The mission
At some point along the line, I stopped working. I'm not sure why, I'm not sure how. Maybe I used the work that I was doing for school as an excuse to not work outside of that realm, and maybe that's fair. Nonetheless, instead of filling the time with thinking about how I was going to improve in all of the areas that bothered me - I'm lonely, I'm too fat, I'm don't read enough, I don't write enough - I focused on the first problem as if it would solve the rest, as if another's acceptance of the way that I was would allow me to accept myself. For a while, this worked - I've always looked for something to obsess about, something that would fill the empty hours between every minute, and the long line of shes helped a lot.

But here I am now, after a summer wasted in sloth, after a year spent gradually becoming afraid of my own writing and my own growth, a year of looking toward you not like a man but like an addict. And if you're reading, I'm sorry - that's one of the factors that turned a good thing bad.

It's time to rebuild.

The people that I admire accomplished the things that amaze me through sheer sweat. The problem was believing that I could become the person that I wanted to be without the work that's always at the base of everything good. It's time to work. It's time to build the person that I want to become - not expecting results, but believing that the work itself purifies me. The work itself - reading, writing, exercising my mind and my body - is the good life.

Anyway, this journal is part of that. I need another reason to write, so here's one. Thanks for getting through all the rambling above, here's a story.



The Seeds
Spring '05

Dutch ran out of the yard and into the woods with the terrifying speed of a tall man who was too drunk to slow down, but when he fell on a root and passed out only a few feet from the edge of the porch-light, he slept on his stomach with his ass in the air just like a little baby. Rowan watched his friend collapse in the woods without feeling any need to turn him or to see if he was okay. He’d seen worse from Dutch before. Nobody else seemed surprised, either. Eiron was Dutch’s brother and he didn’t seem to notice, he just pushed some Old English empties off the table so he could carve something into a piece of firewood. Rowan took another drag and passed the joint to his mother. She looked like she was too comfortable on the plastic deck lounge to move.
“Mom,” he said to his smoking mother, “Mom, I’m eighteen now, and I have something to say about that. I love you and all that stuff, but I’m tired of school and I don’t want to go this year and it’s time for me to leave home and go do something else, like help Colin out at the cabin if he needs the help. I know that you’re mad at him because he hasn’t been home in a while but he needs the help and I can help him maybe we can both come back to visit for a little but only if I help him because he needs the help.”
Rowan watched her exhale and take a breath of the cool sweet September air. “Okay,” she said. He took the rest of the cigarette when she passed it back.
Rowan took another drag. “And I think that he would need the help, it’s harvest time and it’s a big job with everything that’s got to be picked before anybody else can find it and take it themselves and you want to be able to take that and dry it right but there’s still lots to be picked so it’s a big job and I think that he could really use the help.”
“Okay,” she said. He saw her reach under the stained white chair. She found the bag and rolled another cigarette.
“And he’s got the space. I don’t think that it would be much trouble to fit me in there because I don’t need much and I’m ready to work and that’s why you should let me go, that’s why you’ve got to let me go, that’s why I’m leaving.”
“Goodbye,” she said. “Say hello to him for me.”
Rowan understood.

