Honor Road

by Jason Ross

  He finally approached with his 30-30 rifle leveled, safety off. He found no surprises, the new-fallen snow was untrampled and the cars were frosted with several inches. Nobody had been there in days.

  Sage yanked open a car door with his left hand, covering the inside of the car with a one-handed grip on his 30-30. In the bottom of the footwell lay a small, dead dog. The cold must’ve preserved the corpse, since the smell of decay barely registered.

  The loneliness hit him so hard he almost had to sit down. The sight of the little, mangy mutt, so well preserved, sparked a ferocious hunger for companionship. He wished the dog would look up and blink back death.

  Who the hell would leave a dog locked in a car to starve?

  These days, if someone came upon a dog, even dead, they’d probably eat his rotting corpse. Sage leaned on the door frame and set the 30-30 against the side. It struck him for the first time, the sheer amount of resource contained in a modern automobile. As he looked around the passenger compartment for food, he made note of the treasure trove—plastics, vinyl, stuffing, containers, oil products, flammables, hardware and elastics. The quantity of manufactured goods made him think: how could he solve his boot issue with car parts?

  He assumed, since they’d been abandoned, that none of the cars contained enough gasoline to travel, so he wouldn’t bother trying to find keys or check the tanks. Driving down a road, in any case, would be like begging for bullets. He hadn’t seen a moving vehicle in weeks.

  It was still early in the afternoon, maybe three o’clock, and Sage had his work cut out for him. He got a fire going in the center of the circle of cars and set his boots on elmwood spikes, unlaced with the tongues open, to encourage them to dry. He dug around in the snow for stones, and put them under the burning sticks, where the coals would heat them. While the fire dried his boots and heated the stones, he went to work on the cars, cutting away raw materials with his heavy Glock knife.

  After trimming and testing the pliability of the seat leather, floor mats, and headliner, Sage settled on the headliner of an Aerostar minivan as the best material for boot gaiters. It provided the best combination of flexibility and impermeability.

  While he’d sloshed along earlier that day in his boots, it’d dawned on him that he’d seen, but never used, boot covers for hiking in the snow. In a mental “gap,” he’d even remembered the name for them: “gaiters.” They were like stretchy tubes that sealed the space between boots and pants. If he could make a pair of gaiters, it’d stop the snow from scraping into his boots.

  After almost two hours of trial-and-error around the firelight, Sage produced a pair of gaiters made of headliner and seatbelt cinches. After testing them for a couple days and making modifications, he’d finish the hems with his tiny sewing kit.

  By the time he completed his gaiters, night had fully descended. At first light, he’d leave this camp behind, so if he wanted anything more from the dead cars, he’d need to get it now. Dead cars were everywhere along the highway, but Sage forbid himself from going anywhere within 300 yards of the blacktop. It was far too dangerous—far too likely to lead to an encounter. He could out-run most full-grown men, but he harbored no illusions; they were almost all heavier and stronger. It would be years before his long, lean body could match theirs in a life-or-death struggle. Running and hiding was his survival advantage, for now.

  Sage ripped up the rear seats of the Aerostar, popped out the zig-zag seat springs, and began construction of a pair of snowshoes. The snow in the flatlands were just the first frosting of winter—six or eight inches in most places and a little deeper in the shade. The mountains that loomed ahead had been basted by snow for over a month. He expected it to be several feet deep. He’d need to float on top instead of crunching through, like he’d been doing in the irrigation ditches.

  Fear crept up his spine as he pictured the flickering light of his fire traveling across miles of snow-glassed ground. Even surrounded by cars, it might be visible from the highway. The snowshoes would have to wait. No matter how much he enjoyed the warmth, the fire wasn’t worth the risk now that full night was upon him.

  He stamped the fire out, spread the coals and bundled himself against one of the elms. He scraped out the stones from the fire, dusted off the cinders, and plopped two hot stones in each drying boot.

  Then, he watched and waited for an hour to make sure nobody approached. When he was sure he was still alone, he set up his bedroll in the Aerostar and drifted off to sleep.

