Thursday’s Crossword

Sarah Capdeville

The second pandemic winter, I become a third-generation crossword solver. I follow my grandma, with her penciled workbooks beside a women’s bible or two, a flyswatter, buds of yarn turned afghans for every one of her thirteen grandchildren. Then my father, with his years of folded newspaper on a clipboard succeeded by a New York Times digital subscription, asking me about phrases in Spanish or literary references.

For their twenty-eighth birthday, my partner and I rent a tiny off-grid cabin wedged in the far northwest corner of Montana. Around us are cursive tracks of snowshoe hares and draping cedars and winter silence save for the bounding barks of our hosts’ Great Dane mix, gentle as the hares. The cabin overlooks a willow-clutched pond where Canada geese and mallards argue over the one patch of open water. A woodstove the size of a breadbox heats the whole cabin, and we feed it leftover chunks of carpentry wood, marveling at how quickly we shed our coats in its wake.

I pull a newspaper from the pile of kindling, thumb through its classifieds and small-town stories, read the funnies like I did when I was a kid. I fold everything back beside the dry splinters except for the crossword section, and then I make my first mistake and begin with a pen.

My partner tsks, finds a pencil. I trace and trace and trace over the wrong letters, like so many hare prints outside in the early dusk.

*

There’s a photo of myself I keep coming back to, from my last season working as a wilderness ranger for the US Forest Service, taken two days before I’m diagnosed with lupus. My eyes are pinched shut in a grin, hat rim blotched in old sweat. A crosscut saw bends over my shoulder, sheathed in a halved firehose like a gutted boa. In the background, a corridor of pines stands over low water eddying north. Wires thick as ropes hold up the bridge where I’m standing, all stained wood and bolts and wobble that doesn’t phase me, that rarely did. The bridge hangs between banks, and I’m stopped in its drape, all smile, all grin, suspended.

*

Nouns are the lightest words, easiest to pack and unpack. I tell myself this the same way I still know the order of filling my frame pack even though I haven’t used it for anything but car camping in years. Sleeping bag on the bottom, tent upright and to the left, sleeping pad and clothes stuffed beside. Everything rolled, shoved, compressed. I tell myself a noun is a container, or else can be contained.

Illness is noun I use often, modified by chronic. Adjectives are cumbersome, this one especially, a knot of three consonants and only two vowels, the I so often swallowed. Hoarfrost splintering, the crack of my knees when I stand up, a crow cleaning her beak on aspen bark. But chronic illness isn’t a container, can’t be contained. It is familiar water between my hands, but there’s no clear edge to trace. If I draw a line in the sand the water will corrode it back by daybreak.

In my own thesaurus, chronic sits beside dynamic, liminal. I once tried to quantify an entire year of fatigue and malaise and migraines and swollen feet and brain fog and chest pain and muscle aches and bloat and breathlessness and everything else unexplained, unnamed. I drew up a scale, boiled down and designated a rating for each of 365 days, and then I plotted those points on a graph. I thought I would find a pattern, a landscape with some semblance of access, raw ridges sloping into the open valleys of good days. What I found instead were spikes and troughs, over and over and over again.

I thought there would be more valleys, more slow slopes. I stretched out the table to dull the points, added a spectrum of red to green. But there was no map. No topography. No easy boxes, and so many consonants. Even the silent ones hardened the space around them.

*

When we come back home, there’s another war and the same virus and a bleached March sky that drags toward thaw. I’m working remotely as a writing tutor at the university, but it’s not enough hours to survive on. I apply for a job that everyone close to me agrees is a perfect fit, that asks for a video interview and two writing samples and then an in-person interview two hours away as gas prices spike, where I’m asked how I plan to deal with burnout.

“Get outside” is all I can manage, because that’s what’s keeping me afloat now. The people in the room are backcountry skiers, backpackers, peak-baggers. When I talk about hiking at a pace to notice wildflowers, they soften and agree, but there is a surprise that hangs in the air across the conference table.

My immune system is shoddy; I am already risking too much, sitting in this stagnant air to twist the past two years of contract work and freelancing and volunteer editing and what is technically a student job into the qualifications of this job announcement. In the white space of my résumé is a winter of hiking in the dusk of late afternoon because it often took me that long to work up the courage to leave the house, is a spring and summer and fall and winter and spring and summer and winter and counting of staying home as the world decided crisis was not a chronic thing, found consolation in whatever loss was not theirs.

