Nov. 27, 2011

It snowed a little bit overnight and the cabin felt cozy and safe as we cooked breakfast.

Lake Cocolalla, 150 feet away, glittered blindingly in the morning sun, which seemed brighter than usual. I squinted, looking across the back lawn, over the subdivision road that provided access to the lake front cabins and over the cold, dark waters of the lake.

It was 11:11 a.m. when Carrie poured me a second cup of coffee and asked me what I was going to do that day.

Both of us were sporting four alarm hangovers, which explained why the light seemed brighter than usual. The fact is, I had started to notice subtle changes in the weather. It had been a warmer-than-usual November, with one small cold snap that lasted two or three days. A warm south wind puffed in from across the lake and my photographer’s eyes kept thinking that the natural light was more like what one would see in April or May than at the end of the usually dreary November.

Sipping coffee and leaning on the deck railing, I looked at the funky angle Ointment was in on the driveway and cringed at my madness.

We had driven down the desolate vehicle-strewn-highway, cutting through the centre of the stovepipe top of Idaho, as drunk as pirates recently set afoot in harbour after months at sea. Despite the fact the old laws and ways didn’t really apply any longer, it gave me the willies thinking about how destroyed we were and how dangerous it is to drive in such a condition at the best of times. These were not the best of times. These were shit-strewn-all-over-the-highways times.

Blinking away the brightness when I stepped back in the cabin, I informed Carrie what my day’s plans were.

“I am going to wander around and see what’s what,” I said. “Who knows? Maybe the only people who were not snapped up by the hand of God, or who zipped through seams of time into another dimension or turned into droplets of water in an instance or whatever the heck happened to everyone, are those who live around this lake. Pretty much resigned to the fact that there has to be answers of some kind, I am.”

Carrie said she was going to do some painting.

“You may hear gunfire,” I said, rinsing my coffee cup. “Possibly a lot of gunfire.”

“Just don’t blow anyone’s doors off the hinges this time,” she said, meaning it.

I still felt a pang of shame about that. “I won’t.”

Stepping outside, I breathed in deeply and savored the freshness of the air. Could it be possible that the air is fresher from the elimination of motor vehicle emissions, and other aspects relating to humanity’s daily infusions of gaseous matters into the world, I wondered?

Like every day since Nov. 11, I stepped outside expecting to hear a sound of human life. A plane passing overhead; distant traffic; a chainsaw; hammers pounding; playing children squealing; a siren; a tire screeching; a train rolling along across the lake. Silence — another heaping helping of standard, everyday silence.

‘Our cabin,’ was one of the older buildings in the subdivision. It was originally a farmhouse, belonging to the people who subdivided their lakefront property in the late 1970s.

It had four bedrooms, including a large kids’ room with three bunk beds, and a beautiful brick fireplace next to a large picture window that looked out toward the lake. A long, narrow, grassed yard led to a community beach.

With a spacious dining area and kitchen, as well as a large wrap around deck, which had the sinister feature of two levels separated by a nasty four or five inches, the cause for many brutal (and some hilarious) spills and tumbles, the cabin had been the site of dozens of family gatherings over the years, as well as many weekend parties.

We had become friends with several of our neighbours as a result. Carrie and I had been so busy working on our photography and communications businesses the past two years that we hadn’t gotten out to see them much.

And I wondered how they were doing before they went ‘poof’ and disappeared.

I didn’t see smoke curling from Fred and Fern Smith’s place, which was located at the far southern edge of the subdivision. Retired and living full-time at the lake, if they were still ‘here’ or ‘alive’ there would be smoke curling out. Fred loved his fireplace.

The thin layer of snow on the ground half melted to grass and half packed down as a Salvador Dali-style footprint as I walked toward our neighbour’s cabin, belonging to the hyper-dizzy Wendy and unbelievably boring Allan Dagramowski.

