Moss

It was getting dark again and cold again. Toby was wheezing by this time. He was using the walking stick with more and more dependency. Muscle up, Marine, he told himself. You’re not a momma’s boy! The idea of spending another night out here was unacceptable.

His spirits rose and fell. A tree might look familiar for a second or two and he’d think, Okay… Okay… here we go, I know that tree, please God, I know that tree, don’t I?

But the next tree might be twisted or somehow odd, and he’d have to admit he never laid eyes on it before, and surely he would have remembered the twisted tree, or the dead half skunk, or crossing the dry riverbed. The more unfamiliar the trees and rocks and thorn-bushes and dried up streams and dead half-skunks he came across, the more he realized he was nowhere near his Winnebago. It had been thirty-six hours from the time he had gone off for firewood.

“Muscle up, Gyreen!” he hollered out loud. “They gonna send you home in a body bag!”

Every couple of minutes Toby would stop and listen. He hoped against hope to hear his name being called.

He pictured his two grandsons in the rear view mirror on the way up here. They were sitting as far apart from one another as the back seat allowed, both silent and sullen listening to their walk-mans, or whatever the hell they were listening to. They wanted root beer. They kept asking for root beer. Root beer! He had hotdogs and marshmallows and chocolate candy bars and Cheetos and Pepsi and hot cocoa packets and four T-bones and ninty-seven dollars of other assorted items but he had failed to provision “root beer”.

His daughter had looked sideways at him when he confessed this egregious error.

He had tried to get them to talk. He started a song, “One hundred bottles of beer on the wall, one hundred bottles of beer…” and found he was by himself when it came to the singing of songs. Sharron sat as silently as her two boys, the only difference being that from time to time she would voice a strong desire to be allowed to drive.

If he was going to die out here, Toby considered, he was going to die a very lonesome death. This was going to be a story rarely retold, a story of one old fool named Tobias Lent, ex-staff sergeant, ex-husband, ex-father and grandfather, ex-accountant, ex-golfer, meeting his end by his own stupidity. It was going to be a bumbling old man’s wondering off into the woods story. A death with no dignity story only a fool would bring up at dinner.

The poor old guy just wandered off and got himself lost.

I should have kept an eye on him!

It’s not your fault—you couldn’t watch him every moment.

It was not quite dark by the time Toby fought his way through the brambles ducking under thick vines, and came into a clearing in the midst of ancient trees and centuries of fallen leaves, and though nothing looked familiar, all thoughts of impending doom suddenly vanished within him.

He stood absolutely still, moving only his eyes, slowly taking it all in. It was lovely and quiet. He studied the bolls of the trees dripping in moss, and lowered his eyes down at his feet at the carpeted forest floor, and everything he saw he basked in, gazing at nothing short of splendor, absorbing the perfection as though he were breathing through his eyes.

THIS was heaven. This was perfect. The colors were perfect. The rich, heady, loamy smell of earth was perfect and all of it, every bit of it, filled him with a happiness; an inner joy from head to toe, from heart to soul.

He laughed for no reason but the witnessing of something akin to nourishment. The gentle patches of blue sky he could see through the trees tops bathed him. The dark green moss soothed him like a mother’s arms holding him tightly. The sounds of the forest, the rightness of it all, and the smell of fertility, of life, like a womb, like a warm hug, made him laugh like a baby laughs—no known reason for it, but instinctive and honest.

The sounds of a helicopter throbbing overhead silenced him immediately. He thought to run for the tree line, but there was no tree line. He listened to the chopper whirring overhead and continued to listen as its sound diminished and finally was gone.

Toby threw his walking stick away from himself. The forest, once alive, had now gone silent. He hadn’t heard the sound of a low flying helicopter since 1967, and it changed something inside him now as he sat down in the twigs and damp earth and began to feel cold and hungry again, and very much alone again, and lost like never before.