Deep Forest (202 hits)
Category: UberMadness! EntryRating: 2 on 1 review (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by NerfHerder <NerfHerder.at.comic.com> (View user info) at 2006-11-21 11:56:23 EST
This post was an official UberMadness! entry. Click here to view the original matchup.
"Pair up, lumber jockies," rang out the boss' voice. Much like the violent blow of the steam whistle or the Windows startup sound, the lumberjacks who called the Canadian Rockies their home knew the familiar shout as their call to action.
"Magruder and Applegate....G5. Sloan and Silbert...Q7."
As the boss handed out the day's assignments, someone always made the same joke. Today it was my turn.
"Berger and Butterfield...F2."
Cupping my right hand to the right side of my mouth, my joke rang out loud and clear.
"You sunk my battleship!"
Scattered laughter prevailed for the first few, precious seconds but quickly turned to boos and death threats as always. Nobody but the new guys thought it was funny. My usual partner, Sy Hedges, was late to the assignment meeting as usual, and slumped over to where I was standing with his ax already over his shoulder.
"Damn. Just some days you don't feel like going out there," Sy said.
"C'mon," I said, taking a big whiff of the air and spreading my arms. "What job is going to be better than this? We're outdoors in one of the most beautiful areas of the world all day, we're barely supervised and we get to use ax..."
"Sturgis, is that you," yelled the questioning slavemaster. "Stop sucking Sy's dick, get your map and get the fuck out of my sight."
Sy and I quickly grabbed our map and compass and set off to our site. Each day, a two-man team was given a small section of the Canadian Rockies to work on. Usually it would take a team between a few days and a week to clear the trees in any given sector, depending on how fast the men were chopping and how dense the lumber was.
We caught a ride to our section with one of the boys on a Cruncher Buncher for the day who was cutting near us.
As our paths diverted, me and Sy gave him a friendly nod and continued on foot. As we jumped off the machine, the pine needles crunched underfoot and I was reminded how great this job really was. I looked at Sy to see if he had noticed the same thing and realized he was already several paces in front of me.
In this business, a big part of enjoying what you do is taking a little extra time to enjoy the beauty of the world around you. Sy hadn't seen that for a long time and it was starting to take a toll on him. I still took some pride in my work, but it was getting increasingly hard for me to destroy something that I admired so much.
"Sy, wait up," I said, bringing myself to a jog in order to catch up with him. I was still a few paces behind him but I could see he had stopped walking and his head was tilted back. His nostrils were wide open and he had a smile on his face that perhaps Sy had even forgotten how to do.
"Wow Sturgis," he said. "Somethin' different about this place."
I crossed the small stream separating Sturgis and myself, highly skeptical that a few steps would make any difference in the already impressive forest.
But he was right.
As my foot stepped across that little stream, a sweet, misty air seemed to invade my nostrils. It wasn't just the scent of fresh pine needles and Canadian air, but something different that I couldn't put my finger on and didn't really care to. Such was the invigoration and other worldliness of the sensation.
The sky reflected a vibrant blue that was queer if not downright wrong for the season.
The trees almost seemed to glow and were planted much more sparingly than in other parts of the forest, almost as if they were each planted there to require one to specifically admire each tree on its own.
But what was the most noticeable was the overwhelming sense of pure happiness that conquered my soul. I think Sy summed it up best when he said,
"I just feel so...good."
Simple words but also true words. For minutes, Sy and I basked in this good feeling. Eventually responsibility reared its ugly head and knocked my conscious into moving forward with the job.
"Alright Sy," I said, "as much as I'd love to stay here, we've got a job to do. Check the map. Where do we need to go?"
Sy laid the map on the ground and calibrated his compass. I stood by, admiring the trees planted there. They didn't look like the other trees in the Canadian Rockies. It was almost as if someone was caring for them on his own, trimming branches to make sure no tree interfered with another's' branches or even thought about it.
"Uh Sturgis," Sy said cautiously. "We're here."
Shit, I thought, I knew this place had been too good to be true. Now the question was how Sy and I would get out of destroying this little piece of heaven.
"We can't chop it down," I said.
It was heresy. We were on par with a hooker who would not spread her lips and a conductor who would not raise his arms. We were deserters. We were pansies. We had come to do a job and we had let ourselves get in the way.
On the other hand, we were noble activists. Standing up for what we felt and believed in. This part of the forest was different from any other, there was no question in my mind. This should be studied not by the blade of an ax but by the inquiring minds of science. Maybe it was some sort of feng shui or the trees gave off some sort of drug but whatever it was it needed to be known but human kind rather than cut down and used as toilet paper.
For the first time, I noticed a squirrel running across the pine needles. As he was scampering from tree to tree, he had made a crossing on the ground and crossed my path. As I stared at him, he stopped.
I had seen squirrels before but none had stopped to stare as I did at them. But the stare finished prematurely on a glimpse and the squirrel continued to run. Even that small encounter, though, was not a usual critter encounter. Most of the time, I feel as if the animal is looking at me to find out whether or not I will charge them or try to harm them in another way. This time it felt like the animal was looking in me, somehow.
"Did you see that?" I asked, turning to Sy.
Something told me he had seen something a little better. With his arms held out like a perch, Sy was playing host to four Red Shouldered Hawks, each quite content to be on Sy.
