Double Exposure (6 page)

M
oss on the north sides of trees, spiders’ webs on the south.

Vertical stick in the ground, movement of the shadows caused by the sun.

The sun. Tracking east to west.

Most of the things he’s read about finding north when lost in the woods worked more easily during the day. Supposed to stay put at night. But he can’t. He’s got to find north so he can find east so he can find the river.

Though Spanish moss is draped over virtually every hardwood limb in the area, for some reason it doesn’t grow this deep in the river swamp.

No moss. No spiders’ webs around.

He continues going through the list in his mind.

Night.

Northern hemisphere.

North star.

Polaris.

Brightest in the handle of the Little Dipper.

Clear night.

No good. Fog. Clouds.

Clouds move west to east, don’t they? Well, roughly. Not exact, but it’s something.

Impenetrable fog.

Blotted out sky.

He’ll have to wait until the fog lifts or find a break in it somewhere.

Time to move.

C
arefully.

Quietly.

Slowly.

Climbing out of the cypress stump, he avoids the damp ring of urine the big man left as he begins to make his way in what feels like the direction of the river.

Feeling his way through sharp, craggy branches and hard, twisting vines, his progress is plodding.

The dry, dead leaves crunch and crackle beneath his boots, undermining his attempts at silence. He tries shuffling his feet, then sliding, then lifting them high and placing them back down softly, but nothing he does makes any difference. Quiet advancement through the woods this time of year is impossible.

He has no idea exactly where he’s heading. Just moving. He could be walking away from the river, could be walking toward one of the men hunting him. He has no way of knowing.

His breaths, backlit by moonlight, come out in bursts like steam from a Manhattan manhole.

His movements are awkward, unsteady, every shivering step a struggle in the turbid terrain.

Halting occasionally, he listens for the other men.

Body tight with tension, he can’t help but believe a high velocity round will rip through him at any moment, the scorching projectile piercing vital organs and arteries. Bleeding out slowly, painfully like a gut-shot animal. Or his head exploding in Zapruder film-like fashion. Of course, he could be attacked from close range, brained with an oak branch or beaten to death by the big man.

Panic.

He wants to run, everything in him giving into the flight side of his fight or flight response, but he realizes it would be suicide. Even if he could remain on his feet and not run into a tree or trip and bash his head on a cypress knee, and even if his frenzied, out of control run didn’t alert his predators to his presence, he would soon tire, becoming even more dehydrated and disoriented.

Slow and steady.

Careful and quiet.

He knows he needs to mark the trees he’s passing, to be able to identify them if he comes this way again, but doesn’t want to reveal his whereabouts to the others.

Gnawing.

Growling.

Grumbling.

He hasn’t eaten since lunch, and his body pangs remind him.

Cold.

Hungry.

Tired.

Lost.

Lonely.

Afraid.

He wants to sit down, find a place to rest a while. Just a few minutes. But he keeps moving, stumbling forward in the foggy forest, not sure where his unsteady steps are leading him.

Rustling in a thicket to his right. He stops. Listens.

A large, dark marsh rabbit darts out of the bushes, stops, turns, speeds away. Its small, red, rodent-like feet carrying it beneath a fallen tree. It then disappears into the dense undergrowth beyond.

Exhaling, he begins breathing again, his heart thumping on his breastbone the way the rabbit’s back feet do on the ground when sending out alarm signals.

F
reeze.

Fear.

Panic. Inside.

He’s taken very few steps before he hears—what? The approach of a man? Has to be. Sound’s too distinctive to be anything else. Hairs rise.

Goose bumps.

Quickly. Quietly.

Ducking behind the base of a large pine and into the surrounding underbrush, Remington tries to hide and to still his racing heart enough to hear where the man is coming from.

Listen.

Heart pounding.

Deep breaths. Calm down. Relax.

Close. Footsteps. Forest floor.

Whatta I do?

Be still.

But—

The steps stop suddenly.

Bracing.

Waiting.

Nothing.

Don’t forget to breathe. Crouching so low, clenching so tight, holding himself so still … his body aches from the tension.

What happened? Where’d he go? Can he see me? Hear me? I’m not ready to die—not in any sense of the word. So much left undone, so much more to become. Please don’t let me die. Not now. Not like this.

Eventually, inexplicably, the footsteps begin again.

