Wick - The Omnibus Edition

by Bunker, Michael

  After Clive’s departure, he walked back to the highway from the Golf Course, heading north-northwest again along the eastern bank of the highway, passing walkers and worried hikers carrying gas cans and sacks and sometimes children. He passed more and more people along the highway. Where were all these people coming from? Some nodded a lukewarm greeting, but most just kept their head down, walking purposefully, their breath pouring out before them like spirits.

  As the temperature dropped, and coinciding with the change of the weather and the impending darkness, the number of people on the road—in cars and on foot—had diminished as well, until only now and then did he see anyone else on the road. “I’m going to be cold tonight,” he said aloud, though there was no one around to hear him.

  ****

  The animals are acting funny. The thought occurred to him, and he didn’t even know why he had the thought, or what it meant. He remembered having this thought a few days before Sandy hit, watching a group of swallows range through the sky, then land in a tree overhead and screech. Now he didn’t hear any birds at all. He could not even hear a dog bark anywhere in the distance. Maybe another storm IS coming.

  He passed what might have been a very small hamlet on his right off the access road and, as he did, he hearkened back to Clive’s warning about how people were going to get edgy and dangerous on the roads as time went on. Veronica had said as much to him too, without all the political context. He knew that this was probably true, and not just because Clive and Veronica had said it. He had watched what happened in and around New Orleans only days after Hurricane Katrina, and many of the books he’d begun reading lately, books that fed his discontent with the city, had talked about what might happen in any urban society when people started getting restless after a major event. The line between order and chaos in society could indeed be a very fine one, and the threads that made up that line seemed increasingly strained already. If a blizzard did more to cut off access to gas and groceries and electricity and normal, it could put that social fabric near the breaking point.

  Clay had never been a doomsday survivalist, or a doomsday anything, but he was interested in alternative viewpoints. As he had explored a number of these different viewpoints online, and in a bookstore around the corner, he’d been surprised at how many of them actually made some sense. Even Clive, with his apocalyptic vision, had said some things that seemed to resonate. Clay wondered why he was drawn to these kinds of outsider visions. For example, one particular book he’d read in the weeks before the storm had been written by a neo-Amish separatist. He knew that this was a stretch for a guy in Brooklyn. How could he have explained to his friends at the coffee shop that he was reading a book by this guy in Texas named Jonathan Wall who had suggested that a major disaster would eventually strike that would be the straw that would break the camel’s back? Wall stated that such a disaster could begin the precipitous tear in what he believed was an ‘artificial veil of civility’ that perilously held Western Society together. How could Clay even explain to his friends that he was reading a book that dared question the industrial and cultural foundations of the modern society?

  No matter. He would be home soon in his farmhouse in Ithaca, and the world could crack open and swallow the city whole, using Texas for desert, and he would be secluded in his forest. He watched his breath form in front of his face and felt his brain congeal around this thought.

  Clay decided that he should get off the road, if only to be removed from the possibility of meeting strangers that might be unpleasant. Walking on the back roads might take him several more days to get to his destination, but, in the end, his goal was to actually arrive at that destination, and now he figured his odds of doing so increased in direct negative proportion to the number of people he would encounter on the way. Leave yourself a way out, he thought, that lesson still in his mind. Don’t get trapped!

  He walked another mile past the hamlet, then veered to his right to cut through a wooded greenbelt. As he did so, the cold wind began to blow more forcefully, and darkness fell around him like a cloak. He crossed over the northbound access road and headed into some woods that ran alongside the road.

  He began to shiver. He wasn’t a survivalist by any stretch of the imagination, but he did know a few things he’d picked up here and there by watching survival shows on the Discovery Channel. He suddenly found himself thankful for those long hours he’d spent sitting in front of the television after Cheryl and the girls had died. He had never been out in the wilderness much, but he had imagined it happening, and he thought that this was half the battle.

  In the backpack, he still had the rolled up woolen blanket that Veronica had stuffed in there, and the Mylar survival blanket, folded tight into a small square, still in its plastic wrap, was safely stowed in the side pocket of his pants.

  His coat was supposed to be rain proof, and his boots were excellent for hiking. They should keep his feet dry, even if the weather did turn bad. He sent up a little thank you to the heavens for bringing the strange confluence of events to this point. He was truly out in the wilderness now, and he felt ready to face whatever came.

  After another thirty minutes of walking northward and away from the highway, the darkness deepened as the heavy clouds dropped down and became fog. No light made itself available to assist him in his efforts to navigate the woods. He stopped, and reaching into his backpack he pulled out the small flashlight Veronica had thought to pack for him. He was so very grateful to have met her and to have talked with her. He made a mental note to send her a letter or postcard upon reaching home, to thank her for her kindness, and now—for likely saving his life.

