Journal (25 page)

We
moved along at an accelerated rate, running from what was behind us, trying to
cover as much ground as possible before dark.  Occasionally, when the
conditions were right, I dropped back or climbed to some high point to see if
we were being followed, and after, would jog back to catch up.  If they were
coming, they weren’t close because I didn’t see them or detect any evidence of
pursuit.  Maybe Gabriel hit Nora after all.  Once again, it’s a strange thing
to hope for, but as the saying goes, better them than us.

A
couple things to make note of here:  The first being that the road we traveled swung
close to the river at this point in our journey and started a wide, gentle turn
to the west.  The land also flattened out on both the east and west banks into
a broad valley and evidenced much past cultivation.  We passed half a dozen
silos in one grouping where, I suppose, farmers in the area had stored their
grains.  There was also an occasional building of the type to house farm
equipment.  In fact, there were several such machines in evidence, all in
various stages of decay.  On the opposite side of the river, I could see Highway
97 and a similar number and type of farming related structures.  And finally,
the weather; it was actually warm for a change.

We
also encountered a road sign announcing our approach to the town of Orson, elevation
1,329 feet, population of 1,950, and home of the Orson Huskies.  Only thing, the
“1950” had a black line painted through its white numbers and was replaced with
a zero.

In
the failing light of our approach to Orson, Anna and I walked together, holding
hands as if downtown window shopping on a Sunday afternoon.  It was a peaceful
few moments for me, and for the first time in a long time I allowed myself to think
of what could be, instead of what was.  I gave hope to family, community, and
safety.  I don’t know why, but I day dreamed Anna and me in a room somewhere,
not exactly touching but close together, just standing there, looking out an uncurtained
window at children playing in the street.  No weapons were in evidence, the
sense was relaxed, and there was a strong feeling of belonging.  This feeling didn’t
last long, of course.

When
we sighted the first few buildings of Orson, a neighborhood of single-family
homes, we spread out and turned east, as was our typical tactic in this
situation.  It was our intention to bypass the town in main to avoid a possible
ambush.

We
walked for maybe half a mile over uneven ground before spotting a structure
that some might call a single-wide mobile home, though there wasn’t anything
mobile about it.  It wasn’t on wheels, just gray cement blocks stacked four
high.  There also wasn’t anything about it that offered confidence it could
serve as suitable housing.  A limb from a tree growing at one end of the
trailer had partially split off the main trunk and rested on the roof.  Long,
thin, dead, branches hung down and were woven through with a vine of some sort,
a berry I think, effectively concealing one end of the structure.  Leaves were piled
deep around the base, and the windows were brown from dirt.  Near the wooden
steps to the door leaned a child’s bicycle with a black and white checkerboard
seat and flattened tires.  On the ground next to it was a plastic, blue-green
wading pool filled with rainwater, blackened from the leaves settled on the
bottom.

As
uninviting as it was, I checked out the inside anyway and found it surprisingly
clean and rodent free.  One end was comprised of a combination living room,
kitchen, dining area, and the remainder was divided into two bedrooms and a
bath.  The floors were dusty but clear of debris, and there was no smell.  I still
almost rejected it as a place to stay the night, though.  See, it appeared to
have only one door, meaning one way in and out; a death-trap in certain
circumstances. However, in the hallway under a throw rug, I discovered a trap
door that freely opened and exposed the underside of the structure and thus, a
secondary means of escape.  So that is where we stayed the night of April 14
^th
and where I started writing these words on the morning of the fifteenth,
finishing them that night — this night.

After
attending to our immediate need for food, and while the four of us were still
seated at what served as a kitchen table, I explained to Anna and Gabriel what
happened to Petra and me after our unexpected swim.  They, in turn, told their
story.  What follows is their narration in as much detail as I remember, and
word for word where recollection makes it possible.

