First Time in the BWCA and Solo
by Ben Savitt (continued from page 1)
I come to you Storm, a lone seeker after truth in a world grown gray in uniformity, naked, I stand upon this cold rock amid smooth water and broken forest glaring defiantly into the growing blackness of you. Know, Storm, that as you will not be deterred, nor will I be moved, your pelting rains will leave no track upon the exposed skin of my body nor will your forked tongue taste fear in my breast. I am Man and unafraid, you are Storm and mighty. We two have our time and, for us both, our time will pass. Your roiling purples and blacks flicker before me as you rumble your advancing drum beat from across a charged sky. From my chest sounds the answering bellow mingling over the treetops with you in perfect harmony. I love your fury and wildness. Miles away stands my dwelling of four-walled red brick. Within its walls I have come to find order and comfort, weakness and ignorance. Take it, raze it brick from brick, its furnishings stick from stick and I shall sleep upon the ground with the black-mouthed sky as my blanket. Scatter and drown my struggling fire so that I may grow in wisdom, having known more completely, night's cruel chill. Storm, if your strength be greater than mine, my life I gladly give to you, I am life's lover yet no fear of death exists in my heart. I fear not the end of life but its lack of a beginning. If, to this rock I have come to find death, a warrior's death. If, beyond this rock my life is reborn, a warrior's life. I shall say, Storm I have stood before you, felt your rains on my face, and found, on your drafts, sweetest liberation in bitterest truth.
These words I'd found in my head on a dead morning commute to a dead end job two years ago, they'd grown in me, become a mantra, a prayer. I would repeat them quietly to myself in my cubicle, walking home alone in the concrete and the mist, I spoke them, wrote them, in moments of weakness, hopelessness, lostness, the words saved me. I wanted to live them. I wanted to come here. It was the test, a life I had or a life I sought.
I sold the only two marketable items I possessed, a Sony Trinitron big screen and a diamond engagement ring. The TV was a college purchase made to augment the beer-and-football Sundays and now was substituting for too much of life; the ring was just a mistake, given to the wrong woman and returned to me shortly thereafter. Both items symbols of a life I did not want, one I wished to bury. I took the proceeds of my sales to Cabela's in Owatonna to collect my prize. The Weh-no-Nah Fisherman: fourteen feet of forest green Royalex hulls, fifty-seven pounds and nearly forty inches wide. Light enough for the portage, stable enough for fishing all day on rough water, short enough to ride well on my Volkswagen's roof rack. I spent all summer and fall in it, out on the water, paddling, fishing, everyday, after work. I cut out after-work happy hours and started missing dinner regularly and dropped 30 pounds of indoor softness. I was finding something. All winter I planned for the coming spring and the ice-out, lunch breaks spent at the bookstore reading up on wilderness travel and canoe tripping, I went over maps and routes, meals, wildlife, first-aide, anything pertaining. Everyday, the spring and the coming adventure were on my mind.