Rare Air
Part Eleven
Isolation is its own form of cancer and gone untreated it will kill. It’s easy to play the part of the anti-social loaner when you have plenty of people to ignore or find cause to denigrate for their very sin of existing. It’s easy for some to fall into the trap of believing that hell is other people. For all of me, Nietzsche was in need of a stiff dick and an even stiffer drink and in that order.
I climbed the rest of that day, after my crying jag. I worked my way up the trail and kept on going when it ran out. I grabbed at branches and bare rock and I worked my way, ever so slowly, up the side of this awful mountain. I slept out in the cold, pushing cut branches and leaf litter up over me for warmth. I rationed through the slim pickings I had pilfered from Nothingsville until it ran out and then I did my level best to hunt what small game there was to be found.
I learned how not to start a fire, and how not to cut up, or try to butcher a small animal. I learned a multitude of lessons involving burst fingers and cut skin. I learned how hard life was and I was only living like that for a few weeks before I tried to find my way back to Nothingville.
Full disclosure, I had plans to reave the place. To kill those who might try and stop me. I trudged down barely remembered over grown hiking trails in the hopes of laying wait and sneaking in at night. Instead I would up more lost than ever before and winding my way back up a whole other face of this hideous climb.
Finding the cabin, at the time seemed like a godsend. A legitimate reason for new found faith. I was two days without food and nearly a full day without water when I pushed through the ferns and the fucking berry bushes to see its distant, green roof.
The place was left alone, not abandoned so much as ill-used. The roof was green with lichen, the outside walls caked with mud and over grown vines. Someone had tended a garden there; someone had taken the pains and time to dig a well that was still clean. Most of all, hunters and park rangers had kept the place supplied until the plague came.
There were MRE’s, canned goods that hadn’t quite turned, a fully stocked first aid kit. The entire place was like a time capsule left by the well-wishers of yesteryear.
The luck, right? What divine providence!
I was two weeks on the other side of feeling human and suddenly, food, water, a sponge bath and some rinsed socks and undies. I was also busy unpacking my cumbersome C-bag and finding a home in the cabin for its contents when I found those photo ID’s I had kept with me.
Kelly and I would have been willing to murder innocent people for the resources I had come across by luck alone and Drew would have waded hip high in the ripe dead for the same. I didn’t feel guilty for my new and lucky circumstances but I did feel lonely.
My people were gone. My people were dead yet I had four walls and a roof, clean water, and food for weeks. I didn’t have an immediate need but I was left wanting. The cabin had no books, there was no one to talk to, no cell phone to wile away the hours on. No youtube videos to watch or emails to check.
I tried my luck at leading a deer up to the porch only to have to run off and the same with a raccoon. Better for them that they avoided me in the long run, eventually I would have hand fed them just long enough to dash their brains out.