  Sometime during the witching hour, he awoke to snow flakes drifting down from the heavens. To his sleep-addled mind it felt like entombment. Even in his shallow wakefulness, he heard the gentle pattering of Mother Nature piling obstacles ahead of him. The coming storms would conceal his path home in the maddening drudgery of snow and solitude.

  He thought about the little dog. His face flushed and his nose ran. A lone tear burgeoned in the corner of his eye, then lost it’s battle with gravity and chased a path down his check, off his chin, and onto the floorboards.He lay awake for a while, in the steel chill of the Aerostar, worrying the decision whether to forge on without the snowshoes or to dedicate the morning to their construction. There was no right answer, and nobody to help him decide.

  Life and death hinged on decisions such as these. For once, it made sense to worry, but his worry tendered nothing but lost sleep.

  Blue Mountains, 4300 feet elevation

  Southeastern Oregon

  As much as the road beckoned him, Sage saw it for what it was: a deathtrap. With the warm blacktop melting away the snow, the surface of the highway presented much easier walking than the forest—maybe half as difficult.

  Sage floated on top of the snow in his homemade snowshoes, but it was no easy thing to traverse uncut snow.

  Back at the circle of dead cars, he’d used the aluminum seat tubing as frames and the zig-zag seat springs of the Ford Aerostar as platforms for his homemade snowshoes. He sunk into the snow only four inches, but even that sapped his strength a lot more than walking on asphalt. He would’ve traveled twice as far on the mountain road, but then he could almost guarantee a bullet to the back of the head or a sudden ambush of bat-wielding men. Sage walked the path less travelled, always. To do anything else was a death wish for a five-foot ten-inch seventeen-year-old boy.

  The snowshoes were already proving critical. Six times, he silently circumnavigated knots of desperate people stumbling along the snow-patched highway up the Blue Mountains. Sage ghosted around the groups, unnoticed. He’d yet to see another footprint out in the snowfields that paralleled the road. He traveled alone, so he traveled carefully.

  But he ached to join one of the groups. He sometimes paused behind a snow bank or a screen of pines to listen to their chatter. They blathered, argued, jockeyed for control, complained about food or dreamed loudly about the “old days.” They were all desperate, untethered people. Sage knew if he threw in with any of them, his food would be callously devoured and he would be cast aside.

  He seriously considered it anyway. He wondered if a person could literally die of loneliness.He had no choice but to stay in the same canyon as the winding, climbing highway. Scaling up and over, into an empty canyon, would burn too many calories and run the risk of an avalanche or a fall. The road passed through the easiest crossing of the mountain range—alongside a small creek that eventually opened onto a high snowfield up above.

  Sage reached the top of the Blue Mountains in three days, never lighting a fire or even heating water. He ate freeze-dried meals cold, with only filtered water from the creek. Because he shared the canyon with other travelers, he minimized flickers of light, flashes of color and wisps of scent. He slept in his camo-pattern tent, partially collapsed to reduce its profile, and covered it with sticks and branches.

  He got better and better at shaving risk off his movement, economizing his food and perfecting the silent catechisms of putting up and taking down camp. He traveled more and more at night. He was covering ground, but
the truth became increasingly clear: he couldn’t keep this overland movement up forever.

  Moisture plagued him, a relentless nemesis. Every sleep time, no matter how he configured his tent, condensation accumulated along the tent wall and dripped onto his sleeping bag. Sage woke up every hour to dab runnels off the ceiling with his dirty clothes, but the tent was like sleeping in a light sprinkle. His bag grew more and more damp, and he got colder each night as the insulation compacted. He already slept fully-dressed. The next, and perhaps final, defense against the cold would be sleeping in his coat and boots as well. He gained altitude every day, and the nighttime temperatures hardened past freezing.

  It was with palpable relief that he finally reached the high saddle of the Blue Mountains. He crossed the open meadow in the moonlit dark. The half-moon hadn’t set until three a.m. that night, and he’d come to see that moonlight was almost as good as daylight for overland travel, and it was undeniably safer.

