“We weren’t sure but it was probably about after where we saw the tree on the deer camp, we started thinking about boundaries. Or I did. I’ve become mildly obsessed. The recent wind storm left damage, some of it undiscovered, for weeks, in more remote locations. But past that last place, there’d be no more camps, not even crushed ones. Poking at ramps, hellebore & sucked into leafy muck, we kept to what looked like an old logging road, but what could have been more, going back further. The old Lincoln Gap? Or not far from. That poor, caved in log cabin with a tonnage of tree on it, their water tubing made a neat line up the stream still, culminating in a buried sheet rock bucket, encircled by wire mesh. A crafty little rig, worked a lot of the time, maybe. Not so relevant, now. So when was it, exactly, we crossed over? The National Forest has a mood to it. I’m getting to understand, why so many people go missing, here. And why, any remnant to the past feels like safe space, even a heaved-up, wreck of an old done road, once meant for vehicles, now inhabited by water, rocks, mud and moss. Otherwise, there’s just ancient whirlpools of forest warp & weft. A thing to break time, and sometimes, break humans. It seemed like a year ago, we’d passed Mike on his ATV, hauling chunks of trunk wood in his dump body, pulled the dogs aside, so that he could pass without incident. No, now we were in the mesmerizing upper cut of a screwed with, but powerful regional mountain confluence. Or convergence, of water, on all sides. When the choice came to go right, and put our feet to something steeper, we decided to stay low, and let our ears be our guide, and the river, our keeper. The river, not so much one thing, but many, cocked with spring melt & rain run-off tumbling from all sides. The discussion dug into one or two skiing excursions, that had not landed with precision, and gone confusing until clarified, last winter, recently, in fact. Maybe we came down from that stand of spruce, or crossed the ravine, about here? The lay of the slope, how could trees remind you of anything in this quantity? Don’t they all “look alike”? When you’re in fear, yes they do. And that is the terror. To be lost in a land of unfamiliarity. To be singular, amongst a species thoroughly at home & imbedded in primal wilderness, sharing a language not designed, necessarily, to tell a human how to survive. Well, these true things, these harsh conditions of nature, for some, hold promise, a bit of code cracking required, agreed. To the explorers among us, who, slipping and sliding, tripping and falling, memorize visual markers like rain, as it turns to snow, with with an almost studied carelessness, I pledge allegiance. I, for one, on any uncharted or partly mapped excursion, am looking for what still has not been fucked with. Riding up the main road later, in a Chevy Silverado, we passed a pair of fiberglass shower stalls, dumped on a mountain gorge pull-off. Okay, I thought. That’s probably not what it seems. We laughed, reservedly. With our propane tank filled, and an extra coffee in each cup holder, our unanswered questions seemed, thankfully, far away. All was right, for the moment, with our world on fire.”
