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    Naked in the Road
    Naked in the Road
    Naked in the Road
    Ebook469 pages8 hours

    Naked in the Road

    By Barry Pomeroy

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    About this ebook

    Why does a man head out into the woods, leaving everything behind him: home, friends, old life, clothes, even his name? No trauma triggers the decision; it's not preceded by dialogue or even observed by others.
    It soon becomes clear that the "why" doesn't matter, though there are intriguing hints along the way. What matters is the journey--both inward and outward. At first, the issue is survival: how does an educated product of civilization survive without tools and clothes? He starts by scavenging the forgotten and discarded detritus on farms and by the roadside, and discovers that what he needs can be either found or made-as long as he needs only essentials. And that raises one of the central questions of the book: what do we really need?
    From this barest of beginnings, he seeks refuge with the most destitute, hungers with the penurious, and survives with an ever-growing array of skills. With him, readers can learn how to live, eat, make weapons and build shelters in the forest, construct a raft and escape notice in the night; find a world of geology, metallurgy, botany, palaeontology, and finally myth, vision, and community.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBarry Pomeroy
    Release dateDec 7, 2015
    ISBN9781987922370
    Naked in the Road
    Author

    Barry Pomeroy

    Barry Pomeroy is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, academic, essayist, travel writer, and editor. He is primarily interested in science fiction, speculative science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, although he has also written travelogues, poetry, book-length academic treatments, and more literary novels. His other interests range from astrophysics to materials science, from child-rearing to construction, from cognitive therapy to paleoanthropology.

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      Naked in the Road - Barry Pomeroy

      Chapter ~ One

      I waited until late at night. I never looked at the clock, but judged time by the gradual movement of the stars, which will wipe across everything that we are in their slow, thousand years’ movement. I stripped and stood for a moment in the blank darkness of my small room and thought about how I was on the cusp. From that moment I could reach into at least two unknown futures, and now that I was about to take that inevitable step into one of them, I hesitated.

      Is it not always the case that every movement, every step we make, is to tread a path that otherwise does not exist or has no meaning to us? Does not every chance brush of the hand contain one future or another? I can reach for the knife or for the wallet when confronted by a mugger in the street—in my social interactions I can kiss or kick.

      Standing there in the silence, in the dark, I thought of the implications of choice. I had resolved to go through with my plan, but I feared its outcome. No one can be lifted out of their life and put down in a strange town and be happy by nightfall, their pockets empty and heart full of joy.

      I had planned to leave the house naked and walk into the dark, had planned it for years, even been driven to it for as long as I can remember, to make my way in the world as best I could. I carried nothing in my hands, and out of respect for those sleeping, made no noise as I crossed the kitchen, stole through the door and, with my hand on his head, spoke gently to the suspicious dog. It would be a dog, alone in the world, who would suspect my ill-defined intention and realize the importance of that leave-taking. I felt the light summer breeze across my body, and my flesh bristled slightly with the chill. I turned for a last look. The partial moon was high in the sky and, cast half in shadow and half lit, the house seemed a photographer’s carefully constructed set. A balance of light and dark.

      When I first considered that farewell, I thought of those things I would miss. Not so much the obvious, such as clothes, food, money and a knife, friends, and methods to procure all of the above, but rather the trivial and more easily taken for granted. I remembered the silent greeting of the dog when returning late, I was recognized with pleasure, or the crisp fold of a new book that cracked when opened. Those fantasies meant little now, and I was instead walking naked under the waning moon into a world of which I knew little.

      I had anticipated the hike to the nearest place where I could locate some supplies, but had forgotten—and I cursed myself—the effect of the rough paving on my feet. To avoid the chip-seal tarmac, I had to keep between the rough pebbles that flanked the weedy ditch and the coarse paving, which consisted of uneven crushed rock bound temporarily together with tar and the pressure of heavy wheels. I walked on the mixture of sand and microscopic rubber torn from the car tires and imagined it to be coating the bottom of my feet as I tried to move as quickly as possible in the chilly night to a place where I could find clothing.

