Topic: Ghosts (AT)

It was overcast.  A light but relentless drizzle had been coming down for three days, pattering annoyingly against the shell of his once waterproof jacket. He felt as though water had worked through the crevices of his skin into the secret place where his spirit resided.  He couldn’t remember the last time he had been dry or comfortable and his usual lust for adventure had flat-lined under the misty onslaught. 

In different circumstances he was the type of guy that sought the rain out.  A tempest of thunder and sheeting water was his mechanism to show the world that he was not, in fact, afraid of anything.  It was his cleansing ritual; his one concession to the new age hippy crap that seemed to have overtaken his generation.  Yoga was not for him.  Instead, he had devised his own communion. Personal, natural… but unregulated, unhindered by any rule or master, any doctrine or dogma. It was just him and the rain.

So he had pressed on with this trek despite dire predictions from a dozen weathermen forwarded to him by friends making their excuses.   He had persevered even when the clouds had descended and this damnable drizzle had begun.  Amy alone had stuck with him for a day after that.  She loved him that much anyway; just enough to suffer through 24 miserable hours.  To be fair, the outdoors were not her favorite even when the sun was out.  She professed to enjoy their trips but he knew that enjoyment was often just an exchange of goods or services, a means of getting something out of him later by humoring him now.  She was a master of the relationship, in the generic sense, and master of their relationship specifically.  If he chose to stop and reflect on why he was doing any-given-something – which as a general rule he did not do because he often found it unsettling -- the answer could usually be traced back to her.

Yet in the end, not even the promise of future returns could win out over the drizzle. As the clouds brightened slightly to reveal the morning of the second day she had stopped on the shoulder of the first bit of pavement they came across and begged him to hitch a ride with her back to “civilization.”  He hadn’t said anything but had sat on the guardrail with her taking turns tossing small pebbles into a puddle in a pot hole. He waited there only long enough to see her climb into the cab of the beat-up red truck and say something pithy and vaguely flirtatious to the driver.  She hadn’t waved.  Her mind was already focused on dry clothes and a heart attack breakfast at the Waffle House on the interstate off-ramp.

Now, at the end of the third day he was alone and thinking that he had been a fool not to let himself be convinced.  The rain and the solitude had ripped away the beauty of the external world and replaced it with the shadowy ghosts of a depression that haunted his quiet inner moments.  The trip had gone from being an escape and a reminder of the joy and beauty of life to something that was much more reminiscent of a prison. A carnival house of mirrors that no matter which way he turned only confronted him with another distorted self-image, each more warped than the one before.  This particular moment, in the fading light, he was shocked to discover he was more afraid than he had ever been before in his life.

He reached into his bag and began to pull out pieces to his sodden tent, letting the elastic filled poles snap together between his clammy trembling fingers and assembling the shelter in a flat space under the spreading boughs of a maple.  He clicked on his headlamp, which sufficed to make the evening minimally brighter but did nothing to push back the oppressive gloom and tried in vain to light his small stove.  Unable to coax any sort of flame with any tool he possessed he filled a packet of dehydrated food with rainwater and let it sit for five minutes before shoveling the soupy, salty mush into his mouth with his fingers.  He felt the weight of his knife in his pocket and found it comforting, but in a way that left him even more disturbed. 

The darkness progressed and he climbed into the tent and lay on his back, looking up through the fogged plastic window of the rain-fly at nothing.  Sleep eluded him and suspicious shadows danced in the corners of his vision.  Sometime during the night he realized he was crying but did not have the energy to wipe away the tears. They trailed down his face and dripped onto the floor of the tent.  When it became light again, he had not yet closed his eyes. 

Sitting up was the hardest thing he had ever done. 

Trembling, but not now from the damp or chill, he stuffed his supplies back into his bag haphazardly and staggered out of the camp, careening from one tree to another, deeply - he feared mortally - wounded in some way he could not understand.  He emerged from the trees into the gravel trailhead parking lot without any recollection of the miles he had covered from the camp, or how long it had taken him.  He felt broken.  A car door slammed someplace far away as he stood in the clearing, lost, eyes darting everywhere but seeing nothing.

And then one of the ghosts called his name.
Again.
Louder.
Insistently.

He shook himself and looked around again just as Amy reached him, sliding her arm between his pack and his back and pressing the length of her warmth against his side.  He felt her lips on his as if he was an observer in his own body.

“Are you alright?” she asked. “You look like you’ve had a bit of a rough time. Come sit in the car for a bit and warm up.  I brought you some clothes and some coffee and we can go get some breakfast, or a shower -- whatever you want.”

The words failed to register but he felt himself nodding and she guided him to the car with the gentle pressure of her body against his.  He leaned on her gratefully.

And with each step the ghosts receded a little more, back into the mist.

