“Listen,” says K. “Not even the radio’s working.”
Blips of static as her fingertips spin the dial. The low hum of our tires on the hardball. The subtle rattle of our camping gear in the back.
“Maybe that’s got something to do with it.” I point over the steering wheel.
A telescope swoops into view, out of the trees.
“Wow, look at that!”
The telescope is skeletal, brilliant. It stands up out of the hills like some monument to our better angels, an astral stenographer compiling what stories the stars yet have to tell.
“I can’t google what it is,” says K. “Do you have service?”
“I dunno, check my phone.”
A creeper-choked fence blurs by. No Trespassing. This is Government Property.
“Is maps still working?”
“Nope,” says K. “No bars. No GPS. Nothing.”
We drive by another sign. You Are Entering a Federally-Mandated Quiet Zone.
I glance at K. and smile. “We’re really in the boonies now.”
“I guess so!”
“Maybe if we stay on this road, we’ll eventually see signs for the campground.”
“I dunno, I thought it said we still had another hour till we got there. You think we’ll hit service again?”
“I hope so.”
The radio telescope sinks back into the green in my rearview. We’re headed to the Monongahela National Forest for a much-needed break from our careers, from endless emails, from the traffic around D.C. Take our minds off things for a while. A chance to do some camping. Some wildflower hunting. Our own little adventure.
“Looks like it’s gonna rain,” says K.
I peer up through the windshield. “Watch it dump right when we need to pitch a tent.”
West Virginia’s Allegheny Mountains keep out not only electromagnetic interference, and other accoutrements of the modern world, but most tourists, too. Barely another soul on the road. The woods and the hills hug so close you can’t see around the bends; have to wait till you get there. I steal a glance at my phone. Still no GPS. It’s a funny feeling—that twinge of anxiety we get nowadays when our phones go kaput. Refreshing, too. No more notifications. No more must-answer texts from my boss at the Defense Logistics Agency. No more Facebook, or glimpsing posts from all my old army buddies, pics of their kids, what we’re getting up to these days and, sure as the sun sets, up come the pics of the fallen. Those fallen during deployment, those fallen after. Scrolling through social media anymore is like strolling through a cemetery, only you recognize all of the names on the graves, photoshopped rainbows and patriotic flags pasted alongside faces which haven’t aged a day since they were last seen, breathing.
I need a distraction.
I open my mouth to spark a conversation about how the U.S. military launched the first GPS satellites back in the nineties—then shut it. Nope, I’m not talking about military shit. Not out here. I’m not even going to think about Afghanistan. Or war. Or the price paid. The emails from Colonel so-and-so waiting in my inbox at work, needing maintenance on such-and-such medical device while the U.S.S.-whatever is in port. None of it.
“Hey, you really think we’ll find a Canada Lily up there?”
“We better!”
*****
I hop back in the truck and slam the door. A barrage of rain pounds the windshield. “Well, it’s wet.”
K. hands me a towel to dry my hair. “D’you see the creek?”
“Oh yeah, it’s full.”
“Is it going to flood?”
“Um, I don’t think so. Our spot’s on a bit of higher ground. We should be alright.”
“But what if we need to leave?”
“Yeah, there is that…”
Only one way in or out of the campground and it’s across a span of three interlocked cement blocks plopped in the middle of the Williams River—what passes for a bridge way up in the mountains, water already brimming across the upstream side of it.
“We should be alright,” I say. “Rain’s supposed to stop overnight. I think it’ll all run off the mountain by morning.”
We’re one of only two parties in the whole Tea Creek Campground. Practically got the place to ourselves. Wasn’t much to see on the way up. Could barely make out the fog line on the side of the road as it wound us up the face of the mountain. Grey sheets of downpour. Muddy, swirling ditches.
After waiting in the truck a spell, we catch a break in the rain. We jump out. Select a spot. Unpack the tent. Pop up some bungies and fling an oversized tarp purchased specifically for this rain-forecasted weekend overtop it all. Just in time. Right as I light the camper stove to heat up some Hamburger Helper the deluge starts again. Part of the allure of the woods, in the off-season no less, is the serendipity of the less-than-reliable weather, yes, but also the chance to feel like we might be the only two people left in the world. We sit in our camper chairs, K. and I, paper plates warm on our laps, and watch the rain make channels around our campsite. Thunder vibrates in our backs and butts. The rumbles pass and we hear only the surge of Tea Creek behind us, engorged with tannin-stained excess ere it confluences with the Williams. Light fades and we call it a day. At least we got the tent up. At least we’re mostly dry and warm after a long journey. We couldn’t have hoped for more, not us. We dream, together, the volume cranked high on the white noise of a seething mountain stream.
