In the Loyal Mountains by Rick Bass Page A

up, and people too, after they’ve been hurt—brings jars of honey from his beehives. Dave brings his banjo, and Janie her fiddle. Young Terjaney has an enormous electric accordion with row upon row of colored flashing lights which once belonged to his father. Old Mr. Terjaney had brought the accordion all the way from Hungary. He kept it strapped to his chest when he played. The sound was magnificent.
    Old Mr. Terjaney drank a lot. Along with everything else, we bring homemade beer to the barbecue, made in our cellars during the slow winters, beer that we keep chilled in the river during summer. Old Mr. Terjaney would open one jar after another of the deep amber-colored brew. He’d get out in the road and dance as he played his big one-footed polkas and waltzes. He kept a jar of beer perched on top of the accordion.
    One night, near midnight, he spilled his beer. He’d been dancing and playing a polka with his jar wobbling on top of his accordion. The instrument was hot from the good use he’d made of it, and it exploded like fireworks, electrocuting Old Mr. Terjaney right there in the road. We thought he’d done it on purpose—perhaps this was a special function of the instrument when he pressed a certain button. There were so many buttons. We even cheered at first. It’s amazing that Joe was able to repair it.
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    If it is snowing when you go out to get wood for your fireplace, tie one end of a rope around your waist and tie the other end to the cabin door. The snow can start coming down so fast and hard that in the short time it takes you to get to the woodshed, you can get lost in a whiteout on your way back. It doesn’t sound like it’s possible, but it happened to me once. A light snow turned heavy in just seconds, and then became a blizzard. I ended up staying in the woodshed all night waiting for daylight. I felt ridiculous, but not as ridiculous as I would have felt dying within a mile of my cabin, when all I had wanted to do was get a few sticks of wood.
    There is some compass in all of us that does not want us to walk a straight line. I respect this, and do not try to challenge it in blizzards.
    Sometimes people run out of gas (visitors, not locals) up on the pass, where during the winter traffic can go by only every second or third day, and some of them freeze to death in their cars—traveling without heavy clothes, without sleeping bags in the back—and others freeze in the woods when they get out of their cars and try to walk for help. Everyone up here has CB and shortwave radios in their trucks. You can live in a dangerous place quite easily, but to visit it is another thing.
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    We’ve got a nice cemetery. There are two cemeteries, actually: one that no one seems to know about, up in the hills above the river, that this kid just found while out walking one day. But the other cemetery, which originally catered mostly to loggers—since they were the ones who used it the most, what with trees falling on them and saws back-bucking and trucks and skidders rolling off cliffs and the like—is now used by everybody, and is majestic.
    It’s up on Boyd Hill, and you can see the river from it, even through the larch trees, which are centuries old. Two hundred feet tall, they tower like redwoods and have withstood even the biggest fires. They’re so huge that eight or ten people holding hands can’t encircle them. The larches line all sides of the cemetery’s wrought-iron fence, and the air beneath the canopy of trees so high above is a different kind of air, motionless, even when the rest of the woods is windy. Different, too, is the thin light that’s able to filter through. Moss grows on the headstones. The shade is cool and smells good. There’s a spring nearby, up higher on the mountain.
    The timber companies would love to cut the trees around the cemetery—each tree is worth several thousand dollars by itself—but no