“When
I saw you in the water, with just your head sticking up, hair plastered to your
face, looking at us speed away, it scared me to death, but when Gabriel said
that Petra went in, too, well, it was a feeling I don’t think I can describe”,
Anna said.  “I can tell you this; it made me literally shake all over.  My
muscles seemed to turn to mush.  I felt helpless.  Despite all that, in the
back of my head, I realized that if there was any chance at all of helping you,
I had to keep calm and get to shore.  That became my whole objective at that
point.  Get to land.”

Gabriel
did a half smile and added, “Yeah, I thought you were both goners for sure;
flat out done for.”  As he spoke, a gust of wind shook the trailer.  There was
a draft somewhere, probably the windows.  I could feel it on my face.

Petra
let out a little squeal upon hearing his words and, in a voice as quiet as a
sparrow’s breath, she said, “I didn’t mean to.”  She covered her eyes with her
hands and looked down at her lap. am I doing this because deif

Gabriel
quickly reached across the table and took one of Petra’s hands, “Ah that’s okay
baby sister, it all worked out.  Nobody got hurt or anything.”

Anna,
who was sitting next to her put an arm around Petra’s shoulders and kissed the
top of her head.

Continuing
with the story, Anna said that with one paddle they were only able to maintain
the slightest compliance of the craft.  Still, they managed for another mile or
so until the current ripped the remaining paddle from her hands.  “When it
happened, I just sat there at first and looked at it as it drifted away,
spinning in the current.  There was nothing I could do.”

I
noticed at this time, Petra had begun to squirm and shift around in her seat. 
It was completely understandable considering she’d been sitting there listening
to us adults talk for nearly an hour already.  Anna smiled at this and
stood-up.  Without stopping her story, she crossed the short distance to the
kitchen and started to go through drawers and cabinets.

“We
were pretty much at the mercy of the river from then on”, she said.  “I was
sure we were going to end up in the water, too.  It seemed the only thing we
could do was use our body weight to try and keep ourselves somewhat level.  As
far as going straight, forget it.”

She
stopped talking at this point because she squatted down and started going
through the cabinet under the sink.

Gabriel
took advantage of the pause in her narration to say, “I sat in the middle of
the boat with a hand on each edge and leaned one way or the other depending on
which side was high and which was low.  It was a crazy ride all right.  I don’t
even know how to swim.  If we’d gone into the water, I would have ended up just
like one of those bodies we’ve seen bobbing their way downstream.”

While
Gabriel was talking, I saw Anna pull a paper bag out from the cabinet she’d
been searching.  She opened it up and tore a big piece off, grabbed one of the
pencils I use to write in this journal, and put it down in front of Petra on
the table.  She sat down next to her again, leaned over, and drew something I
couldn’t see.  Petra took the pencil from her with a smile and started a
drawing of her own.

Anna,
once again picked up the story, “It seemed as if the boat was hitting every
rock and piece of junk, floating or otherwise, in the river.  The hull was
getting these dents all over it.  The sound was just terrible.  It was like it
was going to rip the thing wide open at any second.”

At
one point they ran into something so hard that she said it tore a small hole in
the aluminum just below the waterline, and the river started coming in.  At
first, she just held her hand over it, but that didn’t help much.  Gabriel got
the idea to cut a piece off one of the backpack straps, roll it up, and cram it
into the leak.  It didn’t completely stop the water from coming in, but it slowed
it way down.

As
I sat there at our little table and listened to Anna tel dark brownwotl her story, Petra sat
beside her, bent over that scrap of paper, her face just inches from what she
was working on.  Across from Petra was Gabriel, stretched out in his chair, turned
slightly to one side with his arm thrown up behind and over the back.  It all
gave me a sense that I had somehow been transported back in time.  It was like
a Sunday night thirty years ago, sitting at the dinner table with my family. 
The only thing missing was my mother telling me to turn around and sit straight
or to finish my dinner.  On one hand, it was a good feeling, like being in bed,
under the blankets on a cold night, not a fear in the world, and with that
drowsy feeling just coming over you.  On the other hand, it felt like I was out
of touch with reality, as if I were hallucinating the whole thing.

