Jackson walked down the dirt path 100 feet behind Reid.  The canteen swung from his pack and mesmerized Jackson.  Each step flung it the other direction, twirling it around as if winding up a toy car.  When the rip cord could not withstand any more tension, the canteen would spiral violently in the other direction.  It was hot and Jackson could see the moisture from Reid’s legs evaporate.  The heat distorted his vision; it made things look wavy, like gasoline spilled from a boat engine into a calm lake.

Jackson’s lacerated feet stung each time he planted them into the loose dirt.  His weight tightly packed dust into each chasm in his skin.  The gritty sand rubbed against the burned flesh on top of his feet.  The abrasive particles burst tiny blisters and mixed with puss inside each wound.

Jackson walked behind Reid as they backtrack eight miles to Pretoria to buy new gear.  Three weeks of hiking in the African sun had dried out Jackson’s skin.  It felt brittle and thin, as if the slightest blow to his flesh would cause it to crumble and flake.  Jackson and Reid barely spoke the last week.  The pain of flexing their cracked lips was too much to endure unless absolutely necessary.

It made Jackson feel sick to think about his gear getting stolen in Wonderboom.  It was supposed to be a holy place, he thought.  He sat alone in front of the famous 1,000 year old fig tree for an entire evening the first night they arrived.  He examined the layers of the tree, how the branches surrounded the fragile trunk and formed a protective barrier against whoever tried to disturb its century long slumber.  He felt safe in front of that tree, like his parents and sister and Reid and other branches in his life had taken root around him for protection.

The old man’s shoe laces lay in a heap on the ground, he held out a pair of Nike running shoes.  “No.  Boots,” Jackson held his hands on either side of the cross-trainers.  He was met with a blank stare.  His shoulders sunk and he stared back into the old mans face.  It was textured and brown like the earth.  Jackson envied this man’s connection with Africa.  He had been embraced by her, transformed and consumed by her, whereas Jackson had just been abused and beaten.  He wondered how many nights the old man had spent beside the Wonderboom.

The train was old and rickety, clearly composed of decommissioned cars from wealthier railroads.  Jackson and Reid got in the back, a barn-red cabin decorated with steel rivets.  The seats were small and wooden and the windows had been welded shut.  Smoking was allowed.  Jackson went out the back, to the deck on the back of the car.  There was a green wooden bench on one side of the door; Jackson sat on the floor with his feet dangling past the railing.  The sun set behind the train casting orange shadows from the Baobab trees.

The train arrived in Sun City in the early morning and Reid and Jackson bought a map from the station.  Jackson pulled up his wool, thermal socks and put on his cross-trainers as the looked for nearby villages and parks.  There was a small village near a stream about ten miles east from the station.  They could make it to the water before noon and follow the river north near the village.

Reid walked in the stream while Jackson stayed beside him on the shore, wet shoes would rub against his sores.  They walked to a stone mantel and climbed it to examine their terrain.  Jackson could see the village about a mile up stream; tiny straw points shot up from the dust.  The sat under the mantle’s overhang in the shade and napped.

Jackson awoke to three boys circling him and Reid.  He jumped and assumed an aggressive stance, the boys backed away and laughed.  Jackson smiled at them and kicked Reid’s foot to wake him.  He raised his hands, showing his palms to the boys, and walked toward them.  The grabbed at his linen shirt and one ripped off the t-shirt tied around Jackson’s forehead.  Another boy came, a teenager, and said something to the three younger boys.  They started walking back toward the village.  The youngest grabbed Jackson’s shirt and pulled him along.

Reid played soccer with the older kids in the village and Jackson played with the chickens with some of the younger ones.  He knelt on one knee as the kids chased the chickens around him.  Some of the boys were playing with Jackson’s pack, looking through his stuff.  He took out his notebook and sketched the toddlers sitting in the group of chickens and gave it to one of the boys.

One of the boys pulled out a bag of trail mix and gave it to Jackson.  He opened the bag and picked out five M&M’s and gave one to each kid.  He showed them how to eat it without biting.  The kids’ eyes grew wide.  They grabbed at the bag and held out their hands for more.  Jackson picked five more.  They focused on that M&M like Jackson had never seen.  As he looked at the kids’ crooked smiles, unable to widen because of the feverous sucking on this chocolate candy, he realized that they had never eaten chocolate before.