But not as content as Sy. His grin was bigger than anything I've ever seen in the Rockies.
"I don't know how it happened," he said. "I was yawning and then these guys just came over and plopped down as if I was made to be a sitting post."
At once, all three birds looked as if they had stayed their welcome, spread their wings and flew North. Sy didn't lower his arms for minutes afterward.
As we explored the other parts of this magical forest, my mind was wide open. I had already been shocked as I never thought possible thrice today so why wouldn't the shocks keep on coming?
On our journey through the seemingly never-ending land, we casually spied five dogs, two foxes, plenty more hawks and Sy said he made contact with a lion but was too dumbfounded to tell me before the lion moved off. Many of them came right up to us and nuzzled or licked our hands. It was something out of a fairy tale. How did such a place exist?
As we moved deeper and deeper, Sy's radio crackled and we were both reminded that the outside world still existed.
"Sy, come in, Sy, this is Yogi Bear, come in."
Yogi Bear was the name the boss used for himself whenever he needed to call someone on the radio. Usually I would think it a clever name but now the interruption enraged me. I snatched the radio from Sy, who was about to respond, and threw it on the ground. Still intact, I brought my ax out from the back of my suspenders and brought it down upon the radio, splintering the conglomeration of plastic and wires to the four corners of the Earth.
Then the rain decided to visit.
Usually I would take cover from the rain. I don't like being wet and I hate being soaked to the bone. It's annoying, really.
But today was different. Today I saw the rain as just another part of the Earth and Nature. The rain was falling to replenish not only the trees around us, but would pool and provide the animals with refreshment as well. It would wash away any impurities and make the spot new again.
I craved refreshment more than folks in beverage advertisements or pilgrims in the hot, desert sun. Because my longing came not from my senses and Earthly desires but from something deeper inside me.
If the sky has an eye, I looked directly into it and thanked it. Raising my hands, the warm rain melted away any cares and responsibilities that were left after splintering the radio. For that moment, the only thing I wanted or cared to do was absorb the gift from the sky.
Walking side by side, with the rain subsiding, Sy and I went further into the forest.
What we saw at the end of our journey was unlike anything we had seen yet on our journey or would ever see again.
It was an apple tree, deep in the Canadian Rockies. The apples had that shade of red that I had only seen a few times in sunsets while flanked by brilliant shades of yellow and orange. The red that commands you to admire it from the inside of your mouth.
As I reached out to grab one of the delights, a thunderous voice from atop one of the nearby mountains warned me to stop.
I looked around for the source of the vociferation but found none other around save Sy, who was also searching with his eyes.
Dismissing it as another quirk of the strange land, I reached once more for an apple. And again, the deafening articulation stabbed from somewhere out of range of my eyes and commanded that we halt.
"Where are you?" I asked, "And who? Who be it that commands us not to eat the fruit of the woods that belongs to none but those who find it?"
"If anyone may command thee," boomed the voice, "it is I."
"And who be thee?" Sy asked timidly.
That moment, our boss and taskmaster came from behind us and grabbed us each by the ear.
"I'm the guy that signs your fucking paychecks, you morons. Or at least I used to be. Where the fuck you been all day?"
"Boss," I said calmly, liberated by the still pervasive sense of the woods, "don't you feel it?"
As if being awakened for the first time, the boss rubbed his eyes and yawned. A grin started to creep across his face that I had never thought possible. A grin of unimaginable joy and...
"I don't know what the fuck you're talking about but I don't see one felled tree around here. If what I'm supposed to feel is rage, then YES."
The trees around Sy and myself seemed to stop glowing. The birds stopped chirping. Everything seemed grayer. The sky had returned to its natural gloominess. Sy and the boss had already begun to walk back to the camp, most likely to be fired and fire, respectively. As I joined with the former, I afforded one last glance at the woods to see if maybe the feeling and the glow were merely hiding from the boss.
I thought I saw a glint off a tree in the distance. And the glint was red.
As my pupils widened, I could clearly make out the outline and substance of the apple tree that so shortly ago had seemed like the culmination of our trip.
I had stopped walking.
I looked forward at Sy and the boss. And then back to the apple tree. The boss had noticed I had stopped and shouted for me to hurry up.
But I took off the other way, towards the apple tree. Still wet from the earlier rain, the drops skidded off my skin, left to wallow in my tracks.
The boss continued to shout threats my way but I knew he could not catch me with his shouts and would have to rely on his legs.
As I came to the tree, I plucked the apple I had been so enamored with before. As the boss charged up to meet me, I attempted to defend myself with nothing more than a look of innocence and joy.
It didn't work.
The boss speared me to the ground and shoved my face into the pine needles.
"If you take one fucking bite of that apple, you're out of here, you hear me?"
I bucked the boss off, elbowing him in the ribs and rolled the other way. Before I could sink my teeth into that red delicious, he was back on top of me. Fists pummeling my kidneys, I again used my elbow to connect with the boss' nose, hearing a satisfying and sickening crunch.
As he staggered off with his hands atop his face, the blood pouring from his nose looked pitiful compared the red I held in my hand. As I brought it to my mouth, the boss issued one final warning.
"You know exactly what will happen if you eat that. It's bigger than a job, you know."
I knew. But I had to know more.
Chomp.
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Submitted by kaos-king (user info) at 2007-06-04 22:52:34 EDT (#)
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