Topic: Setting Sail (AT)

Charlie’s stomach gurgled and rumbled ominously.  No doubt something he ate was about to make a return appearance.  He hadn’t been able to keep anything down for days.  An embarrassing predicament, but at least one he did not have to endure alone.  Indeed, nearly everyone on the tour was suffering to a greater or lesser extent from some sort of gastrointestinal distress.  Personally, he blamed the salad at the restaurant the first night out in Cairo.  It had looked like a nice enough place so he had ignored the advice of myriad guide books to eat only cooked food and had dived in, experiencing the local flavors of the meal with a gusto that was coming back to haunt him with disturbing regularity now.  His theory about the salad specifically stemmed from the observation that his daughter, Alicia, and her friend, who both refused to eat anything green and leafy as a general rule, were the only ones not suffering any ill effects.

The girls were bounding ahead of them now, deftly dodging the vendors and street performers that littered the main tourist streets of the Egyptian city.  The vendors seemed magnetically attracted to the girls’ blonde hair. He felt a fleeting worry for them but they were street smart for a couple of teen girls, well traveled and versed in the culture.  They had even picked up a fair amount of conversational Arabic in the week since they had arrived to better to fleece the good merchants of Egypt out of their wares.  

The road they were on now was narrow, more of an alley really.  Charlie let his stride go into auto pilot, pacing the shorter feminine form of their Egyptian guide beside him so as not to outdistance the group.  He suppressed the gathering nausea and let the sights and sounds of the market wash over him.  Low level chatter came to his ears in what could have been a thousand languages as various vendors sized up their group and made their own best guess as to which tongue was most likely to make a sale.  Smells of barbequed meat, spices, incense, perfume and the musk and dung of donkeys, cart horses, camels and feral dogs all vied for the attention of his olfactory sense.  Tapestries, posters of pop stars and the best soccer players in Europe enlivened the otherwise drab salmon colored mud brick walls of the market stalls.  The flowing Arabic script he found so enchanting was juxtaposed with the hieroglyphics that so many tourists expected.

The group reached the end of the alley and the market, emerging onto a broad cobbled roadway crammed with every conceivable sort of wheeled conveyance.  Small taxies honked their way into and out of impossibly tight gaps, tourist busses ignored everything smaller than they were, minibuses didn’t even seem to slow down as savvy locals hopped on and off at street corners.  A gaggle of running Egyptian youth penetrated their tight formation and he reached a hand down almost by instinct to cover the pocket containing his ready cash.  A few members of the group had learned the hard way that this was not a place to let one’s guard down.  A traffic cop helped them to cross the street, sublimely ignoring the sound of horns and raised voices as he held up white gloved hands to a stream of traffic that was mostly stopped anyway.  Their guide slipped the officer some small money in a much practiced exchange a less observant man might not have noticed but which everyone here expected.

And then they were there.

The Nile in all its glory spread before them.  Close to a mile wide, it looked like a lake that reached for infinity in both directions.  Stacks of four story tall river cruise ships tied against the bank looked tiny relative to the expanse of water in which they waited their turn at the locks an hour’s sail upriver.  Smaller boats ferried people and goods across to their fields on the other side.  Somewhere nearby a 2-stroke diesel pump that coughed like a dying smoker sucked the lifeblood of a nation from its slow muddy reverie and expelled it across acres of cotton and corn.

The blazing orange sun began to slide towards the horizon casting long shadows on the far bank amidst ruins so old they required imagination to fill in most of their detail.  Their guide ushered the group down a ramp to the edge of the water and separated them into small, triangular sailed boats.  This was the moment Charlie had been waiting for this trip. He corralled Alicia whose usual smile and exuberance were notably absent and arranged for them to have their own vessel.  She looked up at him, an expression of concern in her face and her eyes as moist as he suddenly found his own.  They boarded their boat and despite its small size it seemed large and empty with just the two of them and the solid looking Nubian at the tiller. 

“Are you ready dad?” Alicia asked, placing a slender arm around his shoulders as he sat on one of the benches near the rail.  He nodded mutely and the big man pushed the tiller to one side, nosing the front of the boat away from the bank and into the open water of the river, setting the sail so that it ruffled then snapped full, harnessing the evening breeze.

“Where dad?” his daughter prompted him.  He pointed mutely.

“There. In the shadow of the ruins.” Alicia looked up at the boatman but he was already adjusting their course to the indicated spot.  Charlie dragged his hand in the cool green water.  Small wavelets lapped against the hull with a soothing rhythm. Other triangular sails moved across the orange horizon in the middle distance but they had this small piece of river to themselves.  This was as close as he could come to where he had met her 33 years ago.  That trip had been a whim of grad student fantasy.  In fact, he had had to sell most of what he owned to get here but it had been worth it in ways he could never have imagined when he boarded the plane with a camera, a notebook, and the clothes on his back.  It was here on a boat just like this, on an evening just like this, with the sun setting just so that he had shared a boat ride with another grad student group and she had been there.  And they had laughed together for the first time.  They had shared the rest of the trip, and then the rest of her life.  Cancer could not take that history from them.  Their beautiful daughter looked up at him silently, a monument to that history, like the pillars on the shore were to the history of a nation.  He took the small rectangular box out from under his arm and felt its smooth texture under his fingers as he had many times since the day of the funeral.