He put the bag of trail mix back in his pack.  His face no longer looked happy when the kids grabbed his shirt.  He knelt on the ground and stared at a piece of sugar cane lying in the dirt.

Ten plastic cups stood in front of him with their jaws unhinged – gaping holes of disbelief that seemed to slam shut, exposing only hard, white teeth, whenever a streak of orange threatened to breach an aperture.  Tight, elastic-lined cotton sleeves choked A’s forearms and gathered in a wrinkled heap around his elbow.  Every breath of the tantalized onlookers behind him, like a mist or vapor, seemed to gather on his skin.  The back of his neck glistened and the bystanders’ zeal reflected the bare, 50 watt bulb hanging from the exposed piping.  A bead of sweat ran down A’s forehead and was trapped by his eyebrow.

Fuck you guys.  A held a Mr. Rogers t-shirt over his cock and looked for Lindsey.  You guys can’t fuck’n make me run and then block the door.  Camera flashes shown past A’s middle finger.  He recognized the dimple Lindsey gets when she laughs from behind a Polaroid camera and his stomach tightened.

“Ith’s cold outside, fuck.”
Jeering tongues tripped on alliteration and stumbled off line like a drunk walking heal to toe.  “Pasty!  Prasty!”  They crashed into puddles and sprayed A’s face, each drop sizzled on his red skin and evaporated.  He pushed his sleeve up above his elbow and looked across the composite board.  Lindsey raised her right eyebrow, “let’s see that ass.”  A grabbed the orange ball and a drop of cold water ran down his thumb and chilled his wrist.

A’s bare foot sank into a mud-hole behind the grill and his entire body buckled.  Fuck.  His thumb bent backwards when he tried to break his fall.  He lay there for a second, ashamed, as everyone laughed and hung out the windows.  He choked on his own tongue as he tried to stop the tears from swirling around in the mud – his ass stuck up in the air.

A spun the ball between his thumb and middle finger until the black star was centered, like a reticle, in the middle of the first rim.  His right foot was forward and his hips rested against the table at a 45 degree angle.  He closed his left eye, aligning the right with his extended forearm.  A’s arm was still, aimed at the ten-part, plastic pyramid.  Involuntary nerve discharges contracted A’s arrectores pilorum.  He followed a line or hairs from his elbow to the cup.

A stood at the back door of the apartment holding his thumb.  He could feel each heartbeat pulse through the swollen muscle. Are you guys serious?  He didn’t bother covering up, you could barely discern any evidence of masculinity through the mud.  Open the door, asshole.  He hoped Lindsey wasn’t by the door when they let him in.  He didn’t want to see her again.

“Don’t be a pussy.”
The perspiration on A’s fingertips kept the ball from sliding out of his delicate grip.  He bent his arm and looked past his elbow into the white cavity of the crowning cup.
“Skunk run!”
A’s chest collapsed, expelling all the oxygen from his body and pulling his torso over his hips.  His arm hung in the air like a swan.

And so, for me, the only fiction that still means something today is the kind of fiction that tries to explore the possibilities of fiction beyond its own limitations; the kind of fiction that challenges the tradition that governs it; the kind of fiction that constantly renews our faith in man’s intelligence and imagination rather than man’s distorted view of reality; the kind of fiction that reveals man’s playful irrationality rather than his righteous rationality.  – Raymond Federman

Et ainsi, pour moi, la seule fiction ce qui signifie toujours quelque chose est aujourd’hui la sorte de fiction qui essaie d’explorer les possibilités de fiction au-delà de ses propres restrictions; la sorte de fiction qui défie la tradition qui le gouverne; la sorte de fiction qui renouvelle constamment notre foi en intelligence d’homme et imagination plutôt que la vue dénaturée d’homme de réalité; la sorte de fiction qui révèle l’irrationalité enjouée d’homme plutôt que sa rationalité vertueuse.  – French Translation

