A short story by Courtney Roberts

Photo by Joshua J. Cotten.

The bird feeder

By Courtney Roberts

Although the sun had begun to steal through the clouds, the birds had not yet resumed singing.

The forest was eerily quiet as she stepped off of her porch and crunched across the gravel driveway to her car. She did not get into her car. Fifty yards below her house, the road was blocked by a mudslide, nearly shoulder high; whole trees were tangled up with one another in the middle of it. She could not even begin to imagine how that might be cleared, and by whom; it was not a state-maintained road.

Photo illustration using National Park Service photo of storm damage in Western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene.

From the back of her car, she pulled out one of the trekking poles she sometimes took hiking, and then set off down the road, veering off into the woods just above the mudslide’s impasse. She used the trekking pole to test the ground before each step; it was impossible to tell, just by looking, which bits of ground would bear her weight, and which bits would suck her foot down to the ankle or deeper.

It was September 27. Two days earlier, summer had only just begun to give way to autumn; the leaves had not yet begun to change color in earnest. Now, the trees were nearly leafless. The temperature was still mild, but the forest looked just like it had when she had first moved in months earlier, at the end of winter. Everywhere she looked she saw brown; except that today, it was not the brown of a sleeping forest in winter; it was brown with mud.

By the time she emerged from the woods back onto the gravel road, just below the mudslide, there were several men and two tractors on the site, beginning to dig. She felt a wave of warmth and gratitude at the sight of them, and waved her trekking pole enthusiastically at them by way of greeting.

A few hundred yards farther down the road, the creek that ran through the woods — and that usually crossed under the road through a culvert — had at some point during the storm left its banks altogether, and cut a new course for itself directly across the road, carving deep, watery trenches into the roadbed. But some of the men of the neighborhood were already here too, sporting knee high rubber boots and leaning on shovels, assessing. There was no distress evident in their faces; they looked, for all the world, as if it were a normal day, not the morning after an apocalypse.

Another 50y yards on, where the road turned from gravel to pavement just before it met the main road, her friend’s car was waiting for her; come to take her into town to look for breakfast, and to buy food that didn’t need electricity to be cooked, and bottled water to hold her over until her well was working again.

At the grocery store, her friend filled up a whole basket, but she grabbed only a few things, conscious of the fact that she would have to carry the bags through the woods while trying not to lose her balance and fall into the mud.  

By early afternoon, the men had somehow gotten the mudslide mostly cleared. She joined a team of her neighbors to shovel out the last of the mud — a task which the men had feared to do with the tractors, lest they accidentally dig out the roadbed itself. The mud was watery and foul-smelling; like manure mixed with something she could not identify.

Meanwhile, down the road, the other group of men had succeeded in routing the creek (mostly) back into the culvert, and had begun to fill in the pits and valleys the water had gouged. By evening she was able, very gingerly, to ease her car through on a narrow lick of just-solid-enough ground. She was not normally a very intrepid driver, and had she been very slightly less desperate to get away she might have been too wary to attempt the barely passable road. But the cloud cover had begun to thicken again overhead. More rain was coming. The thought of another evening alone in her house, listening to rain, caused panic to blossom in her chest and in her stomach. Never mind the bottled water and granola bars she had purchased that morning. Electricity at her friend’s apartment had been restored already, and she had invited her to come spend the night; to enjoy her first hot meal and, even more exquisitely, her first shower in 48 hours. To be somewhere else before the rain came back.

It would be a week and a half before electricity was restored to her house, and several weeks after that before her well was functioning again. All told, nearly a month and a half elapsed before she was re-installed in her house.

***

AdobeStock photo.

It had been mid-February the first time she visited the cabin, nearly the end of March when she had moved in. The cabin was at the foot of the mountain, built on a narrow plateau cut into the hillside. The woods had been all gray and brown, winter still firm of grip as she bounced and rattled up the gravel road to what was to become her new home.

By late March, the daffodils had begun blooming, but nothing else had. The sun had been bright and silvery the day she moved in, leading a caravan of friends’ cars loaded down with all of her things, through the leafless woods.

Spring was slow in coming that year. By mid-April, the trees had not yet leafed out, but their branches were heavy with green buds. Weighed down, tree branches arched over the road in a way that they hadn’t in their winter-bare state, so that they transformed the little lane into a vibrant, viridescent tunnel. Alone in her car, she laughed for joy every time she trundled through. She bought a rocking chair for the front porch and drank her coffee there on weekend mornings. By the end of May, she was so walled in by green that she could no longer see the neighbors’ houses.