I want the people in the conference room to know about this kind of burnout. I want them to know that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to not be exhausted in one way or another. I want to expand the last section of my résumé before the white space, not all the leaps and bounds after—draw out the moment on the swinging bridge over a summer-low creek. Packed a crosscut saw into the wilderness for one of the last times without knowing it, June 2019, I would write. Carried weight of saw and gear and chronic illness with all its synonyms—persistent malady, dynamic disorder, incurable ailment. Bore the seared belief that I could hold it all at once.

*

In crossword puzzles, the answer (or any of its parts) never shows up in the clue itself. Dog in the Iditarod would never lead to sled dog, land of bagpipes would never lead to Scotland. In this way, the clues circle around their answers with a tilted degree of specificity, like rain outlining a tree’s canopy on the ground below. Sometimes this rule is a weakness, a dead giveaway. The refusal to say the word carves a negative crisper than a synonym ever could.

*

I skirt away from sunlight, which gnaws my jaw into migraines. Weather patterns bottom out my energy levels; autumnal cold fronts are the worst, cells gusting across whole mountain ranges and knocking sandbags into my chest. For half the year, the tissue below my nail beds swells and reddens and sometimes blisters, and my toes throb and prickle under my tender layering of wool socks and slippers, never enough. I check every label on food, can’t eat out, can’t eat food friends have prepared; a kitchen sponge that touched gluten will trick my body into sabotage for months. My hair thins and thins, loops in the shower drain as the hot water tempers my muscles but sends my head spinning, knees humming with weakness, which one of my doctors assures me is nothing to worry about.

And that’s another burr. Maybe, I think, so often, I’m overreacting. Sometimes the weather changes and I’m fine, hiking in the rain with no hot ache in my forearms. I tell myself it’s not that bad, and then when it is, the grief pops like a snowshoe hare in her white coat, everything around her brown and dripping.

*

I’d given crossword puzzles a try for years in my teens and early adulthood. And I kept falling flat, kept giving up, until I understood that they are not gridded tests of trivia. For all their answers of school names and hit songs from the ’70s and popes and capitals on the Arabian Peninsula and bird species and ballet moves and Chinese emperors and college mascots and Italian terms of endearment, crossword puzzles are not solved by a Jeopardy!-level collection of knowledge. They are a matter of patterns—alternating consonants and vowels, the rain-on-tree outline of an answer, the transfer of tense and plurality and abbreviation from clue to answer, the play on words, the circled letters and themed puzzles, the grid of white and black squares itself.

There is both rigidity and fluidity, and what took me too long to understand is that the key to crosswords is not knowing but guessing. Is filling in an answer to see what hooks around it, then erasing it because nothing does. Is knowing that French is flush with vowels and stock names are often not, and casting out letters in the shape of their intersection. Is writing down the last part of a long answer even though the first part remains unknown until the very end. Is swishing single S’s into corners, islands in a sea of blanks. Is patience, playfulness, adaptability. Is all about embracing clichés, and so therefore about learning how to stand on the scaffolding of conviction.

*

The winter after I stopped being a wilderness ranger, on one of those hikes through dusk, I found myself staring up at the bare branches of western larch above the trail, black against the pale fading sky. I didn’t grow up around larches, only started really admiring them when I moved to the west side of the Continental Divide. Larches are unique in that they are deciduous conifers, meaning they have needles and cones like their neighbors of fir and pine, but every fall those needles turn the color of bright amber, then drop.

That crepuscular winter hike, I tried another noun, another container—disability. I was in a place that speaks the language of flame, an ecosystem centered on low-intensity, high-frequency burns. All around me were the last golden wisps of tamarack needles, dropped from branches thirty feet above the earth. I stared at those trees—coniferous, needled, bare—and watched what a different life, contrasted by evergreens, did with its seasons—raggedness for winter, growth bright as lime come spring.

I held the word disability in my mouth and felt its liminality, its give and take, its adaptability. It felt like a canyon I could walk into. It felt like a sturdy bridge flush with wobble.

