Stuck: Rediscovering Writing in the End Times

March 2020: You remember, don’t you? While we were all sterilizing our mail and hoarding toilet paper for the apocalypse, I was launching my debut novel.

What’s funny about this—if anything is funny—is that The Companions opens during a pandemic, two years into lockdown, though I call it quarantine in the novel because lockdown is not a term used historically for such scenarios. In the 1970s, prisons and psychiatric hospitals adopted the term to refer to an extended period of confinement, but it wasn’t used to describe isolation in the face of a contagion until 2020. Pretty fitting, actually, considering how lockdown made most of us feel.

(The Two Kinds of Artistic Doubt.)

That said, I was describing the same basic phenomenon—people living in a prolonged state of isolation and fear, over-reliant on tech as their means of connection, although in my book that comes not in the form of Zoom cocktail hours but as the consciousness of the dead uploaded to machines and kept as companions by the living. Who wants to read about that kind of horror when you’re living through something far too similar?

Prior to my debut, the best advice I got (but didn’t take) from another writer was: “Get a therapist.” My writer friends know me to be a bit obsessive. When I get an idea, I write and write until I have a draft. But after my novel came out? I couldn’t write for a long time. For a while, I didn’t think I’d write again. Who was I without writing? It took getting stuck in one of the biggest snowstorms in California history for me to face that question.

It was winter 2021, and a friend was nice enough to let me use her mother-in-law’s vacation home in Twain Harte, a true gift to my two San Francisco-grown kids who dream of snowy expanses. Twain Harte is an old mining town situated in the Sierra foothills—which is to say it’s a place of dreams fulfilled and broken—and named for two famous Mother Lode authors. I didn’t think much of this then, considering I didn’t go there to write.

We arrived at about 3:30pm on a Sunday. I’d been watching the weather carefully, so I’d get there before the snowfall hit. I knew it was coming, but I had no idea how bad it was going to be—no one knew. That’s how it is in our new and ever-changing climate reality, a chronic kind of uncertainty.

I’d been to the house once before, so I felt confident I’d find it even though my phone’s map app was mostly useless above the main road and everything was white with snow. My Mom Car, a city-sensible 2007 Toyota Yaris that clears the ground by about two inches, was absolutely not fit for snow, and my anxiety was peaking. I loved taking adventures with my girls, and so far they’d all worked out, but had I miscalculated?

I started up one unplowed road that I was pretty sure led to the house, passing an SUV very seriously teetering into the trees. Immediately, my Mom Car sank in the snow. I told the girls to sit tight as I ran up the road, maybe a little frantic, to confirm that I was on the right path. And there it was—the house was snow-covered, the yard buried, but I knew I’d found the spot and ran back to the car.

In a potentially dystopian scenario, you have to watch your caloric expenditure, but I wasn’t thinking about that yet. As I was hoofing up the snow-buried path, sweating, I was thinking yay! Someone will definitely get her steps in today.

The kids were fine, bored. “Why didn’t you let us come with you?” Good question. Perhaps I needed a rapid-fire anxiety release. Would I have to dig my car out? I didn’t show my fear as my tires spun in the snow, the car unmoving. In my mind contingencies were forming: we’d leave the car alongside the teetering SUV and plod our way back to the house, wait out the storm. But my car was blocking the road—what if a neighbor needed to get out? So, I rocked the car gently, like a good little baby, until she was free. Then I reversed down that snowy road.

With one road unpassable, I’d have to go the other way, the steep way I’d hoped to avoid. In truth, this was what had been giving me anxiety all day—trying to get my Mom Car up a scary, sharp drive covered in snow and ice. In my mind, I’d seen my car lose traction on that incline dozens of times. I’d felt the helplessness of us careening backwards into a tree, or maybe onto the main road, colliding with a passing truck. I had cables for my tires, not as good as chains. In the nights leading up to the trip, I’d watched YouTube tutorials for installing and removing cables over and over. Could I, in fact, successfully do it?

At the base of that drive, I decided to go for it, no cables. In the end, after all that mounting anxiety, I got up the road pretty easily. Timing, it turned out, was perfect, snow falling heavily by then. An hour later, and we wouldn’t have made it at all. Ahead of us, the drive to the house was blanketed in a couple feet of snow and impassible.

We left the car at the edge of a neighbor’s drive, with a note on the dash, one that would be totally buried in minutes, and tromped toward the house, through snow so high we lost sight of our scrawny dog as he followed in our boot prints.

