Acid Rain

by R. D Rhodes

  The thunder soon ceased but the lightning continued to flash every fifty seconds. I pulled the zip down a little, and watched the rain smash the earth and bounce back up. The black cloud blotted out every chink of light. I zipped it up again. A puddle was forming inside the left of the tent, I was so glad we had placed it on a slope.

  I got into my sleeping bag and cozied myself into the dry middle, staring at the ceiling, listening to the storm. A week ago, it was my hospital room ceiling that I was looking up at. But I didn’t want to think about that. It felt soothing, even therapeutic, and I felt so protected by my shelter and the trees that kept out the worst of the storm, that I didn’t want to taint my mind by going back to that negative place.

  Will Harry be walking in this right now? Or will he have found shelter? No! Stop it! He will be okay.

  I brought my hands together. I asked God to keep him safe, and if he was willing, could he make the weather good for him?

  I finished my prayer. Five minutes later, the downpour suddenly stopped. Instantly, like someone had flicked a switch. I smiled in astonishment.

  I was finally able to peel open the curtain door. I shook it out and pushed it up on top of the tent, then I took a cup and scooped out the puddle. It was stunning out there. Nature was putting on a new show- shining sunbeams down from the sky to begin. The forest woke up, the birds chimed louder than ever their jubilant songs. The branches dripped melodically onto the roof and the bracken, and the world was interspersed with bright light mixed-in with the atmospheric grey. The air was fresh and sweet. It was almost as if the storm had been deliberately blasted against the land in order to give it new life. This really is what calm after the storm means, I thought.

  I contemplated going out, but the ground was soaking, and the inviting, toasty warmth of the sleeping bag was too much to resist. I nestled myself in, lulled by the sounds of the forest.

  Chapter 50

  M y face felt fuzzy, like it was covered in cobwebs, but when I wiped them off with my hand there was nothing there. I couldn’t see any spiders in the tent either. Strange, I thought.

  I sat up. My insides felt full of energy. I felt supercharged. It must have been a good sleep.

  I put on my boots and stepped out into the drenched ground. Judging by the sky, there was only a few hours of light left. I circled the tent. Droplets clung to the sides, but it was standing as strong as ever. “You are fucking brilliant!” I said out loud, and I pinched the tarp and shook out the remaining moisture.

  I went back to the fireplace. I really did feel full of energy, not just in my insides but all over. I couldn’t place why or how that was. Maybe this is what Harry felt? I wondered. Anyway, what should I do? The day is coming to an end, and I don’t want to have wasted it.

  I laced my boots and jogged down the hill. The resinous, piney aroma smelled fantastic. I ran down to the bridge me and Harry had went to, and I jogged up the same way. The river was crazy, running so much faster. The rapids thrashed savagely, foaming white all the way down. I jogged up by the whirlpool and the falls beneath me, my boots squelching through the yellow leaves and mud. What are you playing at? a voice popped into my head, Sleeping during the day, when you could have been doing something? You’ve wasted your time. But that nap felt good. And I couldn’t do anything in the rain anyway.

  I jogged back by the sixty-foot drop, stopped for a break, then carried on to the bridge, trying to burn off some of the excess energy. My stomach started to rumble. I hadn’t eaten anything apart from a little porridge in the morning. I had thought it best not to eat too much, just in case Harry didn’t come back for a while, or didn’t come back at all. Maybe that’s why my body feels like this? I considered. Especially my head. Though I felt full of energy, I also felt airy and light.

  I ran along the right-hand side of the loch. The sun was poking through, and the land was awash in all its resplendent colours. But all too quickly a cloud pulled across and blocked out all the light. The glen turned back to greyness. What power a cloud has! I thought.

