Bitter Fish
Benjamin Thomas
Copyright Benjamin Thomas 2013
PREFACE
The following events happened. Times, names, details were rearranged to fit a storyline making this a work of fiction. Several characters were combined into one. Names are irrelevant.
There was a man living in a cave in Southern Missouri, I don’t know where he has gotten himself too, or if he is still alive.
Chapter 1: On the river
I finally broke the silence by saying “Everything I have ever done has been an effort to attract a mate.”
Erik looked up from his side of the camp fire, “Everything?”
“Everything.”
The sun was just touching the top of an Ozark mountain, shades of yellow, red and pink bursting from the Western sky. The early twilight, still hot and humid from a blistering summer day, was slowly slipping into night. Overhead bats had begun the nightly hunt for mosquitoes, but the roaring fire kept the bugs away and gave us something to center our attention on. Locals like to call this an Ozark television, the hypnotic flicker of the flames that draws one into a trance.
We were camped on a gravel bar along the Huzzah River. The loose rocks stretched away from us and around a bend. This is truly the deep wilderness, fifteen miles up from our take out point, on a remote section that almost no one ever floats. This is good and bad, good because we get to see some amazing sites that no one else ever will, bad because we have to deal with log jams, fences and other obstacles. Since no one floats this, no one clears out the trees except mother nature.
“What about all the books you read? What about this? Aint no women around here,” Erik asks.
I think about my reply for a while. “Well you may be right, but I think I read because I want to appear educated. I do all this outdoors stuff cause I want the bragging rights. To be able to say that I floated something no one else has, to be able to say I did 120 miles in my canoe in a year; bragging rights.”
He pokes at the fire as he thinks about my answer. “Why do you care so much if you meet someone? You have a full life, friends, and family, what’s the rush. You want to be tied down again like you were with your X?”
Again he has me stumped. I stare at the fire and wonder. Why do I care? Why would anyone care? What drives us, me, the human race to find that special someone you can’t live without. He obviously isn’t looking for anyone, he hasn’t been on a date in years. And that last girl was a friend of a girl I was trying to bag. He was the wingman and ended up with her for a few months before he got sick of her free loading off of him.
“I think I am trying to replace the love I never felt from my mother” It isn’t easy for me to admit this, but he is like a brother to me and I can tell him anything. We go back a long ways, went through our divorces about the same time. A nice spring day a year later I sort of saved his life after he took a bad spill on a motorcycle. The years have brought us close.
“That’s ffff’d up.” I suppose I don’t need to explain more to him. What little I have told him of how I was raised answers those questions. It wasn’t a bad childhood by third world standards. I had enough to eat and clothes to wear. Lots of books lying about the house so I got to read a lot. A set of encyclopedias that I thumbed through. Nowhere in those encyclopedias did it mention cutters. People who are so self loathing they will take a knife and cut themselves . My left arm is a maze of scars from my childhood. I wish I could say none of those scars were recent but I would be lying.
“Is that why you are going to Africa? Just for bragging rights? That’s a long trip to hell just to be able to tell a girl that you have been there.” He is right, it is a long trip to hell. I get on a plane at six AM next Saturday and am not done traveling till Monday morning at four. There are some layovers in that itinerary but it is a long trip regardless. I don’t know why I am going there, but my when my sister in law asked me to go to Burkina Faso I asked her what country it was in. Silly me, it turns out it is a country, the second poorest one in the world. She warned me about it, but I decided to go anyway, get a sneak peak of hell before I end up there permanently. This is my going away float, last chance I have to be out on a river before I leave.
We are each drinking pretty heavily since the night has settled in on us and there is nothing left to do to get camp ready. It’s a good location, a nice flat gravel bar with plenty of wood to be had, nice log to throw your ass over for the morning dump. I have spent so many nights out on the rivers that each camping spot starts to look like the last.
Morning comes fresh and clear, a strong breeze from the south, a few puffy clouds in the sky. What a day! This will work out great, we are heading north and with this strong wind behind us we will make good time. Breakfast consists of beer and snickers. I organize a lot of float trips, and tell first timers to plan on a case of beer a day. This might seem like a lot but it is amazing how fast it can disappear. Generally I bring along some “dehydrated beer” in the form of whiskey. You never want to run out of booze out here if you are dependent on it.
We break camp quickly and head on. Both of us have been paddling for years, and we have shared a canoe so often that it is second nature. It gives me time to ponder what he said last night. His break from his X was so easy. He never loved her, was not very attracted to her and went straight into the arms of hot girl, young enough to be his daughter - in Arkansas maybe. That might have lasted 2 months, I forget how long they were together and try not to bring it up; it’s still a sore spot.
My break took years. Years of us tearing each other apart. She did most of the tearing, I did most of the crying. I don’t know why she was so unhappy with me. I am not perfect but wow, it was bad. I found out about the affair the morning I was released from the hospital where I had spent a few days with viral meningitis. I guess she picked that day because I was still so sick there was nothing I could do. What a way to add insult to injury. We tried to hold it together but after something like that it pretty much destroys everything. So we divorced. Three weeks after she moved out she showed up with the new guy to pick up some stuff she had left. I never realized how much I loved her till that moment.