Two days later, Rowan stood in the dirt at the end of his driveway, under some trees that weren’t going to show any colors anytime soon but must have been getting ready to think about it, and waited there for Eiron and Dutch. In the bag that he dropped in the dirt so it leaned against his bare ankle was a collapsible fishing pole with extra lines and flies, a stainless steel leatherman that he had somehow stained (with all twelve essential tools, including the bottle opener), a bigger knife, a few lighters, a fresh flashlight, a dusty pot and a dirtier frying pan, a steel spork, a small spade, a bag of pot, a sleeping bag that the man said was used in the Swiss army (even though it was just a normal sleeping bag), a pound of rolling papers, the cheapest water filter that anybody could find with a water bottle to pump it into, and then he’d added a compass just for the hell of it. What was taking them so long? Eiron didn’t have to be at the diner until three and it wasn’t like Dutch was going to school today. It didn’t matter. Rowan was in a goddamn great mood and that was the end of it.
When Eiron’s truck rolled up, Rowan had barely stepped into the slightly smoky cab before he started talking at Eiron, who drove fast through the cool crisp morning, and Dutch, who crumpled up in the bitch seat with no signs of bitterness.
“I’m ready, motherfuckers. This is it,” Rowan said. “I’m ready to work like a dog and sleep like a frog, way out there in the magnificent woods of Tioga County with my brother. I’m ready. I’ve got everything I need to stay out all day on the harvest trail, all day on the job until I go on back and sit with Colin like hardworking men do. I’m ready, motherfuckers, I’m ready. Look at my clothes if you don’t think I’m ready. Synthetic, bitches.”
“Where’d you get the money?” Rowan thought that Eiron was born skeptical and was pretty sure that he’d die the same way.
“I saved, asshole! How long have I been talking about this? How long have I wanted this? Maybe you smoke too much and your memory’s going. How old are you now? That’s a goddamn tragedy if I’ve ever heard one, nineteen and you don’t remember anything and you don’t listen.”
Dutch laughed so hard that he hit the top of the cab with the back of his shaggy head, and that was enough to set off Rowan and Eiron. It wasn’t until a while later, when they were turning down some dirt road or another that Dutch actually said anything.
“Will he have anything for us there?” Dutch spoke softly but melodically, as if he were singing along to tender idiot music.
“First rule of harvest,” Rowan said. “Don’t smoke away the crop.”
“Oh,” said Dutch. “How much longer is the trip, then?”
“Well, you might be able to take a little,” Rowan said. “Don’t worry.”

When they pulled up to Colin’s cabin to find Colin, they didn’t see him around. From where they were, the house was quiet and the world was calm. Rowan was pretty sure that he was probably out at some patch harvesting, and that he’d probably be back soon if they just waited. Eiron must have not wanted to wait because he yelped and before Rowan knew it the truck had turned around and they were driving fast away from the cabin.
“Did you see it,” Eiron yelled, “did you see it?”
Rowan hadn’t seen anything but a quiet house and a calm world and also some orange tape across the door that said something.
“Crime scene, motherfuckers!” Eiron drove so fast over the dirt road that the truck shook hard.
Dutch hit his head again but Rowan couldn’t laugh. “Crime scene!” Rowan yelled so loud that nobody could hear him. Somebody told, he thought. Somebody told or somebody saw and somebody found it and the police must have got Colin. Colin was gone. They must have found the cabin and caught Colin so now Colin was gone and everything that he worked for was gone and Colin was gone. Colin was gone and all he could feel was the shaking of the truck on the dirt road, which shook his eyes so hard that they thought about blooming into tears with the dying leaves.

Rowan handed the letter from the sheriff’s department to his mother. They hadn’t heard from Colin, and they didn’t want to go back to the cabin, so this was the first sign that he was really gone. After a few moments, he didn’t want to watch her read it anymore, so he got up to leave the room. As he passed her, she reached her right hand up and out towards his. He stopped, and she held it.
“Stay here,” she said.
He did.