  I picked up the pace and then sprinted about three hundred meters, until I couldn’t physically run anymore, and I reduced myself to a walk with my hands on my hips. Raindrops started to fall again, landing on the loch with reverberating ripples. I gazed along the shoreline in front of me, at the stones, brush bushes and lapping water as my boot heels crunched in the dampening gravel. I imagined seeing women, branded as witches, being drowned by church prosecutors on lochs like this, while the villagers screamed curses at them in mass crowds at the waterside. I pictured some of those women getting dragged out of the water, then hung on stakes and set fire to. And more images followed. I saw crannogs in the loch and smoke rising out from their thatched roofs, then men in ragged clothing fishing and swimming, and groups of people building and rowing in boats. I pictured women and children collecting water in jugs. Then for some reason, a Burns poem started singing in my head, “When a body meet a body coming through the rye. Sure a body meet a body coming through the rye.” Where have I heard that from? Why is that in my head?

  You’ve probably heard it somewhere, I thought. Who reminded you? Maybe it’s a connection from thinking about witches? Tam o Shanter, that’s it- the Burns poem about witches! I remembered. Then from that to Coming through the Rye. That must be it. “When drouthy neighbors neighbors meet, honest men and bonnie lasses.” The songs continued. My ears were ringing with them, “Ride fast Tam! Wee sleekit, cowrin timrous beastie.”

  Jesus, I can’t go on like this. I turned around, crossing back over the bridge as little lines from his poems in primary six came back to me. What I would do now for a great big chicken burger with lettuce and sauce and mayonnaise…

  The sky darkened very quickly. I picked up my speed again. Honest men and bonnie lasses. Honest men and bonnie lasses, my mind raced. Wee sleekit, cowrin timrous beastie. To a mouse? Harry! He mentioned Burns a few nights ago. It was a small thing, but it must have stuck. Everything sticks. Everything taken in from the environment is processed in some way or another. It becomes you. Environment determines consciousness. What? I thought. Where did that come from? Has someone said that to me too? Environment determines consciousness? No, that can’t be true. Not all the time? Stop criticizing yourself. Think, in this place you feel alive and special and think it’s beautiful, and you feel alive and special and beautiful. What the fuck are you talking about? Nutter.

  That’s my stomach rumbling again. Aw, I’m really hungry. Listen to those beautiful geese calling out. Environment becomes you, environment determines consciousness. Like attracts like. C’mon, don’t be scared. You’ll be fine when you get something to eat. That’s it, faster. You can get a fire going.

  I arrived back in the dark and climbed inside the tent and switched on the lamp. The rain started coming down hard again, drumming the roof as I pulled out the stove and set up for tea. Ach Aye. Dickhead, Dick fuck up! Chalk, chalk a block Armageddon. Cunt! my mind kept on. I took out a bigger portion of rice than usual and poured it into the pot. The blue gas sparked on and I tapped my foot. Aye Fuckwit cunt flying saucer. I couldn’t sit still.

  It’s just hunger. “Calm down.” I said aloud to the silence. Calm down? You’re gonna go fucking crazy in here, girl. Harry aint coming back. You’re all alone. No, he’s definitely coming back, fuck off brain and leave me alone. “C’mon Aisha, shut yourself off.” Switch off. Wanker whimsical wally. He’s dead. No, he’s not. He’s dead right now. He’s lyin in the fuckin gutter with his eyeballs gouged out by the crows. Shut up! “C’mon, calm.”

  What time is it? Five, or six. He’s running amok. Running through the streets with stolen gear getting chased by the cops. No, he won’t even be there yet. I rubbed my face roughly and massaged my temples with my fingers. I picked up Harry’s Moonwalking with Einstein book from on top of his clothes.

  What you doin? You don’t want to read that. It’s shite, what you reading that for? Can’t handle me?

  I dropped the book and
focused on the flame. Focused and focused and narrowed my eyes till the thoughts in my head receded. Calm. Calm. Calm yourself. Focus. Then I started to think of Swedish and Polish people saying focus, and it sounded like fuck us, and they kept repeating it over and over.

  “It’s okay. It’s all okay.” I said aloud.

  The water started bubbling, it’s like a witch’s cauldron, and minutes later the rice was soft and fluffy. I dished it all into my bowl and wolfed it all down hungrily then drank all the water from the pot. You still hungry? You should have some more. Feel it sitting inside your stomach, like Jonah in the whale waiting for a friend? More! More. Will I have more? I can’t, they’ll be nothing left. I’ll have some more. I put in more rice and water and boiled it up again with rosehip syrup to flavor it.