*****
Come morning, the water’s receded a bit but remains as frigid as ever. After a bacon breakfast, we scout about the campsites. Still no service. Though we do spot a cantankerous crayfish barring its claws at us from atop a stone; in a blink, it vanishes in the runoff.
“Let’s go,” says K. “I want to see Cranberry Glades before it rains again.”
“Okee-day!”
The Monongahelas are some of the tallest mountains in the state. No glaciers ever made it south of the Mason Dixon line but many species more associated with boreal climes did. And they’re on display at Cranberry Glades.
We pull into the gravel parking lot and hop out. K. readies her Nikon. A boardwalk leads us out from under the plip-plopping maples and tulip poplars onto an open bog. A few squat alders and rhododendron grow here and there, but it’s cranberry that rules here. A ruddy, plush carpet of roots and decay, a soggy foundation for other species to take hold.
“Oh, look here!” says K.
Our first find: the sanguine-striped cup of a pitcher plant. Carnivorous, there being little to no soil to sap nutrients from in the bog but plenty of bugs. Peek down in the pitfall and find a few gnats slowly being digested into juice.
“How did a plant figure out how to lay an ambush?”
“It never figured anything,” says K. Snap, snap—her Nikon. “It’s just DNA and where it ends up growing.”
“Nature and nurture?”
“Basically, yeah. For everything. Even us.”
“Except human beings have choice, right? Free will?”
Snap, snap. “Pfff, I know better than to get into that conversation with you.” Snap, snap.
We remain vigilant for a mythic blue crayfish. A sign tells us they tunnel up to six feet into the bottom of the bog. Other organisms, like frogs, repurpose the crayfish’s burrows. We find a turtle instead, wakened out of hibernation. And skunk cabbage just beginning to twirl its way up out of the leaf litter. And purple, gentle orchids abloom in oh-so-tiny patches of sphagnum.
Snap, snap.
I don’t mind standing aside and waiting. I wait and watch K. finesse her focus, put her fingertip to the shutter, readying herself for the moment the wind grants a reprieve and a stationary subject. I wait and watch the water. The water of the bog moves imperceptibly through pillars of root, islets of peat. Younger me would have been less patient. Younger me would’ve been bursting my banks to hurry on and do something with their life, like joining the military and deploying once, twice, nearly thrice. Older me has already done it and seen it. Older me spends more of his time in his head than anywhere else; grown sick and tired of his own thoughts. Older me has learned to wait and to listen to something other than himself. Listen to a bog. To a turtle bellyflop into the water. To the blips of raindrops serenading what story they yet tell, a different sort of story, one with no end and no beginning.
In certain sections the boardwalk submerges and almost disintegrates altogether; keen to become bog itself. A pair of blue jays don’t like us invading their territory. The jays follow us, squawking, as we slop our soaked boots back to the truck.
“No Canada Lily,” I say.
“No Canada Lily,” says K. “But we won’t find one in a bog. Maybe back along Tea Creek where I spotted some beebalm.”
“Beebalm’s blooming already?”
“Oh yeah, everything’s blooming.”
There’s something in the cool wetness of the woods and in the smell of the leaves unfurling that makes her heart glad. In a way nothing else can. Not even me.
*****
“There it is! Stop!”
I punch the brake. The truck’s tires skid on the gravel road. A sign points to the trailhead.
“Mill Point Prison Trail.”
“We found it!”
“Yay!”
Not two steps into the trail’s untrimmed grass and I’m thinking—Oh, we’re gonna get some ticks on this one. But we don’t. We wander down and around the various loops. Over two-by-four bridges astride eager streams. Along one set of abandoned concrete foundations after the next, nothing and no one left to defend them from the slow assault of weeds and neglect.
“Mill Point Prison was a minimum-security federal prison,” I read aloud from an interpretative sign. “There were guards but no walls or fences. The forest and the remoteness of the location kept most inmates from escaping and—”
“And what?”
K.’s snapping at a cluster of wild daisies whose mass of roots, bit by bit, continue to undo some bygone mason’s hard work.
“And they had conscientious objectors from World War II held prisoner here. And illegal moonshiners. And one guy named Howard Fast who went before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1950 but ended up in Mill Point cuz he was a commie.”
