Election Day

My nostrils register the stranger before my eyeballs get a chance. The morning breeze, warm for early November, wafts a musky scent, along with a faint hint of woodsmoke, across the mountaintop. My fingers head straight for the canister of bear spray attached to my belt as I scan the clearing. About twenty yards away I spy the origin of the odor; a man, perched like a bird, on a decrepit old log. He stares off over the eastern rim, the sky awash in swirls of pinks and reds, as the sun gets ready to peek out over the horizon.

I take stock of his clothes and gear. His pack sits next to him, covered with the grime and dust that one can only get after serious time on the trail. Matted hair sprouts out from under his knit hat. Though filthy, it all appears to be top of the line, expensive stuff. I have no idea if he knows that I am there. I try to figure out whether or not to beat feet back down the trail when he jumps up, arms outstretched, like some sort of crusty-chic Christ, his crucified silhouette a sharp contrast against the sanguine sky.

“How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains,” his voice booms and cascades down the valley in front of him.

I turn to run. The snap of a twig under my foot sends him spinning around.

“Oh, shit.” He tumbles backwards off the log, his face turning a shade of pink not altogether dissimilar from the early morning sky.

“Are you okay?” I ask, my hand still on my bear spray.

He responds with a cackle as he claws his way back onto his perch.

“I think so,” he says. “Nothing busted but my pride.”

As I approach I get a better look at him. White male, probably early forties. His eyes dance behind Burberry frames and his beard, brown shot through with flecks of gray, frames a beatific smile. There is something oddly familiar about him.

“How about you?” he asks. “Sorry for my little outburst there. Sometimes I just can’t help myself.”

“I’m fine.” I decide that I like this stranger. “What was that? Thoreau?”

“Not a bad guess, but no. John Muir. The grand old man of these hills. And boy did he get it right. Not a better sunrise in the world that the one up here. It hits me everyday.”

I glance again at his gear. It has seen a lot of miles.

“You doing a thru-hike?” I ask.

“Nope. Just kind of wandering.” He bends over and reaches out, his fingers gingerly caressing a delicate orange flower that I hadn’t noticed until now. He pulls it close to his face and buries his nose in it. There is something about his innocence that is staggering. “You?”

“Just looking for a little peace and quiet.”

He inhales deeply from the flower again.

“And you had the misfortune to run into a crazy like myself.”

“You’re a whole lot less crazy than what’s going on back down there today.” I jerk my thumb towards the metropolis I fled well before dawn. “It’s election day. Time for the people to roll their bones and cast their stones and decide the fate of the free world.”

The stranger stands up, his face switching from serene to sullen.

“Oh wow. I guess I lost track of time.”

He looks at me and it suddenly hits me who he is. The face staring at me, sans beard, had been plastered all over every screen I’d looked at for the past month. A high ranking official in the Democratic Party, his disappearance had fueled wild conspiracies from both sides of the campaign. Especially when his car was found, ransacked and vandalized on a lonely stretch of Highway 30 up near Big Bear.

Before I can say anything, he speaks.

“My first job after college was in car sales. And man, I was good at it. It got to the point that when a real pile of shit car would come onto the lot, everybody bet on how long it would take me to unload it onto some hapless rube. And then one night, I’m driving home, I see this young girl on the side of the road. I recognize the car as one I’d sold. And I remember her dad, how he’d scraped together everything he had, all to buy her a ‘dependable’ car so she could get back and forth to college. I remembered the look of pride in his eyes, and the look of love in hers. And I remember the laughter in the sales office after they left.”

He reached out for the orange flower again, his fingers tracing the petals.

“Seeing her stranded, I got this pain in my gut. Worst feeling I’ve ever had in my life. So I pulled over, wrote her a check for two thousand dollars and never went back to the car lot. And the pain eased up. I decided to dedicate my life to public service, to help people instead of fleecing them.”

He takes a deep breath and continues.

“And so it went for a number of years. Just like at the car lot, I found my niche, and I leapt up the rungs of the ladder, all the way to inner workings of the party. I felt like I was making a difference. But then one day, a couple of months ago, I opened my eyes and the message seemed to have changed. Somewhere along the way we switched from being a beacon of hope to a machine that churned out nothing but fear. And my job went from telling the world about the good we were trying to do, to feeding into some sort of collective anxiety. And all of a sudden, the pain returned and I felt like I was selling used cars again.”

“So what are you going to do now?” I ask.

“I guess that depends on you,” he said. “Are you going to go running off and tell people you saw me?”

I laugh.

“There’s a reason I hike alone,” I say. “I’m a man who values privacy.”

He smiles and picks up his dusty rucksack.