And so, for me, the only invention what always means something is the kind of invention today which tries to explore the possibilities of invention beyond its own restrictions; the kind of invention which outbraves the tradition which governs it; the kind of invention which always renews our creed in man’s intelligence and imagination rather than man’s denaturated view of reality; the kind of invention which reveals man’s jolly irrationality rather than its virtuous rationality. – Retranslated to English

Beams of light weave around corners and expose bundled shadows, like bears that have put on weight to hibernate for the winter.  They clunk around shrubs and trees.  Judgment sneaks past fat, wind-burned mounds of flesh.  I want to shove my hands into your winter coat.  I think I’m dying.  APPARENTLY, RIGAMORTOUS STARTS IN YOUR FINGERS WHILE THE REST OF YOUR BODY CONVULSES.  I thimk I sce mmy sovl cscapimg fromm mmy mmovth.  Left-handed criticisms are poorly constructed.  FACED WITH DEATH I REALIZE HOW PITIFULL I AM.  M&M’S, NO MATTER HOW CHARITABLE, WILL NOT MELT IN MY MOUTH.  THEY CLANG AGAINST BRITTLE, LIFELESS TEETH AND CHIPS OF CANDY-COATING AND ENAMAL TICKLE THE BACK THE MY THROAT.  THE INABILITY TO APPRECIATE CANDY IS ENOUGH TO PRONOUNCE YOU LEGALLY DEAD IN MOST STATES.  Conventional CPR tantalizes the mind but tortures the body.  Your precious air just crystallizes and explodes against your palms.

Rescue is just as uncomfortable.  I’ve bonded with the wilderness.  The last drops of water fall from the faucet and in plunge into the lake.  They send ripples across the serene surface, destroying the now captive creature.  The water, too, is captive, housed by porcelain, guided by steel.  The flurries were so beautiful, guided only by the wind.  The sting is the same.  The warm water cracks my skin as if I were an ice cube dropped into a glass of scotch.  Notice the signature rust and pine colors of the Blue Label between my toes.  I feel drunk.  Tiny pricks sting my entire body like an aquatic hail storm.  My hands and fingers, which were statuesque, suddenly float and move without my consent.  My body is subject to whatever form of water surrounds me.  I have no control.

It’s always the same in these regurgitation camps.  Other-worldly authors in need of rehabilitation; they’re called “users” and “thieves.”  The humanoid beings undergo endless instructional punishment of different mind-games.  The guards make ridiculous demands: “I want to never rehear the same story!”  They don’t realize the personal discrepancies they chant.  Originality! Innovation! and Creativity! are their mottos.  “Make it new,” one shouts. They take aim with multisyllabic criticisms and obscure citations, a regurgitation of Pollock’s nonexistent “red period” on each page; xerographers, all of them.  The torturous lack of innovation with which these fiction guards guard fiction is confusing.  The other-worldly authors are merely repelled by the cookie cutter criticism.  The guards think the humanoids are being cured.  Whose mind-games truly are instructional punishment?  The guards, drunk from the bootleg they prohibit, have filled nature with citations and references, creating Wastelands out of gardens.  But, the humanoids have been outside the cave before and see through the different mind-games with bloody eyes.

The dust jellyfished  in the sky, gaining speed with every revolution.  Each particle is tiny, but traveling with such velocity that when they collide with neighboring, dormant particles they force action.  The swirl just watches.  Safe under the I-beams and rivets of the marshmallow above him, stretched out like a steel umbrella, the swirl sits in the curve of the wooden handle.  His tentacles dangle below the lacquered, cherry scoop and sway slightly.  Would swirls sway and wiggle without the tumultuous dust canopies above them?  He rips open a bag of jumbo-smoore marshmallows and starts mashing them together.  The soft, powdery coating disappears as the sugars begin to bond with one another.  SMASH!  Another mallow collides with the pile.  White strands of sugar fall from the mass of goo and sway below the cherry scoop in the breeze from the dust jellyfish.  The swirl is completely indistinguishable from the mass of goo he’s created.

(|= =|)  The two rest against the pole of the umbrella, a plagiarism shooting upward, toward the canopy of steel.  In the eye of the particle hurricane, another, smaller dust swirl spins the opposite direction.  Its almost an exact replica of the bigger, more intimidating hurricane except for direction and magnitude.  A tiny spire, too small to identify the origin.  The swirl and mallowfish wondered if another, even smaller jellyfish might be in the middle of this copy.  And another inside of that copy.