This is how she would have wanted it.  Exactly.  Charlie stood, nausea forgotten, carful not to hit his head on the sail, and stepped to edge of the boat.  His daughter stood beside him, her shoulder pressed tightly against his.  Slowly, he removed the lid and tipped the contents of the box out over the rail.  Some of the fine grey ash floated off in the evening breeze but most fell down and mingled with his tears in the water of the Nile.

Topic: Frost Heaves (AT)

Sunlight filtered through the leaves of the trees and made dappled, shifting patterns on the surface of the road.  The old turnpike wound through the ancient wood seemingly at random, though she knew it was not.  It had simply been easier to steer the carts and horses of bygone days around forest giants rather than commit the time and manpower necessary to attack each in turn with axe and saw.  Houses and inns had been built along the cart road, farms established, loves won and lost, families begun. This evolution of the countryside over 200 years had been such that much more than trees would have to be removed to make the road straighter now.  Thus the black asphalt had been the only concession to modern times.  At some point lines had been painted on the surface, but they had long since faded into obscurity in most places, diving into potholes or under cheap tar road patches, rubbed out by years of neglect and hundreds of tires.  Everything seemed run-down and lonely.  Forgotten.

She preferred it this way.  Where else but on this old New England turnpike could you drive through an enveloping tunnel of leaves and sunlight? The illusion of solitude and peace here was so deep it was almost oppressive.  She shut the radio off and rolled the windows down despite the early spring chill, listening to the hum of the tires on the roadway and the low level growl of the engine as she smoothly eased the car around a bend.  The soothing sounds seemed to perfectly complement the environment through which she navigated and the smells of a New England forest seeped into the car.  She breathed deep of decaying leaves and moist earth, tree bark and hidden spring flowers.

A knee high pile of stones edged out of the forest and turned so that they ran parallel to the roadway for a time.  She reflected that these lichen covered boulders had once been obstacles in some poor mans fields and how, through his blood and sweat they had become a wall that had stood long enough to become a monument.  Her car downshifted automatically as the road pushed its way up a short, steep hill.  A few trees had been cleared from the top providing a panorama of the surrounding forest.  There was just enough space to pull off to the side of the road onto a gravel shoulder and she did, breaking under the spreading branches of a familiar sugar maple.  A sign had been nailed crookedly to the tree long enough ago that the bark had begun to grow around it.  She could just make out the faded red letters amongst the flaking of rust.  “Frost Heaves Next 5 Miles.”  Memories flooded in now.  She remembered standing on the shoulders of a giggling friend to cross out the “5” and replace it with the sign for infinity in dark red paint.  She had been 15 and at the time had thought this small act of vandalism equal parts rebellion and hilarious fun.

 

She got out of the car and walked into the clearing, her heels sinking into the moist spring ground.  She took them off and walked barefoot, savoring the feel of the earth on bare skin. Someone had been thoughtful enough to put a picnic table here once, but it had seen too many New England winters and its rotting planks now only provided comfort to insects.  The undergrowth had begun to overtake the clearing and new spring tendrils edged out onto the open ground

It had been too long since she had been back here.  She spun slowly in a circle on top of the hill, taking in the forest, the horizon broken only by the steeple of a tiny white church in the direction the wandering road was taking her.  This had been home once.  This hilltop had once been her favorite place, her secret fort as a child, her escape from a father who always worked too hard and occasionally drank too much. Her first kiss. Her first bottle of whiskey.  She wondered if anyone had been there since those days.  It looked unlikely.  The next generation must have found their own place to savor their illicit youthful moments.  She clamored up the stone wall, heedless of her expensive clothes and sat for a time on top of the loose rocks and closed her eyes.  This land was in her blood.  So deeply ingrained that not even 20 years on another coast, in a world full of glass and steel man made mountains, movie moguls and palm trees could remove it.  Even now, despite all she had done to forget this place and fulfill her high school promises to escape the boring small town life, this hilltop still felt more like home than her condo.

Sitting there on top of the wall on the little hill she couldn’t fathom why she had been away so long.  Why she had stayed away.  Why she had run away in the first place.  Why it had taken the death of her mother to bring her back for the first time.  The sad thought brought her out of her reverie and she moved back towards the car.  She threw her heels into the back seat and paused for a moment with the drivers door half open to look up at the Frost Heaves sign.  She shut the door again and rifled through her bag for a minute before finding a permanent marker.  Hiking her skirt she climbed up onto the hood of the car, the metal still warm against her feet and leaned against the tree with one hand.  Even the texture of the bark felt familiar.  Reaching up with the marker she again scribbled out the 5 and added a bold infinity sign amidst the rust.  Hopping down off the hood she got in and started the car, pulling back out onto the old turnpike, leaving the hill behind her, headed home.