marginwalker2002

I can't believe that in a world such as ours, a world of technological overflow, a world of sprawling city states housed within mammoth archology buildings, a world where every acre of land is used as some pseudo-religious shrine to the electron, that a place like this actually exists. In the three weeks I've spent in Elk River, Idaho, I have seen deer, bear, birds I can't begin to name, and more trees in one place than I could have ever conceived of.

And it's the trees I've really come to appreciate. The way the birch bark peels, like a bad sunburn. It just does something for me. Like its shedding its layers to accommodate new growth, dropping pieces of itself to feed its own root system. I remember finding an old computer. The thing was ancient, like 20th century ancient. Had an actual monitor, keyboard and a damned disk drive. Seriously, a disk drive. Nothing as simple as voice recognition or neural interfacing. Nothing. Anyway, there was this game on it. All text, called "Zork" or something. So, I figured I'd play around with it and give it a try. It bothered the hell out of me. Typing things in just weirded me out and I got frustrated. Really frustrated. I typed "eat me" in a fit and the game tells me "autocanabalism is not the answer". It made me grin. I see this tree and I think to myself, maybe its not the answer for me, but it sure seems to be working here.

So, birch trees are sprinkled around, autocanabalizing is you will. Then there are pine trees dropping their little needles like peanut shells on the floor of some throwback western bar. You also get a smattering of aspen, some elm, and probably some maples or something. Right now though, my favorite is the oak. They're all over. They throw shade all around like some huge green umbrella. The wood is strong and looks good in both table and chair form. Much better than those preformed, injection molded, plastisteel things that pass as furniture these days, that's for sure. Oaks also make great platforms for elevated hunting blinds. I've been up the trunk of a few in the past few weeks. All great reasons to have such a tree around. But, at the moment, I'm most inspired by their ability to stop a bullet. Or several dozen of them coming at high speed in short bursts.

The last ten minutes or so have been a little hairy. Three juiced up goons have been taking pot shots at me over a small piece of merchandise I was paid to acquire. These three goons, coincidentally, have been paid to reacquire it from me. Didn't bother to ask nicely, no attempt to wine and dine me, nothing. Kids are so unprofessional these days. There used to be four guys. One of them, a tall guy with a bad suit and worse skin, tried to stop a small piece of hollow point lead traveling just at just the other side of the speed of sound. Problem is he used his face. Not very effective and messy as hell.