I used to imagine, as a little boy, that I worked on some sort of fishing boat on the deep ocean.  I was a courageous deck-hand, unafraid of the tumultuous seas.  I would lean out over the deck and wrestle to pull big game-fish in as huge waves crashed into the side of the boat.  I didn’t fear the waters in my imagination.  But each heroic outing into the sea was interrupted by a horrible creature almost twenty-five times larger than anything seen on land.

I’ve had this obsession with Blue Whales since I was a small boy.  I can remember giving my undivided attention to my biology teacher in middle school when she was describing the marine giant.  I couldn’t accept that such a creature actually existed, however.  It seemed to fantastic, even as a child.  I became convinced, in fact, that it wasn’t physically possible for something that huge to exist and resigned to encountering this swimming giant in my imagination.

As I grew up, so did the monsters that infatuated me.  All things to horrible or disgusting or mean to actually exist tantalized my senses in fiction.  I watched movies about alien invasions, read books about the hideous consequences when trying to create a beautiful specimen, watched as animals were mutated into gigantic, super versions of their original selves, but always with divided attention.

I compared each creature somebody invented with the Blue Whale I encountered on the game-fishing boat.  I would be wrestling with a marlin or sailfish, trying to avoid a deadly strike from the predators as I simultaneously attempted to pull them into the boat.  And just as I secured the catch, the boat was jarred from below, sending me sprawling across the slippery deck.  The stealth with which the giant approached always surprised me; it seems counterintuitive that you should not be able to see the equivalent of a 747 jet sneaking up on you.  The Whale would passively, as if it didn’t know the extent of its own strength, toss the boat from wave to wave.  And just as it seemed as if the monster had submerged again, it would spout water fifty feet into the air, raining heavy on the tired deck-hands.

The shadow of the incredible 110 foot whale can always be seen behind the other monsters, a reminder of their relatively puny stature.

I have encountered, as I get older, people who actually try to defend the existence of the Blue Whale.  Of course, none of these people have ever seen a Blue Whale.  They base their argument on hearsay and expect me to accept the assumptions of other people as fact.  They claim that marine biologists have an expertise which I lack and that I should assume them to be correct.  Those same experts, I remind them, once assumed that world which the Blue Whale supposedly rules was the center of the universe and that the waters it patrols ended and dropped into nothingness.  Existence based on insistence cannot be legitimate.

Even when asked to describe a few practical things about the Whale, excluding facts about its impressive size, even most experts fail.  Nothing is known about the Blue Whale’s mating habits or locations, almost nothing is known about its feeding habits and it has proven to be surprisingly hard to locate an animal that is supposedly twice the size of the largest dinosaur.

I was watching the Discovery Channel’s new mini-series called “Planet Earth” with a friend the other day.  It was the episode about the deep ocean, of which the Blue Whale is purportedly included.  Unsatisfactorily, however, the show included only a short clip of two Blue Whales swimming, citing the Whale’s small population and surprising elusiveness.  My friend, confused by the lack of information on the world’s largest animal, summed up my skepticism when he asked: “So, this whale is twice the size of the largest dinosaur, right?  And to reproduce there has to be two of them, right?  You’re telling me they can’t find, what, four dinosaurs having sex?”  I couldn’t get that question out of my head.  It was absurd, sure, but it was pointedly accurate.  Consider that the same documentary was able to capture a Vampire Squid, the last remaining member of its order, and a creature that lives in water 10,000 feet below the surface but not the largest creature to ever exist on Earth.

The Blue Whale doesn’t have any particularly astonishing powers.  Most of its prowess is earned by its unbelievable size.  At 110 feet in length and a rumored weight of 200 tons, the Blue Whale is much more than impressive in its size.  It is said, in fact, that it is the largest creature to have ever inhabited the Earth.  Even the Seismosaurus, the “Earth-shaking lizard”, is thought to have weighed no more than 30 tons.

