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| Photo by Todd Quackenbush image courtesy of unsplash.com |
One thing about growing up in the middle of nowhere is you can pretty much pick a direction and start walking, and eventually you’ll find something more interesting than where you’re from. After I left my friend’s place, I started heading west.
I stuck to small side roads and cut across country, not feeling cold or wet made this easier, and I wasn’t really sure if anyone could see me. I felt hungry and tired all the time, but never thirsty or sleepy; I eventually realized that my hunger and fatigue were in my head, or mind, I guess. I didn’t really understand the rules yet, and a lot of time went by before I really paid any attention to where I was or where I was going. Another thing about growing up in the middle of nowhere is that when you do decide to head out on your own, things will mostly look the same for quite a while.
For me it was big, flat, grassy country, low hills in all directions, but nothing else. And the sun in the sky for what seemed like days and days at a time. The occasional truck going by in the distance slowly, slowly.
After a while, I started to pay attention less to what I was feeling and thinking, which I can’t honestly remember much of now, actually, and started paying attention to where I was and what was around me. It was about this time, maybe coincidentally, that I got out of the flat lands and first saw the mountains.
You see them in movies and on TV, and in books I guess, little cartoon-like paintings in textbooks with brown sides and white-blue caps. But a mountain in real life is nothing like a small image. For one thing, a mountain isn’t just one thing; sure, all its pieces add up to one huge shape that it’s easy for a person’s eye to grab and think about, but once you get up close you realize that a mountain is really a place, or rather a huge collection of places. They have forests and rivers, bare sides and ravines. They aren’t just taller than ordinary hills; for the most part they’re made out of ordinary hills. A mountain is a sum, a collection, a collaboration of earth and stone and living things. I climbed right to the summit of the first mountain I saw. Well, it was kind of hard to tell which of them exactly was the first one I’d seen, so I went to the middle one. It took me about a real day and a half to find the way up, a lot of it was steep and rocky. When I was on the top, I sat cross-legged in the snow, and imagined what the wind must feel like, and I watched the sun go down, blinking as seldom as I could manage. I didn’t feel like I’d conquered it, or made myself better than it, by getting to the top. I felt like I was another piece of it. A lot of my time in this weird exile of mine has been spent trying to get my mind as blank as I can get it for as long as I can; the first time I realized I could do that, and that it felt good, was on that mountain. The sky was blue, blue like a flower near the land, and blue like a dark stone at the top, and I forgot to feel hungry. But eventually I got curious about the higher mountains I’d seen farther off, in the distance on the other side as I’d climbed up. Curiosity tipped me back down out of the sky.
I decided not to leave the mountains, however. When I realized I’d reached the top of one that was taller than its neighbors to the east and to the west, I went north instead. It’s sometimes hard to navigate when the sun hardly seems to move, but I managed. It was even harder at night; even when there was a moon, you’d be surprised how shadowy it can be in rocky places.
The best thing about traveling north was that there were no people. That might sound odd, since the worst thing about all this has been the loneliness, but I’m not sure I was completely sane at that time. There are big patches of time that I can feel, but I can’t really remember anymore. I was sad all the time, and trying not to take cheap shots at myself for the sake of self pity; I was learning that it didn’t do any good. I had finally started to believe that what was happening to me wasn’t going to go away, that I wasn’t going to wake up the next morning and realize it had all been a crazy dream. And that made me sad, pretty much all the time, but the weird thing about feeling that way is you get used to it, and it sort of wears away, gets comfortable, until you don’t notice it anymore. Anyway, I think being alone helped me find out how to feel like myself and be okay with it, mostly. I didn’t talk much. Eventually it passed.
It was also during this time that I learned that I can’t really be hurt, at least not easily. This wasn’t because of an encounter with a bear or a mountain lion or anything dramatic, I just fell down a lot. I mean a lot. I fell off hillsides, boulders, high crags. Sometimes I fell a long way; I would basically just land on my back or shoulders (sometimes I’d land on my feet and legs, but feel them give way and wind up on my back or shoulders), and get back up. I fell when there wasn’t really anything to fall off of. I rolled down a roughly thousand-foot slope of rock once. I can get dizzy, but I can’t get sick. It’s uncomfortable to be so durable, but I guess it made my journey possible. I’m not sure I’m especially clumsy for a ghost, but who knows. I’ve never met another one to compare.
