Snowbound with the Aurora

The forecast had said light snow, flurries tapering by evening, which is the kind of thing a forecast says right up until it lies to you. I was thirty-four years old and I had been driving through northern Minnesota long enough to know better, but the commission was worth real money and the cabin had no cell service to speak of, so I kept going. My name is Paula, though everybody in the photography world calls me Aubrey, a name a client once printed on an invoice that I never bothered correcting. It stuck. The dashboard said twenty-one degrees and falling, the wipers were losing a fight they had started an hour ago, and the road had become a rumor under the snow.

The job was simple enough on paper. A lodge owner up past Ely wanted big prints of the aurora for his great room, and he wanted them of this particular lake, this particular stretch of shoreline, and he was paying me enough that I said yes without doing the math on the drive. I had a thermos of coffee gone lukewarm in the cup holder, a bag of gas station peanuts, and about forty miles of nothing in either direction. That last part is the part I want you to hold onto, the forty miles of nothing, because everything after that comes from it.

The car slid on a patch of what the Minnesotans politely call a frost heave and what I would call ice with ambitions. The back end stepped out to the left, I corrected, overcorrected, and then the shoulder grabbed the front wheel and swung me around like a partner who had decided the dance was over. I went backwards into the ditch with a soft crunching sound, not violent, almost gentle, the way bad things up there tend to happen. The engine died. The headlights lit up a wall of white and nothing else.

I sat there for a minute doing the mental inventory. I was fine, the airbag hadn't fired, the car was nose-up in a snowbank at a frankly embarrassing angle, and I had no idea if I could drive out of that even with a shovel, which I did not have. I had a sleeping bag in the back, a camp stove, and half a tank, so I wasn't in danger yet, but danger up there is less a cliff you fall off than a slope you slide down while telling yourself it's fine. I tried the engine twice. It turned over and made a sound like a cat being asked to do math, so I shut it down and saved the battery.

I put on my parka, got out, and walked a slow circle around the car, which told me what I already knew, that I was stuck and that walking anywhere in a whiteout is how people end up on the news. So I did the sensible thing. I went back in, wrapped myself in the sleeping bag, and waited to see if anybody at all would come down this road before morning.

Somebody did. Maybe forty minutes later, a set of yellow lights swam out of the snow, wide apart, high up, and resolved into a plow truck moving slow. I got out and stood by the car and waved both arms like a person flagging down the last helicopter out of somewhere. The truck stopped maybe thirty feet past me, backing up with a beep and a hiss, and the passenger door opened.

"You stuck?" the man called, and I said yes, I was, and he said get in then, you're gonna freeze out here standing around. He was maybe twenty-eight, tall, bundled in canvas over a hooded sweatshirt, with a beard doing its best against the wind and a face that looked like it smiled a lot in better weather. He introduced himself as Kyla, which I did not expect, and he said it the way people say a name they've had to explain their whole life, quick and without apology.

"Kyla, after my grandmother," he said, climbing back in and putting the plow in gear. "It was her name and Mom wanted it kept in the family. I've spent twenty-eight years spelling it for people."

"Paula," I said, and he nodded and didn't try to shorten it or ask questions, which I appreciated more than he could know.

He told me he was running the last pass before the county called it a night, that the road I was on dead-ended at the lake five miles up, and that there was an inn about eight miles back the way I'd come, the kind of place with a bar and six rooms and a sign that had been faded since before either of us was born. He could plow his way back down and I could follow, except my car wasn't going anywhere, so really it was him giving me a ride and me arranging a tow in the morning. I asked him what it would cost and he laughed.

"Nothing. I was going that way anyway. This is the job, pulling fools out of ditches." He glanced over. "No offense. I put my own truck in that same ditch twice when I was learning to drive."

"None taken. I've got a car full of camera gear and a client expecting me at a cabin I can't reach," I said, and I heard how that sounded, like my problems were the most important problems in the county, and he was kind enough not to point it out.

The inn, when we got to it, was exactly what I'd pictured, log siding, a porch with rockers nobody was rocking, a sign with a loon on it and half the letters working. Kyla walked me in through the bar, where an older woman with reading glasses on a chain looked up from a crossword and said the name Mildred like she was announcing herself to a courtroom.