Everyone lived through a long winter. Rowan and his mother sat at Colin’s trial and knew that he was guilty. She found Rowan a dishwashing job, which he kept. He was good at it because he could let his mind drift away with the steam. The standing still grated on him. He still saw Dutch and Eiron pretty frequently, though, and they weren’t the type to let any changes get to them. Sometimes, he’d smoke with his mother after work, and they’d sit there together in the cool dark winter night even as the supply ran short, and he’d think to himself that she was quiet like she had been before, but this new quiet was an aggressive kind of quiet that was louder than it had been before, and night after night it was the same way until the long winter had slowly begun to lose ground to a wet spring and one night when he was smoking with her after he was thinking of how it felt to walk home in rain-soaked mud earlier that day and at that point he thought to himself that they’d all been standing absolutely still for so long while the world wasn’t slowing down at all.
He explained this difference in speed to his mother but she didn’t listen enough to reply so he continued. “It’s that I’ve been doing the same thing for years, you know? How long did I go to a school that I hated and then come back here to wind down for sleeping so I could do it again? How long am I going to go to a job that I hate so I can come back here for some money to continue doing it? How long do I have to stay?”
“Welcome to the world, Rowan,” she said as she sat in the long dusty couch that wasn’t very different at all from the plastic deck lounge that had been outside.
Rowan thought about that for a little while. He thought it could be possible, but then he took another puff and he knew that it shouldn’t be, that he was too young to be held in this small dark cold house while the planet turned faster and grew warmer and spring came for real. Colin was gone but he was right to leave, he was right to try to live out there in the swiftly turning forest where he could move, so Rowan took another breath and spoke hot breaths into cool smoky air.
“I’m leaving,” he told his mother, “I’m leaving for the woods, I’m leaving soon to continue Colin’s work. They probably got the whole crop when they went to the cabin in the fall, but I have seeds. I have a bag of seeds that he gave me and I’m going to the woods, far out, so far that nobody will know and I’ll live there for a while so I can plant those seeds and in the fall I’ll stay there again for the harvest and I’ll sell it in safer places and nobody will catch me and I’ll have money, and you can have some, too. I’m leaving.”
His mother choked when she heard it, and she spoke like there was something still stuck in there that she wanted to dislodge. “Are you an idiot? Were you watching when they put him away? What if you’d been there like you wanted to be? You’d be gone too,” she said, “you’d be in jail too.”
“They won’t catch me,” Rowan said. “I’m going too far out, and I’m not going to use anything like a cabin that anybody can see. They won’t be looking because they already found Colin. Nobody will see me. They won’t find me, they won’t know anything, it starts with seeds in the ground that nobody can see but me, not you and not anybody.”
“You’d be there too, as much as a waste as he is, and I fucking love him and I fucking love you too and he won’t be the same boy when he’s out. You won’t recognize him, you won’t recognize me, and if you leave this house to go out there to do those things you will grow up wrong and bitter you goddamn little boy I love you and I loved him too much you goddamn little boys I loved you so much.”
Through the smoke, he saw her break down. She must have seen that he was serious. She must have known that he was leaving.
As he had before, Rowan waited for Eiron wearing his synthetic clothes and holding a beaten bag. Unlike last time, he also carried a small brown tent with a larger black tarp, a warm hat, some lengths of rope, a hatchet, a long brown poncho, a few days’ worth of dry foods, and a bag of a few pounds of tiny brown seeds. He got the seeds last summer, when Colin said to keep them in the dry house for him because the cabin had too many holes in the rain.
“Finally,” Rowan said to himself, “finally I can give the seeds back.”
Rowan drove with Eiron and Dutch away from his home, far past his brother’s ruined cottage, deep into the woods until they got out of the truck and started walking west. They walked west until they couldn’t see the truck anymore, then traveled a few minutes further before they stopped.
“Thanks, guys,” Rowan said, “thanks for everything you’ve done for me and my mom. Thanks for being good enough men to bring me here and to turn around and leave me alone out here in the wilderness where I want to be. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“Goodbye, Rowan.” Eiron reached over to Rowan to shake on it before he turned away. When Dutch had done the same, they turned around and started walking east back towards the truck until Rowan spoke.
“Guys, meet me back here in a week and we’ll party out here. It’ll be fun. Bring your shit and stay the night.”
“Okay,” Dutch solemnly said.
“Bring some extra food and stuff for me, I’ll probably be out,” Rowan added. He gave them one more salute and turned away.
“You know,” Eiron said, “you should have brought a gun.”
Rowan stood in warm sunlight and had nothing to say.
“For protection,” Eiron said, maybe because he was older than Rowan and Dutch, or maybe he never really liked it out here and Rowan had never noticed.
“I don’t roll like that,” Rowan said.
“Well, okay. See you later,” Eiron said, and that’s when they turned and finally left.
Rowan looked around for a moment and saw that he was completely alone. He reached into the bag where he’d rolled the small amount that he’d had left into about fifteen last cigarettes, pulled one out, and took a drag.

