Seconds Count
Wendy Miller
With my eyes half-closed and head tipped back, I relish the warm sun shining on my face through the car windshield. After a winter of drizzle and Covid, the first hint of spring fills my lungs with hope. The car radio crackles as my husband, son, and I drive farther from Portland and closer to Spokane. A trip we make several times a year to see family. This visit is to celebrate my dad’s birthday.
When we travel through the Columbia River Gorge, we delight watching windsurfers skip on the river’s white-capped waves. But today, the water flows silent—a placid reflection of denim sky and shadowed shoreline. Mt. Hood, Mt. Adams, and Mt. St. Helens dressed in white glacial gowns dance around us as they come in and out of our view depending on the bend of the road. Waterfalls gush off the basalt cliffs. Life stirs with optimistic force, except for the dead fir trees standing like skewers on the rocky hillside.
A fire started by a 15-year-old boy ravaged the Gorge four years earlier. He hurled a firecracker into a ravine that hadn’t seen rain in 83 days. The fire burned for three months and spread over 48,000 acres. The blaze forced many to evacuate their homes, trapped day hikers overnight, and closed stretches of Interstate 84. Clouds of smoke drifted to Portland. City-dwellers choked on the unhealthy air quality that lingered for days. Snow-like flakes of ash floated through the haze.
I had noted the charred trees on previous trips, but today the scars are more visible. I suppose enough time has passed for the dead to decay and for the wounded to recover. The thick bark of a Douglas fir tree acts as protective armor against forest fires. So many dead trees attest to the intensity of the inferno. To see a few evergreen survivors huddled among the graying trunks surprises me. Their lush boughs pop against the starkness, forming a patchwork quilt pattern of annihilation and endurance on the steep terrain.
How did any survive? Were the living clusters privy to a hidden stream of life-giving water? The randomness gives me pause.
My dad understood the world through numbers. He taught math at a community college for 40 years. I asked him once why he didn’t move on to a more prestigious university to teach. He said, “I can make more difference in the lives of students here.”
Edward Norton Lorenz, a meteorologist, used mathematics to explain the universe’s unpredictability. While running weather models, Lorenz noticed that a slight change in an initial condition, rounding one variable from .506127 to .506, created a significantly different outcome. His findings are known as the Butterfly Effect or Chaos Theory and have been used as the basis for many movies and works of literature.
Thinking about the fire, I ruminate on the small changes that could have occurred to prevent it. What if the wind blew out the fuse instead of fueling it? If the teenager hadn’t brought the firecrackers. If it had rained. When most big things go wrong it seem like a lot of little things conspire to make a catastrophe, but maybe they add up for good too.
When I was in middle school, my dad drove two friends and me to school in his red Ford Falcon pickup truck. We girls squeezed into the bench seat next to my dad. The seat belts had long disappeared. There was a small hole in the floorboard’s corner where we could see the street. If it was raining, the one sitting closest to the door covered the hole with her foot so the rain didn’t splash through.
In the spring of my eighth-grade year, my dad got a new truck, a blue and white Chevy S10 Blazer. One morning, my friends weren’t with us. I have two siblings and my dad worked extra teaching night school, so this morning was a rare moment alone with my dad.
“A boy gave me a cassette tape to listen to, but I haven’t had time. I need to give it back today,” I said.
“I have time before my first class. Let’s pop it into the cassette.”
We parked across the street from my school. The two of us marinating in the spring sun streaming through the car window. Electrified by Prince crooning “Little Red Corvette” through the car speakers.
“Dad, let’s play it one more time.”
And he did. Over and over until the school bell rang.
Despite infinite possibilities, some laws of nature are constant. Gravity holds us to the Earth. The sun and moonrise. Spring follows winter. Love prevails.
“A bighorn sheep!” said my husband, interrupting my thoughts. I glimpse the spiral horns as we zoom by. We had seen several lured by the tender new blades of grass sprouting roadside on previous drives, so we knew to look. Today, we spot the lone ram.
We count life in years, but the moments are where we live it. The three of us journey onward to celebrate my dad’s eighty years on Earth, or 2,522,880,000 seconds of a life lived. Billions of flutters.
Wendy A. Miller lives in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. Her essay, "Mom Conquers Volcano," appeared in "Luck and Opportunity" an anthology of short stories published by The Personal Story Publishing Project and featured in their 6-Minute Stories podcast. Her work has been in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Quail Bell Magazine, and Grown and Flown, where her essay ranked 14 in their "Parent Best Posts of 2020." For more of her writing, visit her website www.wendyamiller.com