      My nudity was an attempt—I thought at the time—to strip myself of the dross that collects on a person’s life. Cutting my life down to these essentials must surely make some deep change. I would try the ultimate self-sufficient act. Steve once described me as a rugged individualist like Henry David Thoreau and, since I had read of Thoreau living in his forest retreat (by virtue of his statements rather than his deeds, for he subsisted mainly upon the generosity of his friends), I wanted to agree. I wished to test myself to see out of what I was made. It seemed as though I were made of thin-soled stuff indeed.

      I had no illusions of those castles that filled the daily dreams of Thoreau and many a person since, but I wished to shuck that which some would call essential. I told no one; I went naked into the world to see what would come of someone like me.

      Chapter ~ Two

      So far, my feet were sore as if they’d been beaten. It is often the way of privation that we focus on it instead of more lofty goals. But I was nearing my first stop and had to prepare a plan of attack. I suppose it was cheating that I knew of a nearby house and its owner’s habit of hanging laundry overnight, but I rationalized that that was such a common practice I might come upon a clothesline at any time. There was still a light shining through the curtains, shapes moving around the door, and out of an upstairs window I heard the high howl of a child, cut off abruptly by the slam of the window’s frame against the casing. I proposed to move ahead, for I wished to be some miles away by daybreak, and accordingly crept to the rear of the house, all the while listening for the opening of a door and the guttural roar that would precede the attack. I heard instead my own breathing—made loud by nervousness, I suppose.

      Rounding the corner of the house I found no clothes. Not entirely surprised, for I was prepared to be left to my own devices, I crept toward the barn. The horses were in the field, luckily, since I was not sure I could silence them with my breath before one should give an alarm. One whinnied, but to no effect, for the householders knew even a slow porcupine may disturb a horse at night. The instincts of a herd animal are strong and have lasted through many years of what we call domestication and might better call slavery.

      I was looking for a horse blanket, even a sack, for my concern was covering myself enough so that the cold dawn would not find me shivering and unable to turn my mind to the task of food. The barn door creaked, but I pulled it open a few inches so I could slip inside. Using my sense of smell in the gloom, I made my way to where the tack was kept and found two old horse blankets so encrusted in dung that even as desperate as I was, I was reluctant to take them. Searching still farther, I was lucky enough to find a car blanket, which, although slightly damp from the leaking bucket hanging directly above it, seemed to be sound enough. Judging by its smell (although it had a distinctly horsy odour) and feel, it seemed to be relatively clean. It must have been left for some occasional use, such as covering the baby carriage from direct light when the parents visited with the horses. Or perhaps it was the spread that prevented the scratchy hay and straw from reaching a teenage girl’s skin while she read her trashy novels in the mow to avoid her father. His gripping hands were famously violent and everyone knew he spent many long afternoons tormenting his daughters.

      Finding myself drifting, as is my wont, into conjecture about chance events, I shook myself to alertness. I had to cure my mind of meandering if I wished to survive. I had changed status in order to become that lowest thing, one of Lear’s naked wretches without place or cash, and life was rife with cruelties. The blanket would shut out the stars while I slept and cover me while I searched for food. Gathering it to my chest, and momentarily frightened by what I guessed was a barn cat, I made my way back to the door and drifted into the light of the diminishing moon with the first acquisition of my new existence.

      Torn briefly between ripping enough cloth from the blanket to construct makeshift shoes and using the entire blanket as a poncho, I chose a wrap. My feet must survive as best they could, even though I tormented myself briefly with the thought that a broken toe or even a deep scratch could put a hole in all of my elaborate plans. Shaking aside those thoughts even as I shook out my new blanket, I turned my now-resolved mind to my next task. I had to acquire some type of cutting implement in order to make the blanket into a garment I would not have to constantly secure with either my hands or a sharp stick.

