Southern Bound Winds
Oct 2022
Maeve Healy
A young woman sits on top of a rock in one of Big Sur’s many running creeks. She stares at the running water and lets it run over her bare feet. It’s freezing, as are most of the streams in Northern California during the month of January, a stark contrast to the warm air that surrounds her. In the distance, wood and leaves burn, and the morning dew begins to evaporate as the sun comes out.
Before coming to this rock, she’d sipped on orange juice and ate pancakes inside a wood cabin where the men cooking in the kitchen would yell just loud enough for the people in the restaurant to hear. They smoked cigarettes early in the morning, as they had been doing when she’d walked in, and they drank water from plastic cups as they conversed about the man who’d been fired from the general store across the way, the local town vandal, and the young woman who walked in with her hair braided. She would be so pretty, they said, if it were not for the bags under her eyes; they drowned out the blue in her irises. The men were rudely interrupted by the chef not long after the young woman had walked into the cabin and were forced to continue their conversation on their second cigarette break — before the lunch rush commenced. They began cooking again and the kitchen became filled with the faintest scent of tobacco.
After having her breakfast, she followed the sounds of rushing water to the creek and sat upon her rock. She hopes for just a moment of silence; a moment in which the anxiety is gone. Suddenly, it is. She is at a peace unknown to her before — one in which her mood disappears, making the raging ocean of voices inside her head taper off and begin barely lapping at the shore.
She looks up at the foliage that shields the stream from the sun and notices a crack in one of the branches that leans out over the river. Compelled to look at the branch, she stands up on the rock and squints at the sight.
About 300 miles to the north, a forest fire was being put out by some firemen. As they worked, intense heat rose from the burning trees and the rapid change in pressure pushed air up away from the fire — creating an updraft of almost 40 miles an hour. The wind began making its way down south, where it would hit the towns surrounding Big Sur and the creek where the young woman sat.
The slight smell of smoke came, and the wind came along with it, hitting the tree just right. The tree branch cracked and began falling towards the girl, who froze and saw her young life flash before her eyes.
In the second it took for the branch to fall, the girl saw her childhood bedroom in the wee hours of the morning, when her father would kiss her on the cheek before going to work and leave the scent of his toothpaste behind. She saw the father of a family friend who was killed in a car accident swimming in her pool. She smelled the coffee she spilt on a cream-colored dress before her brother’s wedding, and she heard the bells on the cart of the paleta man who used to walk in the park with popsicles and frozen mangos. The last thing she saw was the bishop raising his leather-bound Bible as lace bookmarks spilled out from the pages.
She shut her eyes, and immediately after, the branch hit the ground an inch from her. She closed her eyes once more and looked for the calm she had found just a minute before, but was only able to focus on the smell of wood burning.
Maeve Healy is from Chicago, IL and studies in the College of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.