They Almost Always Come Home

by Cynthia Ruchti

  He thought he’d been so smart to leave his food pack with the canoe and take a minimum of food in his daypack when he blazed a trail through the woods in search of a waterfall named Lacy. It wasn’t a surprise to find the remnants of a waterfall but no active flow. The stains of water left their imprint on the rock face, but nothing remained that he could touch or photo- graph or hug to his heart. Like his own Lacey.

  So smart. Just a few food items. How long would he have to make them stretch?

  What made him grab his tent when he abandoned the canoe and food? The last things he needed for a short jaunt to snap

  266

  CYNTHIA RUCHTI

  a couple of photos were his tent and sleeping bag. Given the choice, should he have chosen the food pack instead? Staying out of the elements and having a place to sleep sounded good. But the idea of starving to death in the comfort of his tent offered no comfort.

  When the rain started, he’d been grateful for a roof overhead.

  Now it promised only deeper darkness—and little more.

  He pushed himself up from the log and shook off his

  lassitude. Could he use that word in a sentence? His weariness and diminished energy grew into full-fledged lassitude. Rehearsing vocabulary words could only fill so much of his day. He’d have to find a worthwhile way to occupy himself while he waited for deliverance.

  Recite Scripture? Days ago, he hungrily devoured what he

  read in God’s Word. The black ink on the white pages spoke with an almost audible sound, a Voice reassuring him of The Presence despite how things appeared.

  Only what lived on the fleshy walls of his heart and mind

  could speak to him now. Too few words. Too late to commit more to memory. Too late for a lot of things.

  Where was his solo trip notebook? In his clothing pack. He

  felt his way to the tent. He let the flap hang loose as he patted his way around the interior in search of the pack. His hands found the pack and searched its surface. Belts, buckles, straps, zippered compartments. His mind oriented him to the scene invisible to his eyes. This one? No. One compartment lower on the right side of the pack. Yes. There it was.

  He sat back on the tent floor, removed the pen from its

  nest among the spirals and flipped the notebook open. His fingers moved over the pages, searching for one without the subtle indentations that let him know he’d pressed his pen into its wood fibers. When he regained his sight, he might laugh at where he’d started writing and at his distorted pen-

  267

  They Almost Always Come Home

  manship. At the moment, all that mattered was writing, get- ting the words—God’s words—recorded. As if that mattered to a sightless man.

  After a minute with his head bent over his work, Greg chuckled at his folly. Without eyes, he could write lying down with his paper on his stomach if he wanted. He didn’t need to see, but he could feel the words scrolling onto the page. He resisted the easy ones—“For God so loved the world . . .” “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want . . .” “Behold I stand at the door and knock . . .”—certain he could bring those familiar verses to mind without thinking later on when he’d exhausted himself trying to dredge up other passages of Scripture he knew he ought to know.

  The sound of the pen tip on the paper soothed him as he wrote.

  “The godly man does not fear bad news nor live in dread of what may happen. He is settled in his mind that God will take care of him.” Psalm something or other. Living Bible paraphrase.

  “Be strong and take courage.” Joshua or Deuteronomy or one of those books.

  “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” New Testament, he was fairly certain. Or was it?

  “Thou wilt keep in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee.” King James. Sunday school memorization contest when he was in fifth grade and the family next door hauled him to church with them—to his dad’s chagrin.

  “Faith is the evidence of things unseen.” The book of Hebrews. Chapter twelve, if he wasn’t mistaken. Or was it eleven? “The evidence of things unseen.”

  When had those words meant more than now?

  A wolf howled somewhere in the distance. The echo drifted on the air currents. Greg’s prayers hitched a ride.

  268

  Greg stretched the kinks out of his arms and shoulders and back. His wrist rebelled against his efforts to loosen the cramp from the writing marathon the “night” before. He’d slept with the notebook in his other hand. Before he closed the cover and slipped it into his breast pocket, he bent up a bottom corner of the last page on which he’d written. When he thought of more verses, he’d know where to start.