      I thought about the Iceman, as they called him. He was found in the mountains of Austria and Italy (they are still fighting about his exact location and their ultimate self-gain) clad in early Bronze Age clothes. He wore leggings and a loincloth, presumably for easy access in the frigid climes he frequented, and a long, sleeveless, leather cloak. All of that was covered by a long woven grass overcoat. Some academics had tried that attire and declared it to be more than sufficient for dealing with the cold, but that constraining and bulky clothing might be at least partially responsible for a wound they found on his shoulder. He was carrying, embedded deep in his clavicle, an arrowhead that was missing its shaft, and at first they thought it represented an old and healed wound. He carried weapons, a bow and twenty or so arrows, as well as an axe and a knife, but what help would such defensive strategies be if he were layered in constricting garments?

      The blanket was the best I could hope for on my first night. I pulled—strangely with some difficulty—myself back to the present problem. I needed shale or some such rock that upon being struck, would produce a sharp edge I might be able to saw a hole in my new coat. I had given up hope of finding a bottle, for the ditch had been recently cleared of such debris. Middleclass locals had generously given of their Saturday afternoon for the yearly beautification project sponsored by the government, an event attended almost entirely by church groups. Even without that obsessively happy glee club, alcoholics tended to collect, or more accurately, have their children collect, returnable bottles. They idled their huge seventies cars on the fringe of the road and, when their children’s hands were full, they sped away, their air of satisfaction mixed with a blue cloud of hydrocarbons.

      Clattering around in the ditch, my luck turned, however. I found an old green Sprite bottle, which under other circumstances and some twenty years later might make an antique to adorn the little-used back window of some suburbanite’s cottage. For me, however, it was a real find. If I broke it properly, and then mounted the sliver to a shaft, I might have a knife rather than just a sharp fragment. Once again I mentally returned to that poor frozen man, nearly twice my age, who lay under the drift until middle class hikers brought him and his misery to the light of the transient public imagination. His stone knife was such a one as I might dream to make.

      I gathered the rocks I needed and was so entranced in my task I barely noticed the lights sweeping over me as a car curved from a side road. Crouching in the ditch, I wondered how I would explain myself to the village that always has dealt with me with some puzzlement if not outright rancour. But such an explanation, however stilted, was not needed, and with the blanket over my back to prevent my skin from showing in the light, I lay on the roadside. When I lowered my head I smelt the rubber and exhaust, and so it wasn’t until after the car had passed that I realized I lay in a patch of what we called sweet clover when we were children. Even to this day I don’t know its botanical name, but it proved to be my first meal of my new life.

      I gathered a few rocks about six inches long, and laid the bottle so it was cupped by the rocks and the grass I had wrapped around them. How various the vagaries of experience. That bottle had lain there perhaps ten years or more, and such bottles have only existed in the world for the last three to four hundred years, and yet it is trash to the quickly moving car, to the society which would spend itself in vain pursuit of cave and covering until the entire world lay waste.

      I struck the bottle once in its midsection with a heavy, dull rock I had picked out in the last of the moonlight. As the bottle caved, I tentatively grasped the shards with my fingers, all the while aware my new world no longer provided Band-Aids. I might as well have been living hundreds of years before antibiotics, my wounds wrapped in dirty cloth, bound by superstition and the discomfort of malnutrition, as well as the probing eye of the feudal lord. Not that our modern existence is so different.

      I lifted the shards from their bed and spread them upon the uneven pavement. Not surprisingly, most were too small for a knife, but the first order of business was a coat. I grabbed a large piece of glass from the neck of the bottle, and although it was clumsy to work with, I scratched it across the blanket until the fibres began to give way and I managed to make a passable cloak. I was struck by how that would appear to these villagers in what Yeats called the prosaic light of day. I was a creature left over from the dawn of time, had more in common with the Iceman on his lonely cliff than I had with these people I had known my whole life. I had put myself in that position, however, and the Iceman had, I deeply suspected, been driven to that cliff by some force or other.