Anna’s
voice pulled me away from these thoughts and feelings, and back to her story. 
“The biggest challenge we faced was somehow controlling the boat well enough
that we could make it to shore.”

“Yeah,”
Gabriel said.  “It was out of control.  At one point the river spun us all the way
around, two full times.”

“So
then how did you finally make it to land?” I asked.

“Luck,”
she said.  “There was this piece of an old wooden dock that must have washed
downstream and ended up wedged in some rocks, partly in and partly out of the
water.  Gabriel saw it coming and was able to reach out and grab hold of it. 
As soon as he did, the current swung us around in front of it and a little
closer to the shore.”

Petra,
apparently already tired of her drawing, put the pencil down, sat-up straight,
and yawned.  After a second or two, she leaned her head against Anna’s shoulder
just as Anna was explaining that when they swung around the front of the old
wooden dock, it kicked their boat into a current that had split off from the
main flow of the river and carried them still further toward shore.

Almost
as soon as Petra leaned into Anna, the wind gusted and the vines on the outside
of the trailer scraped the siding, making a sound like an army of crabs
scurrying across a hardwood floor.  Petra’s eyes popped wide at the sound, and
she nervously looked side to side and to us.

Apparently
seeing both her fatigue and apprehension, Gabriel stood up and walked around to
where she was seated.  He clapped his hands a couple of times, gently, and
said, “Come on Petra, let’s get you to bed.”  To us he said, “I’ll probably
just stay with her until she falls asleep.”

Petra
stood up, and it looked as if Gabriel was going to lift her, but changed his
mind and said, “Ah, you’re too big to be carried, come on.”  I watched them
walk down the short hall to the bedrooms.

Anna’s
eyes followed them as well, and after, stared into the space they had occupied,
a thought no doubt residing in her head.  After a few seconds, she looked back
at me and carried on with the story.

“Ah,
let’s see, you asked how we got to land.  Well, eventually the current swept us
into shallower and shallower water until we started scraping things and came Definitions */
tifto
a complete stop.  We couldn’t see the bottom exactly, the water was too dirty,
but Gabriel chanced going over the side nonetheless.  He touched bottom all right,
it was only about hip deep I guess, but with his weight out of the boat, it
lifted off of whatever it was fixed to and floated free.  We almost became
separated at that point but, after a mad scramble, we somehow managed to get
the boat closer still to shore.  After that, I climbed out, too, and we pulled
the whole thing to the bank.  We quickly unloaded all our stuff and used the
machete to make the hole in the hull larger, essentially rendering the boat
useless.  After that, I shoved it back out into the current, where it drifted
downstream some more and started to fill with water at the same time.  It was
still floating off when I lost sight of it.”

They
took what they could carry and started walking back the way they’d come, the
direction Petra and I had gone overboard.  She said that was about the time the
storm hit.  At the moment of her saying this, almost like an orchestra playing
background to a stage play, rain started peppering the roof of our little
shelter, and thunder rumbled deep and throaty in the distance.

By
her description, the storm quickly grew in intensity to the point it became
clear that to remain out in the open was a threat to their lives.  They grew
concerned that the river would rise even higher than it already was, and so moved
away from it, west toward Highway 97.

“As
we walked toward the road, we heard a tree, and by the sound of it a big one,
give way and come down.  When it fell, the ground shook as if God himself had
reached down and touched the earth.  At the same time, the wind was casting all
sorts of things about.  A branch, about the size of a shovel handle, struck my
shoulder and glanced off the side of my head.  Gabriel got something in his eye
and, while trying to rub it out, was hit from above by a limb that swung down
as if hinged to its tree.  Visibility was almost impossible.  Besides all the
stuff blowing around, the rain was coming down so heavy that it was like
looking through a foggy window.”