Though I admittedly get caught up in the remarkable assumptions about the Blue Whale, like rumors that an adult human could pass through the aorta of an adult Whale, an artery which is no more than 4mm in humans, I maintain a certain sensibility.  It is expected that only the most outlandish facts survive in a creature mythology.  Centaurs are remembered for their rare form, Leprechauns for revealing treasure, and Blue Whales for their mammoth size.  Even what is known about Blue Whale eating habits is used to further bolster the giant’s size: it’s said that Blue Whales eat more than 4 million krill each day, making it the world’s most accomplished murderer.

There is simply not enough evidence to entertain the idea of a creature like that existing.  There are a very limited number of Blue Whale sightings, similar or fewer than the number of alien or Nessie sightings.  The inability to find Blue Whales in the wild has limited the number of photographic opportunities.  But the legends of these cryptids survive through media.  If it was not for the media attention surrounding these cryptids, creatures presumed extinct or hypothetical species of creature known from anecdotal evidence and/or other evidence insufficient to prove their existence with scientific certainty, they would not exist.  Just by way of discussion, Blue Whales continue to exist.  Even if they do not, in fact, exist in the waters of our planet, they now exist in the sea that is our mind and are, for all intensive purposes, real.

I prefer the exaggerated stories about the behemoth, anyway.  No other creature can hold fifty adults on its garaged-sized tongue.  No other creature has a heart large enough to fill a garage: the Blue Whale’s is 1,000 pounds, the size of a sports car.  The Balaenoptera musculus, named by Linnaeus, can be interpreted from Latin as either “muscular” or, ironically, as “little mouse”.

I sat on a table, just outside the cafeteria, and watched through the window as frisbees and footballs soared across the quad.  It was the first warm day after four long winter months and most of the student body was outside, rediscovering the discretionary nature of shoes.

I was inside, though, surrounded by pale, shaky students who were gathered around a table of cookies and soda.  Another one of these zombies would come out of the cafeteria every five minutes or so and join the others by the sugar.  Few of them spoke and most sat motionless between bites or sips.  “Barrett?” whimpered a woman, as if unsure of my presence and preferred pronunciation, who stuck no more than her head out of the cafeteria door.  As I rose from my seat the woman motioned for me to enter cafeteria and then disappeared around the corner.

The cafeteria, once a place of nourishment, had been turned into a sterile, medical-instrumentation warehouse.  I was seated facing the needles and IV bags and pumps and across from a very tired looking woman.  The table was cold and white and barren except for a stack of papers, of which I received and was asked to carefully read one.  I skimmed the sheet and looked up to the woman to signify that I was done.  The woman then proceeded to question me; “I will now proceed to question you.”
“Have you ever lived in a foreign country,” she asked.
“Yes.”
She looked startled, as if I had answered a very simple question incorrectly.  “Really, where,” she asked.
“London.  For four months earlier this year.”
“Oh, well, that doesn’t count.  You’re fine.”  She regained her composure and continued the survey, the rest of which I seemingly answered according to her expectations.
“Have you gotten a tattoo recently?”
“No.”
“Have you traveled to Africa in the last year?”  I began to imagine myself trapped under a flipped car with my arm pinched under the door.  The dent-resistant paneling had punctured a vein in my upper arm and I was bleeding profusely.  Though miraculously rescued from the vehicle just before leaking gas had ignited and MEDEVACed to the nearest hospital, I died because somebody with the blood I needed to survive was daydreaming as a middle-aged woman asked him what he was allergic to.
“Are you on any prescription medication?”
“No.”

I was moved again, to the back this time, amongst the equipment.  As I sat in the chair my elbow slipped off the arm rest and banged a metal tray.  Somehow the twang of stainless steel enhanced the smell anti-biotic wipes.  Another woman came and introduced herself as my phlebotomist.  She immediately tied off my arm and began prepping the needle.  “It shouldn’t hurt,” she said, pointing the needle at me as she came nearer.  I had done this before and knew it wouldn’t, but I always thought that was a strange assertion coming from somebody holding a very long, sharp, metal object which they intended to insert into somebody else’s flesh.  I wondered why, if it was natural to donate, was there a need for the nurse to make a remark intended to calm to patient down.
The phlebotomist held my left forearm.  Her rubber gloves were cold against my skin; she turned my arm over and the rubber pulled against the hair on my forearm.  As she inserted the needle into my arm I felt a burn.  It was a cold burn, though, like the kind you feel when you build a snowman without gloves.  The burn then turned into a deep, achier pain.  It was as if she was pressing on a deep muscular bruise.  She had missed.

