Four men sit idle around a campfire, the
flames' iridescent glow casting dancing shadows across faces that neither
twitch nor stir. Their stares remains fixed, their focus deliberate. A single purpose has drawn them deep into the wilderness to momentarily escape the
respective lives that choice and circumstance have hewn from the slab of
fortune: the doctor, the lawman, the preacher, and the wanderer...all have
abandoned their titles this night to adopt the simple monikers that allow even
kings to reclaim their identity.
It is for the camaraderie that they have
gathered together, to hearken back to the glories of former days, when the burden
of age yielded to the caprice of their tempestuous youth. With gleeful exuberance
they recount their childhood tales, aided by the half-empty bottle of "Old
No. 7" that both clouds and guides their memory. No matter, for as tales
grow larger so too do their smiles, the unmistakable hallmark of time well
spent with friends. Long into the night they fill the forest with laughter,
merrily singing a ballad of days of old.
In time the unattended flames slowly die
and the men retire for the evening. As one fire retreats back into the earth,
another crests the morning horizon to welcome the dawn of a new day. The four
men rise early and bid their farewells before returning to the lives that for a
single evening had been left behind. The doctor will return to his wife and the
preacher to his, while the lawman also has a girl that awaits his arrival. But
what of the wanderer, the man who lingers long after the others have departed?
He stands idle beside the highway, looking south towards Atlanta, then turning
north to gaze down winding roads that climb the Appalachian mountains and
disappear far into the distance. He wants to follow that latter trail, to tread
its steps into an unfamiliar land of ice and snow where all the world is but a
stranger, save for that one face...the face his misses dearly, the face that
still haunts his memory every day.
In resignation he begins southward, glancing
over his shoulder with every step to imagine a life that might have been.
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I needed to escape last weekend. For two
days and nights I camped in the Appalachian mountains with three of my oldest
and dearest friends. Each of these men I have known for some twenty years and each is a brother to me. I needed to spend time with them to forget about the
reality of my situation, how I am about to lose yet another job to the fickle
whims of fate, how I don't have a plan of what to do next. I needed to forget
about those things and focus instead on what is actually important in my life
and what it is I actually want out of it. Of all the paths that I might take and
all the possibilities contained therein, there are only two things that I
actually desire. The first is to become an accomplished writer, and to that end
I am pouring my soul into completing a project that has been years in the
making. My second desire is for a woman I so foolishly cast aside. Somewhere
over the mountains she resides, far from my southern home where the snows of
winter are just beginning to fall. Of my two desires, one I have complete
control over while the other I have none. Instead I have only hope, a misguided,
undirected, and undeniably foolish hope that one day the woman I abandoned will
return, and with her a love such as I have never known before or since.
The skies over Boston grow cold as
winter approaches, yet it is only a soothing warmth that I still remember.