The first day he had was really only an afternoon, blame the trip for that, but that’s still plenty of time to start. Starting was finding water. Starting was really investigating that water, smelling that water, looking for tracks, then moving on to find something bigger, something that moved. On the first day, cigarette in his hand, he saw plenty of light to work by under tiny green leaves and tinier buds that just weren’t there yet, and he smiled when he found something a little larger, something with a little bit of moving water, and he smiled at that because this would be the inexhaustible source from which everything else came, how much else did he need above good water? He walked away from the water a little ways, out of sight, so anybody there for the water wouldn’t see the tent and wonder why that tent was there and now that he thought about it he shouldn’t have set up the tent already, even if he’d found water, he should really only do that when the light’s going down and there’s not much to see the tent by, so when would that be? He must have had a little time, though the sun had moved since he started, so he took it all apart and took away everything on his back including the tent and took a drag and then started looking for wood. He was lucky that it hadn’t rained sooner, so the wood was beginning to dry and he found a little but not a lot and just about now was when the light was beginning to change. He gathered it all back up and set up the tent again not too far from the water next to his small pile of wood with some good starter wood and a few pieces of the hard stuff but none of it was enough for a good fire. He didn’t need one, not on the first evening, not when there were still a few things that he could eat from his bag that didn’t need a fire and so he spent the last few moments of the first daylight filtering good clean moving water into his mouth until he didn’t want any and then into the water bottle until it was full. He ran back to his camp in the very last of the first light. On the first night he lay there and waited, but nobody can fall asleep fast on the first night, not when there’s stuff to hear in the darkness, not when he’s never gone to bed this early, not when the world outside seemed so big. He lay there in his Swiss Army sleeping bag, then sat up and poked his head out to take company with a cigarette. Staring into darkness, he finished it and fell asleep eventually. One day gone and ten last cigarettes left.
On the second day he woke up too late. The sun had been up for a while, maybe a few hours, and somebody could have seen the tent and they could have reported it five minutes ago. He threw himself out of the tent and packed everything up as fast as he could, abandoning the pile of wood, and he was a little ways upstream before he realized that he was in the middle of nowhere and that he was an idiot and already he was hungry and thirsty and now tired from all of the running. He walked back down to the woodpile and exhaled deeply, then went back over to the stream to pump some more water, to eat a little more of the food that he still had, and to light a cigarette. Under the new spring greens he smoked and then he left for more wood so that he could continue his mastery of fire in this new and different place. A few hours gave him hunger and thirst but also a larger pile of wood, which he divided into four piles that he hid in buried caches around the campsite to throw off anybody that might walk by and see and with another drag he was sure that they would be. He pumped water and ate a little more of the food from his shrinking stash, but he had wood and that was enough of a start, so he spent the rest of the daylight finding herbs around the camp and looking for the little buried roots that he could bring back to wash and boil over a fire that he started with an old lighter and new wood. He still needed some of the food from his bag, but in the fading light of the second day he could light a cigarette and feel like wood and the first salad was enough. On the second night it was easier to sleep. Two days gone and only four last cigarettes left.
On the third day he woke up closer to dawn but still too far, into the relentless pounding of sweet spring rain that he knew would soak the wood that he left out and only dampen the rest that he left buried, and he could not take down the tent so nobody could see him because his clothes and his ponchos could not save him from getting soaked if he stayed out too long, so he sat in the entry of the tent, lit a cigarette, and watched the rain splash into the pot that he then filtered because he was bored and not thirsty. He had to eat more of the food from his bag, but he took another drag and he was pretty sure that the rain would stop soon. When it did, he left his camp to find more roots in the cold fertile soaked ground, and when the sun finally broke through the clouds he saw that it was afternoon, and that the third day would be a waste of wood, food, and weed if he didn’t at least find enough roots for tomorrow. He gathered roots and herbs for the rest of the day still angry at the rain, including later on when he yelled at it for making the best of his wood only slightly damp. At the end of daylight, when he was boiling the water for the roots, he ate a little more of the food from his bag and lit another cigarette, still angry under the dripping green buds of a cruel forest that won’t stay dry, and by the third drag he realized that it was his last cigarette. He was so angry that he had to smoke it on such an already unsalvageable day that he slept immediately after dinner.