      With a cloak around me I felt a little more at ease with the night and the decision I had made. I already had clothing to protect me from the chilly night air, and spread before me were the makings of a fine weapon. I thrust my wish for shoes aside and concentrated on the glass. It was getting darker, and with many hours before the dawn there was no rush, but nonetheless I felt impelled by a kind of insomnia brought on by my first adventurous night. Surrounded as I was by people sleeping soundly in their beds, I was the one inmate on the floor who contemplates again the weak bars on his cell. I had, how permanently who knows, broken those bars, somehow found a key, weakened the concrete casement and walked out of the impenetrable grid that is normal living and stable behaviour.

      If it were indeed to be a long night—and I had recently been accustomed to staying up late, especially as the date grew nearer—then I had best improve on my time and make what tools, weapons, and clothing I needed for the coming weeks. Or, for that matter, the coming rest of my life.

      Some might say that all I had to do was walk the narrow strip of sand leading directly back to bed, which is—in all probability—still warm from my resting before leaving in the dark. That is true. I could have easily returned, written off my abortive pathway as a failed experiment, or misbegotten fancy, my mind gone astray in books instead of healthy outside experience, such as baseball and hockey. That adventure had taken me from a warm home to guesswork. The warmth of the family hearth is relative, however, as any runaway can explain, their short-term roadside relationships preferable to the cold ashes of their family fire.

      I do not mean to give an impression I lived in precarious or even abusive circumstances. I had chosen another way because I believed the accepted way was—in some ill-defined fashion—more dangerous. I am still unsure how to articulate such a conjecture, however. The glass before me was a more legitimate worry anyway, for do we not, as a culture of worriers, spend more time on such esoteric matters as the happiness in a life we have not chosen than upon the chance thrust before us?

      Only one sliver of glass was long enough to resemble a knife, about four and a half inches, and overly thin for a blade. I was not looking for grace, just a sharp edge that I could insert into a wooden shaft and use for scraping and cutting. I was not worried about using that knife as a weapon either, for by twilight the next day I hoped to have a metal knife in my possession, as well as some food upon which to exercise it.

      I decided to make do with a shorter and more solid bottle piece. So selecting from my collection—for I could not carry all the glass with me—I took a shorter piece, and broke the longer, more slender fragment into a fine, sharp cutting edge. I was next occupied with finding food, for I had not left the house with a full stomach. That would have been cheating. I remember some high school kids, who upon joining a planned famine in order to raise money for some cause or other, had starved themselves for thirty hours. After their fast, they met in a pizza restaurant, where they confessed to gorging before undertaking the privation.

      I had thought to leave several weeks earlier and set a date, but part of the exercise involved making no specific plans. I wished to bring myself through those same solemn steps in evolution we experienced long ago on the broad savannah of Africa, so I might again step through a doorway and sit around a table eating pie. Pie. Even the thought of it ushered me to my next task.

      Unlike those who might wish to try this in the city, I was fortunate enough to live in the country, and in midsummer many blooming gardens are left to their own devices in the dark of night. No one expects even groundhogs that time of year, their dull-nosed gnawing at the base of beans and the late sprouts of lettuce. Into these unprotected gardens I was going to come, and that thought made me wish I had made off with a sack from the barn I had stopped by earlier. I hoped I would not pay with my life for such mistakes later, for it is by such oversights we are undone. One strike less with an axe could have earned a cave dweller his death instead of an evening’s meal. Even in our time, a moment’s inattention at the wheel makes the road a hazard, as the driver blithely rolls towards the oncoming car. Even these fears contain their own downfall, for time spent regretting an unchangeable past, or learning a useless lesson, leads to the same blank cliff.