“That’s not spooky.”
Wind rustles the trees. It’s like we stand in the bottom of a green canyon, its walls aflicker with the winking of thousands of eyes. K. waits to refocus her lens. A stream, not far, babbles down a set of slimy steps, of which I imagine ranks of prison-issue canvas shoes stomping up, once upon a time. The wind dies.
“At least we’re not like that anymore,” she says. Snap, snap. “Sending people to prison, I mean, just because they don’t wanna kill other people.”
It’s only the shudder of a memory, an unexceptional one: never-ending lines of trainees in their grey, sweat-soaked t-shirts trotting their sneakers down the road.
“Every time my left foot hits the ground—” sings the drill sergeant, in cadence. “All I wanna hear is that kill sound!”
Kill! right, left, right Kill! right, left, right Kill!
“Yeah,” I say to K. “At least.”
Down around another bend, a concrete staircase seemingly materialises out of the hillside. We take what we find. The air cools as we climb and come under a passageway of junipers, who knows the last time anyone took a pair of clippers to them.
My fist shoots into the air, signalling for her to stop.
“What is it?”
I point.
At a small camo-green box. Wedged between two piles of rocks. Right where the stairs expire into the hill and the junipers open and grant a view of the stream, the edges of the woods, the layout of the prison that was.
“It’s an ammo box.” For some reason, I’m whispering. “Don’t touch it. It might be booby-trapped.”
Which sounds immediately ridiculous but then, in the leaf litter, I find five spent shotgun cartridges. I pick one up. Can see where the firing pin impacted the back of the shell. The smell of gunpowder on my fingertips.
Kill!
I drop it. “Let’s get outta here.”
“Why would somebody hide an ammo can in the middle of the woods?”
“I dunno. Somebody hunting where they shouldn’t be, probably.”
On our way back to the parking lot I keep glancing over my shoulder. Like the trees watch our every move.
*****
By the end of our second day, I’m beginning to crave a little screen time. Part of me wishes I had downloaded a movie or audiobook or something onto my phone, but I brought only real books. The People, Yes by Carl Sandburg. Quiet Strength by Rosa Parks. They lay an arm’s-reach from me inside of the tent, but I don’t reach for them.
I lay instead thinking of a book I don’t and will never own. A book I refuse to read. A war memoir penned by an officer I served with on my first tour. “This book has Hollywood blockbuster written all over it!” It was a tough tour, yes. They usually were for infantry grunts. Everyone walked away with stories to tell. Well, nearly everyone. This officer’s memoir, however, became an instant bestseller. I remember a handful of guys saying they had read it. Many were impressed. “This is our story!” they said. “This is what it was like.”
Others, not so much.
“Don’t waste your money.” “It’s all about him and how badass he was.” “Fuckin’ tool.” “D’you hear what he wrote about Sergeant so-and-so?”
I remember searching out the title on Amazon—4.9 out of 5.0 stars. Hm. Still, I did not add it to my shopping cart. I refused. Not out of any personal aversion, I barely knew the guy, but out of a general allergy of mine to all species of heroic military tale; an allergy developed precisely because of my seven-plus years of active-duty service. Instead, my curiosity piqued, I scrolled through the ribbon of related, recommended books.
The titles blurred by: “A raw, authentic account of untamed Green Berets in action.” “A true war story.” “A Navy SEAL’s firsthand account of American heroism.” “An untold story of American valour.” “Forceful!” “Powerful.” “Gripping!”
I’d somewhat inadvertently stumbled into the self-pollinating ecosystem of the modern military memoir. The War on Terror, Iraq, and Afghanistan spawned a locust swarm of “gritty narratives” and “action-packed, highly emotional firsthand accounts of enormous sacrifice and bravery.” Most penned by elite warriors with Twitter handles. Not a terribly diverse gene pool. Most hero-authors appear to be your stereotypical white, male, red-blooded American. Which probably tells you more about their intended audience than it does, say, the nature of war.
Or does it?
“The inside story of what it’s like to be in war.” “Takes the reader into battle.” “Puts you right in the middle of the action!” “This book is not a book that lets you read about what war is like, this is a book that puts you in the middle of every battle with the bullets flying past you and explosions rocking your world.”
So what? I ask myself, trying to sleep but not sleeping, rain drum-rolling across the top of our tarp. So what if most of these guys penned their “harrowing” tales of valour with the help of ghostwriters and professional editors? What’s wrong with an immersive war story so people can know what it’s like, or at least pretend to themselves that they know what it’s like? What’s wrong with the packaging and selling of “authentic” war accounts like they’re the latest summer blockbuster?