  Crawling out of the tent, he was greeted with radiant

  warmth on his face. Sunny day. Good to know.

  He lifted his face toward the direction the warmth was

  strongest and opened his eyes, straining for a hint of light to reach his retinas. Nothing.

  A low growl quickened his heartbeat. His pulse settled almost

  instantly when Greg realized it came from his empty stomach. He’d have to eat something. Part of a fruit leather? He’d divide it in fourths. A little for breakfast. More for lunch. Some for supper. And he’d save the rest for tomorrow’s breakfast.

  First things first, though. Bathroom break.

  Without thinking, he lifted his left arm to check the time.

  Just like a sighted man would. He slipped the pointer finger of his right hand under the watchband and prepared to fling

  39

  269

  They Almost Always Come Home

  it toward the flashlight graveyard when it occurred to him he had a ropeless method of finding his way back to camp. The alarm on his watch.

  It took some finagling to set it up by feel only, but Greg managed to configure the watch to beep, a sound he’d found annoying before he lost his sight.

  He set the watch on a flat rock near his feet and shuffled into the woods, arms extended, memorizing the position of the trees and roots. When the sound of the beeping grew too faint to hear, he backed up a couple of paces. That was far enough. When he was done with his morning routine, he followed the sound of the beeping until it was right underfoot again. He lifted the watch and kissed it before slipping it back onto his wrist. “Good boy,” he told it.

  Sparky hadn’t been near the friend his watch promised to be. It needed a name. Taking a cue from the biblical method of naming characters like Isaac, whose name means “laughter,” and Ishmael, whose name means “God hears,” Greg christened his watch, “In His Time.”

  Certain elements of his memory were razor sharp in this land of photogenic light and shadows. He recalled that Hagar, a woman rejected and condemned, adrift in her own wilder- ness experience, reached out to the Almighty and called Him “The God Who Sees.”

  “My Lord. The God Who Sees.”

  He spread his arms wide and invited the sighted God to walk him through his wilderness.

  ********

  Suicide.

  270

  CYNTHIA RUCHTI

  He chewed the last mini-bite of fruit leather, using his

  tongue to dislodge a piece that got stuck between two molars. He needed every morsel.

  Suicide, he thought again. The idea of finding his way back

  through the twist of woods to his canoe, then back across the remote lakes to one that was more well-traveled spelled certain suicide. The exertion of the trip didn’t frighten him, nor did the fact that he couldn’t keep his normal pace. The journey deal-breaker lay in the impossibility of finding his way with- out the benefit of sight.

  Willingness, he had in abundance. But his internal GPS

  system was missing a key component. Sight. Hard to triangu- late without sight.

  The danger of wandering deeper into hopelessness kept

  him imprisoned at his camp.

  “Secure the perimeter,” he told himself and any woodland

 
creatures listening in. “If I’ll be here a while, I need to make it as safe as possible, as convenient as possible, and easier for someone to find me.”

  He drew a slow breath. It didn’t imply a lack of faith if he felt

  he needed a more permanent camp setup, did it? He’d gladly abandon it all at the first sound of a search plane. Or another human voice. “Hey, buddy? You okay? Need help?” Sweet words.

  The only ones he could imagine holding greater sway for

  him? “Greg, I love you. From the depths of my heart. We can make this marriage work.”

  ********

  Rolling and tugging, crawling when necessary, Greg moved

  a series of downed logs and soccer-ball-sized rocks to form a two-foot-wide runway leading from camp to the water’s edge.

  271

  They Almost Always Come Home

  When finished, he stood tall and felt his way down the slope, tapping first one side then the other with his feet.

  When he reached the water, he lowered himself to a rock- bench. He stripped down to his underwear, grateful for the penetrating warmth of the sun. His workout hauling logs invig- orated him. He lifted one arm, turned his head, and sniffed. He couldn’t see. But he could smell. And he did.

