The first real attempt at a story I've had planned out for the better part of five years now. Who knows if it'll become anything, but I'm hopeful.
We begin with Oliver, a forest ranger in Sydcedar, a forest just barely clinging to the Pacific Northwest United States.
10:56 AM
The woods were quieter today, but still just as lively. The only noise Oliver Davila could hear, other than the gentle rustling of the wind, was his pencil tapping on the pristine glass of the Ranger welcome desk. His notebook lay abandoned to the side, flipped open to a rough sketch he’d made the day before – a brightly colored finch.
As the fall weather began to bite at the ankles of new visitors, the slower winter season began to creep in, a welcome relief to Ollie and his coworkers. They did not hate the company, but as the better half of the team of ten were some sort of nature-focused creative, they reveled in the peace. Ollie was itching to take his break, eager to go out and document the misty morning. His camera was slung across his chest, never leaving his side.
His pencil hit the desk with more urgency, tapping out the seconds until Danny or Sel would relieve him of his empty post. As if on cue, the back door let out its telltale creak, and Ollie stopped his movement in relief.
“Dude, don't look so tense.” Danny’s shock of bleached blonde hair crossed the threshold of the visitor counter, and Ollie jumped to his feet at once. His eyes met Danny’s, and the other let out a stifled laugh.
“I’m not– I–”
“I get it, get out there.” Danny patted him on the back, pushing him toward the open doorway into the back office. “Just don’t get too lost, we have that gig tonight, remember?”
“‘Course. I only get lost when I mean to.” Ollie winked over his shoulder as he collected his things. Danny assumed the position Ollie had just spent the first half of his morning in, resting his head in his hands. “I’ll see you later on. Five, yeah?”
“Yep. Now get out of here, man.”
“Roger that.”
The wind was crisp on his neck as Ollie walked into the forest, following the trail he traced daily, imprinting his bootprints into the mud that had received him thousands of times before. He had practically lived in these woods nearly every day since he was thirteen, and now, as he neared twenty-six, he still felt as if the entire forest was holding out on him. The world seemed much smaller when he was beneath the trees, as if the borders of the woods were all that existed. The trees stretched tall above, dwarfing the usually tall figure. Nothing anthropogenic mattered under the canopy, and it was obvious to any human stepping foot among the ferns.
Ollie reached for his camera, unzipping the case with a practiced quiet precision. There was a bird ahead of him on the trail, a steller's jay, and his body moved on instinct even before he made the decision to try for a picture. He felt a part of these woods, an animal among the foliage who had as much of a right to be there as the native fauna. Kneeling in the mud, he felt his boots firm under him as he steadied his camera against his thigh. The jay was oblivious, for the moment, which allowed Ollie the precious seconds he needed to focus his lens and snap a few good pictures. However, in what felt like a willing eternity but was likely barely seconds, the jay had moved on, gently whistling as it left.
Standing up, the forest ranger hummed contentedly. The photographs were helpful for his job, sure, but that was not the reason he took them. Distilling something like nature into a photograph, especially a digital one, was distinctly fascinating to him. The woods will always exist, nature has and always will persevere, but taking a moment of it and preserving it in such a way to both capture its beauty and impermanence was his goal.
He walked on, slipping his camera back into its carrying case. Ollie was a quiet person, always had been, and it came as no surprise to anyone in his life that he ended up with the career he had. Forgoing college for a more traditional job in his town, he had held the same post since he was seventeen, learning the paths and frequent visitors, both human and not. Nothing about the woods truly tended to surprise him, though he said otherwise, as their unchanging beauty certainly remained a point of interest. He confidently made his way further into the underbrush, keeping near-silent as he tended to do.
As a child, Oliver and his friends would stomp about in the woods, crushing sticks and leaves under their boots loudly and without care. They would run after animals and blow raspberries at tourists, but they were happy. As obnoxious and stupid as they look to him now, they were happy. About a mile and a half north of the park station was a clearing, long hollowed out by trampling kids with memories just the same as Ollie’s. There was a small bonfire pit, embers decades old, the remains of a half-built lean-to, and a towering black willow tree that had been stripped and smoothed at the base from the kicks and climbs of growing children. Part of the job of a park ranger was to document the effect of humans on their park’s landscape, and though Ollie would never admit it aloud, he had traced his way back to that clearing time and time again to glean any sense of professional familiarity for the childhood memories that had escaped him so often. He would get glimpses, on occasion, of those times. But they were too often obscured by the stark memories of what came after, and he was left wallowing in the could-have-beens. If Erin never went to Canada, if Mika hadn’t stayed, if he had gone to college, if Dante…
There was a lot for Dante. And he tended not to dwell on most of it.
A rustle in the brush brought Ollie back to his senses, and he instinctively reached for his camera. A rabbit bolted across the path, tearing through the mud and leaves. Its white coat was streaked with red, and its eyes somehow met Ollie’s as it ran. He’d never seen anything like it. It was fleeing from the stream to the south, and the way it was running unnerved Ollie in a way he could not place. At least not until the deer bolted across the path as well, followed by a chipmunk and two more rabbits. Stumbling backward, Ollie hit the dirt, hard. A pair of birds raced by, chirping urgently as they flew. Sat in the mud, he was surrounded by fleeing creatures of every size, united in their evasion. The logical explanation was that a bear, or perhaps a mountain lion, had made their presence known by the river, and some inciting event there caused the animals to flee. But Ollie somehow knew that this wasn’t the case. He got to his feet, keeping a cautious eye on the trees beyond the path and grabbing his camera from where it had fallen when he hit the ground. Tucking it into his bag, without a care for the mud caked into the body, he began to back away from the spot where the animals had come from. The river was not far off the trail, and he was able to hear the rushing stream if he listened hard enough. What worried him was the lack of additional noise. There was no roar or hiss, not even a hint of the kind of noise that would send animals running as they had.
Ollie was a curious man, but not a stupid one. Without letting his gaze stray from the treeline, he began to back away, turning to the trail that led back to the visitor center. A million thoughts and ideas were pushing at his brain, hypotheses and possible causes, but he did not let any one of them take his focus away from the sounds and sights of the trail.
He missed something, though. A pair of eyes stared out at him from the cover of a leafy fern, a hundred or so paces back. It was not for lack of trying on Ollie’s part, for none knew this area better than he did, and he was paying all the attention he could to the surrounding area. But it was not enough, and the pair of eyes knew this, and if it could still speak, it would express contentment.
No comments:
Post a Comment