      I would have to survive without a sack, or contrive one from what material I might chance upon. In many ways I had advantages my ancestors could not have dreamed of, for I had access to the wealth of the world, even in a ditch. The material wealth many idly throw away is a fortune to the needy. Of course, every story leaves a story half-ignored. My ancestors in their dim time exemplified survival in a way I could scarcely achieve, my mind rotten with Hollywood and the closed fantasy of text.

      With my fragments of glass, I followed the dusty roadside, still with no notion of my path.

      Chapter ~ Three

      Wrapping my slivers of glass in the fold of my blanket, and pinning it with a sharp twig, I went to the nearest farm. Unfortunately, I had forgotten about their dog. These people had one of those dogs that most justly represented themselves. Just as public lore would suppose dogs resemble their owners, their cruel and slovenly ways were represented in their mangy and eternally angry mutt. Another slip on my part. How many slips was I allowed before I slipped too far? I was not willing to go back, and soon that would be impossible, so I had better turn my mind to the rusty matter of living, or I’d find a ragged hole in my life and be up to my elbows in dog blood.

      Time moved more slowly in my new world. No more than an hour or two had passed for those sleeping in their sour-smelling beds, yet for me the adventure had already seemed the matter of the whole night. I found myself constantly looking at the night sky, waiting for dawn. I tried to be careful not to step on something sharp and thus put a new wrinkle in what had been so far a pretty easy night.

      I was getting farther from what I knew; I was not sure, for instance, where these people kept their garden, which meant a bit of stumbling around in the increasing dark. The house was quiet and, viewed from the road, the farm had a very peaceful aspect. The cows were resting, which reminded me of a local farmer’s declaration: I love to see a cow lying down. I wonder what that meant to me as a child. He was referring to how a cow chews their cud while lying, so a cow at rest was satiated, at least momentarily. Farmer Brown’s cows were full and, stirring softly in the night, which likely came the closest they could to contentment, given their eventual end at the knacker’s.

      Creeping closer to the barn and trying to keep its long shadow before me on the ground, I slowly circled the buildings. When I saw the workshop I thought to find enough metal to make a knife, but I was intent on my task and did not want to get waylaid by a desire for metal. In any event, I would never dare turn on a light in the shop. Better to be satisfied with food and worry about a blade another day; if the early hominids could wait two million years for their metal, I could at least wait until dawn.

      The garden turned out to be near the house. It was one of those mixed gardens that are quite common in the country. The acrid smell of the gas came to me in the moist night air, and I located, by it, the potato rows. Ignoring the popularity of pesticides, and distrusting those more recent cures, farmers still picked their potato bugs off the leaves by hand when they were about the size of pencil erasers and drowned them in tin cans of gasoline. They had six rows of about forty feet, more than enough for a family for the winter, barring accidents. These people lived as though disaster had already struck and planted more than they could use, worrying always about the longer winter, the later spring and the drawn look of their own faces in the mirror.

      Potatoes were not that useful to me. I could eat them raw, but the vitamins I could get from carrots pulled fresh from the ground, or green beans, would outweigh the aggravation of carrying the heavier potatoes. When I found and pulled the carrots—which was no easy task, since they were intertwined and twisted—I missed having a bag.

      Strange that that garden, which in other ways was so well kept, should be tended by someone who didn’t feel it necessary to thin carrots. Carrot seeds are so small that the gardener inadvertently plants many more than can actually grow well. First, when the baby carrots are sprouted, and then later, when they are half a finger’s size or so, they are pulled, and the first succulent taste of baby carrot is enjoyed. Who planted these, I wondered. They were probably new to gardening. If these people are novices, what does that mean for me? Carrots and beans might not be the only food I could find. I knelt between the rows and felt the plants and smelled. I found some broccoli, grown in that wild, stretched way organic broccoli has of growing, and tomatoes and green peppers. I stayed away from the onions, since they would increase thirst, and concentrated on the juicy tomatoes, which I ate on the spot since they would not bear carrying. Nor would anything else, if I didn’t find something to hold my night’s pickings.