“Uh,” she grumbled, “hold on.”  She wiped away the blood on what was already a raised puncture wound and put a bandage on it.  My bleeding was getting in the way.  The second attempt bared a similar result, but the pain of driving a steel needle into my muscle seemed to build exponentially.  I flexed in shock and tightened my grip around the foreign object jutting from my arm.  The needle twisted in her hand.  “Wow,” she said as she pulled the metal out of my arm, “you have deep veins.  They’re hard to find.”
“Sorry,” I apologized almost automatically.  I was surprised at how willingly I conceded fault.
“Let’s try the other arm,” she insisted.  The third attempt, after creating two, insufficiently bleeding holes, was a success.  As soon as the blood flow was consistent the nurse left.

I was left to watch as my own blood was pouring out of my arm.  I imagined myself in a different circumstance, where my arm had been similarly punctured, but where the blood was free to spill on the ground next to me.  Quite a large puddle I’d imagine.  An injury which, no doubt, would be treated very carefully if sustained accidentally.  Volunteering such a hemorrhage seemed like a horrible idea.  I imagined myself as a surgeon, working against time to repair that very injury.  I would inevitable have to locate the puncture and stitch it closed.  That would prevent the situation from getting an worse.  But to rehabilitate, the patient would probably need to recover a portion of the blood he had lost.  His life would be dependent on whether people were willing to risk a potentially dangerous hemorrhage under controlled conditions to enable to recovery from a similar injury incurred accidentally.

The bag into which I was bleeding was now half full.  The lower half of my right arm felt as though it was asleep.  Each finger had become harder and harder to move individually and I felt a slight dizzying sensation when I moved my head from side to side.  There was a lag in my vision, as I moved my eyes one direction the scene would follow behind, as if pulled by a whip.  I was cold; my body was not at full strength.  As the bag filled with my blood I began thinking about the imposed limits on donations; one could only donate so much at a time and so frequently.  The woman stopped by to see how everything was going.  She seemed to be happy with the amount and speed of the blood being spilled from my arm.

The bag was full.  The woman carefully removed the needle from my arm, on the first attempt, and instructed me to sit for a while and eat some sugar.  I walked slowly out of the cafeteria and joined the silent others around the cookie table.  I found two chocolate chip cookies, an orange soda and a seat by the window.  I sat, cold and motionless, watching the other kids, who did not give up what was theirs, run around in the warm sun.  My body ached, trying to recover from the recent trauma, each time I lifted the soda to my mouth.  I could feel my body trying to reproduce what it had just lost; my heart beat heavier than normal.  With each pulse I could feel blood being delivered to my extremities, like a wave starting in my chest and crashing against the shores of my fingers and toes.  As I sat amongst my pale, motionless, zombie-like brethren and watched our active counterparts I wondered if I had done the right thing.  It was clearly unnatural, as my body was reminding me, to give up what it needs to function efficiently.  Though I have two eyes, it would be unnatural to get rid of one just because I could function without it.  Charity, however, and the chance to assist in someone’s survival, seemed equally natural.  I finished my last cookie wondering if I could donate a kidney.

The rain pounded on the windows and filled the whole house with the sound of chaos.  Thunder rumbled outside, shaking even the foundation of the house, testing how stable it was.  Each bellow made me increasing unconvinced.  The wind penetrated the smallest holes in the house and whistled while outside it worked on the wooden deck, pushing the weakest boards and causing them to creak, which, when muffled by the wind, sounded like horrible cries from desperate victims of the storm.  Ball lightning ignited the sky every fifteen seconds, just for a moment, to make visible the carnage the storm was already responsible for.  I moved all the furniture in my basement against the walls and set up a tent.  I crawled inside and got in a sleeping bag and listened to the cruel weather beat against my house.  It felt like I was outside camping.

Then the basement door flew open, letting in the rain and wind that had been relentlessly trying to break down the walls of house.  The carpet around the open door was instantly soaked and debris flew in threw the opening.  I ran from my tent to close and lock the door, my shirt drenched.  Moments later a door slammed open in the kitchen upstairs.  I ran around the house locking all the doors, finally separating myself from Nature.

