"It was unreal"
"This looks in no way familiar," I thought to myself. Two sticks stick out of the snow, crossed in an X to mark the end.
It was snowing on top of already extremely low contrast light. We were heading home after riding for about six hours straight, some total of a hundred and some miles. My machine, an amalgam of the still-functioning parts from other dead machines, had a strange quirk to its throttle: I could run the machine at 0-3000 RPM, and from 6000 to its maximum RPM, but nowhere in between lest the driven clutch start killing the motor by trying to decelerate. This meant that as far as the power range on my machine, I could either putt along at around 5mph, or, have the throttle near wide open at 50mph and above. And, forced to go that fast, and it snowing, and there being no difference between the sky and the trail two seconds in front of me and the trail ten seconds in front of me, I had apparently lost myself along a well-marked, groomed trail.
I wasn't afraid, nor panicking. Far from it. I knew where I was. Basically. Markers, about every 100 yards, could take me back to where I'd started, maybe meet up with the group behind me that wasn't so exceptionally bound by high-speed constraints. I was in no danger of running out of gas, or even freezing. It's just... by some weird circumstance, I'd ended up somewhere I'd never been before, or known about, or really acknowledged its existence.
---
I think there's a weird beauty to dreams. Your brain puts your consciousness in a random, read-only portion of your memory, and has you sit there, idle, for hours at a time while it performs maintenance. In that random portion of memory, you are reduced to your most child-like, imaginative, story-telling, story-making state. Everything is a wonder. Everything is terrifying. And it is little more than a feedback loop.
I guess I should qualify. That's what I think dreams are.
The thing that amazes me about dreams is their ability to dredge up the best and worst of yourself, in that you can experience things your waking mind cannot or has not with a powerful reality. The love for someone who has only just left the room and the void they leave behind. The conflicted terror at relatives accusing each other of bad parenting. The loneliness of talking to a bucket.
I want to think the stories are somehow relevant, or at least related to my normal life, but I can't rationalize how they are.
---
I'm back at what's called "The Channel." It is an area at the junction of the two big lakes over which most people pass to get to one or the other. Being a channel, it is relatively shallow and the quickly running water causes the ice around the channel to result in extremely thin ice, with only certain areas over which it's safe to pass. Which is why I'm back here. If my group had already made it this far, I would see the distinct marks the sleds they were towing would make.
I was seeing none. "Damnit," I thought.
I'd make it back to the channel without passing them, which meant one of a few things: a) they broke down before the channel, and had not gotten here yet, b) I wasn't at "the channel," or c) they passed me somehow. I'd only just come from the only path beyond the channel. I would have seen them, even going 60mph in the snow and flat light. This was the same channel I'd been passing over for years, save for the alternate universe possibility. This meant that they hadn't reached the channel.
I continued backtracking towards them.
---
I'm just waking up back at the cabin. I decide I want to keep my cell phone and wallet with me in case I get lost. I've had it off so far: I'm about 15 miles from any road system, and more than that from any cell tower, sitting inside a steel-roofed A-frame. On a whim, I turn it on. It boots for about a minute, and gives me "No service" immediately. I start puttering around, entering notes of things to bring for next time.
Strangely, a message pops up from a coworker: "U available for question?"
Another message, indicating that I have a voicemail.
I dismiss it. That's odd. I notice up above, the tiniest slice of a signal bar I've ever seen, and then I see it promptly go back to reading "No service." I go back and look at the time, dated yesterday. I wonder what the question was. I'm supposed to be on vacation, but my mind is wandering through configuration procedures. It's truly a difficult thing to disengage.
I turn it back off. We're about to go riding.
---
I've never met her before, only heard lengthy descriptions. Smiling as we're about to shake hands, she tells me "You look a lot thinner than your photos."
"Thanks," I can say in return.
I'd ridden hundreds of miles across the desert. I'd lost some considerable weight in doing so, evidenced by the veins on the backs of my hands and my measurably slower idle heart rate. However, I didn't feel as she'd greeted me accurately at all. I felt no more self-confidence than before, only a small sense of accomplishment to at least starting a downward trend, and only dread at having failed to meet any ideal.
I smile as I shake her hand.
---
My eyes are streaming tears not for sorrow but instead for driving across the lake at 70 with my visor up, scanning my featureless horizon for stationary machines and their riders. Frustratingly, none to be found. I keep racing back. And back. To eventually I get to where we all started from. No X to mark the end here, and nobody there to mark the beginning.
I curse the inside of my helmet. I've now doubled my distance traveled, to no avail. I'm using gas at a rapid rate, though, still not bad enough to worry.
I turn around and consider how they would have gotten past me. I start racing back to the channel. If it was anywhere, it would have to be there, tracks or no.
---
Talking with someone and talking with many people are two entirely different skillsets, neither of which I'm all that well acquainted, though, one-on-one conversations I can usually manage a lot better.
With a few caveats. Usually, the conversation has to be question/answer. I can answer questions all day, at length. I love to answer questions. It means there's a definite purpose to what I'm saying. I don't have to at once respond, react, engage, and keep note of the body language, tone, and direction of the other person. It's a lot to keep track of, particularly simultaneously.
At parties and social gatherings, I usually end up cornering some poor sap and talking into boredom about computers, movies, and video games. It's what I know, and how I see the world. I don't have a lot of good and well-thought opinions about much else, so my application of the aforementioned concepts to the world at large is the best I can do.
This might explain how my conversations tend to repeat themselves, winding their way back to my own comfortable topics.