*

I assumed, for a while, that Sunday crossword puzzles were the most difficult—more clues, more space, themes, wordplay a given. But one Thursday I find myself stuck on a clue whose answer I know, without a doubt, is George Orwell. The only problem is that there aren’t enough blank boxes to hold all the letters. I pencil in and erase, pencil in and erase. Check the clue and numbers again. Exasperation sets in. I flit around other sections of the puzzle, bump into the same problem of too few boxes and too many letters. The measured calm I’ve garnered from my crossword practice flips, turns to vexation. Turns to exasperation. Turns to panic.

I’ve made it this far with crosswords because I figured out their mechanisms. I mapped their structures and rules and quirks. A question mark indicates a pun, an abbreviation in the clue indicates an abbreviation in the answer. Of course the puzzle’s solution is built on a myriad of complexity—history and names and lingo and language—but all those words, at the end of the day, fit into four tight corners within four wider corners. Every puzzle is a distillation, a promise. There are edges that don’t budge, that don’t dissolve by morning.

I stare at George Orwell’s name, brush away context, the heavy tug of doublethink, until it is only george orwell. There are twelve letters, eight boxes. And there it is in the association—the double, the geor geor stacked side-by-side. I let them be single. What’s left is georwell, eight letters, a clear hold around the surrounding vertical answers. It is sneaky. It is clever. It is intentionally disruptive. And it is the first of many crossword puzzles that I’ll shamelessly abandon.

Thursday’s crossword, I learn, is the hardest. Thursday’s crossword breaks the rules.

*

I don’t get the job.

The daydreams about fixed, stable income drop their deluges. All these other nouns—wilderness, recreation, communications, conservation—turn up answers different from the ones I penciled in. I had traced and traced an outline of myself, hooked all the right words in the right places, buffered the gaps in so many résumés, so many cover letters, so many versions of myself until I couldn’t write anything else, writer’s block like a wound, no more words save for those cut evenly into boxes.

I stare at this most recent rejection email with its clean, unburdened words. It does name a gap in my experience, just one of the half-dozen bullet points in the job announcement. I try to hold it at face value. I try not to scribble in my own blank spaces.

It’s late March, and winter sprints away. The robins return, as they always have, just in time for my mother’s birthday, which my family and partner celebrate with gluten-free cake, first on the back deck and then the shaded front deck because the sunshine is too warm, too honeyed and flushed on our faces. We play Uno, and I watch the birds flit into the crooks of crab apple, Russian olive, lilac, all still leafless and spindly against the warm sky. We take the dogs up the dry hillsides that I used to run in high school, where I kneel to the grainy earth and admire buds of sage and prickly pear cactus bunched against limestone.

“Their loss,” people say when I tell them about the job. It’s the most I’ve heard that word in years, and it starts to echo, bounce around my chest like apples in the bed of a pickup. And I start to spin out the synonyms I wish I’d heard three years earlier—displacement, abandonment, grief. I conjugate, shift syntax—what I lost, what was taken, what I let go. I try erosion, snowmelt, migratory, deciduous. Spring is a blooming thesaurus. I think about the larches, the way they drop their seeds on fire-scarred earth, the sharp push of seedlings under the tall and thickset boles of their parents.

All the apples tumble into a drumbeat. “Their loss,” I agree, but really what I mean is my loss. Really what I mean is that I’ve dropped my needles. Really what I mean is that I’m no longer pretending to be evergreen.

*

Another adjective—disabled. I’ve yet to come across the word in a crossword puzzle. With its mostly balanced spacing of consonants and vowels, it wouldn’t be a bad answer. The consonants are common enough, and the vowels are all distinct. It’s also the kind of word that people endlessly dance around, testing with the tilted degree of specificity. I dance around it too, stalled on the rain’s dark earth.

I think about that crepuscular walk under bare arms of sleeping larch, how it felt to hold the word disability on my tongue. The difference between an adjective and a noun—a thing I can shuffle and move and reposition until it doesn’t dig at my shoulder blade, drag on my breastbone, squeeze my throat shut. All the things I’ve continued to bear because I thought naming and holding them was enough.