Photo by John P. Roberts.

She began taking walks in the evenings, and for the first time in her life began making an effort to identify plants. A flame azalea grew at the end of her driveway. The road was thickly bordered by golden ragwort, periwinkle, touch-me-nots, bee balm, fleabane, Queen Anne’s lace, blackberry brambles. Several small streams trickled and criss-crossed through the woods, and when she came home late at night, tiny frogs hopped back and forth across the road in her headlights. She learned to drive slowly up the road after dark, on the lookout for them.

To the amusement of her friends, she downloaded a birdcall identifying app. One night through her open windows she heard what sounded like a horse whinnying repeatedly — but by now she had explored the mountain thoroughly enough to know that there were no horses nearby. On a whim she pulled up the app, and was surprised and delighted to learn that what she was hearing was a screech owl.

She accepted some tomato seedlings from the father of a friend, planting them somewhat doubtfully in large pots stationed on her front steps — the only place that might possibly, she thought, get enough sunlight, now that the canopy overhead was in full leaf. She planted sunflowers in pots as well. The sunflowers shot up rapidly, to her delighted surprise, but then died almost as quickly. The tomatoes unexpectedly thrived; she gently helped the vines twine around the tomato cages, and when they outgrew the cages by July she gave over the railing of the porch stairs to them. By early August, she was eating sungold tomatoes like grapes.

***

The hurricane had arrived in the mountains on September 26, floodwaters cresting the following morning.

In the cabin, she lay on her couch in the semi-dark — the electricity had gone out that morning — and watched through the window as the wind bent the trees outside nearly double. So hemmed in by trees was her house that she could not usually see the sky out her windows; only trees. Now, huge swathes of gray sky were visible as the trees thrashed back and forth. The walls of the house creaked and groaned around her. More than once, her metal roof groaned so loudly that she thought it was about to come off altogether. I guess, she thought, if the roof comes off, or if a tree comes down on the house, I’ll go sit in my car.

To get in her car and drive away would only be to trade dangers, she knew. Her house was safe from flood water, at least. Many places were not, and nowhere at all was safe from the dangers of the wind, and the danger of waterlogged hillsides giving way in cascades of red clay. So she lay alone in her shadowy living room, and prayed, and waited for it to pass. And eventually, the storm did pass, and she sallied out into the world to see the damage.

It was two days before she heard a birdsong again.

 ***

One mild November evening, not long after she had begun staying at the cabin again, she went for a walk in the waning, pearly light before dusk. The mud that had been cleared out of the road was still heaped in piles alongside it, nearly as high as her shoulders in some places. Intermittent piles of dead wood were scattered along the roadside and in the ditches — branches and trees that had been felled by the storm, as well as branches and trees that had been cut down after, to clear the way for the linemen as they slowly rebuilt the better part of the decimated electric grid. Looking around the ravaged forest, she thought in despair: it will be a long time before this place is beautiful again.

 ***

She settled back into the cabin, but soon realized that the 24 hours during which the storm had raged had stolen all the charm from her cabin in the woods. Nothing actually bad had happened to her, or at least nothing worse than inconvenience. None of her fears had been realized. Her house had not been crushed by a falling tree, no mudslides had pushed it off its plateau perch, the floodwaters had kept their distance. When she thought of what so many of her neighbors throughout the region had suffered, she felt silly for being so unsettled, but sensation is sensation. She shuddered every time she heard the rattle of raindrops on her metal roof. On windy nights — and winter nights in the mountains often are windy, and that winter was especially windy — she lay awake in bed listening to the gales howling, and remembered laying on the couch, until finally she got out of bed and picked up a book. While reading, she could push the stress created by the wind to the back of her mind. She was sleep deprived for all of December, but she re-read all of Harry Potter.

By January, she had pretty well decided not to renew her lease. She had hoped, when she had moved into the cabin, to be able to stay for a long time. She had moved so many times in the last few years, her life shaken up by every life change of her various roommates. The cabin, all her own, had been an opportunity to be still for a while. It depressed her now to think of moving into an apartment complex in town — a sort of negation of all she had dreamed when she had first climbed the steps of the cabin that February day, and a denial of a summer’s worth of glorious woodland happiness. But an apartment complex meant being safely ensconced in a building far from trees, a building too big and sturdy to be blown apart by the wind, and with people on the other side of her walls. She could hardly believe she had become the sort of person who would value such things more than she valued the feeling of being surrounded by nature; but nature had shown its true, hostile face, and she didn’t know how to effect a reconciliation. So she made up her mind to abdication.