  ****

  The woods have been frightful for millennia. When Hawthorne wrote, he made them the seat of mysterious evil. Children’s fairy tales often take the protagonists deep into the forest to teach them a moral lesson in goodness. Thoreau went into the woods to redeem them, but he was only a stone’s throw from civilization and had a cleaning woman come round once a week to do his laundry. Now, as Clay walked deeper into the dark of the forest, he thought through the cold in his feet and the chill on his face that the forest could frighten as well as comfort. He held onto this thought as the cold made his thinking disjointed and his actions more mechanical and instinctive.

  He looked around for some high ground and found some in a close growing copse of pine trees and figured that the bed of pine needles under them would make as good and comfortable a bedding as he might otherwise have concocted.

  At that point, he got to work making a shelter, working mainly with scattered memories from books and television shows he’d read and seen over the last couple of years. From pine branches he built a shed roof lean-to, open to the south, covering the north wall thickly with more branches that were heavy with needles. When the lean-to roof was dense enough to block the breeze, he built another wall, this one straight up and down, about three feet from the open front of his little hut. He started with two stout branches, pounded them into the ground about four feet apart, and then wove thinner branches between them like wicker. Against this wall he leaned more greenery and branches to make it both a heat reflector and wind break should the wind shift around to the south.

  Next he began digging a small trench with his hands and his pocket knife, and eventually a small scoop that he quickly carved from the wide end of a fatter branch with Veronica’s knife. The trench ended up being about ten inches deep, and almost a foot across, and it ran parallel to, and within eight inches of, his heat reflector wall.

  Despite the dropping temperatures, he began to sweat from the exertion, and he reminded himself not to let himself get too wet. Hypothermia was now his most immediate enemy and could start very easily were he to get damp in these temperatures. By about eight or nine o’clock, he had the trench finished, and he figured it must be in the high 30’s Fahrenheit outside, and the air was damp and thick and the fog obscured anything from his view that was more than fifteen feet away. A stiff breeze bega
n to pick up from the north as he walked around the campsite picking up rocks to fill in his trench.

  He’d learned most of this method from reading the story of a survivalist (he could not recall the man’s name) who had been traveling in the mountains of Turkey during a winter storm. The survivalist had nine or ten locals with him who knew the area and who constantly laughed at him and ignored his warnings when he told them that a blizzard was going to come through the mountains overnight. The survivalist built what he called a “fire bed,” while the Sherpas (for lack of a better word to call them) laughed at him and called him names in their own language. The story ended with the man waking up in the morning after the blizzard and finding all of the Sherpas frozen to the ground and dead. While Clay didn’t expect it to get that cold on this night, he wasn’t taking any chances. It was November, and who knew what kind of storm might be heading his way.

  Using the small box of matches he had put in his backpack and some lint pulled from the wool blanket, along with some dried leaves and pine needles, Clay soon had a roaring fire going in his fire bed on top of the rocks he’d spread in the trench. The fire would heat up the rocks, and eventually, when the coals were ready and spread over the whole trench, he would bury the lot again with six to eight inches of soil, pack it down, and on top of this warm ground he would make his bed.

  He was pleased with himself and smiled and even laughed a little when the whole exercise of building the fire bed actually worked. As the fire crackled and snapped, causing one of the rocks to explode from the heat, Clay huddled in the wool blanket and warmed himself by the fire.

  Despite the fact that he had walked a good portion of the day, he wasn’t overly hungry. He’d eaten the two turkey sandwiches in Middletown, which, though it seemed to be too much at the time, served him well to get him this far. He decided to bed down with the little hunger he felt from not eating supper, saving the two remaining energy bars for tomorrow.

  After covering the trench with soil, he had packed it down, stomping it with his boots, feeling the heat from his soles come up into his toes. He took off his jacket and his pants (that’s what the books said to do), wrapped himself in the Mylar blanket, covered that with the woolen blanket, and then carefully placed his coat and pants over the top of that. Figuring that the more layers he had the better, he put his spare set of clothes (the set that Veronica had washed for him) on top of the whole pile to complete his heated cocoon. Twenty minutes later he was surprised by how warm he was. The night would grow colder, he was certain of that, but now he felt happy and content that he would make it through the night no matter how cold it got. If a guy can make it through a blizzard in the mountains of Turkey, surely he could make it through a gentle freeze in mid-state New York.

  He closed his eyes and listened to the wind. It whistled through the treetops like a siren’s song.

  ****

  He woke up during the night and didn’t have any idea what hour it was. He was still comfortable enough, but it was definitely getting colder and everything around him was damp. He couldn’t see in the darkness except to make out the shape of his shelter and the nearby wall of his heat reflector, but he could hear well enough. Only occasionally he would pick up the growl of a car going by on the distant highway, or the low rumble of a faraway train or truck. Once or twice he thought he heard an animal prowling around his camp, and for that reason alone he was glad he had not eaten anything for supper before lying down to sleep. The smells of his camp shouldn’t attract any predators.