      I finally settled on several small tomatoes, eaten immediately, with some broccoli, and fifteen carrots and three or four handfuls of beans. I hesitated over the turnips, since they were a snappy and tasty four inches across, but had less food value and would merely slow me down. Seeing the turnips gave me an idea, though. Turnips require fertilizer, which usually comes in thick, plastic, eighty-pound bags. Farmers typically leave these at the end of the row or near some trees, weighed down with rocks so they don’t blow away. My novices were no exceptions. Near the old cedar fence—under a small granite boulder—lay two bags. I examined them as thoroughly as I could and took the better of the two.

      Once again, my stock had gone radically up. I had food for two days, glass to make a knife, and a sack to carry my belongings. I was still poorer in some ways than the most destitute person in the street, but I also had access to more food and clothing—at least I hoped the coming day would prove that to be the case. Now it was time to take my wealth, and as Robinson Crusoe suggested, make a fastness in which to sleep.

      I thought I might want to return to the garden, so I tried to clear my tracks. I walked the rows and scraped my hands along the surface of the soil, which luckily was dry, and removed my tracks. It would not do for a farmer to return, even a novice, and find bare human footprints in the garden on the same night I had disappeared.

      I didn’t want to risk running afoul of a nail in a board or something else that could greatly damage my survival, so I went back to the road on the same path I had picked through to get to the garden. My lack of shoes was getting to be a concern. I would have to rectify that—I had no idea how—the next day. The dew was heavy in the grass, and as I felt the moisture upon my feet I began to wonder what it is that draws a person back to the same dull road. I went back because I knew what to expect. The occasional rock and bruise on my foot was better than stepping into a cow pie or gashing my foot on a discarded tin. Climbing up the gravel marge of the road I again vividly felt my lack of footwear, and the road under my damp soles seemed harder. I would have to toughen up.

      I decided to walk the perhaps half-mile or so to a group of pines near the road. They would provide me with shelter for the morrow and a place from which to evaluate what that day would bring. Momentarily, at least, I was full with food—although most of it, such as the tomatoes, was merely water. I gingerly made my way west along the gently sloping road towards a dark mass in the distance that was a clump of roadside pines.

      The rest of that trip was without incident. The only passing car was the one I had encountered earlier when I was consumed with my bottle. Arriving sometime in the middle of the night at the pines, I left the road and stepped through the barbwire fence, for the pines grew in a pasture, and went at once into the thicket. Groping in the thick blackness, I almost immediately felt something metallic. I felt along its flank and then struck it so that it rang faintly. I had never entered the thicket before so I had no idea what the object was, but it was large and was likely was either a discarded car body or a piece of farm equipment. Farmers commonly leave broken machinery in dry places on the farm in order to return to it and take whatever parts they later require. My mind immediately went back to my desire for a knife.

      I imagined a similar scene many years earlier. A crouching form, newly from the forest, made its way to the plain in order to find wealth beyond all reckoning, a large piece of metal. Metal was so precious that natives used to cut pieces from the edges of copper kettles to make arrowheads. The Cape York meteorite in Savissivik was famous in the area for its iron and nickel and Inuit cold forged tools by its side for centuries until it was stolen by European explorers. The Iceman was likewise found with a wealth of copper in the axe by his side. The early Hittites went thousands of miles across the prairie in search of metal for their swords, which they used with a proficiency that made them the most frightening people on the Syrian plain. Now many tons of metal is left to rust in fields or on rock piles. In urban areas, the case is much worse. Most metals end up in landfills on the outskirts of the city, and any who would try to reuse some of that wealth are charged and fined for their trouble. At least the farmer, presumably, was using it for parts, or scrap.

