went and killed himself with cancer. A suicide, they’ll call it. And now this old lady, with no visible signs of injury traumatizes me.

“I’m 36.”

We take this road, the road we take when the Nisqually oversteps its bounds, not because we’re looking for a way out, but because no more beautiful vista can be found here to the west of Clearwood. I love the Madrona covered hills, the hated Scotchbroom giving its yellow fingers in spring, an old country store and a burned out trailer with a lone interior door still standing, still bearing a deadbolt. I love this road, this road we take when we have no other way, especially when we take it for no reason at all.

“Do you have anywhere to go, someone who can watch you?”

She hates the question, I know. And I know her answer, even before she looks in silence at the deadbolt and the folding chair. And she knows mine, as I look to the front door, open so that you can see her daughter smoking on the porch, open so that you can see the one road we take when there is no other. I want desperately to be on that road now, and back to our island where I can escape these problems over which I have no control.

- Written in November, 2000