Come Hell or Ice

The morning we abandoned our house, we lay in bed and listened to the surrounding trees come down. I went out on the back porch and looked at my watch while the woods collapsed all the way back to the river. When the rate of fall reached one tree every thirty seconds, we ran for it, the car weaving drunkenly around the snags that choked the road to Hannawa Falls. Friends took us in, no questions asked, for a whole week. That's the way the North Country is--nice, come hell or ice.