Outside Forces

by R E Swirsky

CHAPTER 63

  Monday 08:17 North boundary of Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada

  “It’s boiling already,” Michael whined.

  Richard huffed. “Two minutes I said. The water has to boil for at least two minutes.”

  The sun hadn’t yet reached around the mountain into their camp. Dew covered the tents and rested in quiet droplets on the leaves and surrounding evergreens.

  Richard stared at one of the tents and smiled. Tawnie and Michelle were tucked deep inside their bags lying side by side as Richard and Michael prepared breakfast. He hadn’t expected Michelle to shush him off to bed with Michael like she did last night, leaving her sitting alone with Tawnie at the fire so the two of them could talk.

  Michael added a few more dry twigs to the fire and looked up at his dad, who was busy chopping up peppers for this morning’s omelettes. “We don’t have enough food, do we?”

  “We have enough,” he replied. He shovelled the peppers into the bowl with the eggs and other ingredients and began to whisk them all together.

  “But that’s the last of the eggs, and there’s only one more pepper left.” He squinted up at his dad, trying to comprehend where the rest of the food was.

  Richard smiled at him. “We have rice. Enough to last nearly a month if needed.”

  “What?” Michael replied disillusioned. “I’m not eating rice for the next month!”

  He laughed. “We have oatmeal, noodles, and dry soup mix, too. We just had to eat the veggies and dairy before they went bad.”

  “Ichiban noodles? We used to eat that all the time when we hiked.”

  He stirred the eggs and added some salt and pepper. “I think that’s all you ever ate when we went into to the back country.”

  Michael’s face relaxed at the memory. That was nearly a decade ago. He gazed down into the fire and shoved a few more sticks below the kettle of water. “Do you think the cabin’s still up here?”

  He shrugged and shook his head. “I don’t know. It may have been torn down or fallen in.” He shifted his gaze up the valley to the west. “This time of year, snow’s gone in the pass. If it is still standing, there might even be a hiker or two overnighting inside.”

  Michael studied his dad for a moment and shook his head before shifting his gaze in the direction his dad was staring. It was almost July. The sun shone nearly eighteen hours a day, and there was no rain in the forecast for the next three days. “I doubt it. That cabin’s back deep up there and there’s nothing to see…no view, barely a creek.” He squinted up at his dad as the sun began its creep around the back of the mountain behind his father. “And it’s a dead-end trail.”

  “Uh-huh.…” He continued to stir the mixture and readied a pan. “I think that water’s done now, Michael,” he said.

  Michael removed the kettle and poured the water over the coffee grounds in the press. “If you can even call it a trail,” he added. He went silent for a moment and pushed the coals into a pile in the centre of the small fire pit. “That’s why you built it so far back up there, isn’t it? You picked that place on purpose.”

  Richard really didn’t want to think about why he had built that cabin, but Michael was dead right about its location. “Yeah,” he said.

  “Why did you build that cabin, Dad?”

  “Michael, go tell Tawnie and Michelle it’s time to get up. Coffee’s ready and the eggs will be done in a few minutes.” He hadn’t thought about the cabin in years. He adjusted the small grating above the fire and set the pan on it to cook the eggs.

  Michael popped his head into the tent the girls shared for the first time, announced breakfast was ready, and returned to sit cross-legged on the dirt next to the fire. “So why did you build it?” he asked

  Richard wanted to say it was made for days like these, and that really wouldn’t have been far from the truth. He squatted down next to the fire opposite Michael. “I wasn’t much older than you when we built that cabin. A couple years older, maybe.”

  “We?”

  He chuckled. “Yeah.” His thoughts drifted, bouncing back over the decades. It was a different age entirely. “You really want to know?”

  “Uh-huh. Seems like a lot of work.”

  He chuckled again. “It was the seventies. The cold war was full on, and I was a first-year poli-sci student at U of A. I had a crazy way of looking at the world back then—always going on about politics, and everything was us versus them.” It struck him funny how his interest in politics faded and reversed completely once he graduated and got married.

  Michael frowned. “Like what? You thought a nuclear world war was inevitable and up here would hold the best chance of survival?”

  “Yeah,” he replied and nodded. Michael’s perception was sharp, but it seemed much more complicated than the few words Michael used to sum it up. He laughed again. “There were four of us. We were all a little extreme, I guess. Building the cabin seemed logical at the time.”

  Michael nodded.

  “We all promised one another that when the time came, no matter where we were, we’d all find our way back here to wait it out.” He gave the eggs one quick stir around the pan. “We had it all planned, how we’d survive out here. We’d hunt and fish. We’d clear some of the land down in the valley bottom over time and just rebuild from scratch all that man had destroyed.”

  He laughed again.

  “Why do you laugh?” Michael asked.

  “Because it was all just a fantasy. Any war of that magnitude would have left no safe place on the planet. Not even up here.”

  Michael was silent for a moment. “But it wasn’t pointless, was it?”

  “All that work—weeks’ worth of cutting and sawing. It seems kind of pointless now, don’t you think?”

  But Michael didn’t think like him. “Hope,” he said, and looked up into the sky. An eagle flew high above them, blocking the sun for an instant.

  “Hope?”

  “Yeah.” Michael remained staring into the dawn sky, watching the eagle pass overhead until it banked sharply and disappeared over the trees. “You were all building hope up here. That was the point. You four never gave up on humanity.” He paused and looked at his father. “Just like you never gave up on me.”

  Tears suddenly rose to the surface, and Richard’s emotions swelled, rendering him speechless. He stood up and walked around the fire to his son, motioning with his hands for Michael to stand. He spread his arms out wide. Michel stepped into them. He hugged his son with all the love he held inside him.

  “I will never give up on you, son. Never.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”