Mae

In May, the lilacs bloom so sticky sweet, plucked for tea, fed to small children falling in love, so sweet. The rivers run high, push their borders, make people worry or wonder but always always the flood banks hold, and houses, built too close to beautiful rivers, manage to continue toying with nature. Dams strain against the added pressure. Young trees are torn up from their roots and lodge themselves against the flood banks and the dams. Sometimes ice flows down, big chunks and it stirs up the sediment at the bottom of the milltown dam, filling the river with cyanide and mercury and a month or so later, as that sediment flows into the sea a little more of the Pacific Ocean will die. Later, they would try to remove the dam, take away the sediment and bury it in barrels, try to clean up the United States' largest superfund site, but in the May of 1995, there was barely even talk of such things.
Because it was May, and in May people are giddy. Parkas and fleece lined boots are stuffed with cedar and hidden for the next three to four months. In May people can be confident that the long winter was finally over. Sure winters were getting shorter but they still controlled life for 8 months out of the year. And global warming really only succeeded in making the weather more unpredictable, more manic depressive, more vindictive. There might be a 60 degree day in February and the people would thank the gods for a chance to wear tee-shirts but every one knew that mother nature would come around to bite you in the ass. And so while winter became less stable, with less snow, she lasted longer and became more vicious. Temperatures dropped to unheard of depths and snow and ice would creep later and later into spring. On June 9th of 2001 there was even a summer blizzard.
It wasn’t a particularly violent storm as these things go, but the trees were unprepared. Slowly growing leaves since April, they were in the full flower of summer. So when the snow came, it had something to rest on and it pulled down branch after branch, taking roofs and power lines with it. During the night people woke to the screaming of the trees. In the pitch blackness it sounded like murder or the end of the world. The power went out and those awake could not see into the dark. If they choose to go near their windows that is. Most didn’t though, frightened that the old cotton wood across the ditch that they had been meaning to cut down would take this opportunity to crash through the roof. So they stayed in bed, with the childlike belief that their blankets would protect them, that if they closed their eyes it would all go away. Some succeeded in going back to sleep but many stayed awake, listening for the end. And like much strange weather, it ended with the dawn. By nine am it was a balmy 50 degrees but the roads were nearly impassable due to the carnage. The hundred year old maples of the university area, the cotton woods, the aspens ached and bled in the morning light. The road shimmered, as though covered in ice but it was only water.
The ponderosa pines, those tall trees that smell like vanilla or caramel, that covered the mountains were fine, of course. They had been designed by nature or god to withstand worse. But city trees, even Montana city trees, were almost uniformly broken.
It was the second to last day of school when the blizzard hit and officials didn’t know what to do. Technically, there was just reason to cancel school. The Missoula school board states that school may only be canceled when it is dangerous for the buses to run. Since the school buses were so well winterized that happened maybe once every two years despite blizzards, and ice and slush and negative 30 degree weather. But it was June and the chains had been taken off. The logical thing was to cancel. But no one, not the superintendent, not the 3 high school principles not the 300 teachers, not the students wanted another day of school to push in to summer vacation, snow storm or no.
All told a majority of the students showed up. Those that couldn’t weren’t penalized but it meant that the poor teachers had to keep giving finals for a week or so after. The students had good reasons, usually farm kids with blocked roads, or ranch kids who spent the day repairing fences and tending to wounded cows.
Amy wasn't a farm kid, or a ranch kid. But a tree had landed on her truck and the long windy dirt road they called a driveway had been made impassable. She lived in the mountains, surrounded by Ponderosas, but also Larch and Tamarack, and they had come down. She spent the day she should have finished chemistry dragging branches off the road. The larger logs, her father chained to his truck and dragged to the house, where he chain sawed and stacked them and let them sit for a year to dry, before burning them in the winter to keep warm. "This is kind of a blessing in disguise," he told Amy and went on to ramble about how nice it would be to not have to go out hunting for fire wood or buy it, how they would sit together in front of the stove in a year, him reading, her doing homework. Amy nodded, she might have even agreed with him. But by the time those trees were actually burned, there was no way Amy and Noah Schwartz would be in the same room together. It always takes a tragically long time for trees to die.