  Other than five nights on each side of the new moon, he enjoyed a few hours of workable moonlight. Each month, fully half of all nighttime hours were bright and navigable, particularly across snow. There wasn’t enough natural light for fine tasks, like tying snare wire, but if he shadowed the rising moon, he no longer required a flashlight. He could travel, set up camp, sort his pack and prepare meals without artificial light. Stuck within the walls of the canyon, amidst shiftless strangers, his nocturnal habits armed him with the double-edged sword of secrecy and solitude. But his emotions despised his isolation. His mind buckled and bent. He awoke once, weeping, inconsolable. Another night, he became convinced he saw his mother in a group of stragglers mumbling around a fire. Like a castaway alone on the seas, his mind became parched from lack of connection.

  On the east-facing side of the mountain range, Sage paralleled the path of the highway along a stream bed. He caught glimpses, now, of the rising sun as it freshened the day from its home below the horizon. He could see several hundred miles to the east, out across eastern Oregon and Idaho.

  Mankind had gone insane, but the Earth remained the same. Somewhere out there, past the rising sun, his family waited for him. Having crested the mountain range, Sage picked his way through pine forest, searching the moonlight for rabbit tracks and listening closely for human sound.

  He decided to push ahead without hunting or fishing until he reached the next farming valley, but searching for rabbit sign had become a ceaseless habit. His eyes did it of their own volition, only alerting him when there was a promising convergence of track, or a likely rabbit warren.

  It was a dim night, with the half-moon dipping in and out of the thin clouds, and he had two hours left until the moon set. He forced himself onward, not stopping to place snares or wet a line in the snow-banked creek. He could easily get trapped by a snowstorm at high elevation, caught in an endless white-out of blinding snow, buried beneath more powder than his snow shoes could navigate. Better to mimic the deer and elk, he reasoned, and descend without delay. So far, he’d lucked out on this climb—nothing but ice-cold sunshine. Other than a few, errant flakes, it hadn’t snowed.

  Sage heard a human voice and froze. Voices carried a long way in the canyons, and his course along the river was never more than a couple hundred yards from the highway. He padded quietly around a snow-basted hillock and crouched.

  He heard a laugh. Male. Young adult. More talking. At least three men.

  Sage waited as the voices grew in volume then faded, bit-by-bit, up-canyon. They traveled uphill, walking in the dark, heading God-knew-where. The west side of the Blue Mountains couldn’t possibly be better than the east side. Seattle and Portland seethed toxic humanity to the west. Why would anyone cross the mountains from east to west? It wasn’t the only group he’d encountered heading west, and it worried him. What could be so bad in the south-eastern corner of Oregon that people would flee toward the big cities?

  While he waited, the perspiration under his jacket chilled. The moon shadow of the lodgepole pines grew long. Soon, he’d lose light and it’d be time to dig in. It wasn’t safe to walk along the stream in pure darkness. The snow concealed small crevasses.

  Up ahead, he spied a dark, pine hollow that ran perpendicular to the main canyon—a small tributary to the main stream. He had to cross the tributary to get there, but the heavy pine overhang in the hollow would hold heat and maybe hide a tiny campfire. He’d pitch his tent under a drooping fir and protect it from the winds. More than anything, the side canyon would buy him distance from the highway—maybe three or four hundred yards.

  Sage waded through snow alongside the creek until he came abreast of the feeder canyon. The moonlight had all but disappeared behind a cloud. Waiting while the group passed had made him late to make camp.

  He worked his way up the tributary to the stream and searched for a crossing in the undulations of snow. The waterway looked about as wide as Sage was tall, with a curling cornice overhanging both sides. Even though the stream was too wide to jump in snowshoes, the cornices closed the gap. Sage backed up and launched into a flopping, snowshoe sprint.

  The moment he planted his first snowshoe to jump, the cornice collapsed, dropping a three foot section of snow into the creek. His momentum carried him forward, unable to recover with his boots bound up in the snowshoes. He went down to his knees and fell forward, slamming his forearms onto the mossy rocks on the bottom of the creek, barely holding his face from plunging into the stream.

