Prodigal Father Wayward Son by Sam Keen

Author:Sam Keen [Keen, Sam; Keen, Gifford]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781611250381
Publisher: Divine Arts

I remember when it started to turn around. We had finished kayaking and been bussed to a campground to begin our eleven-day backpacking trip. It was late afternoon, and we were packing, getting ready for an early-morning departure, when Jim came and stood in front of me. He was holding a two-foot length of parachute cord in a loop between his hands.

“Do you know what I could do with this, you little faggot?” he said, a nasty grin spread across his face.

I was tired, and I was dreading backpacking. Here my size would once again be a huge disadvantage, and I could already hear the taunts my slow pace would provoke. They’d pushed me so cruelly for so long, I just didn’t give a damn.

“You could probably choke me to death,” I replied.

This wasn’t what he was used to from me, so he wrapped the cord around my neck and started to squeeze. I stared straight into his eyes until blackness rolled up my vision, and I fell backward, landing on top of two eighteen-year-olds from the other troop.

“Jesus, Jerkford, you klutz,” one of them spat at me.

“What a spaz,” said the other.

But I ignored them. I got up and stood right in front of Jim again, not saying a word, not doing anything, just looking into his face.

“You’re a fucking freak,” he muttered. But he looked away first and wandered off to pack.

This was hardly the victory of a Hollywood movie, in which I would have beaten him to a pulp — but it was something.

The next week and a half was grueling, worse than I’d expected. The first five days, we walked through relatively easy terrain, but by the end of the week, we began moving into the high country, camping at eleven thousand feet, crossing and re-crossing the Continental Divide. Above timberline, there were no trails in the vast, high landscape, and we soon found ourselves traversing long scree fields or balancing along knife-edged ridges with steep cliffs on both sides. As we climbed past thirteen thousand feet, the air got thin, the terrain grew even steeper, and a remarkable thing happened. Suddenly I found myself in the middle, or sometimes even near the front of our troop. I was a long way from the fastest, but I wasn’t the slowest.

On day nine, we were camped on a ridgeline, above twelve thousand feet, when a miracle occurred. Jim, my tormentor, was a serious smoker. He’d packed a carton of cigarettes and had been sucking down a pack a day the whole trip. That night, high, high above the world in a rocky, cold, windblown camp, our tarp tents stretched just below a jagged ridge that fell two thousand feet almost vertically to a lake below, Jim began to wheeze. The wheezes turned to gasps and the gasps to great, wet, hacking coughs.

During the night, he developed full-on pulmonary edema (a gathering of fluid in his lungs). After a worried consultation, the two leaders agreed that they had to get him to a lower elevation.

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