by Lisa Ferrari
I am then awakened from my miserable slumber before dawn on the fourth day. I’m separated from the others and put aboard a helicopter and flown to the top of a mountain. No one tells me anything and I don’t ask. I’m too tired to give a shit. I merely want to survive this.
The chopper touches down and the dispassionate Ranger, who smells like a dead skunk and has the worst shit-breath I’ve ever encountered, pretty much pushes me out the door of the chopper. The pilot doesn’t even shut down.
Shitmouth tells me to be back at camp in 24 hours because they’re striking the camp; if I’m not there, I’m on my own. Then the shoving begins. I manage to hit the dirt and stay on my feet.
I don’t give them the satisfaction of crouching the way people always do when they exit a helicopter. Being decapitated by a helicopter would be instantaneous. I’m so cold and hungry and thirsty and jittery and exhausted that I almost welcome it.
The chopper lifts off and disappears into the night. I watch it go, until at last I’m standing there alone with my big knife strapped to my thigh.
That’s when it occurs to me that I’m expected to do something, to complete a task of some sort: Shitmouth said to be back at camp within 24 hours.
I don’t know where camp is.
Which way did the chopper go?
Where did we come from?
I didn’t think to check the constellations or count in my head to try to figure out how far we flew and for how long. Is camp two miles away or 20? Can I make it 24 hours? Am I really alone up here? What if I slip and fall and break my legs? Or my neck? They must have insurance on me for this wilderness bullshit. But what if I die? What am I worth to The Billion-Dollar Movie? A hundred million? A million? A hundred thousand? I have no idea.
I’m ready to panic.
My instinct is to turn to Kellan. That’s what I’ve been doing for the past number of months, pretty much ever since I met him.
Especially when it comes to all this Hollywood stuff. Kellan is able to navigate these waters with ease. I’ve learned a lot by watching him and by getting to know everyone at Heavenly Pictures, Sheila and Heather and the whole team.
But they’re not here now.
Kellan isn’t here now.
He’s down there, probably bemoaning his own itchy butthole and grumbling stomach. He’s probably doing push-ups and pistol squats (at which I suck), reveling in the fact that he’s going to be leaner and more shredded when this week ends and we’re back in our house, soaking in the Jacuzzi and drinking egg whites-and-oatmeal shakes. I wonder if he’s pissed at them for dragging me up here. Alone. Did Kellan know they were going to bring me up here alone? He wouldn’t like it.
I sit down.
Maybe taking a few minutes to calm down and think is a good idea before I go charging down the mountain in the dark. Maybe that’s why Shitmouth brought me up here in the dark, to test this very thing.
I sit cross-legged and try to get in touch with the earth and the wind and the animals.
Oh God, what if there’s a wolf or a mountain lion or a bear watching me right now, ready to pounce on me and eat me alive?
I pull my knife from its sheath, trying not to filet myself.
I cock my head and listen.
I hear only insects. Crickets and maybe June bugs.
And then I look up.
And wow.
Stars.
So many stars.
I’ve never seen such stars.
I feel so small.
So insignificant.
So tiny.
Like a bug. One of those crickets or June bugs filling the night with their music.
I’m here, among them. I’m one of them.
In that moment, looking up at the stars, surrounded by the song of nature, a peace comes over me. Unlike anything I’ve ever known.
I put my knife back in its sheath. I won’t be needing it.
I’m no longer hungry.
I’m no longer thirsty.
I’m no longer exhausted and miserable.
I am all of those things, yes; but those things no longer matter.
I’m surrounded by all of this. The night, the cool air, the mountains, the plants and the trees, all of it…for there is an energy here, a life-force. And I am a part of it. I belong to it.
And then I feel it.
I know it.
Everything is going to be all right.
I SIT QUIETLY.
Eventually, the sky lightens.
The sun rises. It’s warm on my face.
It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
I weep at the sight of it.
And I laugh.
I laugh and I cry all at once and I don’t know why.
