King of the Rock

Descriptive Passage

Lush green trees arced around the well-trodden path, embracing any who passed beneath their ashen arms. The trail had seen enough traffic to remain unvegetated, yet most ignored this scenic sliver of paradise. Inviting isolation enveloped the disturbed, degraded, and downtrodden. In places such as these, the only problems found were those brought. Memory apart from this place had little permanence within. The leaves above dampened the sun, sending pillars of light through nature’s microscope.

            On both sides of the dusty trail, small mounds of decaying lumber lay haphazardly strewn, deliberately creating a barrier between wilderness and man. It seemed that the makeshift barricade stood to hold back the encroaching roots, which ever so often lifted a fallen tree or parted a pile of nettles. However, the barriers true purpose reveals itself halfway down the forgotten road.

At a forty-five degree angle, waving its message in any passers face, a decrepit sign hunched. With its board clinging to the pole’s distal end, the sign stood in this spot longer than the majority of its viewers had lived. The whole drilled into its bottom had split. The board had only remaining near the pinnacle due to a series of shoddy lashings; the paint had cracked, only remaining comprehensible due to the engraved letters.

 “Please help preserve our camp. Stay on the trail to slow erosion,” the message read, though it took minutes to decipher. Right behind the sign the woods bend back, with several twigs snapped clean in two. A series of bushes parted down the middle sagged as some creature had left them. If the birds ceased their shrill calls and a person stopped to listen, what had drawn the perpetrator would become apparent. Further along the “game trail,” the sound of the trickling liquid grew increasingly clear. The thick undergrowth parted to a stream bursting its banks; poor plants drowned in the flow. Between rounded river stones and flooded flora, an observer may find a set of footprints pressed into a strip of mud. A cloud moved in front of the sun darkening the prints; however, a persistent observer could still follow them to their source. Several yards up the energetic brook, a massive bolder endured. The bolder flaunted its volcanic origin, with its tiny fissures and cavities. Resisting the change its younger brothers embraced, the moss-covered stone attracted and harbored smaller rebels. The holes near its base sheltered a variety of aquatic insects, and their eggs. Moss made room for its companion lichen, both clinging for their lives. However, the most note-worthy of the rebels lied at the stone's flattened top.

A young man, exposed flesh coated in dirt and body curled into the fetal position, used his arm as a pillow. His shirt and hair were in worse condition than his face and arms. His blue jeans would appear military camouflage to a careless eye. The grass and mud stains continued from his brown shoes all the way up his soiled uniform. The clouds parted, soaking the scene in light. The boy stirred. With a yawn, the lad’s eyelids cracked. The sliver of green and black widened, eventually giving way to white. A minute later, he stretched, and then padded for his notebook. Finding the book, he glanced at the exposed page. Titled “Environmental Observations,” it began as the name suggests, yet slowly morphed into images of the surrounding plants. It ended with a picture of a Viking impaling himself on a spike. Nobody, but the boy would recognize the scribbles as words, let alone understand meaning of the strange vortex of lines near the bottom, but that did not matter. If they needed a translator then that was their problem.

Five minutes passed, before he looked skyward. His semi-pleased expression turned into one of horror. The sun could not possibly have moved so far. His suspicions confirmed by the blaring of a distant siren, he bounded to his feet. He leaped off the rock, knocking his pencil into the water. The pencil flowed west as he leaped north. Though one foot landed on the shore, the other was not so lucky. He went running through the underbrush, one shoe brown the other white.