The Dagramowskis were a wealthy pair of idiots from Spokane who were always trying to intrude into our lives. Lobbing out pre-attack shellings of obvious fake sincerity, they would invite themselves over to Thanksgiving or Easter gatherings by clearing bits of their normally manicured and pin-neat yard adjacent to our lot. Eventually, one of the kids would end up saying hello to one of them and then the ‘borefest’ would be on.

Allan was an accountant for some major northwest U.S. insurance firm specializing in arse-reaming silly gits from their hard-earned savings and Wendy was a housewife, though they had no children. She complained endlessly about how hard her life was, though all she did, as near as I could tell, was jam bon-bons into her fully-lipped yap and blab ceaselessly on her cell phone to her sister and mother. She wouldn’t even take Rascal, their sadly overweight Scottie Terrier, for walks. She left that for Allan to do when he dragged his three Scotch-bolstered hide home for a late dinner, always started by Wendy when he got home, rather than before he got home.

That used to drive Allan crazy. I heard him go off about that 10 or more times, I thought as I rounded the corner toward the front of their spacious A-frame cabin. Light snow covered the walk and the blinds were drawn.

Though I was becoming increasingly desperate to find signs of other human life, I felt relieved that Allan and Wendy were not around.

However, the cabin next to the Dagramowski’s belonged to my favourite lake people — the Mills. Henry and Tess Mills were about the same age as us, had kids about the same age as ours and, like us, didn’t have a lot of money or use for droning wads of tedium like the Dagramowskis.

My heart sank a tad as I walked up to their front door and made fresh tracks in the snow. Their blinds were drawn, too, and there was no sign of anyone around. I tugged at their front door to make sure it was locked, as I would do if the world hadn’t undergone some whoopsy daisy apocalypse.  Old habits.

It was the same at the Morgans’ place and at the Piedmont’s and the Atchison’s. Thankfully, there was no sign of life from the Caligun’s house. Morris Caligun was a successful lawyer from Boise and his ‘cabin’ was roughly three times larger than the next largest place at the lake — belonging to the Dagramowskis. He was a man who never stopped talking about himself and, subsequently, he was often at the lake alone. That meant he would have ‘parties’ in order to not kill himself from the depression brought upon by being severely lonely.

Carrie and I had been to the lake in the neighbourhood of 200 times. In that time, we had been trapped into having to say yes to attend Caligun’s parties about 10 times.

Henry Mills and I had, as a result, concocted the most elaborate murder scenarios.

I even jotted down copious notes after one evening of heavy drinking and murder scenario devising, for the purpose of writing a short story about how a group of cabin owners become suspects in the foul slaying of a big-mouthed lout. The working title was ‘Who killed the big asshole?’

It took me about half an hour to tour the entire subdivision and when I stepped back inside the cabin, Carrie had a lovely blaze crackling in the fireplace. I grabbed her around the waist and held her close, squeezing her with a hug that verily shrieked, ‘I love you.’

“I love you, too,” she said, smiling. “No one? I didn’t hear any fireworks.”

I shook my head.

“At least that old prick Caligun isn’t around.”

“Or the Dagramowskis!” Carrie laughed. “I didn’t have to go for a walk to know that. They’d be here telling us about how their cabin isn’t actually an A-frame — it is more like a K frame because they have a massive upstairs deck and yada yada yada blah blah blah.”

We laughed about the people who may now be dead or burning in hell or being eaten by pan-dimensional cannibals, before Carrie wiped at her eye.

She quietly said, “Tess was really a beautiful person. What do you think happened to them?”

We spent the rest of the day either pacing about troubled by the great mystery or staring blankly into the fireplace. The final vestiges of human existence cuddled in a warm ball beneath a tattered old blanket, doing crosswords, poking at a fire, with Carrie reading about ‘The Secret.’

“What does it have to say about all this?” I asked of the book.

Carrie ignored me. Another day came and went. We didn’t even talk about heading out on the road to try and find our kids.

But the tug to explore gnawed at me as I listened to the fire crackle and pop.

Ian Cobb/e-KNOW

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