The power had gone out and I was soaking wet, but I had managed to safely escape the severe, indifferent storm.  I turned the radio on to see how much longer the fight might last; a thirty mile string of storm clouds was headed in this direction, with tornado sightings nearby.  It was frightening to think of how intense the weather outside was, but, separated from it in my house, I tried to convince myself I was safe.

I felt a subliminal fear; the feeling of being completely helpless, at the mercy of an indifferent force, is jarring.  My mind is turbulent inside the fragile tent.  Post-tornado coverage and news-stories about the devastating consequences of severe weather play in my mind.  I can picture the unmistakable carnage left behind by a twister; house-like structures wobble behind a graveyard of dismembered support beams buried under shingles and side-paneling.  I began to wonder how heavy debris must be and if I would be able to crawl out from underneath it.

Nothing compares to the power or fury of a severe storm.  When Thoreau climbed Ktaadn, he was making a conscious effort to test the limits of his survival skills and the hospitality of nature.  I was just trying to go to sleep.  Storms are reminders that all of Earth, even the inhabited areas, are part of nature – not just the extreme locations – and that nature is an indifferent, mighty force to which we can typically do nothing but bow.

My house was constructed in a relatively weather friendly area, certainly not atop a mountain or at any location that would usually inspire awe.  And, it was constructed in such a manner as to withstand natural punishment.  Nevertheless, as the storm continued and intensified I began feeling less safe.  The sublime was manifesting itself over my house, in rural Minnesota.

There was nowhere to run to.  No place is safe is from nature; it is impossible to escape.  We are forced to brave the storm just as any animal in nature has to.  We try to separate ourselves from those forces which we can’t control.  We build houses and surround them with manicured lawns.  We put screens on our windows to keep nature outside and preserve civilization inside.  But it is impossible to construct civilization apart from nature.  It must always, under any circumstance, exist as a part of, or with concession to, nature.

A huge crack of thunder, like the sky was being torn apart, stopped the news reels in my head.  I heard the sound of shattering glass.  I got out of my tent again and ran upstairs to find that the umbrella on our deck had been blown through the glass doors in the living room.  I suddenly realized that we were not safe in the house.  We hadn’t escaped Nature by moving into a house, we had merely built a house in the middle of nature.

I sat at the base of an Elm tree who’s outstretched arms protected me from the rain like a father who wraps his coat around his shivering son.  From my vantage I could see only the wide stances taken by the other giants to brace against the gusting wind.  An immovable forest – magnificent, huge trees who, from their vantage, see all that lives around them.  The rustling of the oval leaves above me became more familiar and, when distinguished from the pounding of the rain on the ground around me, comprehensible.  The giant Elm whispered the secrets of the forest.  It spoke of all who inhabited the forest, past, present and those yet to come, as brothers.  And when asked how he knew them all he explained that he shared their Mother.

The final leaf from one of the Elm’s older brothers, overcome with the weight of the rain, broke free from the otherwise barren skeleton and floated to the ground.  Its lamina was no longer green and thick, like those leaves above my head.  It had already started to rot and was brown near the base and more rust-like near the top.  Its body had been ravaged by time and was almost indistinguishable from the healthy, acuminate leaves acting as my umbrella.

And the Elm, who had stood so dauntlessly against the wind, suddenly creaked and twisted.  He spoke once more, but not, this time, to me.  His tone was solemn, eulogistic.  “The birds and trees are just components of the only, one individuality – Nature.”

And, in the distance, through the rain, I began to hear other voices; quiet at first, but growing louder with each second.  As they became more audible other noises, more machine like, musical, could also be heard.

And, soon, as the forest faded away and the rain stopped, and as Axel Rose welcomed me into the jungle of cultural awareness, my individual pains were lost.  My ailments were only relevant in that they were shared.

And, it was in this confusion, one born of being half awake and half asleep – and unaware to which half reason belonged – that my most frequent and interesting thought occurred: what is my purpose?

I lay in bed pondering, for nine minutes between snooze cycles, the decision to wake or sleep.