  I ate it all, and felt satiated. My stomach felt full, and the voice in my head faded. I put away the stove, picked up my notebook and started writing. The winds whispered outside. The trees lullabied.

  Chapter 51

  A fter half an hour of furious scribbling, I put the notebook down. I had written ten pages. I thought I could feel my mind tiring out towards the end. But it started again almost immediately, Bastardfuck shit-ass. I tried to ignore it. Eat too much you grow stupid and eat too little you become crazy. And fat bastards. Fat bastards everywhere. One and a half billion starving, one billion obese. Do the maths. And what are you doing about it, CUNT?????? I grabbed my CD player and plugged in Nevermind and turned it up till Kurt was screaming into my ears. I lay back in my sleeping bag and thrashed the floor with my foot and beat invisible drums with my fists. The energy inside was insatiable.

  Next morning, I peeled back the door to see another wet, grey sky. Light rain was trickling down. Judging by the light it must have been about eight.

  I feel better this morning, I thought. More coherent. Less anxious. I poured the porridge and let it boil, realising that for the fourth day straight I’d woken up about the same time; just after sunrise. And it was often the birds that woke me, like an alarm clock. I was adjusting to nature.

  When the porridge cooked up, I chewed it slowly. I licked the pot clean, pulled my hair back and my hood up, and went out to the stream. I washed the pot and splashed my face, and went for the toilet, and cleaned myself. Then I came back and packed my bag, putting in my notebook, the Einstein book Harry had left, and his Edible Plants book too.

  The rain turned the gravel road a darker shade. It rippled the loch and landed silently in the moss. My polyester jacket crackled, and I tightened my hood till it was like looking out from the entrance of a cave. I can’t complain, I thought. It’s the reason for all this beauty. It’s what makes it so green. You need the different weathers as well, and anyway, that grey sky seems to fit in this glen. In the industrial cities, which are already grey, it makes me depressed, but it goes here, it is still pretty.

  But twenty minutes later I had changed my mind. The rain, this constant fucking rain. But then this is what Scottish culture is all about!

  I laughed, thinking, this is the real reason we’ve invented so much stuff. John Logie Baird was just sick of sitting on his arse, bored in the house on days like this, so he invented the TV to give himself something to do. Alexander Graham Bell was fed up getting soaked when he walked to his mates, so he just invented the telephone to talk to them over that instead. And Alexander Fleming and Robert Thomson and James Hutton and James Maxwell, the rain had drove all them indoors too, and forced them to do something creative to fill the time. I delighted at the ridiculousness of it, and it went through my head, boredom and frustration are the driving forces of mankind.

  That makes sense, I thought. Maybe they are.

  I reached the bridge and headed up the river again, stopping at the sixty-foot chasm for the fourth time. It was beautiful. The peaceful water slowly drifting through smooth red sandstone towers. And in the middle of those towers some ingenious little shrubs had found cracks to grow in, from thirty feet above the water.

  But the scene was missing something. I realised the original feeling of awe it had over me, had gone. Or at least diminished. The first time, with Harry, I was simply stunned. And yesterday after the storm, it looked amazing too. But today, it just wasn’t as impressive.