I am filled with the knowledge that all my fears, everything that has ever terrorized me, isn’t real. It was entirely in my mind. I made it real. I let it have power over me. And I shoved a gazillion calories down my throat trying to hide from it.
But I needn’t have.
Being here, atop this mountain, hungry and tired and cold, I’m happier than I’ve ever been in a way I never would have expected.
I have so much love in my heart.
I am so grateful. For everything.
I SIT AND watch the sun rise.
But with each passing moment and with each degree the sun rises higher, I know it is time to go.
My night on the mountain has concluded.
I know why Shitmouth brought me up here.
I feel bad for thinking of him as Shitmouth. I think his name is Scott.
I get slowly, a bit sadly, to my feet. Sad because I must leave this place. But I know it will be here waiting for me should I ever need to return. I stretch a little, do some gentle twists and side-bends, touch my toes a few times, yawn glorious and wonderful, and begin walking. My brand-new-yet-already-filthy official U.S. Army boots make a satisfying crunching sound on the gritty earth.
I’m fairly certain I’m facing the direction in which the chopper flew away. I’m assuming, perhaps wrongly, that the chopper was heading back to our camp. But maybe they decided to be cute and circled the mountain prior to landing and then they flew in a different direction in order to confuse me.
I don’t have a compass but I know the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. I decide to head toward the sun, which is east, because my gut tells me I watched the sun set behind this mountain last night when I was back at camp, turning up my nose at the Ranger Tea, which actually sounds delicious at the moment.
Scott said be back at camp within 24 hours. If I walk four miles per hour (which I know is a decent pace because I’ve spent hours on a treadmill walking at that speed) I could, hypothetically, cover nearly one hundred miles in 24 hours. Am I more than one hundred miles from camp? How fast does a helicopter fly? The ride to the mountain top couldn’t have been more than ten to fifteen minutes. I was half-asleep and very angry in my exhaustion fugue so maybe we flew for an hour. If a chopper can fly a hundred miles per hour, maybe I am a hundred miles from camp. Shit.
But they gave me 24 hours to find my way back. Over rough terrain. Something tells me I can’t be very far from camp.
I head down the mountain, my boots sliding a bit in the dirt.
I don’t know why but I’m smiling.
I DON’T MAINTAIN a four-mile-per-hour pace. Based on my understanding of how fast I usually go on a treadmill, I know I’m slower than that. I weave between the endless, tall, beautiful pine trees and skirt around rocks and boulders and hop over fallen branches and logs.
The only sound is my breathing and the crunch of my boots on the dirt and pine needles and leaves.
Kellan has said more than once that I have a gift for endurance. I’m going to find out if he’s right.
I do my best to continue in a straight line by keeping the sun in front of me, then above me.
My only concern is my thirst. I guess I could drink my
own pee. If I had any. Or something to catch it in. Hopefully it won’t come to that. I don’t want to get a dehydration headache. I used to get those at work, carrying trays and wearing those stupid men’s work pants. They were cheap Chinese crap, thick enough to use as a sail on a World Cup sailboat, like John Candy did to win the regatta in Summer Rental. As such, I sweated my ass off in them. The high-necked tuxedo shirt, bowtie, and vest didn’t help. You’d think I’d have sweated off a few pounds working there. But I always hit the buffet hard during our dinner break. The huge quantity of food would pull more water out of my body to make gastric juices. Combined with sweating, I often would have a terrible headache by the time I got home. I even threw up once because I was so dehydrated. I barfed in the kitchen sink while I was on the phone with my sister. She didn’t even notice.
I don’t want that to happen now, here, on this mountain, in front of a bunch of Army Rangers and Calista and Garth. And especially not in front of Kellan. He held my hair for me when I puked at the Glass Turtle after I’d gotten drunk in order to sing karaoke for him. Which was sweet of him. Combine that with the day I vomited Taco Bell all over Tommy Warcraft’s crotch and I seem to be amassing quite a history of regurgitation around, and on, the men in my life. Though to be fair Tommy Warcraft wasn’t much of a man.