The fourth morning came and Rowan couldn’t light a cigarette. He left his camp in the blue dawn light to take a piss downstream. As he unzipped and let fly, the sound of his piss hitting the water was loud against his ears, like the silences had crept up their volume and made noise seem louder. He began to think. A week ago he was at home. A week ago he had food and pot and a bed to smoke and eat in. A week ago his mom was there. A week ago he could hear her. Sometimes he’d hear her being angry at him, or talking about boring shit, but even if she wasn’t talking he could usually hear her around the house, moving and working and doing things. He could hear her inhaling and exhaling sweet smoke. Not now. What he was listening to now were the traces of their home that he’d digested vanishing as he pissed them away. The beginning of the end of his pot was washing down the stream, and the rest of it would leave him no matter how hard he tried. The world slowed down as he pissed, but it didn’t make it hurt any less when he got hungrier or thirstier. Slowly, irrevocably, home left his body in breath, sweat, and piss. What exactly was he inhaling now? What was she doing without him?
The morning got brighter. When he walked back to camp after the long piss he could hear the birds around him. Their calls were sharp. He was hungry, tired of roots, reluctant to get to the last of the food from home, and he wanted to kill something, so he found his fishing pole and returned to the stream.
He took off everything below his waist and stepped into the frigid morning water. Even though it wasn’t the best depth for fly fishing, he went in up to his waist so he wouldn’t leave his dick hanging out in front of the birds. The stream didn’t get much warmer with time.
“C’mon, motherfuckers,” he said.
No trout replied until he pulled in a big one that started strong and petered out. How did he forget a net? He grabbed the fish, which wasn’t tremendously bigger than the hand he held it in, and then bludgeoned it to death with the end of the rod in his other hand. It was easier to walk it back to the pot that way. Later, another came in. It didn’t start as strong as the first one did, but it was much angrier overall. It struggled for a bit, then swam forward with his line so he couldn’t catch up, and darted through his legs so that his line rubbed up against his body and he swore that it rammed his naked thigh on purpose. Still, he killed it and threw it in the bucket. When he saw them together – a big dumb one and a small angry one – he named them Dutch and Eiron.
Rowan laughed when he gutted Dutch and found another fly in his belly. He saved it for luck. Dutch and Eiron cooked up nicely for lunch. Hot and juicy fish-meat after several salads made the sounds of the woods much softer, and Rowan felt mostly happy for the rest of the day, which he spent gathering herbs and roots. He noted that today was the first day that he’d eaten only things that he got from the forest. Also, he pissed away more of the home that was left within him.
Rowan didn’t know exactly when he woke up in the fourth night, but he knew why. He puked out Dutch, Eiron, the salad, and probably some more of home, too. His stomach hurt. His arms and legs felt numb. Nauseated, he laid facedown in his vomit, Dutch, and dirt, and he knew that he missed his mother. Was she awake right now, or was she sleeping? Did she regret him like she regretted Colin?
Rowan woke on the fifth day and wasn’t hungry. His stomach still hurt, but it didn’t feel empty, so he moaned. He had a fever. Either Dutch or Eiron gave him food poisoning. It could have been both of them. Rowan suspected that it was the birds, who flew away from the vomit that they’d been investigating when he emerged from the tent. He stepped over the vomit on the ground and left for the stream where he could wash the dried vomit off his face. His stomach hurt. He was thirsty. His limbs still felt numb. He was pretty sure that diarrhea would come soon. He trudged to the stream that kept him alive so that it could poison him. He stripped naked. He threw his feverish body into the cold water. He treaded so that he could keep himself underwater for a moment. He opened his eyes to see where the waters went, and all he saw was sludge and fish suspended in nothingness. That’s where it all goes, he thought. Thirsty and surrounded by water that he shouldn’t drink, he pulled his head back into the air and began to piss. As he did, he imagined that it was the last of the pot that exited him and let him feel its warmth for one moment before it slipped downstream. He stepped out of the water naked, soaked, and sick. How could he forget to bring a towel?
He heard the crow before he saw it. It had scared most of the other birds into the surrounding trees. They watched it pick at Rowan’s vomit. He watched it too, for a moment, and then it turned and froze at seeing him. Rowan watched the crow’s bright black eye stare at his naked and fevered body. It looked straight at him without stopping. After a minute of seeing its stare, Rowan felt embarrassed. He felt embarrassed for being naked. He was embarrassed for intruding. He was a young boy in an old forest doing stupid things to get money and to get high. He left home for nothing. He looked away from the crow, exhaled, and then inhaled again. When he did, he could smell the lingering scent of the vomit that that crow was trying to eat. When he recognized that smell in the silence of the woods, he started laughing, harder and deeper than he had before, so hard that he felt queasy again, which got him laughing even harder at the stupid fucking crow that was trying to eat his puke.
“You’ll get sick, motherfucker!” Naked and fevered, he chased that crow away. Dutch would like this story, he thought. Mom would probably worry about how he was probably kind of sick, but then she’d think it was funny.

