The day can’t be more beautiful. The skies are blue all the way to the heavens. Fresh snow glistens from the boughs of the evergreens. And the bracingly cold air reminds me with each new breath of my continuing existence as a living creature on this planet. An eagle passes downstream, heading south to hunt ducks and gulls on the open water below the dams, and my soul rises to meet it. Even the slopes of Pill Hill, glimpsed across the frozen river, shine like hammered gold in the light of the newly risen sun.

My friends don’t like me coming here, not like this. I might tear my stitches if I move awkwardly, they say. I shouldn’t be driving at all while on pain medication (they don’t know I’ve ditched the Vicodin the doctor pushed into my hand). After what I endured on the night of the solstice, they say, I shouldn’t be alone.

They assume I must be suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome because what person wouldn’t be suffering from PTSD who was nearly drowned, frozen, shot, battered, and then threatened with dismemberment and disposal in a tank full of shit? Surely, too, the night’s dead must haunt me. And it’s true that new souls have joined the parade of ghosts that follow me silently in my dreams. After everything I endured, how can I not be a wreck?

But I have had post-traumatic stress syndrome before, in the fall and winter following my father’s death. I hadn’t recognized it at the time, but I remember the symptoms vividly: the paranoia, the edginess, the increasingly self-destructive behavior. Most of all, I recall the guilt. None of which I am experiencing now.

Instead of breaking my spirit, the ordeal seems to have strengthened me. Every day since I left the hospital, I have awakened in severe physical pain but with a serenity that doesn’t require an hour of meditation to attain. This calmness puzzled me at first. Even troubled me a little because I kept expecting the demons to arrive.

Then I found a metaphor.

There is a word that blacksmiths use, annealing, to describe the process a blade undergoes when it is allowed to cool slowly. Tempering makes metal harder, sometimes so hard it risks shattering. Annealing makes steel ductile: capable of withstanding tremendous stress without breaking.

I have been annealed.

Only my friends who are combat veterans understand this.

Charley was a prisoner of war in Vietnam where he endured unimaginable tortures, and yet he’d somehow come home a functional human being. More than functional. He is the best man I’ve been privileged to know.