Gradually, the nights got longer, winter was coming in and I was covering a lot more ground as the mountains and hills got shorter and shorter. Navigation was tricky. I had figured out what I mostly thought was the north star, by following an imaginary line drawn from the very front two stars of the big dipper (one of three constellations I could actually find back then).
(I can’t really find any more now, but I thought I’d sound smarter if I implied that I could. You don’t learn much by going to a library and waiting next to the constellation books for someone to open one up on the spot and look it over for you.)
Like I said, navigation was tricky. Sometimes I would stop and wonder if I were heading the right way, and think I’d become lost and have to wait for sunrise. Which took a long time. I can’t feel the cold, but I can certainly feel bored. I’ve come up with a lot of odd ways to pass the time since I went on the road. I spin in circles, try to stand on my head and not fall over. I get out my two quarters, one dime, two nickels, and three pennies count how many heads or tails I can get in a row, or draw pictures with them on a flat stone, or act out little stories with them. They may or may not each have names, but if they do I’ll keep them to myself (God help me). When the sun came up, I’d set off again.
Eventually the trees ran out, and the mountains ran out, and the grass and moss ran out. Then there was a lot of flat empty land, long and dry and empty. The days were getting short, although of course that was a relative thing; the sun still stayed up for what seemed like weeks, but it didn’t get very high up before arcing back down again, and it was always behind me now. Then, after a lot more walking, the land ran out.
The ocean shone in the distance like a grey line of light, then got bigger as I drew close. When I got to the beach, I was stumped; I’d come all this way, and didn’t really want to turn back, but how could I go forward? I stayed by the shore for a long time, looking out into the water. For some reason I didn’t want to get wet, although I’d been rained on countless times without feeling it or having the least effect on my permanent wardrobe.
Finally I decided to swim in the ocean, just to see what it was like. This was after two or three real days had passed on the northern beach. I have no clear idea of where I was, somewhere in either the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, or Alaska. I disrobed, putting my things in a neat pile on the sand, and went to the water.
It’s impossible to describe exactly what it was like to learn that water is basically the same for me as solid earth is for everybody else. I can tell you about how it feels on bare feet, smooth and indifferent-feeling as glass, but with a faint pulse, like a steady hum of music from a speaker you can’t hear. I can tell you what it looked like; imagine the clearest ice in the world, and lots of it, all the way to the bottom, and you walk around on it and look down. But I guess emotionally my only reaction was a non-reaction; I didn’t understand, and then didn’t believe, what was happening. I thought I was doing something wrong somehow, when I first put my foot down and couldn’t put it down any further, and I nearly fell on my face, like when you imagine one step to many going down the stairs.
After a few minutes, or hours, of awkward trial and error, I came to grasp what can be said, and has been said here, in a few words, that I can walk on water. Which actually was kind of a bummer, because I had enjoyed communing with nature on the mountain top, and was looking forward to being part of the ocean. But I guess not. I went back to shore and gathered up my clothes.
Before the sun set I’d tested the water again in my shoes (you never know), and then set out.
It took a long time to go through everything that happened on the ocean that winter, but it can be recited in a few words. I walked, and I sat and looked at the stars, and I thought a lot. I thought about my situation, and my solitary position, and what it meant or might mean. I came up with many, many questions, and very few answers. I thought about my life before the accident, and everything I’d left behind. I thought about nothing as much as I could. The sun stopped coming up. The sea froze over. I sat in one place on the ice. Time passed slowly.
After a long time, when I’d started to think that another change had happened, and I’d entered another phase of my exile, the horizon lightened, then grew dark, and one day the sun came back. When it did, I started walking towards it again.
Since then I’ve basically made it my mission to see the world. I’ve got all this time, I might as well use it.
First I decided to cross the pacific. That was a bad mistake.
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