The Great Leader

It took him nearly six hours to reach the top because of frequent pauses to still his fluttery heart. Also the climb was much more difficult than it looked from a distance where the crags, culverts, and gullies were somewhat concealed. His mouth became quite dry but his struggle excluded worrying about a water-starved body. As a flatlander from the densely forested north he was totally without experience in climbing and though he could walk for hours the angle of nearly straight up exhausted him. During one short rest period he reflected that descending the next morning would be even more difficult because of the gravity of his body. It occurred to him that he would have made this climb as a boy or young man but lost the impulse for forty years, and now it returned as a nearly old man when certain aspects of the mind become captious and boyish again. He suddenly remembered he and Roberta pulling Bobby up a steep wooded hill in his red wagon soon after he came home from the hospital. In their churning climb they disturbed a yellow-jacket nest and each was painfully stung a couple of times. Bobby bawled like a baby and Roberta screamed “Goddamn God” which frightened all of them. In another hour towing the wagon they were out on the end of the timber boat dock where the men had just unloaded the logs and this big Swede who was the captain and a friend of their father’s invited them along to Grand Island to pick up another load. Grand Island was only a few hundred yards away but the three treated the ride as if it were an ocean adventure. When they got home for supper Bobby yelled at the table that it had been the best day of his life despite the yellow jackets.

Sunderson found himself weeping as he climbed and asked his long dead brother, “What’s going on out there if anything?” He was fairly confident that he was losing his mind but then it was a mind well lost. Men did a lot of silent weeping but rarely out loud. He paused to try to think of another but saw one coming and backed away. Before it starts you think you’re going to burst and then you begin weeping like you did out in the woods the day that Dad died.

Time was misarranged, a quirky idea but unavoidable. If the timing had been right Diane would likely have been able to save Bobby in his heroin narcosis but toward his last years he wouldn’t come home or see anyone except Roberta. Sunderson had driven himself into a depression investigating heroin, even snorted a dose, but only came up with the idea that the drug worked for those who want to feel nothing. A blank page. Zero. The emotions were all cessations of emotion. Life became white on white paper. There was an intriguing notion that life became photographs and for once all horrors were at safe removal, totally immovable and at rest. But then parts of the photograph began to move and you needed more of the drug and finally you wiped reality clean.

At the very top there was a mound with a flat space where he collapsed and slept for an hour waking sore but refreshed with the unnerving perception that he could see nothing but sky. This was an odd experience as waking always offered peripheral objects such as a pillow’s edge, a night table, a door, a wall. He wasn’t dead because the clouds were moving and there was a huge front far to the south moving from southwest to northwest that he hoped wouldn’t push his way. He had no idea what time it was because he had left his cell phone with its clock back in the room with the pint of whiskey. He smiled at the idea that what he was doing was a vague parody of what Marion described as an Anishinabe or Chippewa power vision where you spent three days and nights on a hill without food, water, or shelter waiting for vision. The possible grandeur of such an experience was alien to him. He had always refused the sophomoric notion that life was a process of settling for less in favor of the idea that sometimes life was good, sometimes bad. He mildly teared thinking how much Diane would have liked it up here.