Cleaning Out the Freezer
Cleaning Out the Freezer
Poems, flash stories, hunting snippets, and thoughts from the whole crew.
We are square in the middle of two seasons: freezer cleaning and freezer filling.
For those of us who have yet to fill a tag, the bottom of the freezer shines white against the light. And if you’re in the West, you know it’s been a strange season. Heat, wind, wildfire, smoke — they held elk tight and quiet, tucked into the landscape. Pressed against the expectations and experiences of prior falls that lit up in the heat of raucous ruts, I can’t in good conscience say I wasn’t a bit disappointed.
Instead, the archery season called for different tactics — more stilling ones — where you explored the land until signs offered you a credible opportunity to sit and wait for something to happen.
It’s a reality that The Westrn crew can easily analogize. We are almost six months into creating this new brand, this experiment where we’re hunting the media landscape to find game trails that may lead to big vistas or impassable brush. We’re seeking sign fresh enough to follow and water sources that sustain all against the heat.
Like hunting, this project requires steadiness, ingenuity, and the ability to sit and wait. That consistence often causes friction against the need to explore. We certainly have long reads in the works, but other ideas are forming as well. We want to take this moment to share things that are ethereal, lighter, or plucked from the bottom of the freezer in surprise. That hidden piece of backstrap might be a poem, the forgotten tongue a softer moment in the field, the shoulder roast a long braise of a story that formed a long time ago on the banks of a river.
Katie, Kestrel, and I are heading into the Montana hills together for the next five days, reaching into the Montana opener with hopeful hearts and zeroed rifles. Gabby mans the fort from Colorado, while also taking time to hunt or chase lost cattle wherever she can. For the next week or so, we are gone hunting, but we’ll have a long read for you when we return.
Leave us a comment with your own flash story, poem, or snippet on the efforts of the season thus far. Or, if the mood strikes, send them to editor@thewestrn.com. We’d love to share a few of them in our next newsletter.
Thanks, as always, for being at our table. The experiment continues.
Nicole Qualtieri
Editor-in-Chief, The Westrn
Gabby’s Freezer Fossils
Lost Things
His first place was an apartment. Up the stairs, bags in tow, little brothers plodded behind me. Smelled like air freshener and Indian food. His classic rotisserie-style chicken for dinner, steamed broccoli, rice like his mother makes. Glass Nickel Pizza the next. On Saturday, he asked me to shave his back before we scorched our bare feet on hot pavement and leapt into the pool. I did. Sunburned, we escaped into cartoons in the rec room.
His next was a duplex. He found Wendy at church — we didn’t approve. She had two kids from her previous marriage, untamed and undisciplined. He bought a used white minivan. He often cried when we hugged goodbye on Sundays. “Do you sleep in ’til 1 PM at Mom’s? Why won’t the boys open up to me?”
In that van, we drifted past our old house, across from his. I don’t remember why — it wasn’t on the way to Mom’s. Maybe masochism. We turned a corner.
“Look at that crappy duplex,” I said. In that moment, I had forgotten he lived in one, too.
Fat Chick
The sun went down before dinnertime now. Dumb Daylight Savings. In the dark, Clairissa and I hoisted ourselves into her dad’s truck — his truck. The sound of pop-country echoed in my skull the whole 20-minute drive.
Only a few other trucks were parked out front. Woods lined the edge of the lot like a fence. The OPEN sign light ended there. Smells from the Friday night fish fry hung in the air. Walleye or cod? How about neither?
We shuffled through the entryway and found ourselves in quintessential southern Wisconsin. Half-naked beer maidens dangled off the wall, crooked, and multicolored Christmas lights lined the ceiling. The mirrored bar reflected liquor warning labels. The walls, brown with time, felt like a McDonald’s counter. So did the tables. A lone man sat at the counter — greasy hair smashed under a blaze orange beanie, brown fleece-lined Carhartt stained from a dairy-ful life. His muck boots dripped brown sludge onto the linoleum floor. A couple of families decked in Packers gear — parents stuffed with beer — occupied two tables. Two TVs blasted sports. I hated football but watched it anyway.
“Hey, you guys! It’s great to see you, how’ve you been?” Clairissa’s aunt is our waitress. She bent off a Bitter Woman bottle cap before he got to respond.
Swig in cheek, “Great! Stacy’s busy, so I thought I’d take the girls out for dinner.”
“So sweet. Let me grab you two kiddie cocktails.” Alcoholism starts young in Wisconsinites. There’s a reason it has the most liver transplants in the US.
“You ready to order?” She got to me.
“I’ll have a Fat Chick, please.” He chuckled slightly. It was their fried chicken sandwich, but the joke was obvious. I sucked my Sprite-grenadine concoction up the black plastic straw. The fizz burned my throat. The grenadine glued my tongue to my teeth. The sweet syrup induced a sugar rush.