      I used to imagine some future time, when the flood of our resources has dwindled to a mere trickle, and the dumps will become our mines. I never spent my imagination upon the location of intact cultural artefacts such as those that fill futuristic Hollywood films. Rather, I saw a group of people digging through tons of rusty and meaningless trash, and the joy on the rugged and tanned face of a lone digger, as with a howl he holds up to the light a motorcycle engine. Once aluminium was so precious Napoleon had a tea set made of it, while in our time it is mere junk to be thrown. Enormous amounts of electricity are required to purify aluminium, and it was only recently, in relative historical terms, we learned to make it, even though bauxite is a common ore and aluminium a ubiquitous element. For our lone digger, his fortune is made, just as ours is, if we but realized it.

      In the meantime, though, I needed to settle for the night. By grabbing nearby fir boughs mid-stem and lifting with a sharp upward movement, I soon had a handsome, and more importantly, dry and soft bed. I was lucky the thicket contained firs, for pine itself has rough branches, regardless of the softness of its needles, and the pointy needles of spruce, especially cat spruce, are hard to situate into a passably comfortable bed. I carried my fir boughs into the heart of the thicket where dry beds of pine needles carpeted—and prevented the growth of other plants—under a large eastern white pine. The needles have a tendency to pick up sap, which drips off the trees or is gathered from fallen twigs, but I was pleased with my fir branches. Also, the white pine is a needy plant and sucks up many gallons of water every day. That predilection ensured that unless a heavy rain had recently fallen, the ground under the pine would be dry.

      Now that it was time to settle for the night, I took stock of my situation. I had shelter enough for that starry night, even from the dews of the morning, but the weather in the following days would not necessarily prove as kind. Also, I needed to procure some method of making a fire and some way to cook what food I might find or steal. Realistically, I guessed I should be the proverbial protestant ant who spends the summer providing for the fall, rather than the grasshopper, who—well fed with the whimsy of the moment—spends their warmth feeling the wind on the waving stem of grass. The story traditionally associates the grasshopper’s autumnal death with their lack of preparation. That comparison of behaviour and death ignores that the ant is also dead, and unfortunately wasted their time pointlessly worrying about a future they will not see.

      Luckily, ants do not come out at night, for even though local ants didn’t bite, they would be an annoyance if they were crawling over me in my sleep, tickling my skin with their small feet.

      I brushed my teeth by vigorous use of a frayed brushy stick, a method my friend Jonathan had learned in West Africa, and thought about how in Galapagos Vonnegut argues human discontent is due to the size of our brains. He radically cuts human brain size by some speedy evolutionary sleight of hand, and Presto, as he says, humanity is no longer consumed with petty worries. When counselling the anxiety-ridden, therapists claim that eighty percent of what we worry about never comes to pass. The anxious, of course, start worrying about the remaining twenty percent. Fortunately, my friend who is especially concerned about dental hygiene didn’t see me pick my teeth for wooden splinters from my homespun toothbrush.

      If I were pressed, I could not say for sure why I left my warm bed, but I knew it was not to spend my time worrying. That was the first moment I hadn’t been in constant motion, and in the dark and pine-filled air I wondered about my motivations and began to have the usual misgivings.

      I remember when a friend and I explored the conduit and heating tunnels beneath our university. We had both been below a few times but we decided we should try to live the entire weekend in the tunnel system without using the lights. Lighting was always a question in these holes, but the switches themselves were dimly lit and we usually carried a flashlight. On that occasion, we’d packed enough food for a couple of days and, when no one was looking, we slid into one of the open grates. We wandered around in the tunnels guessing where we were more by feel and memory than by any logic. After a few hours of that tedium—and he was not the most entertaining company—we decided to turn the lights on and search for a place to stay the night. We noticed, however, that the air was singularly bad. There were a few vents letting in the cool winter breeze, but we could hardly sleep on the damp floor under a vent, and the other alternatives—dingy concrete shelves surrounded by conduits and damp, cement-filled air—were scarcely more pleasant. Eventually we went back into the light after having only passed a few hours below.