  He left his socks on. What a sight he must have made. The socks provided some small protection against the uncertain lake bottom.

  Small rocks no more threatening than a pebbled pool lined the approach. Good. Sand would have meant greater difficulty in scooping drinking water. He had no choice. He’d have to risk water-borne diseases like Beaver Fever and drink straight lake water. His filtering kit rested comfortably and unused in his food pack underneath his stashed canoe.

  Greg slapped his forehead with his palm. He should have filled his canteen with water before his open air bath. Now he’d have to wait for any silt to settle after he climbed out or look for another route to the water’s edge, farther away from his Jacuzzi.

  He felt his way with his feet as he ventured deeper into the water. Knee-deep. Thigh-deep. Deep enough. He squat- ted, lowering most of the upper half of his body into the icy water. He splashed it over his shoulders, shuddering as he did. Bending forward, he submerged his head and used his fingers to comb the water through his wiry hair. No soap or shampoo. Those, too, were in his food pack.

  If he’d guessed right about the sequence of amorphous days and nights he’d lived through since the lightning, Libby would have expected him home days ago. How long before she started to worry? Would she worry? Or would his absence serve only

  272

  CYNTHIA RUCHTI

  as yet another annoyance? He scrubbed hard at his scalp, then shot up for air, spewing like a whale.

  He couldn’t risk floating on the water. Without the gift of

  sight, he could easily become disoriented. No. Straight out from shore, carefully counted steps, and straight back. That’s all he dared attempt.

  He squeegeed his hair with his hands, sloshed more cold

  water on his armpits, and headed back the way he came. It comforted him to feel the water lapping lower on his legs as he walked. The right direction. Closer to shore. A simple knowl- edge. More valuable than a Harvard degree in this place under these conditions.

  Would Libby call the police first or his dad? She would call

  someone, wouldn’t she? Only Providence could tell them where to look for him. He’d made his own twisted detour, blazed his own trail. No one would expect him to venture this far off the traditional routes through this region. Only Providence.

  “Jehovah Jireh, my Provider. Jehovah Shalom, my Peace.

  Jehovah Rapha, my Healer.”

  Greg pulled his pants over his wet body, grabbed the rest of

  his belongings, and walked sock-footed through the gauntlet of fallen logs toward the living room of his camp.

  His balance was improving. He cringed at the thought that

  he was getting used to being blind. Maybe someday he’d look back on this time with no more clarity than he remembered two semesters of high school Spanish. ¿Donde está el baño? could elicit a response to let him know the location of the nearest restroom if he were stranded in a Mexican village, but that was about the extent of his recollection of those semesters.

  That one important question remained in his mind, plus

  the amazing taco parties Señora Carolina threw for her students twice a year.

  273

  They Almost Always Come Home

  Was there any hope he’d live long enough to forget how this trip ended?

  The sun dried the beads of lake water from his skin and hair as he sat in its warmth. When the breeze picked up, he slipped back into his shirt. He’d been heading out of the park when he took this detour. Nothing in his clothes pack was any cleaner than the shirt he’d worn earlier. When his rescuers came, they’d find him dressed in crusty clothes.

  Message in a bottle. Could he put a message in a bottle and launch it on the lake, hoping someone somewhere along the line of the waterways would find it? How many years from now?

  One of the empty water bottles lying on the floor of the Cherokee would work perfectly—a few too many miles away to be of any help.

  Like the last straw in an already groaning wagonload, it dawned on Greg that he’d left his keys in the ignition of the Jeep. Another in a string of smart moves. He’d heard Libby call him clueless under her breath once. Maybe she was right. Clueless. Sightless. Hopeless. And hungry. His stomach rumbled again.

  “And for your dining pleasure this evening,” he told it, “we have an excellent vintage lake water. For an entrée the chef rec- ommends the sun-baked fruit leather, small but succulent.” He felt in his shirt pocket and added, “And for dessert, a single, salt-encrusted sunflower seed.”

