He didn't like those kind. How was the asphalt made? The stories he meant, he didn't like those kinds of stories that were lost and forgotten forever, beneath the "sands of time". Whatever that means. He had heard that term once, somewhere. I'll be lying somewhere in the sands of time... Ah, Kryptonite, that's where!
No matter. His thoughts were scattered like the balls on the billiard table. He could either re-rack them or start hitting them one by one into their pockets as he walked.
Walking and hiking were a necessity for him. That was this. This was that. He was walking. Thinking, pretending he knew what was real and not real, what was in his mind and what was coming out of his mind.
The imagination, that's what led him here. Here on this dirt path in the "town woods", which clearly had been paved some decades in the past, in a time where his father had been born. His mother too, he supposed. His mother had been born then too.
The path was gently curving through the town forest, until it hit a fork. Going left it went down towards the water. He had heard or read or thought somewhere that the river had been wide and flowing before industrialization hit. Now, with the town's population having swelled to 30 thousand residents, from the few thousand that had been there at the beginning of the century, and the surrounding towns using the river as their water supply, all that remained were swamplands, impassable lands that no developer wanted a part of as it would cost a fortune to fill in the land with something solid to build upon. The sad part of all of it? The river was now shrunken to a shallow pool of its former glory. Glory that, to be truthful, was nothing compared to a river like the Mississippi or the Colorado.
There he was thinking of these things again. "These things", he constantly questioned himself! What did he mean by "these things"? Every time he started thinking about "society" he started wondering about the buzz-word actions of the day. Sustainability. Green. Almost always he bumped up against this quiet seething rage inside himself and the other high-minded individuals he had been surrounded by in college. This rage... to put a thought into it. It was as much about the sense of guilt he was made to feel with the veil pulled back from his eyes as it was about the desire to do "good". Knowledge had certainly led him to sorrow.
Going back to these chunks of asphalt. Who had built the road here? Why had they built it? What had been here in the past, hundreds of years ago?
Native Americans had lived on and in and of the land for tens of thousands of years before Western Europeans--the more "advanced" society--had come along. What did they know that the great minds of the 20th century didn't? What did they know of life, of living, that we didn't? What did they know of Holy?
That's what he realized he was bumping against. The affront to the sacred. The assailant upon the holiness and amazingness of nature that was Western living. Funny, that.
What had it come to that we could no longer enjoy that which nature gave us without ruining it for the future. Well what did we think of the future? What did God think of the future? Did God exist anyway?
Look, each step of the way through human history we've had predictions of the end of the world. St. Paul seems to insist that his followers follow him in his celibacy, not so much for the fact that he abhorred sex, but for the reason that he felt time was better spent in preparation for the end of the world, for the second coming of Christ, which was to be in his lifetime. And there are many examples since then of times that people thought were coming to an end.
Those individuals were living for the current moment, preparing for the end of "now." However, in their preparations, they were focused on good deeds, and furthermore suddenly the "hoarding of material wealth" seemed... well, unimportant.
He kept pondering as he walked the familiar route. A small toad hopped across the path in front of him, the two sacs on the sides of its head were clearly evident. That and it's browner color and rough-looking skin really gave away its true nature. How did anyone ever get frogs and toads confused? And were those sacs actually full of poison?
He had taken the right at the fork, away from the river and towards the rest of the forest. It wasn't too large, at most 100 acres. He actually had heard that once and never really understood what an "acre" felt like to be on. Why acre? Why not something that we could understand better, like "minutes it takes an average man to walk"? Sure there were some blatant sexist and "normalist" things in there, but everyone would understand, right?
At any rate, the path he was walking took him about an hour to do a full loop if he just took the main road. There were a number of off-shoots he could take, if he really wanted the extra time, or if he wanted to check in on the fort that a few local adolescents were building. That was always risky business though, as it was hard to gauge when the kids would be there, especially on weekends like this one.
He looked down at his bare feet as he walked, careful not to tread on any large or sharp stones. Walking barefoot had become easy after he started doing it regularly. The leather sandals he carried with him did well to mask that when he went into more "civilized" places. They didn't understand, other people, why he did that. It's probably because they hadn't tried walking barefoot for a while themselves, and they had been taught from a young age that everyone has to wear shoes and the ground is dirty.
A slight snort escaped from between his lips and out his nostrils, or rather his right nostril because the left was almost always clogged. Of course the ground was dirty. Any place that was clean was human-made and suspicious.
That's not to rule out the human-made places that were dirty. Those places, the ones that instantly came to mind when he thought of it, were probably worse than the roads he was walking on in terms of dangerous pathogens. Or worse. Needles. Broken glass. Blood. Hepatitis.
Those places were the common sense places where one should NOT go barefoot. He knew that much. it just seemed as though folks really thought everywhere was that dirty. Clearly not the case.
Then again he had never walked in a foreign country, in places that he had heard about on the continent of Africa where kids walked around barefoot all day and if you didn't have a worm or parasite from that before the age of 5 you were considered blessed. So maybe there was something to the idea of shoes, there. How small were those parasites or worms? Don't you think you'd be able to see them?
Regardless, the more you walked without shoes, the more calloused and accustomed to that type of travel your feet became. He had seen on the TV once, a man had run the Boston Marathon barefoot. Totally no shoes. And when he was asked afterward how his feet felt, there was no complaining. The guy just walked off. Yeah he looked as though he hadn't cut his hair in about thirty years and his beard was something out of a movie, and he had no shirt on and had clearly been in the sun for about ten years straight. But that shouldn't discount the fact that the guy didn't even have a limp at the end of 26 miles of running. He would have started limping after just five. And roughly one third of Americans couldn't even run that if their lives depended on it.
This wasn't the peace he had come to the forest seeking, though.
He breathed, and kept walking.
The air coming in had a sweet, pine, and wet scent to it. That feel of the earth, of the trees around him, of the needles scattered around, of the sun spotted through the sparse needled foliage overhead. That was what he had come for. He kept walking.
Sally--and really, what kind of name was that?--would be waiting for his text saying that he had finished his walk. His attempt at getting closer to God. He really should be telling Tim, his mentor, the guy from the church that said he saw promise and untapped potential in him and would he be interested in meeting with him regularly to dig into doubts? That's what Tim had said to him a few months back when he had come to a few church meetings in a row. Sally had brought him, and he had gone because he had no other reason not to. The church met on Sundays, but you could sleep in after a night of partying because the service started at 1:00. So he had said yes, first to Sally, then eventually to Tim.
It was Sally who had asked him about his views on God first. And Tim who had dragged out of him that he did not want to believe God existed because what kind of all-powerful all-loving deity would let his father die from a heart attack when He was seven and his sister to get raped when she was 14?
Tim didn't really have any words for him after that. Which he was perfectly content with. Any words Tim had said would have sent him flying with verbal fists. Too many people tried passing the "God has a plan that we cannot see" line by him as if that would make it all okay and understandable. Instead, Tim responded with two tears from his eyes, first the left then the right. The brown eyes that looked at him and he had to turn away out of shame. He hadn't meant to bring his pain and slap this older guy in the face with it, just had meant it to... to put up a warning sign? He wasn't sure. Why had he told Tim on that first time they had met?
Truth be told he had left that world behind him when he had moved out East from Colorado.
Everyone says you can't run from your ghosts. Or something like that. They are right, but even worse; when the ghosts and everyone from where you left just stop talking to you, you start to wonder if you ever lived at all.
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