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That evening, as my kids and I were playing outside, not one other human in sight, we spotted a deer, then another, another, so many deer we were outnumbered. They weren’t especially perturbed by our presence, bounding in the snow as deer do, and it was magical, the snow really coming down now, maybe one of the more magical moments of my life, and I could tell by my kids’ faces they were feeling it too. This is why you’re here, I reminded myself.

In the morning, the power was out, my car was buried, and the sound of generators thrummed through the trees. The year-round residents were prepared for heavy snowfall and power outages, but I was just a tourist, borrowing a friend’s vacation home, which meant no generator, and absolutely no back-up plan.

I had expected a snowstorm. I was prepared to be stuck for a few days, but this was something else. From the main road, we could hear PG&E working on the lines, so we walked down to ask them for an update. They said they had no idea. So many lines down, all over the place. Could be hours, could be days.

The girls and I camp often. Limited food, quick meals—my kids are used to it. Luckily, the master bedroom had a gas fireplace and I could still cook on the stove. In my usual survivalist fashion, I’d brought far too much food. If we had to, we could survive for a couple weeks, rationing. We had water. What was there to be afraid of? Adjusting your body temperature isn’t that hard when you don’t have a choice. I scurried food down the cold chamber to my kids in the warm womb. That’s what we called the master bedroom even if it was mid-50s in there, just enough to take the edge off.

Whenever I saw a neighbor, I made sure to wave and approach, to tell them about us, a single mom and two kids, a tiny, annoying dog. I wanted the neighbors to know we were there, that we had no power—I was afraid we’d be lost in the storm. Standing in the deep snow, I learned that the next-door neighbor was also a single mom and teacher, and I felt it, that connection. She must have felt it too because she offered the girls and me her couch should we need it, a kindness in the cold that nearly got me crying.

In the afternoons, when the sun was at its highest, I went out to talk to the neighbors, to kick my car loose of snow—so much kicking my shin muscles ached. Perhaps a waste of time and calories, but it helped with the anxiety: I would not find myself needing to leave, but buried. The girls enjoyed this activity, launching snow off the top of the car while I worked on the important stuff, the underbelly, making sure the wheels were free. I tried to keep it playful, to light candles at night and tell them that tomorrow maybe we’ll have power! And if not, we’ll frolic some more in the snow. 

Amazingly they played along, even as I was serving them breakfast in the icy cold, our breath like clouds—that is a special kind of trust. They dutifully ate and put on their snow clothes. When it was dark, they went to bed without complaint, exhausted from all the snowball fights and tunneling. Were they also alert to this feeling of impending doom? I didn’t think so, but I stayed vigilant for us all. I asked them periodically: “If we could leave now, would you?” They were both absolute in their noes, which was good because there was no way we were getting out of there.

Meanwhile, I wasn’t sleeping well. A house in the snow thuds and whines unexpectedly, and I’d get swept up in a worrisome dream only to wake to a strange sound. No power, minimal heat, a beautiful house that was an inaccessible coffin.

That Wednesday I woke from yet another weird dream with an idea, something that would breathe life into a novel project I’d long thought dead. It was confusing, because I didn’t want a writing idea right then; I wanted to get my kids home safely. Somehow in this state of heightened alertness, electric with the potential for disaster, my writing fears and doubts were washed away by more immediate concerns, and for the first time in I don’t know how many months, I could write. When I wasn’t cooking or playing with the kids, I wrote for as long as my laptop had power, and when my laptop died, I continued in my journal until my hand could no longer manage in the cold. A few days later I had the shell of a novel.

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On the seventh day, the snow had melted enough that we decided it was time to try our way down that steep drive. The power still hadn’t come back on, and my girls were finally weary of being cold. Out front a few of the neighbors gathered to give me guidance and kick away at patches of ice on the road. I did what they suggested; I took it “low and slow.” Somehow they had become my friends. I guess that happens in extreme conditions though it could go in another, darker direction, I have no doubt. Under such circumstances, you show yourself, and others do too. We all hugged goodbye.

I haven’t been back to Twain Harte—I’m frankly a bit skittish to take my kids into the snow after that experience, and I still drive the Mom Car—yet as release day for my second book grows near, I think about those neighbors often, the deer in the snow, the strange dreams and the idea that brought me back to writing. I’d been waiting for the world to give me something, to tell me that they wanted to hear from me, but no one came looking for my writing, least of all me. That’s the funny thing about writing: sometimes it comes looking for you.