Boobs, lights, sports, beer. Why did my mom’s boyfriend bring me there? Why was it normal for me to be there? Underage kids could still order alcohol with their parents’ consent back then; I never did, though. Didn’t need to. Clairissa would find that out with me a year or two later. But back then, before we could drive, I was just glad she visited her dad on the same weekends I was at my mom’s. We still lived across the street from each other then, too, making those weekends feel almost like normal pre-teen years.
“Here’s your Fat Chick!” More stifled laughter. I ate in near silence, pretending I was somewhere else other than that sad, dark bar. Sports, sports, sports…
He paid the check and tipped her well. I lowered myself off the old stool and slipped my coat back on. The Carhartt man was still there — same stance, new drink. But the Packers family was on their way out, too. We beat them to the door; the voices and restaurant sounds muted once outside.
Frost formed on soggy fallen leaves. Tiny snowflakes swirled in OPEN sign’s red glow. His blue truck turned on quickly, pop-country and warm air on full blast. Being the smallest, I squeezed into the center bench seat. Touching on both sides, I stared ahead, awaiting the comfort of home.
To Cast A Fly
My dad didn’t have an easy childhood. His parents are immigrants; he’s a second-generation American who grew up in Section 8 housing. He worked three jobs by the time he was 12 and hasn’t stopped working since. That is, until I took him fly fishing.
My dad, his wife, and I hopped into the rental SUV they drove out from Denver. I rolled down my window, letting the sage-scented wind whisk me towards the mountains. I was taking my dad to the Beaver Ponds, the first place my then-boyfriend took me fly fishing. Needless to say, to me, it’s a special spot.
We turned off 135 onto Ohio Creek Road and the pavement quickly switched to gravel. Past the mega-mansions, beyond the cattle ranches, and up and through a swath of aspens. Fresh mountain air rolled through the window and onto my tongue. We parked the car at the trailhead in a nest of spruce. I tossed on my pack, slung my fly rod over my shoulder, and we set out on my dad’s first Colorado hike.
I don’t think too many words were uttered on the way to the trailhead. I recall a handful of ooohs and aahs. But nothing complicated. Nature has a way of dominating conversations. We plodded along slowly, secretly wishing the ponds would never arrive, that we could hike through the trembling aspen leaves and blooming lupine forever. But the spruce opened up, a squirrel chattered, and the Beaver Ponds came into sight.
A cupped meadow held the main pond near the base of the Anthracites. Surrounded by wildflowers, a trodden dirt path encircled the small body of water, crossing over both of the crystal-clear, cold-as-ice inlet and outlet streams. Mountain chickadees bounced between lodgepole pine branches. The rocky peaks to the west scratched the sky as the world spun towards dusk, the alpine meadows changing from spring green to soft lavender. Brook trout spawned in the shallow water, bodies gliding between their liquid substrate and each other.
I took out my fly rod while his wife snapped a few photos. I made a few practice casts, and when I felt like I sufficiently showed my father how it’s done, I handed the rod to him.
Oh, he flailed. That fly line whipped back and forth so fast, not even an osprey could have caught the feathery bug at the end of it. It’d hit the water about 10 feet away from him, drift back to his feet, and everything he learned about swinging from his high school baseball coach would kick in again. Twenty minutes passed before he turned to me, grinning.
“That’s the first time I haven’t thought about work in years,” he beamed.
That was probably the proudest I’ve ever seen him because, in that moment, my dad realized something for the first time: connecting with the natural world provides solace from the stresses of life.
Nature picks you up and holds you like a baby robin in her hands, telling you that your life matters in a voice as warm as a summer breeze. When it’s time to go, she sets you down, and somehow, you feel renewed. You’re not even sure how it happened. And no matter what you have to go back to — work, home, your own mind — she’ll be waiting for you when you return. And maybe, next time, she’ll let you catch a fish.
Katie’s Freezer Fossil
horses and elk and me
Somewhere there’s a world
where I fit in some prenatural order
nestled between these two creatures
they help me fly away.
When they stampede
the shapes of them
churn
ripple
jockey
bargain for space
up ahead
upheaded
I know them from a distance, across a draw
braced sideways on a hill that crumbles
set steady against a world blazing with change.
They keep the score of the earth
and its dwellers
and our many faults grievances failings
in knotted clumps in their manes
and lofty tines on their heads
and their breath on a cold morning fills the sky
with something more pure than ice-air.
Kestrel’s Freezer Fossil
Bird Hunter
Wingbeats explode from the sagebrush and I jump a little as always. Every time a grouse startles me, I wonder if elk notice the frantic wingbeats as an early warning for approaching predators. The meadow where I saw the herd at daybreak is close by. There’s just a narrow break of lodgepole pines between us.
I enter the trees where a disappointing carpet of dry twigs and downed logs block the edge of the meadow. Scanning ahead for small movements in the breaks between the trees, I hope to catch a shifting leg or a head rising up from grazing. A dark blob at the edge of a distant tree may have just shifted. But I can’t make it reappear, so I keep creeping ahead.