  He struggled upright. The snowshoes were seized by the flow of the water. They threatened to drag his legs downstream. As the icy chill filled his jacket and pants, Sage heaved air. His diaphragm spasmed from the intense cold. He grabbed a pine root sticking from the bank and hauled himself over the four foot wall of snow on the opposite side, hand-over-hand. He gained the far bank and flipped over on his backpack.

  The chill of the water and sub-zero mountain air went immediately to work killing him. As much as he wanted to lay there and catch his breath, there was no warmth whatsoever to be had in the snow, yet he so wanted to stay still, curled in a ball. Every movement exposed his flesh to the frigid cold of his soaked clothing. Staying perfectly still minimized the discomfort, but the specter of death nudged him with the back of its scythe, urging him to move; to push through the galactic pain of the ice that frosted his skin. Move or die, Father Death seemed to say.

  Sage worked his snowshoes underneath him and plunged his wet gloves into the snow. He hunted for anything solid to help him stand, but the snow gave way with every thrust. Nothing held his weight enough to push against. After compressing the snow with a dozen vain attempts, he created his own snowpack and finally floundered to his knees, then to his feet.

  Without a fire, death from hypothermia would come in a few hours at most. Other than his head and his left arm, ice water covered him, gobbling up his body heat. The moon was only an hour from setting. Soon, it would be completely dark.

  The feeder canyon towered over him, too far to reach deep cover before hypothermia sapped his will to live. He could feel ennui coming over him, like a slothful demon occupying his mind, slipping in behind the freeze.

  Sage’s teeth clacked together in the worst shiver he’d ever experienced. He stumbled and shivered for a hundred yards, heading toward a pine with a skirt of dead branches at its base—fuel for a fire. He reached it, then set to work bending and popping the dead branches from the tree, clearing a small area under the pine canopy. Starting a forest fire was the least of his worries. In his frozen state, lighting the whole damn mountain range on fire didn’t sound like an entirely bad idea.

  He was making a lot of noise, snapping branches off the pine. Several of them cracked like rifle shots, but he had no choice. Death by cold was imminent. All other contenders would have to wait their turn.

  In five minutes, he had enough pine boughs. He’d read the Jack London story about the man who’d died in the same scenario; alone, wet, and huddled beneath a pine. He remembered the guy running out of matches while he
willed his frozen hands to function.

  Sage spoke out loud just to bolster his grit, “Fuck matches. I’m using the JetBoil.”

  He piled a teepee of pitchy pine twigs then dug into his frozen, stiff backpack. He removed the camp stove and dumped the pieces onto the packed snow around his knees. His hands struggled with the threads on the burner head to get them to line up with the propane tank. He finally got a smooth twist, ran the head home, cranked the valve, and clicked madly at the piezoelectric igniter until a flame burst to life. The warmth hit his hands like acid, but he sighed with relief. Sweet warmth—but it would be short-lived. The propane bottle felt light.

  He pointed the stove at the teepee of twigs, and the fire from the JetBoil hissed long and strong, a flame thrower dousing the twigs in curling, greedy tongues of flame. He kept it on the twigs until they caught solidly. He tossed the loose parts of the stove back in his pack without repacking the case, then alternated warming his hands and adding pine boughs until steam spun night-ward from his frozen sleeves and pant legs.

  With death no longer imminent, another brand of chill ran down his spine. It’d been a half-hour since he’d fallen into the stream and since he’d considered any risk other than hypothermia. He sat next to a blazing fire, the smell of smoke traveling up the mountain on the prevailing breeze, announcing his presence to any threats nearby.

  He hadn’t so much as looked up from the fire in thirty minutes—a soft target if ever there was one. He snatched up his 30-30 rifle from the pack and worked the lever to make sure it hadn’t frozen shut. He ran it six times, ejected the rounds onto the snow, wiped each round with a dry spot on his fleece and reloaded the rifle. His hands were growing cold again. He’d shucked his gloves off to dry them by the fire.