  I moved on upriver, towards the waterfalls and the whirlpool. Maybe I need to move, I thought. Take the tent and put it somewhere else. But I can’t, for Harry coming back. But that’s the great thing about a tent, I can be nomadic if I want to. If I don’t like where I am, I can up and leave and take my home with me. But a house is rooted. And so many houses are built so close together, and on top of each other, our personal space is nonexistent. And if you have bad neighbors, you can’t move your house, you have to move out. Houses as well, get you in a position of being indebted to landlords and governments. To get money you have to join their club of routines and restrictions and rules. When did it become normal to live your life to work? But living out here means I don’t have to conform. No house. No bills. No taxes. No rent. Nor the stress that comes with any of those things. I am living as simply as possible. Simplicity is peace. Peace leads to happiness and fulfillment. Yeah, that’s true. And I’ve made a big change by coming here. On the first night I was scared. I was scared last night too. But it’s change, and change is good, it’s how you grow. Maybe that’s where depression came from- boredom, lack of challenge, and having to stay in one place? When the hunter-gatherers were moving around, fighting animals and hunting, every single day a battle to survive and always feeling adrenaline, they wouldn’t have been depressed! What can you do if you feel that fight or flight hormone now? But nobody does anything about it anyway. About houses or any of this. Most people are simply passengers on the ride of life. They coast along like they’re passengers on a train that’s being driven by someone else, rarely testing themselves, hiding in their safe jobs in their safe homes in their safe cities. They sit in comfort watching the world go by from the inside, the modern man does anyway. Well, here I am, the driver, I will navigate and beat them all and laugh about it.

  But what am I doing that’s so unique? Shut up, of course you are. This society is so expectant and entitled. The government needs to do everything and provide for everyone. It’s the government’s duty to fix their lives and sort society. We need, they need, personal responsibility. Personal responsibility?

  I wasn’t making any sense. All I knew is that I was stupid and dumb as fuck and knew nothing. I passed the whirlpool and the waterfall below the ridge to my left and kept on walking on to new territory up the river.

  I passed by some really old pine trees, and many birches and alders, and soon came to a spectacular oak- thick and sturdy and with three huge growths protruding from its middle. Its girth was about ten times the size of the other trees. Two gigantic branches hung below the rest and one of them was almost touching the ground. I couldn’t resist climbing up onto it and I crawled along its length, almost hugging it at its narrowest point. I got about fifteen feet up then climbed up the next branch which drooped down, and I went on and on until I was more than halfway up but couldn’t go any higher. I couldn’t see much from up there except for the other trees. A yellow leaf drifted past me on its way to the ground.

  It was still drizzling rain, but the bark wasn’t so slippy, and as I hung suspended in mid-air, supported by the arms of this giant tree, I was suddenly overcome with gratitude. For life? For keeping me up there? For the air that I breathed? I didn’t know, but I felt like kissing the tree, and so I did.

  I clambered back down and trudged on through the thick, leafy mulch, stopping to turn around and stare at the tree once more. That feeling of awe was back in me. It was a real grandad tree of the forest, the biggest by far I’d seen in the glen. And as I looked at its incredible, sprawled out character, silhouetted by the green-needled pines and grey-barked birches beyond it, I remembered something else I’d read in that Tolstoy story, War in Peace- when the characters were riding in a carriage through the for
est, and they came to a giant oak, described just like this. And I thought of a week ago- up the mountain it was the huge sky that reminded me of that book. Someone saying, “That sky, that great sky, why hadn’t he realized it before?” I read that book about three years ago, why is it all coming back to me now? I wondered, and then I thought, there must have been a point when he was writing that, that he had experienced the same things I have experienced, and in quite a similar way- the same awe of the oak tree, the same awe of the sky, it’s almost as if our thoughts are linked to the past.

  And after I had that impression a few days ago too, that I was living in a timeless realm.

  I almost tripped as I turned back up the hill, and I noticed, just before a beautiful red-berried rowan, lots of little mushrooms poking up through the fallen leaves.

  I knelt down before the log that they were fruiting around. There were brown ones. Cupped ones. Ones that looked like ears. I dropped the bag from my back and took out Harry’s Edibles book.

  I came to the small section on edible mushrooms and compared the illustrations to what was below. The one that looked like an ear was similar to what the book called an oyster mushroom. I picked off a small piece and nibbled. It felt like heaven in my mouth. I’d gone almost a week of rice and porridge and soup, and it tasted so nutty and warm. I wasn’t sure about the others. There were quite a few very small ones with creamy white stems and brown on top. I picked a couple and chewed them too, letting them melt on my tongue. “Delicious!” I praised aloud. I ate one more, then headed on towards the grey mountains presenting themselves beyond the tree line.