Gone with the windchill
- Oscar the Pooch
- 5 days ago
- 8 min read
“So what’s our safe word? It’s got to be something that you wouldn’t say normally so that no one gets confused.”
“How about supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?”
“That’s a bit of a mouthful. How about, I’m scared?”
“I would never say that.”
“Then it’s settled.” She nodded and reached for the packpack.
We didn’t need to walk far past Mom’s piddle puddle before the trail got down to business. It shrank to barely wider than an Oscar and turned aggressively uphill. The air cut wetly through my coat as we climbed out of the shelter of the valley. With each turn of the narrow trail, there were fewer trees and more rocks. The thinner the trees became, the more wind found its way into my coat until the clamminess felt like it was coming from inside of me.
“It sure is cold.” Mom pulled her paws out of her pockets, cupped them in front of her face, and blew them up like balloons. “I think it’s getting colder.”
People from our part of California are so good at detecting extreme weather that we can identify deadly temperatures long before anyone from another part of the world. Mom can sniff out global warming when it’s only sixey-eight degrees, which is the number for the boiling point of City people. She carries a hoodie everywhere she goes, in case the temperature drops below sixey-five—the number where bodies clench and teeth clatter. If the weather goes below fiddy-two, it’s just a matter of time before Mom freezes to death.
Dogs aren’t as sensitive as humans, but the clammy wind was doing something funny to my paws. Although I could see them and move them, I couldn’t feel them. They pranced along under me like the legs of a clumsier dog. “I can’t hear my leg muscles,” I told Mom, in case it was important.
“This is miserable.” She pulled the Witch out of her pocket. “What’s the temperature?” she asked in that voice that meant she was getting ready to prove a point.
“It’s forty-two degrees outside,” the Witch teased.
“Bullplop.” Mom poked the accusation into the Witch’s face. “It says here it’s 35 degrees with the windchill.”
“What’s wind chill?” I asked.
“It’s when the wind makes everything worse. It’s one of the tricks the weather uses to make you grouchy.” Mom packed her shoulders tighter over her ears and trudged on, as if to block out any distraction from her suffering.
“Aren’t we having fun?” I asked. I thought we were, but it was hard to tell.
“That’s up to you, but it feels like the worst is yet to come.” Mom glowered at the clouds climbing down the mountain to meet us.
The white dirt started in slick patches too packed to hold a snow angel. The patches grew until they joined into a slushy layer over everything.
Mom fit her shoes into pawprints that traced an invisible line between a wall-like upslope and a cliff-like downslope. “The trail is clear my ass!” she muttered as she punched her bare hand into the white dirt on the uphill side for balance.
“I know! Isn’t it a wonderful surprise?” I ran ahead, kicking up a spray like a snowplow until Mom screamed at me to stay close, dammit.
In my excitement I hadn’t noticed how far Mom had fallen behind until I heard her calling for me from deep in the distance. When I found her, she was hanging tight to a bush for balance. The white dirt made a mushy sound as her shoe felt around for the solid ground underneath.
“Those branches are thinner than a shoelace, silly,” I told her. “They can’t hold you if you fall. You’ll slide aaaaaaaall the way to that valley down there.”
We both stretched our necks to look down at where our mountain crashed into a smaller mountain far below. Mom pulled herself closer to the bush.
“You’d better hope it can hold me,” she said without taking her eyes off the landing pad. “Your food is in the van and I have the keys.”
The next time Mom yodeled for me to c’mere, I found her wobbling in the trail of pawprints like a tightrope walker without a balancing stick. She unplugged her back leg from the white dirt and waved three of her legs in the air while trying to keep the fourth in its pawhole. Just when I thought the last leg would lose its place, she aimed her free leg at the next hole and fell toward it. She stuck the landing, but not without burying a third paw in the white dirt for stability. Once she was sure that both legs were plugged in again, she repeated the process on the other side. She looked up to make sure I was still watching.
“Now that you mention it, I can’t even tell if you’re on the trail,” I grinned. “I mean, the white dirt is just as steep where you’re walking as…” I looked back at the rocky crashpad to show what I meant.
“It’s. very. steep.” Each word squeezed out of Mom’s mouth in single file on its own puff of air. She looked down again and froze. It was a straight slide to the bottom, with nothing to hang onto or bounce off on the way down. “I’m scared!” She crouched for stability as she slowly pivoted.
“That’s not the magic word,” I called after her to make sure that she really meant it. Chickening out always made Mom grumpy for the rest of the day.
“You asked about how we stay away from danger? This. This right here is the moment when risk turns into danger,” she said, not quite pulling off a know-it-all voice. “I’m scared.”
“Chickens say what?”
“What?” Mom said.
If I could laugh, I would. Instead I wagged.
“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, dammit! Let’s get out of here!” she surrendered.
I wanted to push on like we used to, back when Mom would climb to the top of a cliff to valiantly save her socks, or when she fearlessly jumped into a monster’s gaping jaws to save me. But those acts of bravery were from back when this was America and every heroic tale had a happy ending. Now that an invisible danger followed us everywhere, who knew if stories even ended with happily ever after anymore. Mom had said the magic word and I had promised. I took one last look over my shoulder at the dotted line of pawholes leading to the top before following her back down.
Climbing downhill is really just controlled falling. Since Mom never misses a chance to control anything, she was even slower on the way down. She kicked grooves in the white dirt to make sure her paws stayed stuck to the ground. Her downhill hiking technique gave me plenty of time to watch the mountains on the other side of the valley fight with the clouds.
“Hey, look,” I called over my shoulder. “I think the sun’s coming out!”
Mom looked away from the step she’d been working on just long enough to spot something wrong. “It looks like that storm is coming this way. We should probably hurry.”
When the Weather Jinx spoke, the sky awoke. Right on cue, it darkened to a mominous grey and threw down a spat of rain while it gathered its clouds to show what it could really do.
“I sure hope this weather breaks soon,” the Jinx jinxed.
“It definitely will. How long can it possibly last when I can see the sun?” I searched the foreshadowing sky for the bright spot I’d seen a moment earlier, but it was hidden behind the smudge of rain. I looked back to make sure Mom was listening. “Right?”
Without warning, the rain turned furious. It fell in fat drops that soaked my fur until I was as defenseless to the wind as a hairless human. I tucked my tail between my legs, but only for warmth.
“Crap! Crap! Crap! This wasn’t in the forecast,” Mom fumed, as if this were the Witch’s first betrayal. “We’re gonna get soaked!”
“Too late!” I ran ahead to keep dry under a tree until Mom slithered by. I ran from observation tree to observation tree until Mom was her usual height again. The rain smudged out everything outside this moment as we began to run.
We ran until Mom was wheezing like she was trying to suck the last breath out of the sky. Mom always says that the reason it’s hard to breathe in the mountains is because there isn’t enough air. But if there was so little air, then why was it blowing through me like ice daggers? I thought that life couldn’t get any worse than being soaked by freezing rain, stabbed with icicles of wind, and suffercated by skimpy air, but then the rain started bouncing.
“Ow! It hurts!” I tried hiding in Mom’s slipstream, which is usually the best place to escape weather, but Mom’s puny bulk did nothing to stop the tiny bee stings falling from the sky.
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Mom whined, like there was someone listening who could change their mind about it if she shamed them enough. “It can’t keep going like this.”
But it did.
