A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born

A holiday? Take a break? Why not-lately I had been working harder than any of the businessmen I so badly did not want to become. Crime had paid, and paid nicely, so why didn't I spend some of the hard-earned loot? I probably wouldn't be able to escape firom my problems. I had learned by experience that physical displacement was never a solution. My troubles always went with me, as everpresent and nagging as a toothache. But I could take them with me to someplace where I might find the leisure and opportunity to sort them out.

Where? I punched up a holiday guide from the database and flipped through it. Nothing seemed to appeal. The beach? Only if I could meet the girl from the commercial, which seemed far from likely. Posh hotels, expensive cruises, museum tours, all of them seemed about as exciting as a weekend on a porcuswine ranch. Maybe that was it-1 needed a breath of fresh air. As a farm boy I had seen enough of the great outdoors, usually over the top of a pile of porcuswine you-know-what. With that sort of background I had welcomed my move to the city with open arms-and hadn't ventured out since.

That might be the very answer. Not back to the farm but into the wilderness. To get away from people and things, to do a little chatting with mother nature. The more I thought of it the better it sounded. And I knew just where I wanted to go, an ambition I had had since I was knee-high to a porcuswinelet. The Cathedral Mountains. Those snow-covered peaks, pointing towards the sky like giant church towers, how they used to fill my childish dreams. Well, why not? About time to make a few dreams come true.

Shopping for backpack, sleeping bag, thermal tent, cooking pots, lights-all the gear needed-was half the fan. Once outfitted, I couldn't waste time on the linear but took the plane to Rafael instead. I bulged my eyes at the mountains as we came in to land and snapped my fingers and fidgeted while I waited for the luggage. I had studied the maps and knew that the Cathedral Trail crossed the road in the foothills north of the airport. I should have taken the connecting bus like the others instead of being conspicuous in a taxi, but I was in too much of a rush.

"Pretty dangerous, kid, I mean walking the trail alone." The elderly driver smacked his lips as he launched into a litany of doom. "Get lost easily enough. Get eaten by direwolves. Landslides and avalanches. And..." "And I'm meeting friends. Twenty of them. The Boy Sprouts Hiking Team of Lower Armmpitt, We're gonna have fun," I invented rapidly.

"Didn't see no Boy Sprouts out here lately," he muttered with senile suspicion.

"Nor would you," I extemporized, bent over in the back seat and flipping through the maps quickly, "Because they took the train to Boskone, got offthere, right at the station close to where the trail crosses the tracks. They'll be waiting for me, troop leader and all. I would be afraid to be alone in the mountains, sir." He muttered some more, muttered even louder when I forgot to tip him, then chuckled in his gray whiskers as he drove away because, childishly, I had then overtipped him. While resisting strongly the impulse to slip him a phoney five buck coin. The sound of tne motor died away and I looked at the well-marked trail as it wound up the valley-and realized that this had been a very goocf idea indeed.

There is no point in waxing enthusiastic about the joys of the Great Outdoors. Like skiing, you do it and enjoy it, but don't talk about it. All the usual things happened. My nose got sunbumed, ants got into my Bacon. The stars were incredibly clear and close at night, while the clean air did good things to my lungs. I walked and climbed, froze myself in mountain streams-and managed to forget my troubles completely. They seemed very out of place in this outdoor world. Refreshed, cleansed, tired but happy, and a good deal thinner, I emerged from the mountains ten days later and stumbled through the door of the lodge where I had made reservations. The hot bath was a blessing, and the cold beer no less. I turned on the 3V and got the tailend of the news, slumped down and listened with half an ear, too lazy to change channels.

"...reports a rise in ham exports exceeding the four percent growth predicted at the first of the year. The market for porcuswine quills is slipping however, and the government is faced with a quill mountain that is already drawing criticism.