Under the Dock

The storm was still on the other side of the ridge, but I could smell it.

Rain in the Pacific Northwest arrives before it shows up. It sends the smell ahead like a scout: wet cedar, cold stone, that metallic sweetness that sits at the back of your throat and makes the hair on your arms stand up for no reason you can name. I sat at the end of the dock with my jeans rolled to the knee, my feet in Merrin Lake, and a mug of coffee going cold beside my hip. I let the storm take its time.

The dock ran about forty feet out from shore, gray boards gone soft and silver with age, a few nails standing proud enough to catch a sock. Behind me, up a slope of salal and fern, sat the cabin. Sixty yards, maybe. One room, a woodstove, a bed that sagged in the middle like it was tired of holding people up. The listing had called it rustic. The listing had lied about the Wi-Fi.

To my left the shoreline curved away into reeds and a fallen alder, its roots clawing at the air like it had died mid-sentence. To my right, nothing but water and the gray hump of a boathouse nobody had used since the eighties. Straight ahead, a quarter mile across the lake, the forest stood up out of the water like a wall. Douglas fir, hemlock and cedar, packed so tight the dark between the trunks looked solid.