“Every American should read this book.” “This is a necessary read.” “Stories about the sacrifices our servicemen and women make every day should be MANDATORY reading.”
I don’t even realise it when I fall asleep. The vinyl insides of our tent vanish. My eyes don’t even glimpse the darkness behind my eyelids, but a screen. It’s 2003 and I’m sitting in a classroom in what people used to call ITB Land, Infantry Training Battalion, in ol’ Fort Benning, Georgia, recently rechristened Fort Moore. Drill sergeants stalk up and down the rows of desks. We, recruits, in the process of shedding our civilian exoskeletons, sit at attention, eyes glued front and centre to a screen projected over a stage. This is memory, but not. One of my drill sergeants really did put on clips of Black Hawk Down during my first few weeks in the service. The thumping Hans Zimmer soundtrack; the stark, colour-drained look of the cinematography; the star-studded array of overwhelmingly young, male faces—as familiar as battle drills. It’s one of the few films I can honestly say I’ve seen a dozen or more times during my time in service. The Department of Defense actually went out of its way to help make Black Hawk Down a reality. It provided the actors with helicopter training, Ranger training, Spec Ops training, even the opportunity to meet many of the real-life soldiers who served in Mogadishu. Bullets flash in night vision. Choppers hover over rooftops. Sweaty, dirty, mostly American faces struggle with the pain, the horror, with the choices between greater and lesser evils. It takes a force of will on my part to break the spell, to tear my eyeballs from the screen and glance to my left, to my right. All of us buzz-headed recruits, we watch mesmerised. A classroom become an indoctrination machine. Then it comes up, one of the final scenes. “Hey Hoot, why do you do it man?” says Eric Bana, playing a Spec Ops guy on the verge of leaping back into the fray. “What, you some kinda war junkie? You know what I’ll say? I won’t say a goddamn word. They won’t understand. They won’t understand why we do it. They won’t understand that it’s about the men next to you, and that’s it. That’s all it is.” And I’m not sure I’m seeing it, but I am. Every recruit next to me, up and down every row, even the drill sergeants—everyone’s got at least one hand under their desktop. In their crotch. I rub my eyes but can’t unsee it. A roomful of forearms quietly pumping away.
*****
“You were tossing and turning a lot last night.”
The rain’s gone but the trees still dribble with fresh drops—pip, pip down the back of my neck.
“How’d you sleep?”
“Oh, you know. The usual. Thinking too much.”
“About what?”
“Um, training.”
“Training?”
“Yeah,” pressing my hand up against the underside of the tarp, water sloshing down. “How we train people for the next war with stories from the last one, how we convince ourselves war is awful but sometimes necessary, how there can ever be such a thing as a good war, or a war of choice, when war’s in our very natur—”
K. cups her hand over my mouth. “Shush, space cowboy, before you work yourself up again. You wanna go for a walk by the river or not?”
Only the remnants of rain pitter-pattering through houses of rhododendron.
“Yes.”
We say hi to our camp neighbours as we cross the bridge. A couple of toddlers cast lines for the fat minnows they see down under the surface of the water. Upstream, a fly fisherman wades in up to his knees. It feels good to see people doing good things. We amble down a dilapidated road. Fuchsia beebalm heads poke up through the waist-high nettles. The static feedback of the river floods my ears, my mind. My thoughts begin to stray. Can’t let it go. Can’t stop eddying, transporting myself back in time, when, in our downtime between missions, we’d play games to distract ourselves. Dominoes. Spades. While occupying a country the last thing you want is to be stuck with nothing but your thoughts to occupy your mind. Wondering when the hell you’re getting out of there—if you make it out. I remember a couple of guys who threw in together and bought themselves a stupidly huge flatscreen. I don’t even remember how an electronic of that size made it all the way out to our teeny-tiny base in the Afghan boonies, but there it sat: fifty-six inches of pure, unwavering distraction taking up half their hootch. Epic video game battles ensued. Halo. Mario Kart. Call of Duty. It’s the latter that draws the biggest crowds. The tactics, the equipment, the manoeuvres—they’re rote for us. It’s like we get to do the things we always wanted to do, in war, in a video game more so than in real life. There’s a soldier in all of us. It’s a funny feeling, standing there, hopelessly absorbed, the controller vibrating in your hands with every shot, every explosion, using war to distract yourself from war.