  He lay there for what seemed like an hour in the blackness thinking about Cheryl and the girls and camping trips with them up near Saranac Lake, or that one summer that they spent a miserable, rainy week in a campground near Niagara Falls when everything went bad and he and Cheryl had quarreled incessantly. He felt the familiar pang of loss and thought through the many things he should have said to her, and what he would give for just a moment of her telling him he was wrong.

  As a boy, he’d camped and fished as much as most people his age, and once, at about ten years of age, he’d accompanied his parents on what was intended to be a long hike down the Appalachian Trail. The rugged adventure part of the trip had come to an abrupt end when he had haphazardly tossed a crab apple core at a distant tree, only to have a bear cub drop out of the tree, scaring them all nearly to death. His father had bravely and calmly backed the family slowly towards the car, all the while praying aloud that the cub’s mother wouldn’t show up looking for her offspring. She didn’t, and they spent the rest of the vacation playing “spoons” and “hearts” from the safety of a cabin overlooking the river. The cabin was close to the woods, but closer still to an old store where he’d convinced his mom and dad to take him to buy Dr. Peppers and Moon Pies. He imagined the taste of Moon Pies and wondered if they still made them.

  Clay lay there in the dark and considered whether he’d already reached the extent of his camping and survival know-how. Maybe he’d blown his whole compendium of knowledge on the fire bed. He felt pretty confident that he could fish with the little survival fishing kit he’d found in the backpack (another thing for which he intended to thank Veronica), and he might be able to snare some dumb animal with his shoelaces (something else he’d learned on television), but his best bet was to find a backwoods store somewhere where he could use his ready cash to stock up on food. One fire bed did not make him Jeremiah Johnson. He tried to remember the plot of that movie but kept getting it mixed up with the one about Grizzly Adams.

  His thoughts drifted over to his meager water supply, and he remembered that of all of the issues and categories of survival needs, water was always supposed to be the first and most important. Just as this occurred to him, he noticed that there was moisture covering the lean-to (and everything else), and he saw several places where, near the corners of the lean-to, water was dripping in constant drops. He pulled back his covers and reached into his backpack for the two empty water bottles he had stored there. Boy is it cold!

  After setting the empty bottles to catch the drips, he decided to drink the third bottle of water completely down, since he felt sure the three bottles would fill up overnight, provided the thick, moist air didn’t freeze before morning.

  With all three bottles emptied and catching water, he climbed back under his covers and pressed his body down as hard as he could against the warmth radiating up from the fire bed. What time is it? He didn’t know, and before long he was asleep again.

  ****

  Friday

  Morning came and he was up just as soon as the gray of daylight replaced the black of night. He figured it to be sometime between six and seven o’clock, but he couldn’t be sure. The air was clear of fog again, though the clouds were thick and threatening, and he noticed that the temperature must have turned freezing, or very near it. There was a thick frost on everything, and his water bottles had a paste of fog building on the inside. They had ceased to catch water. Of the three bottles he was able to combine them to fill two completely, with a swallow left over for breakfast. His work had netted him 32 full ounces of good drinking water. He was satisfied with that.

  Everything was wet. Even his coat, pants, and his spare set of clothes were soaked completely through. He spent the next hour trying to start a fire but was unsuccessful due to the damp. Many of his now precious matches had simply crumbled as he struck them against the box, and the wooden sticks had torn along the strike side, leaving a dangerously small patch of grit. He knew there had to be a trick to starting a fire in the wet, but he had wasted half of his matches, and nothing he carried or could find would catch fire in the thick, humid air of the morning. Even the sticks of the matches wouldn’t burn, and when they did, he’d held them under a piece of wool or a corner of a leaf, until they’d burned down to his fingers. If only I knew more about survival…

  His first plan was to put on the damp clothes and hike back to the road, but, deliberating on this idea, he talked himself out of it. He’d made a decision to leave the
road for a reason, and that reason was still viable. It was likely that the highway would become increasingly unsafe as time passed, and he didn’t want to go back there. While he could not know what conditions were actually like back on the main highway, the logic of his original decision hadn’t changed. Clive had rambled on about other, less natural, disasters, and while he was skeptical of these, they’d left an ominous feeling in the pit of his stomach. He decided that his trajectory should be away from, and not towards, other people.

  Next, he decided that he would just stay put awhile, hoping that the day might clear up and that his clothes and coat and blanket would dry more as the day wore on. He shivered as he thought this. He wasn’t sure how much patience he would have if, after some time, the sky and weather showed no positive changes. As he pondered his situation, and, seeking any warmth he could find, he instinctively put his hand down onto the dry earth under where his bed had been, and he felt the faint heat still radiating from the ground.

  A light went on in his head, and he began to dig, first with his hands and then with his wooden scoop, until he had reached the layers of ash and burnt material left over from the fire. Pushing around in the charred remains with a stick he found some coals, still red hot, and now that oxygen was available, they were glowing—even more so every time a breeze blew by. Some of the other lumps of wood, having been starved of oxygen in the covered trench, had become perfect little pieces of charcoal.