It’s probably best to get back to camp as soon as possible. But maybe I’ll stumble across a water source along the way.
I do not wait long, as a couple hours later, I leap over a small ditch at the bottom of which is a stream of water. It’s barely a trickle. But it’s flowing downhill. It’s not drinkable, however. I stop and take a seat on a fallen log, thinking.
The trickle of water is running perpendicular to the imaginary line I’m attempting to follow through the woods which I hope, desperately, will lead me back to camp, assuming I make it before they pack up and leave without me (no way they would actually leave without me, right? Even though Shitmouth, er, Scott, seemed pretty darned adamant about me being there on time).
But getting back to the more pressing issue of water, I could follow the stream downhill and hope it empties into a river or a lake or becomes drinkable.
Or I could follow it uphill and see if it comes from a larger source that is drinkable.
I hold my breath for a moment and listen intently. I don’t hear anything resembling a river or running water.
I decide to try uphill.
I unsheathe my knife and carve a large arrow into the log on which I’m sitting, pointing in the direction I’ve been traveling. The last thing I need is to go searching for water, not find any, come back here and wind up lost and begin running back up the mountain the same way I’ve just come.
That would suck.
I use the heel of my boot to scrape a large square into the earth in front of the log on which I carved the arrow. The square is plainly visible so I should have no trouble finding it later.
I turn left, proceed uphill, and follow the small ditch, which I estimate to be north.
Just over a small rise is a huge granite outcrop. Water is trickling from the rocks and onto the ground, forming a puddle which leads to the ditch I’ve been following.
Jackpot.
I hold my hand under the trickle of water. The water is cold. Really cold. It’s probably rain water or snow melt that fell on the mountain hundreds of years ago and has taken all this time to work its way through the granite.
I cup my hands under the water. The water is perfectly clear. It smells clean. I slurp it up, swish it around my mouth, spit it out, and wait to see what it tastes like.
It’s absolutely delicious. It’s actually sweet. With a hard, mineral feel to it.
One of the Rangers said something about water being drinkable as long as it’s flowing over rocks, and not standing water in a puddle or pond where microorganisms can grow. Like dysentery. Or malaria.
But this water is fresh. I can taste it. Fresh mountain mineral water. It’s quite possibly the most delicious thing I’ve ever consumed.
Too bad I don’t have a snake skin to put some in for the road. Or a canteen. Couldn’t they at least have given me a canteen?
I guess staying alive in the wilderness for 24 hours really isn’t that big of a deal. Even without food or water. And it’s not like it’s snowing. It wasn’t all that cold last night on the mountain.
Perhaps it was, and I simply didn’t mind it.
I SPEND ABOUT fifteen minutes hydrating, drinking as much of the yummy, ice-cold water as I can before I feel it’s time to get moving again.
With a belly full of cold water, I make my way back to my tree with the arrow. I find the square in the dirt quickly, and then the arrow. Before I go, I withdraw my knife and make a small carving:
Claire Loves Kellan
With a heart around it.
It’s difficult to make the heart appear curved. I redouble my effort on the blade. The bark gives suddenly and the blade of the knife slices my hand in the soft spot between my thumb and index finger.
Oops.
After determining that I’m certainly not going to bleed to death, although it is bleeding pretty good, I figure screw it; it’ll give me a nice scar to commemorate my trip down the mountain.
I wipe my bloody, dirty knife on my pants, sheath it, and head off once more in the direction of the arrow.
The cold water I drank acts as a tonic. I feel better than I have since we began our wilderness training four days ago. My mind is clear. My stomach is grumbling a bit and I’m hungry, but I don’t mind it. The hunger is only within my stomach; I don’t have the full-bodied sleepiness and nausea I always used to get whenever I didn’t eat for more than three to four hours. I’ve always suspected I was hypoglycemic. But I was always too scared and too ashamed of my weight to go see a doctor to find out for certain.