"We've got one room left," Mildred said, "and the fellow from the county road crew has it."

"I do not have it," said a voice at the end of the bar, and the road crew fellow, who had the look of a man four beers into a win over the weather, waved his hand. "Take it. I'm sleeping in my truck before I drive four hours home in this. Already told Millie."

So that settled one thing and raised another, because when Mildred led me up the stairs with Kyla carrying my camera bag behind us like it was made of eggs, she opened the door on a room with one bed, a queen, and a floor that was mostly occupied by a radiator.

"There's a rollaway in the hall closet," Mildred said, "but it's got a broken slat and a man from Duluth complained about it in September and I haven't fixed it. I can have Kyla here dig it out if you want."

"It's fine," I said, because it was fine, I was a professional woman, he was a stranger with a plow, and the bed was wide enough that two adults could sleep on it without so much as an elbow crossing a border. "One bed, I'll take the floor if it comes to that. Thank you, truly."

Mildred left, and then it was just the two of us and the radiator ticking like a clock in a Western. Kyla set my bag down by the door with the care of somebody who had guessed what was in it.

"Well," he said. "I should let you settle in. There's towels, there's coffee in the morning, and if you need a tow I'm up at six anyway. I'll swing by."

"You don't have to do that."

"I know," he said, and grinned. "That's what makes it generous."

He turned to go, then stopped with his hand on the doorknob, and I watched him have an argument with himself in real time, because he turned back around and his ears had gone a little red.

"Look, I don't want to make this weird," he said, "but the bar downstairs has chili and the roads are closed, and you've been in a ditch, and it's gonna be a long night either way. If you want company for dinner, I'm gonna be down there at seven. If you don't, that's fine too, I'll eat my chili and go home."

I looked at him for a second, taking inventory again, the way I do with a landscape before I commit to the shot. He was younger than me by six years, give or take, he had pulled me out of a snowbank for free, and he had asked instead of assuming, which put him ahead of most men I'd met in the last decade.

"Seven o'clock," I said. "But I'm buying, since you're the one with the truck. And for the record, nobody owes anybody anything for a ride."

"That's not how generosity works," he said, backing out the door, "but sure, we'll fight about the check later," and then he was gone down the stairs, boots banging, and I was alone in a room with one bed and a window full of snow, wondering what exactly I'd just agreed to.

* * *

Dinner was chili and cornbread and two hours of easy talk, which surprised me, because I'm not somebody who finds talk easy. He was a biologist who'd come north for a conservation job tracking lynx and stayed for reasons he kept almost explaining and then abandoning. I told him about the aurora commission and he lit up in a way that made me reconsider my whole evening.

"You photograph the lights?" he said. "I've lived up here four years and I've never seen a good one. Just smears."

"Come on, then," I heard myself say. "Tomorrow night. There's a fire lookout tower off the grade road, abandoned, great sightline. I was scouting it before the storm ate the plan."

He looked at me over his spoon like I'd offered him something valuable. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, okay."

By the time we'd finished, the wind had closed the road past the inn for the night, the county had parked its plows, and Kyla, whose cabin was twelve miles on the wrong side of the drift, said he'd sleep in his truck and not make it weird. I said that was the dumbest thing I'd heard all day, the bed was a queen, and if he wanted the other half of it, there were no expectations attached, and either of us could say so if that changed.

That night we slept in the one bed, back to back, a folded blanket down the middle like a treaty line, both of us pretending it was nothing, and the radiator ticked, and somewhere around three in the morning the wind stopped like a held breath finally let out.

I woke up to gray light and the smell of coffee somebody had already made, and for a second I couldn't place the ceiling, because it had a water stain shaped like Finland and my own ceiling at home does not. Then I remembered the ditch, and the plow, and the treaty line blanket, which was now a crumpled heap at the foot of the bed, and I lay there a while doing the math on how a rescue had turned into the best conversation I'd had in two years.

Kyla was twenty-eight, which I knew