Erik looks back at me “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“Thought I heard thunder”
Crap, a storm on the river is never any fun, in fact it is very dangerous. I swing the canoe sideways in the water looking back to the South. Nothing. But in these Ozark canyons you can’t see much of the sky. We sit like that for a bit both of us straining our ears. This time we both hear it. The wind is still from the South, that is good. If it changes and starts coming at us from the another direction that will mean a big storm is heading North and sucking air up like a vacuum cleaner. This hot humid air at the surface is what feeds those monsters.
Erik asks “What now?” He doesn’t need to ask more. We both know we are in a bad situation. I look around, deep forest everywhere.
“Let’s paddle like hell and hope we can find a gravel bar, I don’t want to be in these trees if it is bolting lightning.”
The beer cans are down and we are off. Racing the storm is no fun, but if we are lucky we might just find an old barn or a bridge or somewhere to ride it out. Maybe we could even find a cave to paddle the canoe into but I doubt it, not many caves on this chunk of the river.
The storm is evident now, we can hear the frequent cracks of lightning, the wind has whipped around and begins to work against us. This is a big one. Erik pulls his paddle up and points it to the sky. He doesn’t need to tell me what he is doing, I know. He is testing to see how much electricity is in the air. Fishermen do it with
their rods, he does it with his paddle. We are sitting ducks out here and won’t be much safer on shore. Being on this river in a canoe makes us the highest point around. Being on a gravel bar makes us a pretty high point as well. In theory if you get close enough to the trees they bleed the static charge away. In theory communism works. If you get too close to the trees the lightning can jump from the tree to a human body.
“We need to get off the river” he says over his shoulder.
“Up there,” and I nod to a gravel bar just coming into view around the bend. We both dig in deep and fight our way there.
The canoe beached and Erik has the tarp out as the first of the rain begins to hit. I grab the bottle of whiskey.
“What’s that for?”
I look at him for a moment, “You wanna die sober?”
He nods and we walk a few feet away from the canoe, pull the tarp over our heads and try to bunch it so that we can step on the edges a bit and keep it from flying off. We have made it, just in time. The storm comes roaring along, we listen to trees snap in the wind, lightening striking all around us as we pass the bottle back and forth. No point trying to talk, the wind and the rain on the tarp drown out everything. I think to myself; this is a good way to die.
The storm passes as fast as it came, and we are able to set out again with the skies clearing above us, both of us a bit shaken up and a lot more drunk than we should be on a Saturday morning. We both knew we had been lucky. “You know” I said to him, “How many other people have gone through a thunder storm out on a river with nothing but a tarp and a bottle of whiskey? Bragging rights!”
I remember that bragging rights are useless without someone to brag too. Also, who cares? From what I can tell women seem to be attracted to money and power. I have neither. On the rare occasion that I go to a bar that plays dance music I notice the dance off mating contest. If aliens are watching us they are probably featuring the mating habits of the white middle class male on their version of the National Geographic Channel.
I can just hear the announcer , “Notice how this young bucks thrusting gyrations have attracted the attention of a table of females that are in prime breeding age. He will make eye contact with all that return his look. Notice how he eyes them up and down before turning to shake his backside at them. This truly is a perfect example of a bucks mating dance. He is sure to attract a mate and pass on his seed, thus ensuring his dancing genes are passed on”
Watch a show on the breeding habits of a gorilla, you could play that narrators comments over a video of the goings on at a dance club and get pretty much the same results. I tell my theory to Erik, he just laughs and keeps paddling. I am guessing he is pretty drunk by now.
We keep going down the Huzzah without much incident and finally hit the parts that are used for floating by the big outfitters. The river here has had a path chain sawed through the logs and the going gets easy. Then there is the Huzzah Valley Resort, a huge campground, probably 100 acres or more. People paying to camp, to float, to get away from it all while still keeping their RV plugged in. I wonder if those people knew that for the price of their weekend they could buy a canoe and go every time they wanted. Probably not. It is strange to see them in their perfect little world, big awnings set up, mosquito nets to keep out the bugs, the hum of generators.
I see lots of families. I could be one of those guys, watching my kids play, hoping to get a shot of leg off the wife when they finally take a nap. No face I see looks happy though.
Several people on the banks notice our canoe piled with gear and ask how far we are going. When I tell them that we have already done 20 some miles and will take out at Scotia today they look amazed. “Where do you sleep?” “What about the storms?” “Wild Animals?”…
I am sort of drunk and do my best to come up with a Chief Joseph type answer, “The Great Spirit will provide for all,” I say in my deepest most profound voice, that I imagine Chief Joseph must have sounded like.
The camp ground behind us we see no one else till Scotia. Nothing marks the town of Scotia now, just a low water bridge. The locals still remember that this was once a port for moving iron down river. Lost in the woods a few miles from here is an old smelter, a massive stone iron furnace. It is slowly crumbling away, visited only by history buffs and lost hunters.
On the return drive to get my truck, which I left upstream, we see the campground guard. He had let us park my truck next to his house so the local vandals wouldn’t smash a window looking for god knows what in my beater. He seemed surprised to see us.
“How was it?”
“Good,” I reply “much easier than I had expected. Once you get a few miles down there really aren’t many trees over the river”
“What about that storm?”
I give Erik a quick glance and reply “The Great Spirit will provide.” There is no way to describe what it is like so I don’t bother to try. It’s scary. You think you are going to die. You hope it is quick.
Bitter Fish Page 1