So I've cornered some poor soul. And we're talking about video games, and life, and how our lives are changing their nature we get older, notably, in the absence of video games, and the presence of house remodeling, mortgage payments, and relationships.
They say to me: "With everyone being either married or in a relationship or whatever, probably the biggest person whose life is affected is you."
The implication being that my being single removes me from a window of lifestyle moving along a timeline. That for how I live my life, the loss of my friends or my friends' time to such grown-up things is an unfortunate by-product of their aging process.
"I suppose," I could say. Arguing against the point would have been contrary to a process that's been apparent since 7th grade. Arguing for the point would have been very "poor Josh."
Maybe I missed the point entirely. I think I went on talking about video games.
---
I really do enjoy listening to stories. Particularly ones that are important to people. You can tell most times by the way they focus their eyes. If they're looking around at the people listening, they're telling the story judging by people's reactions, changing pitch and yaw on their wordless feedback. If their eyes are unfocused, looking at something close, or far, or imagined in their hands, or wherever, they've living the story, and narrating for those nearby.
Earlier in the day we'd collected a bunch of dead trees around the lake and put them together for a bonfire. Now, slowly melting away the top of the ice, the bonfire is down to coals, and folks are telling stories about growing up.
They tell of childhoods running around in the woods, staying up until 4 in the morning, digging holes under their houses, stealing things from the military bases, harrowing escapes when found out. They talk about trips and friends and acquaintances, conquests in women and alcohol and machinery. Tragedy: "If a young person starts getting thin, it's cancer." They talk about their fathers and their mothers and how it was so different back then, how stupid they were, how nobody cared, how it was amazing that nobody found out, how it was all "unreal." About working at the camp, how they almost died, how they stumbled across a bear, how they heard a noise but never saw anything. About things you should do, or should never do, or never do again.
"--Not that you'd ever tell your Dad, right Josh?" they say, my Dad standing across the fire. "I suppose," I say, smiling back. I take another drink.
They go on storytelling.
I like listening because I don't have any stories. If I do, they aren't these stories. Or at least stories I can tell around a bonfire. Or while drinking. Or that are as important to me as these are to the folks telling them. I really wish I did.
---
I make it back to the channel just fine. Still no sign of them. I'm about to have to make a decision. Retrace the path that I didn't recognize (or abandoned before I could recognize it), or, turn back again, and find some other way to get in contact with them. I don't want to do either, but I only have so much gas, and I didn't bring my cell phone, and I don't have my wallet. If I was truly lost, being without them meant I had no means of communication if I became stranded, and no identification if... I needed to be identified. Why I elected to leave them behind before going out into the wilderness for six hours is a question I still can't answer.
I cross the point where I'd previously stopped to look for tracks. Where I've been previously is all but covered now with the falling snow. I have maybe an hour left of daylight.
I still have options. Not great ones. But options.
I start down the foreign trail. It still feels wrong. I look back to the channel. I look back to where I'm going, the next marker on the path.
And notice, as I'm turning back, another marker... on another path, going in another direction, similar to where I'm going, but different entirely, veering left instead of right. Two sticks in the snow, put together in a sort of equilateral cross., a marker that I recognize from the day before, and six hours earlier.
I'm confused and relieved. Why are there two paths? There's only one lake, and only one end to where I'm going.
I hurry along the path. Someone from my group, noticing that I'd not arrived before them as they expected (I had to go so fast, after all), doubled back and started sweeping the edges of the lake. They see my headlight, and start towards me. I wave at them. They wave back.
"Lose your way?"
"Yeah."
---
It ends up there's a "backside" to Susitna. A long, somewhat continuous island chain takes up the center of the lake, bisecting the lake into two halves. In the poor conditions, I took the wrong one. Easy to get turned around, I guess. How I fail to realize this after going there for twenty years, looking at the maps on the wall, I don't know. Maybe I just never needed to know, never committing it to memory as I never really ventured out that far.
It was embarrassing. And maybe a little disappointing for my dad. He'd grown up adventuring around there with his father, and gone there with his friends when he was my age, and had his own stories. I, on the other hand, fiddle with my cell phone, think about work, make fun of his Steely Dan on the stereo, and complain about the clutching on my machine. And then get lost, and they have to go out looking for me.
It's not the case, I'm sure. But I guess the point I'm getting at is that I don't understand the ideals that I hold, or where they came from. I understand that it's important to find someone to love and to have a family and to value them above all else. But that's not the life I'm living, currently, and despite friends and family moving on, I probably won't be any time soon. I know some things are important, but I don't know why, and I can't tell you what all they are. I exercise multiple times a week with the purpose of losing weight, with only pictures depicting the opposite trend since that strange introduction. I can look back, find pictures, emails, whatever, and tell you what I was doing, but not what I was thinking at the time.
I am not storied, I am just here. Inhabiting a part of my brain that is active while I'm awake, programmed to feel compelled to do the things I do. And that's not to say I'm just an automaton, executing something laid out before me. I don't feel that way at all. I like what I do, and (some) of the things I do give me a sense of accomplishment.
When I dream, though, I feel something different. I feel everything I've burned away or ignored, everything I've forgotten or lost. And though it's gone when I wake up, I can still feel the path I took, or the dream took through me. An edge in a sea of dull contrast, fading with the quickly overwritten temporarily assigned container. Probably the reason why I strive to write them down.
I'm not saying I want to live in some dream world. I'm not saying I want to go become a great outdoorsman, or how to fix a clutch, or be able to tell a story about when I jumped from the bed of one truck to another at highway speeds. I want to be able to say, "this is what makes me happy, not just makes me feel good."
I don't think that's an easy thing to find.
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