Despite repeated rinsing the whiskey puke odor was still in his nose. He turned off his cell phone and put it in the refrigerator for no particular reason. He strapped on his shoulder holster and revolver thinking that it would be fun to shoot Daryl-Dwight in the head but then the problem wasn’t the Great Leader’s but the world’s and the only real solution was to shoot himself.
He drove to the Tucson airport and exchanged his compact for an SUV. He remembered to have breakfast because he was going to the woods of sorts. A burly brown waitress in Birkenstocks saw his copy of Alfred’s map spread on the table and gave suggestions for camping places. She was the typical eco-ninny but pleasant. Her green shorts and brown legs indicated that she was an experienced hiker.
“I don’t want to see anyone for a week including myself.”
“You’re in a bad way,” she laughed. “Try the east end of Aravaipa Creek up near Klondyke. It’s north of Bonita between the Pinalenos and the Galiuros. Take the fork up Turkey Creek so the Conservancy assholes don’t hassle you.”
“Thank you and God bless.” Sunderson had never said “God Bless” before but Roxie used to after he screwed her on the clothes dryer.
“Drop by and let me know how it works,” she said going off to wait on other customers. She smelled wonderful like a hay field and Sunderson felt a touch of life. He went into a huge sporting goods store and bought a cheap sleeping bag, a tarpaulin, a primus stove, a bunch of trail mix and freeze-dried food, coffee packets and a pot, and a canteen. On the way out he looked at a display of bowling balls, which reminded him of Xavier saying that religion, sex, and money aren’t separable. He was likely right. A human is as indivisible as a bowling ball, a biological knot like any other creature, a distressing notion but then so was much of life.
Three hours later he was camped on a flat up Turkey Creek a half mile from his car. The beauty of the mountain landscape made him feel insignificant, which was the feeling he was after. The heavy weight of his personality needed to disappear for a while. Properly and openly perceiving the landscape made his currently dismal self vanish. He had been confused since leaving home in Marquette to a degree that daily seemed impossible at his age when he should have had things figured out.
He walked and walked. Turkey and Aravaipa Creeks were obviously without brook trout but he realized that was missing the point. The truly important idea is where creeks were, often in the most ignored and neglected parts of the landscapes including marshes, swamps, and deep gulleys, landscapes from which the human race couldn’t extract money and therefore they were mostly left to simply be themselves. Marion had said that we have eaten the world and puked it up and except in isolated locations what we have left is mostly puke. This idea was an unpleasant reminder of the tinge of whiskey odor still in his nose so he knelt and snorted some creek water then rubbed some juniper on his upper lip.
The first late afternoon and evening were hard without his habitual alcohol. He simply never missed drinking every day except when he had the flu and then he felt virtuous about not drinking. He had walked so far his legs trembled so whiskey would have been nice and sitting near his campfire he was fearful over how long the nights were in late November, close to fourteen hours at least at this latitude, and worse far north in Marquette. He and Marion always celebrated on winter solstice, December 21, when it turned around and the light began to increase in increments of a minute or so per day.
