Where do story ideas come from? Everywhere. Here’s where the seed of Two Hours Before Winter came from.
Long before I’d started writing it, my wife told me about a tragic event, events really, that happened when she was a young girl growing up in a small fishing and logging village along British Columbia’s inside passage. I’ll not go into it for reasons of spoiling the story, or for being insensitive to residual feelings, but her story meshed with some of my own experiences as a kid, moments when innocence is shorn from your narrow world-view like long summer hair; suddenly you can see the things you couldn’t, and the hair never grows back over the view.
Many, many years later, all grown up and pedaling road bikes up a moss grown forest service road cut through a dense Pacific Northwest Forest, I was suddenly possessed of an almost paralyzing fear and mania. I was a quarter of a mile ahead of my wife up a long hill climb, surrounded by walls of vegetation, shoulders of a glaciated mountain visible ahead through the narrow slot of road. The air was dead still.
I stopped after a few minutes of self-counseling against the dread feeling rising inside me. I got off the bike and stood along the road’s edge in a fighting stance. A furious maddening energy pulsed just on the other side of what I could see. I began to shake. I believed the darkness at the heart of the world was there, would reach out and snatch up my wife and I couldn’t do a thing about it. I stared into the trees, waiting for something terrible to happen.
Before long, my wife came pedaling up the hill. Her face was tracked with tears. She took one look at me and asked: “Do you feel that?”
“I do.”
“It’s terrifying.”
We continued up the ribbon of road hewn into the forest, eventually riding right out of the threat. But it was there. Wild. Intelligent. Violent. It took a long time, years, before we could speak of it without our skin crawling.
We rode that ride several times afterward and we never felt it again.
It reminded us both that the world, in particular the Pacific Northwest, is full of magic. Darkness. Light. It puts a shine on some and casts a shadow over others. I feel I’ve captured some of this in Two Hours Before Winter. I hope you enjoy it.