So I try the word disabled. Quietly, at first, to myself, to the quiet ponderosa and larch and fir, scrubby snowberry, crows with polished beaks. To the stool in the kitchen, the couch, the bandana holding back my hair, the pill container, my hips, tight and aching one day, swinging and free the next. I come back to the chart, symptoms like a seismograph, and realize they are not only lines of a landscape but letters in themselves, fits of hail, the vibration of consonants to vowels, vowels to consonants. There’s a reason crossword puzzles borrow from so many languages for their answers. There’s a reason why English borrows from so many languages for its significance.

I swallow the word on my tongue. Swallow all the words, their letters like seeds. I draw the line in the stream bank, in the soil, around my tender and unsure body. I let myself be the vessel, let myself be changed. I think about that bridge over cobalt water, a stitch between two worlds, and I let the edges meet. The swinging bridge bunches, drops down in a slow drape until I am no longer suspended but submerged.

It is late summer; nothing washes away. My pack lifts from my hipbones, and all things rolled, shoved, and compressed drift out. They are only loss, no longer lost.

The cook set pans a crease of gold. Bull trout weave beneath the tent’s shade. The crosscut saw rests against the shoulder of an old stone, still within reach.

*

I keep staying home. My hair continues to fall out, fingers blister, forearms ache, mind sloshes words and synapses. There are weeks where I don’t read, don’t write. I talk to students about words for hours, and then I fill words into boxes, clue after clue, puzzle after puzzle.

Every evening at five I download the next day’s crossword, and then I go outside with binoculars to watch the elk on the mountainside behind our home. I tally them up, count in a plumed whisper, tap the numbers into a citizen science form online. This is the data I hold: twelve elk one day, fifty-seven the next. None, then a cluster of six, twenty strung through the young firs of the steep draw. When the wind kicks in, sometimes they bunch in the trees, and sometimes they string across the slope, intermountain prairie grasses blown bare for good grazing.

Every once in a while, I stare at myself in the mirror and flex my arms the way I used to when I spent my days crosscut sawing through pine and fir and spruce. And I’m surprised at the way my biceps and deltoids have held their shape, years after that last hitch, that last time packing a crosscut into wilderness. I almost never hike without trekking poles anymore, and it shows, the way my body nestles into the liminality between support and loss. I trace the thin patches of my scalp, the occasional malar rash across my cheekbones. Breathe in and out, thinking of the virus, still here, of my capacity to hike, still here.

Ruffles of overcast scrub the March blue away, followed by damp snow that wraps the trees in white felt. I keep hiking, the dog and I tracing the same paths through muddy woods. On days where fatigue pulls like a dumbbell on my chest, slowness shows pink-lipped buds on the snowberry bushes and pockets of buttercups on dry slopes. Other days gravity lifts a notch or two from the inclines. I return to the higher places, the longer loops. The land is the same. Which is to say it is different every time.

When it comes to the puzzles, I tend to avoid Thursday’s crossword like the plague outside. If I get frustrated or bored or can’t for the life of me figure out the trick or theme to Sunday’s puzzle, I leave it unfinished, skip onto the next one. I look things up, thumb through Wikipedia and Google Maps and IMDb and the thesaurus without shame. Most of my Google searches end with crossword. There are whole websites devoted to answering clues. When I’m really stuck, I use them. Sometimes I’m not really stuck at all. After all, I remind myself, there are whole names I fill in without ever knowing them, entire words thatched against a horizon of answers that never meant anything together until that one moment.

I picture the snowshoe hares with their wide-padded feet, a coat that guards their survival one moment or threatens it the next, and all the mud and wet spring snow and shoulder season in between. The elk who take winter wind as a warning and a blessing. The larch, curling into themselves for those months, boles built to welcome fire. My palms thicken into calluses around the grip of my poles. In the puzzles, I pencil and erase, pencil in and erase. I hold strengths and weaknesses, loss and gains, at the same time. I break the rules back.

Sarah Capdeville is part of the editorial teams of The Hopper and The Changing Times. Her writing has been published in Orion, Fourth Genre, The Normal School, Flyway, and others. She is the winner of River Teeth's 2022 Literary Nonfiction Book Prize for her essay collection Aligning the Glacier's Ghost, published by University of New Mexico Press. Sarah lives in Missoula, Montana, with her partner, retired greyhound, and opinionated tortoiseshell cat, where she navigates chronic illness, goes on many slow hikes, and daydreams about the crosscut saw.