 ***

The first week of February, she bought a bird feeder. She almost didn’t bother — she wouldn’t be here much longer, after all. But for weeks the irrational and insistent wish for a bird feeder had been growing; and there was already a hook on the front porch from which she could hang it. So she gave into the impulse one afternoon, and drove to Tractor Supply to buy birdseed and a bright red feeder, shaped like a house.

Nearly a week passed without any visitors; but finally, one snowy morning, the dark-eyed juncos found the feeder en masse. All morning long she went back and forth continually from the front door, peering through the window to count the charcoal colored birds hopping about, to chuckle in delight at them. After the juncos came the black-masked chickadees, and then a singular tufted titmouse, and then a pair of nuthatches, and then cardinals.

On sunny days she would sit cross-legged on the floor in front of her French doors — with a cup of coffee in the mornings, or a spoonful of peanut butter in the afternoon — and watch the creatures — for there were more than just birds before long. Squirrels, and later chipmunks found their way onto the porch. Occasionally, if she moved, a creature would notice her through the window and would flee, but most days the glare of the sun on the glass seemed to be enough to keep the animals from noticing her, two feet away.

As the weeks drew toward March, winter began ever so slightly to loosen its grip, so that it was possible to drink her morning coffee on the porch, well bundled in sweaters and blankets. Any time a bird approached she held perfectly still, her coffee cooling in her immobile hands. The friendly dark-eyed juncos alone seemed unfazed by her presence; they did not take flight every time she lifted her mug to her lips, merely continued their hopping around on the porch — they preferred feeding on the ground to perching on the feeder itself — and plucking spilled seed from between the wooden floorboards. The squirrels and chipmunks grew used to her presence too; they kept a wary eye on her, always, but they consented to let her keep company, as long as she made no sudden movements.

            Lord, she began to pray; when I move somewhere new, please let me find someplace that has a porch. Please let me find someplace where I can still hang the bird feeder.

            Spring encroached in stops and starts; for every mild day, there were still three more blustering ones.

One morning, early, reading her Bible by lamplight before getting dressed for work, she fell upon Psalm 84.

“As they pass through the Valley of Tears, they make it a source of spring water; even the autumn rains will cover it with blessings.”

Even the autumn rains, she read again, and then paused in her reading to lift her head and listen to a particularly fierce gust of wind howl around the corner of the cabin.

She hadn’t even really notice the wind until that moment, she realized with a start. She had been hearing it all along, ever since she had woken up — but not in a way that had demanded her attention. It hadn’t tied her stomach in knots.

Later that day, as the wind continued to blow fiercely, it occurred to her that — while the winter winds had blown limbs and even a few trees weakened by the hurricane — the trees that were still standing, probably would continue to stand. If they were weak, susceptible to being brought down by the wind, they would have been by now.

But then again, it occurred to her, it had already been some time since she had last worried much about a tree coming down her house, anyway.

Photo by John P. Roberts.

February rolled into March; the last month of her lease. She had not notified her landlord that she did not intend to renew; she had gradually ceased looking at apartments in town. March crept towards April. She began looking up whenever she walked out her door, craning her head to see if the trees were beginning to bud yet. As the light lingered longer each day, she began taking evening walks again. March slid into April, and April burst into bloom. Winter finally gave up the ghost, and then the green that had been creeping exploded; in a span of days, she once again found herself too leafed-in to see her neighbors. All the brown — the mud, the deadwood — was rapidly blanketed. The roadsides were laced with wildflowers. It was a beautiful place again.

She shed her porch-sitting layers. As late spring gave way to prodigal summer, the birds began to forsake the feeder; after all, there was enough to go around in the forest now, and no nosy girls to watch them while they ate, besides.

When her landlord — a month late — sent her a fresh copy of her lease to sign anew, she printed the document, signed it, and scanned it back to him without thinking very much about it. It was opening day for the farmer’s market and she was in a hurry to get there, preoccupied by thoughts of tomato seedlings.

Courtney Roberts grew up in Canton, North Carolina. She lives in Boone, North Carolina, where she works at Appalachian State University, which is also her alma mater. This is her first fiction publication.