Rowan responded happily to the fever’s decimation of his appetite. It really helped him stay productive. He spent most of the day on a search for dry wood, but he spent a good chunk of the afternoon on finding roots that he forced himself to eat when the sun went down. His day and night were periodically interrupted by thirst and diarrhea, but the fever never let him feel cold or alone, so he slept soundly between the interruptions.
On the sixth day, he habitually reached for the bag of food before he remembered that he still wasn’t hungry. He thanked the fever and found a bag of seeds instead. He held the bag in his hand and let its soft weight fall into his fingers. It felt like his mother’s hand pressing into his, asking him to stay.

After the sixth day’s light had faded, he slept as his cooling fever slowly gave way to a ravenous hunger. Around his tent, in the darkness of a warming spring, nearly fifty little brown seeds slept in the ground scattered in five four-foot by four-foot patches of newly dug dirt, from which old roots had been taken and eaten so that new roots could grow. As he slept, Rowan dreamt of the fall, when the forest would be dotted with a hundred small patches of richly green leaves and buds that slowly shook in the breeze, ready to be harvested by whoever knew how to find them.
On the seventh day, Rowan rested. He woke up painfully hungry, but he had the last of the food that he brought from home, so he ate the last of that as he traveled to the spot where he would meet Eiron and Dutch. As he walked, he inhaled the cool sweet spring air and felt comforted. Somewhere, Colin breathed fresh air. His mother’s air might be a little stale, but she still breathed.
He sat in the dirt and waited for the truck. He heard it coming from far away. Rowan could hear the beginnings of music, too. Eiron loved Iron Maiden, and he was probably listening to “Run to the Hills.” Rowan watched them rise over the horizon and saw his friends slowly take form as two boys in a pickup truck carrying a gas grille, steaks, and malt liquor.
Dutch sprang out of the cab. “Rowan,” he said, “Rowan, I don’t know what kind of pussy shit you’ve been into here, but this is going to be fucking awesome. Let’s get trashed and sleep where we fall.”
“I missed you guys,” Rowan said, and it was true.
“She misses you,” Eiron said. “She called before we left. She wanted us to pick up her cell phone and bring it to you.”
The phone felt small in Rowan’s hand. Somehow, it smelled like pot.

Later that night, when it looked like Dutch was going to stay in the weeds that he’d fallen into, Rowan took the phone out of his pocket. Eiron was still awake and alert but Rowan didn’t care about that.
She picked up the phone on the second ring but didn’t say anything.
“I miss you too,” he said.
He heard the sound of her breath.
“I miss you too, but I’m not coming home yet.”
He heard her exhale slowly.
“Are you sick?” Her voice wasn’t happy but the phone felt warm.
“A little bit,” he said. “I ate a bad fish.”
“You are a goddamn idiot,” she said.
“I feel a little better now but maybe it’s just the booze.”
He heard her light another cigarette. He waited for her to exhale again but he didn’t say anything when she did.
“You’re going to be okay, aren’t you?” Her voice was warm and stale and filthy and he missed her and he was drunk but on the seventh night the silence between their breaths felt cool and clean.
“I think I will be,” he said.
“Asshole,” she said.
He couldn’t say anything to that.
“You little fucking boy,” she said. “I love you.”
“I started planting the seeds yesterday,” he said. “I planted them in tiny little patches throughout the forest where nobody will find them. They’re going to be everywhere but nobody will see them.”
“You come home after,” she said.
“They’re going to be beautiful,” Rowan said, sitting in the woods at night, sick but still alive.