Prisoners of Flight by Sid Gustafson

Author:Sid Gustafson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504024082
Publisher: The Permanent Press (ORD)

Chapter 7

Daphne scrounges around the pantry trying to put together a meal. Beans, commodity beans. USDA homegrown American beans. That’s all that’s really left. Oh, there’s some flour and baking powder which she gathers together in water. I stoke the fire and step outside to contemplate the bear and retrieve some firewood. A chill charges the air as a front from the north floods our valley. In the distance I hear elk bugle. Their trumpets are magnified, magnified because it is going to snow, air empty for the snow. They rut, their lives destined by an urge to procreate.

Life stirs everywhere about me. Big lives. Small lives. Lives planning, at once planning and unknowing of their planning. Lodgepole pine sway behind me. Cottonwood leaves dance ahead. No peopled din of any kind permeates this life, none other than our woodsmoke and footprints. I sense eyes watching me. They don’t feel like the bear. Wo maybe. I look around. Many eyes watch. Squirrels, birds, even bugs fretting about the winter they foreordain.

I contemplate my daughter and son. I wonder and worry. I pray to the Great Spirit to watch over them, as I can’t. I once had a real family. Even got far enough along in life to own a home. Had a little string of horses, twenty acres in the foothills—the customary cabin-in-the-woods dream—all supported by veterinary work. A wife and son and I. Then little Trish was born. Turns out I wasn’t really there for her, not like I needed to be. I woke up one day and everything was gone. Can’t blame anyone but myself. I try not to dwell on my kids, but do. My attempts at family have failed. Somehow I must come to grips with my mistakes. Here I sense the family I have lost. Something about our camaraderie—the interdependence, the honesty about fears—results in a dissipation of my guilt, a retrieval of myself, a self I need to understand for my future role as father. Talk has been great therapy.

Before everything fell apart—my business and life and anything else that meant anything—my son returned to visit each summer. We’d ride our horses into the mountains whenever we could, our great escape. We were the first to breach the wilderness each spring, usually around the end of May. Didn’t see many bear those years, just as well with my little tyke along and all. Wally’s his name, a fine son. I got to running so much after my life broke down that our summers together ended. The wife settled in Oregon, remarried, started a new life, and built my son and daughter a secure home, a bit too secure, my boy suggested last time we talked.

We stay in touch. He’s always with me in his off-sprung way, thoughts I intuitively sense 750 miles distant. Whenever I’m in the wilderness, I feel him. The associations of backcountry, the tastes and smells—juniper, pine, spring water—stir my memory of him. For me the forest recalls family, my identity with blood.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.