  ********

  After his meal, he crawled straight forward toward the cliff edge, found it with his fingertips, then scooted back a cou- ple of yards and planted a couple of medium sized rocks as a

  274

  CYNTHIA RUCHTI

  warning barricade. Two or three more trips and he had built something that must look like a caveman’s guardrail.

  Hunger made him weaker than he thought it could. He’d

  lost a day to the storm, then who knows how many to the lightning strike and its aftereffects? Three days—or was it four?—since he ate anything that resembled a legitimate meal. His body would adjust to that, too, wouldn’t it? Every time Libby embraced a new diet, she’d complain hardest the first few days. Then she fell into a couple of weeks of tolerance before deciding it was her duty as a Wisconsinite to support the dairy industry and pork farmers, most particularly through consuming frozen custard, sharp cheddar, and bacon in all its forms.

  “Greg, get your mind off food.”

  So, the list of unmentionables now included food, anything

  having to do with vision, death, and happily ever after. Not necessarily in that order.

  A low roar interrupted his thoughts. Closer. Closer. An air-

  plane! Probably one of the forest service float planes.

  “Hey! Hey! Over here! I’m here! HELP!”

  Greg jumped up and down, swinging his arms in wide,

  frantic arcs. “Down here! HELP!”

  He needed a way to signal the plane. Was it night? It felt

  like night. The temperature had dropped considerably in the last few hours. He’d start a fire, no matter what the risk of set- ting the woods ablaze. No. No time. The plane sounded as if it were almost directly overhead.

  His flashlight. He could flash an SOS-like signal into the

  air. That would draw the pilot’s attention. But he’d tossed Sparky aside as worthless to a blind man. How wrong he’d been. Somewhere tangled in the underbrush lay the one piece of equipment that could help him. The drone of the plane’s engine faded into nothingness while he searched for it.

  275

  The sun on his face. Warm. Penetrating. Black as the stone li
ning of a burned-out tomb.

  Another day. Another colorless, lightless, sightless day. He’d lost count of how many dawns he hadn’t seen. Eight? Nine? Stretches of warm and cold, dry and drizzle, a patch or two of rain again, twisted together with no defined edges.

  Was it too much to hope he’d wake one morning and have to shield his eyes from the blinding sun? Blinding?

  Sight impaired. He was sight impaired. Temporarily. The word blind was for people who stayed blind. Not him.

  Introspection held the potential to sour his existence or sweeten it. Somehow he had to find a way to keep the sour at bay. The hours stretched into days with little to do but think and calculate. How many days without any more protein than the bugs and bacteria floating in his drinking water?

  Purchase orders scrolled through Greg’s mind. Cases of canned peaches. Spaghetti sauce. Flats of hamburger buns. A gross of Bibb lettuce heads. Freezers full of turkeys.

  40

  276

  CYNTHIA RUCHTI

  What he wouldn’t give right now for the overripe bananas

  the produce guy at Greene’s tossed in the dumpster. Or the slightly expired lunchmeat. Or less-than-fresh fish.

  Fish. He could have fished, if he’d brought his fishing gear

  rather than his useless photography equipment. His camera. Brilliant move. What was he thinking? How long did that dream last? Not quite the two weeks of his dream solo trip. All the fabulous shots stored in his camera might as well remain there. What was the point of capturing such incredible beauty if he could never view it?

  His mind traced the contents of the digital memory of his

  camera. The island with the lone pine sentry. The fireball sun- set threading its flames through the line of trees. The mist hovering over the surface of the lake like a downy blanket too light to settle. The leaf caught in the back eddy between two rocks. The columbine’s regal crown-blossom, claiming sover- eignty over its domain. The rich mosses. The otters at play. The loons in dance mode. The eagles outstretched against a cobalt sky.

  The memory card in his mind still held the shots. For how

  long? If this blindness lasted, and if he survived long enough to be rescued, how soon before the darkness snuffed out mem- ories of sights and colors and vastness and grandeur?