And how is what K. and I are doing up here in the woods any different? We’re nature tourists. Snapping photos of that which ultimately does not belong to us, but to everyone, if anyone, really. We make our wildernesses into a utility. A cultivated resource to tap into. Oxygen generators. Carbon sequestration facilities. Pens for preferred wildlife. Playgrounds for city- and near-city dwellers to escape to. Escape the monotony of our lives, the bleeps of our phones, the all-too-routine traumas we visit upon one another, the systemic injustices of our so-called modern civiliza—
“Oh, there it is!”
K. darts off the path and scrambles down the embankment. Whips out her Nikon. I follow her down. In the shade under an elm, on a slim stalk about up to our belt loops, downturned towards the ground, hangs a single lily bud. Just bloomed. Its orange petals, freckled black, curl back on themselves. Fuzzy, rice-grain stamens jut out into the world, as though to say to passing pollinators, kiss me.
“Is that a Canada Lily?”
“You bet your ass it is!”
About a hundred snapshots later, I help her back up onto the path. We find another lily. And another. And another. K.’s radiant with discovery.
Afterwards, ambling back across the bridge, she wonders, “Why can’t we live here, hm?”
*****
The rain lets loose again, then stops long enough for us to get a fire going. The logs are soaked and no wind’s to be found—smoke chokes the boughs. But it’s worth it, if only to dry our socks and eat burnt marshmallows and sit and stare into the flames a bit, twilight settling in, the meaty parts of our arms touching. Our thoughts we keep to ourselves.
I remember when I was a sergeant, when the army began this new program for a virtual reality combat simulator. The Pentagon loves video games nearly as much as it loves movies. Games that put you right in the middle of the action. The more immersive the better. It’s dark when you step into the combat simulator. Then the walls flicker. Every surface a screen. Yellow desert. Merciless cerulean sky. Surround-sound speakers vibrate the floor with the rumble of your armoured truck. You sit in a turret in the middle of the room. Air puffs out of your fifty-cal as you depress the trigger at no-face brown people running across the wall. Turbans on their heads. T-shirts. The no-face people fall to the ground. Lay there. Never a drop of blood.
Our general impression, among other sergeants and myself, was that this virtual reality whatever-you-wanna-call-it is pretty much bullshit. A waste of taxpayer money. Let’s take our guys out into the woods and shoot a real fifty-cal with real bullets so when we deploy, we’re ready to shoot—
“Real people.”
“Huh?”
“Uh, nuthin. Talking to myself.”
K. continues scrolling through her phone, making edits, enhancements to the wildflowers we’ve seen.
“I seriously have like over two thousand pictures on my phone.”
“That all?”
“I’ll never have time to go through them all. Do you have any bars?”
“No, um,” turning in my chair, “I actually have no idea where my phone is.” This doesn’t alarm me as much as it normally would, back home.
“I don’t have any.”
“Bars?”
“Yeah.”
K. pockets her screen and props her chin onto her fist. Her eyes reflect the iridescence of the embers.
“I don’t want to go back,” she says. A sigh escapes through her nose. “But I guess we have to.”
*****
“There it is.”
My finger points over the steering wheel. The radio telescope veers back into view, now on the opposite side of the road.
“It looks smaller, doesn’t it?”
“It does,” I say. “Weird.”
“Maybe we just remember it looking bigger.”
Another hour or two down the road, the telescope long behind us, nearly out of the mountains and back into our jobs and phones and the busyness of the lives we’ve made for ourselves, I spot a billboard. It stands erect with fresh posts over a barn slowly disintegrating into fields of thistle. The Few. The Proud. The Marines. A saber bisects a man’s automaton face. I already know the story, so many do. Enlist. Make something of yourself. Become someone else. A member of the Few. A Force for Good. Here’s a ticket out of your dead-end life. Free college. War will make a man outta ya. And I wonder when I bought into it. The same ol’ story they’re still selling. Why? Because it works. Generation after generation, the story still works. And I wonder where our stories come from. What needs they nourish. Stories of war. Stories of transformation. Of resurrection. My mind attempts to articulate an answer to this primal mystery but leaves me, at the end of it all, with only an image: ashes swirling across the surface of a clear stream.
“Oh, yay!”
“What happened?”
K. holds up her phone. “Service.”
I laugh. Steal a glance at my own. Emails pile into my inbox. I drop my phone back into the cupholder. “Yay,” I say, and sigh. “Back into the fray.”