My attention zooms in on the ground’s shapes and textures. It’s a game of ‘the floor is lava’ with gray, dried twigs. Just feet from the meadow’s edge, I’m relieved to step onto the quiet surface of a well-used game trail. I feel a thrilling hum of real or imagined animals nearby. A berry-stained pile of bear scat reminds me that I’ve seen their sign regularly here and even found their bones, without spotting a single bear.
The wind is good at the meadow’s edge. The bull and his handful of cows could be scattered behind any of the nearby sagebrush. I’d love to stalk them through the tall sage like they’re antelope. I stand still and listen and look for movement. Then, I hear a low, loud grunt mere yards ahead, followed by wing beats that sound similar to a flushing grouse. Brief silence breaks into a clamor of I don’t know what. Hoofbeats? Heavy feet hitting the ground? Instinctively, I think I know what happened, but it seems unlikely.
Would a bear just chomp down on a mouthful of feathers, catching a grouse by the skin of his teeth? Or would he have used his paws? I’ll have to look it up when I’m home. And wait, is that black shape in the trees ahead a shadow or an actual bear? I raise my binoculars, but the figure evaporates like a mirage.
Ahead, there’s a bird feather on the ground. It fits my story but almost makes it too clean. Plus, I can’t get distracted from the elk that may or may not be nearby. I’m curious but resigned that the elk woods are always full of unanswered questions.
I creep up and down the meadow. They’re gone, probably downslope to bed. Blaming the apparition of a bear for scattering them seems like a cheap excuse for an anticlimactic hunt. After glassing the distance for a while, I spot a bull grazing low in a far meadow.
On my way downhill, a stray black Angus cow appears as a shapeless mass in the sage. I’m tired of cows giving me the split-second false jolt of spotting wildlife. But, the cows aren’t up this high and the proportions are all wrong. That’s not a cow. That’s the hind end of a black bear.
As I freeze and consider if I can sneak in on him to fill my first bear tag, he bobs down and pops his head up. We stare at each other, two characters from different storylines, meeting for a moment. We part ways as he turns and lopes back into the woods. Now, everything I’ve seen and heard makes sense. A cartoonish story begins with a grunt and settling feathers, and it tidily ends with the round ears and muzzle of that curious young black bear and his belly full of grouse.
Nicole’s Freezer Fossils
October 6th, 2024
Smoke settles over my home place. Throat thickens, eyes water. Climate and weather are not the same but it’s the sixth of October and the only relief from the sun has been the moon for weeks upon weeks. Elk song comes only in the long hours of stars. I walk through pine and aspen wet hot feet in flowing creeks palm wolf prints in dry mud call to closed lips toe through empty beds drink umami air into lungs over and over, closer and closer inhaling elk — exhaling hope. I tread through dried grass weave through stands of sage press droppings between fingers. Always a day behind. Finally, I stand on the backbone of the mountain look across and see flames licking a far ridgeline pick glass up to my eyes watch as living pines explode. Black carbon billows upward cutting tall pillars of warning into a looming and relentless blue sky.
The Loon
In a dream, I raised shotgun to eye to shoot loons out of a storm-filled night. I caught one in the spray of beads, and it dropped to the water stone-dead on the other side of a sandbar. My border collie jumped in and swam to retrieve it. The current was quick. He paddled in circles but couldn’t find it. Suddenly, a transparent loon swam through the trunk of my body, back to life but gone. The strangeness rattled me awake with a shudder. I reached for the black-and-white dog safe and asleep at my feet.
I once was fishing from a kayak on a northwestern Montana lake when, about fifteen feet below my boat, a refracted loon appeared. My fly rested on the water out ahead of it. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I let it lie in a silent panic. Not to worry. The loon surfaced a few dozen yards away, elk caddis untouched.
The idea of a bird flying so far beneath me flipped everything upside down. It was effortless. No whistles of feathers. No treetops or clouds for scale. Just the black depths of clear, clear water. A bird with its wings tucked into its body, its black and white feathers effervescent, a refracted and water-colored avian apparition against an eternity below it. Haunting and silent.
That same day, two kids showed up riding double on a big bay horse, bareback, with only a halter and a tied lead rope as reins. They broke the stillness all around, the thick calm before a coming storm. They swam the horse in the deep water, cannonballed from boulders in their bathing suits, closed their eyes and threw their heads and arms toward the sky, chatting and chortling with the birdsong of teenage summer freedom. Overhead, the sky darkened, began to roll with threats and flashes.
I wanted to jump in below them. To see the thin, sinewy legs of the horse steadily pumping to stay afloat. To bear witness to the bottoms of bare feet against its barreled, cushioned ribs. Muted laughter ringing above me and shadows of big, well-fed rainbow trout shifting below. I wanted to see what the loon might see, in the crystalline depths of the lake.
I reeled in my long-ignored fly. Rowed to the center of the scene. Felt fat raindrops hit my bare shoulders and arms. Lightning and thunder buzzed, filling the heavy summer air with a dangerous energy.
I took a deep breath. I dove into the blackness, soared through the depths of the ancient glacial waters, and tucked my feathers tight to my sides.
I dreamt I was a loon.