“Well, if that’s the case, I will once again quote the estimable Mr. Muir, 'The mountains are calling and I must go.'”

Written by: Ben Cook
Photograph by: Fabrice Poussin

The Dénouement

The rising sun, a red ball set in a hard grey sky, painted the tips of the ocean waves all the way to the water’s edge. Everything it touched looked bright and hot. Even the crystalline sand shimmered and glowed like a bed of smoldering coals.

A wind from the east blew up from the beach and carried the grit and sea-smell inland. It ruffled and filled the voile curtains at the edges of my French doors and bent inward the saw grass that grew thick at the foot of my terrace. A breeze on a beach was always welcome, but one from the east, with the red light of dawn burning on the horizon, carried a portent. 

 
I leaned against the terrace railing and watched thunderheads form at the edge of the sea just above the horizon, billowing high into the sky, majestic and foreboding. I was sipping my coffee and studying the gathering storm when I heard my front door close. I turned my head only halfway to listen. It might be the wind, I thought, but then I heard soft footsteps approaching. I’d been expecting the visit. He’d phoned and said he had news, the dénouement, he called it. He came up beside me and stood there in the full force of the wind staring out across the ocean vista and expansive sky. I didn’t turn toward him. It wasn’t necessary. The familiarity of his presence did not require it. Don and I’d been close friends for almost twenty-five years.

He was a man of rhythm and tempo like the waves on the shoreline. He’d been a music major in college, and though he’d left that life behind long ago, his intuitive sense of timing remained. He waited for his cue, counting the pulse of the waves like the measures in a symphonic prelude. I waited for his news, and when he found the rhythm for his words, it wasn’t a wind from the east that spoke, it was the storm.

“Rick loved his pickup truck.” Don began in a matter-of-fact cadence. “You know he didn’t need a pickup truck. He wasn’t in construction. He wasn’t what you’d call a very handyman or a do-it-yourself kind of guy. Those things were not his forté, and in his case, better off left to the professionals.” He chuckled. I smiled. “He was a teacher. He’d always wanted to be a teacher and in the end, that’s what he was. I learned he was a good teacher, imaginative, amusing, held in high regard by his colleagues, well liked by both parents and students. He was a good teacher, a good teacher who loved his pickup truck.”

He paused and gazed down at the swaying saw grass at the base of the terrace. I sipped my coffee and watched the light change with the shifting clouds. I stood pressed against the terrace boundary. I knew some of the story but not all. With the news to come, I wanted to be in the full force of the wind that streaked up from the ocean. Don lifted his head and continued.

“In fact, he loved his pickup truck so much that he decided there was no better place to die than on the front seat. I don’t know how he reached that conclusion. I don’t know what went through his mind. I don’t know how he put the logic together to arrive at that place, but he did. I don’t know the why either, but it took some planning. He removed the exhaust manifold and used a vacuum cleaner hose. It pumped the fumes right into the cab. I guess you could say I underestimated his handyman skills.” Don paused and shook his head, puzzled. “He must have read some books, don’t you think?” I turned and saw him smile at the thought; then Don pulled out a chair and sat down at my terrace table.

I would have preferred to take the news standing full in the wind, but after a last glance at the ocean and the endless white caps, I turned away, pulled out a chair and joined him. I wanted to get away from it, yet I needed to face the end head on.

“When they found him, he was stretched out on the seat under a blanket. Julia told me that they’d been trying for a baby. He’d brought home the blanket one day. It was a baby blanket covered in purple ballerinas. He insisted they sleep under it every night. It was their good luck charm, he told her. Looking back on it, though, it doesn’t seem so lucky, does it?” He straightened and turned to face the wind, hoping it would shutter his emotions. “In that state of mind it must be possible to live two lives in parallel, one where you continue with the life you know, your family, your profession, the familiar and frequent steps, and at the same time, unearth the thoughts and designs that write your own epitaph.” His voice rose to a shout. He spit his words at the rising wind. “How can you believe in good luck charms like a baby’s blanket and then make such detailed plans to end your life?” He was short of breath after the outburst. He slumped in his chair, and tears dropped onto the front of his shirt. His questions remained unanswered. They would always remain unanswered. The dead speak too softly or not at all.

There were no answers I could give Don. The answers he sought had died with Rick. I could only offer him solace and share the grief. It was my grief too. Together, we’d lost a friend, or perhaps he’d lost us. It wasn’t an accident or disease that took him. He’d left by choice like a friend who waves goodbye from a parting car, with no thought of tomorrow, only the journey and the road just ahead.

Written by: James Shaffer
Photograph by: Garrett Carroll