Ammi Midstokke

Today is my birthday.

One of the most redeeming qualities of being a writer is that one has a well-developed imagination. While it has often convinced me that sounds outside my tent are bears, coyotes and Sasquatch, it has also spent the last several months telling me I glide through the water with increasing fishlike grace.

The fickle nature of May and June temperatures have the garden stunted, sad and anemic. Even the leaves of the zucchini look like nothing more than a fig leaf covering the tiniest cherub’s wee bits.

“Hello?” A voice echoed through the trees, like the afternoon sunlight streaking between the boughs. I was standing on a tree myself, a mess of woody carnage that had blown down in a recent gust – the kind that uproots and snaps behemoths as if they were kindling.

Apparently, there are no brain eating amoeba in Lake Pend Oreille. Yet. According to Health & Welfare’s recreational water reports, the only water warning on the lake right now is about how many pounds of trout and whitefish one ought to limit themselves to per month (one and five, respectively).

A celebration this week is feeling a little tone deaf.

When the Gold Hill Trail No. 3 of Bonner County was opened in 1990, it felt like an incursion on our home turf. Our family had only moved there seven years earlier, but had been self-proclaimed explorers and discoverers since.

The eagle took off from the sage brush on the slope below me. I had not seen it or heard it until it whooshed upward with a flurry wing and bush, spooking the Brown Dog and me. It took its time. One, two, three beats of broad mottled wings, wider than I am tall, then silent and still, it caught the wind and rode it over the river.

With the impacts of climate change, it appears the question is not if we are going to be overrun with flood or fire, but when. Many neighborhoods in Spokane received their ill-fated answer last week, as the flames swallowed trees, homes, and the evidence of lives lived and curated in collections of family portraits.

I recently traveled to a midwest city to mingle with a bunch of outdoor writers in the middle of a concrete oasis. It seemed an odd place to invite the lot of us: plush red carpets, coffee service in white cups, and toilets that flush. The dress code for a conference of outdoor writers (the collective noun is a “starvation” of writers) is “breathable business” or “adventure casual.”