      The lesson I took from that experience was not to pay too close attention to midnight misgivings. By that token—although I wondered what I was trying to prove, and to whom—I was ignoring mine. As well, there is something to be said for actually having tried something before giving up. Wells claims that in the after-dinner atmosphere thought runs gracefully free from the trammels of precision, and I would extend that lack of precision well into the wee hours. Judgement is suspect, although creative, until dawn. Although under the trees—where I was scarcely troubled by even a mosquito—I might not have had the comforts of home, I was comfortable enough to think.

      I thought of those early risers who make up the bulk of our work world. Even though they are not the most creative people, I would soon be one myself because of my dependence on natural light. Creative thoughts do not happen in the morning light, for the morning is the time to plan the day. Morning may give resourcefulness, and preparation, but no real leaps of thought. The evening allows thought to expand. When the day is done the mind reflects on what it has seen, not with an eye to change, but rather to incorporate it into memory. Once that process is underway, the notions of the moment begin to be compared to other stored thoughts. That is the essence of creativity.

      Although the plebeian mind might associate creativity, or what it calls genius, with the storage of information, and thus wonder at the man who has memorized the Los Angeles phonebook or some such nonsense, creativity’s essence lies in how information is connected and manipulated. Unfortunately, these abstractions didn’t make my bed any more comfortable.

      I curled my blanket around me, shut out the breeze and the distant barking of a dissatisfied dog, and spent my first night sleeping fitfully until I woke with the cold of dawn.

      Chapter ~ Four

      I could have woken to the dawn of the mountains, with the cold wind and the high, clear mountain air, or the sun’s clarity over the desert, smelling the odorous desert weed and my hair packed with dust. Instead, from my thicket I could see, fitfully through the forest gaps, the dew-laden webs of spiders in the grass and the slow movement of the cows making their way from shelter to feed.

      My first night in the open—if that rude shelter could be called the open—had passed, and I had survived. Although I was not yet fit to appear in public, I possessed enough clothing to protect me from the chill of the summer night. By the morning light, however, my blanket began to take on a less appealing aspect. It was dirtier than I thought and likely was used to rub down the horses, or to warm them when they came in from strenuous exercise. Also, it was crosshatched with vivid reds and blues, and therefore poor camouflage if I wished to cross the field in the day. It was serviceable nonetheless, I reminded myself, and began to look around me. I had gained some mosquito bites in the night, but other than a vague itchiness that would fade once I washed in a stream, I felt, if anything, more vigorous.

      My bag of vegetables was still by my side and the road beckoned. I was not certain what that day would amount to once the next sun had fallen, but at least I would not starve or die of hypothermia.

      My first order of the day was breakfast, and since the dull sound of a distant tractor and the infrequent sounds of traffic from the road didn’t seem immediately threatening, I opened my bag. I placed my slivers of glass—which looked different in the daylight—to one side, and pulled the carrots out by their tops. I had carried the tops away with me rather than risk leaving them where someone could find them and suspect a human culprit. Although I doubted I had erased all of my prints from the garden, there was no need to so obviously advertise my presence. I tore the tops from the carrots and laid them to one side, thinking all the while they would have made a pleasant pillow. They would not have creased my cheek, as the fir had, with a kind of fossil. Although I could not see the branch’s effect, upon first waking I had felt its imprint with my cold morning fingers. I took the larger of my slivers of glass and scraped the carrots, removing the dirt with the first layer of skin. Without water, that was the only way to clean them, and I knew that carrots, like all vegetables, are grown in manure. Although I might gain extra B vitamins from some dung on my food, I didn’t want to drift so far into privation that I contracted E. coli. Supplemented with green peppers, the carrots made a succulent breakfast.

      Coming out of the shelter I stood for the first time in the dawn of my new world, and the vista stretched before me now that I had shed the familiarity of the daily routine. In the distance I saw the dim outlines of cows grazing near what must have been the banks of a creek, and heard from afar a dog, a sound which, mixed with the morning birds and a distant tractor, seemed idyllic. I had stepped

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