There are no doctors here. In the woods.
Nor do I want one.
I feel as if I could take on the world. I could live here in the woods indefinitely. I could eat berries and drink mountain water forever. Bring on the Ranger Tea and Ranger Popcorn!
Okay, I need to reel it in. A bit.
But I’m in such a good mood! I’d never have thought I’d be jogging through the woods with armpits that smell like skunk and a vagina that smells like ass and fingernails that smell like poo and hair that smells like dirty hair, and I’d be loving it.
When Sheila told us we were coming out here in order to develop some authenticity for our characters, I was a bit scared and subsequently bratty, though I did my best to hide it. I’m pretty sure Kellan noticed, though. He’s a freakin mind reader.
And then when we got here and it was cold and there was no food and we drank pine needle tea and ate hot, goopy grubs, I wanted to cry.
When Scott slapped me on the ass to wake me up (not that I was anything close to asleep) and put me on the chopper in the middle of night, without Kellan, I wanted to murder him.
But now I could hug him.
When I get back to camp, I’m going to hug him. And slap him on the ass.
BY LATE MORNING, the ground begins to level out. I’m nearly off the mountain and back into the woods.
The sun is almost directly overhead, so it’s probably close to noon.
I’m wishing I had more water. But otherwise I’m going strong. The forest is beautiful. And the smell, my goodness it’s wonderful. The fresh, sweet pine aroma. Perhaps this is why people who camp like to camp. I’m not sure I’ve ever been camping. Perhaps Kellan and I should start.
I WALK, MOSTLY, for several hours. The sun is moving steadily behind me. I look back and try to adjust my course several times, trying to bear due-east as well as I can.
The shadows of the trees begin to stretch out before me.
The sun approaches the peak of the mountain.
Once the sun descends behind the peak, the woods will begin to grow dark. And cold.
I pick up the pace.
I begin to sweat. The cut on my hand stings and begins to bleed. Perhaps it’s my increased blood pressure. I suspect I’m smearing blood on my face each time I wipe away the perspiration.
AFTER ANOTHER LONG, long stretch of jogging, with short intervals of walking, because I felt as though I needed to pick up the pace, I smell smoke. Campfire smoke. I hope it’s not a forest fire. But that would probably be bigger and there would be more smoke. A lot more. And heat.
I continue jogging.
A few minutes later, I hear voices. Laughter.
I pull up and hide behind a tree. I’ve seen Deliverance once and once was enough. The last thing I need right now is to go charging into a campsite full of drunken hillbillies who would like nothing better than to rape my stinky vagina. Or maybe they’re gay and they’d rather have my butt, like they did to Ned Beatty in Deliverance.
I’m not Burt Reynolds and I don’t have a bow and arrow to fight them off.
But after a few seconds, I see Kellan come and sit down by the fire.
He’s eating a slice of pizza. Pepperoni. He’s holding a white paper plate and eating a slice of pizza.
What the fuck? No one said there was a Domino’s up the road.
I see Scott (aka Shitmouth) sitting on a log with his back to me.
Calista is there. As is Garth.
They’re all wolfing down pizza.
This pisses me off.
It’s worse than a camp full of drunken, potentially homosexual rapist hillbillies.
I take down my pony tail and put my hair in front of my face to conceal it, forming a hair mask. It’s not much but it hides my face.
I get down on the ground and crawl very, very slowly toward where Scott is sitting on the log. He’s the one wearing the If you can’t be a Ranger, be a SEAL tee shirt.
He shoves most of a piece of pepperoni pizza in his mouth. His shitty-smelling mouth.
Okay now I’m pissed at him again.
I move slowly across the earth, making as little sound as possible. Any second, I expect someone sitting around the fire to spot me lying on the ground nearby. But they don’t.
As I get closer, I wait for intervals of loud speech or outright laughter in which to move.
It takes about twenty minutes, but I’m eventually right up behind Scott.