Waiting. As he listens to the retreat of the steps, carrying the unseen man further and further away from him, until he can no longer hear them, he counsels himself.

Not ready to die? You better get ready. Don’t let someone get the drop on you again and not be ready.

How do I prepare to die?

Don’t know exactly, but you better figure it out.

T
his treacherous trek through the tall timbers reminds him of the many his dad dragged him on as a boy.

These same trees were old then, he thinks. Ancient. Now they’re still here and Dad’s gone. Soon, I’ll be no more, and yet they’ll still remain.

The earth is a graveyard, it’ll swallow us whole, its seasoned trees our headstones.

Dad loved this land. Loved being outdoors, loved to hunt and track and fish. He had been a man of the land. Unlike Remington’s, his skin stayed brown, tanned—at least the parts that were exposed.

You can tell how much a person loves something by how much of their free time and disposable income they spend on it. Every free moment, every spare nickel—his dad spent them all out here.

Early in his life, little Remington had been awakened before dawn, bundled in too-big camouflaged clothing, loaded in the old truck, and deposited deep in the woods. Moving his short legs as fast as he could to keep up with his dad’s long stride, his small boot prints a tiny fraction of the huge craters his dad’s left in the clay.

Running to keep up, he had trailed his small Bear compound bow through the dirt and leaves behind him, a quiver of short arrows slung over his shoulder continually sliding down on his arm, catching in the crook of his elbow. When bow season was over, it was.22 rifles and.410 shotguns that were every bit as tall as him.

—Come on, buddy. Try to keep up.

—I am.

He’d been trying to keep up with Cole his whole life.

—You okay back there?

—Yes, sir. Great.

He wasn’t. Hadn’t been for a mile or more, but would never tell his dad. Could never.

—Isn’t this great? Worth missing a little sleep over, huh?

—Yes, sir.

There was nowhere he’d rather be than in his soft, warm bed.

Cole cast a big shadow. Out here. In town. Not only a man of the land, but a man’s man, everybody’s buddy.

As Remington got older, his Saturday morning hunting trips with his father occurred far less frequently. It was obvious, hunting wasn’t for him. Obvious even to Cole, though he never verbalized it, never in any way acknowledged it.

Adolescence.

Fridays.

Football.

Dances.

Girls.

Late nights.

Saturday mornings.

Sleep.

Guilt.

No matter how different he and his dad were, Remington had an innate, deeply ingrained desire to please him.

Alarm.

Rolling out of bed.

Stumbling out into the cold dark.

On occasion, he would be waiting in the uncomfortable, mud-covered old Chevy when his dad opened the door and the little dome light twitched on.

Look who decided not to sleep all day. How was the dance?

Cole never showed it, but Remington could tell this small, simple gesture meant more than nearly anything else he could do for his dad.

Remington never learned to like hunting, but he learned how to handle himself in the woods, learned how to use a gun, learned lessons that just might help him survive the night.

Dirty jokes.

Any attempt at imparting the mysterious facts of life came in the form of playful remarks or dirty jokes—both of which made Remington uncomfortable and a little embarrassed for his dad.

One had a mother throwing spaghetti against the wall to see if it was done and a daughter doing the same thing with her panties after a date. If the noddle sticks to the wall, it’s done. If my panties stick to the wall, I had fun.

The jokes were bad enough, but his father’s feeling the need to explain them was just way, way too much.

Then there was the inevitable question: You gettin’ any? And the obligatory warning: Don’t go divin’ until you’ve put on your wet suit. No glove, no love. I’m too young for any little snot-nosed youngin’ to be callin’ me granddaddy.

It was at this age that Remington first picked up a camera for anything other than snapshots, and at this stage that he first began carrying one into the woods.

He still carried a shotgun, but more for show than anything else. The shooting he was doing involved film, not ammunition—captured life, not ended it.

—You ever get a big buck, ‘bout an eight point or better, you’ll put that camera down and have your gun ready at all times. You just wait.

His dad had waited his whole life, and it had never happened.

The last time they had been on this land together had been less than a month before Cole died. Then, it’d been his dad who’d put a camera in his hands, asking him to document the changes he had made to the land—the new trails he had carved into it, the controlled burns he had conducted, and the one hundred or so acres of timber he had cut down to help pay his wife’s medical bills.

Realizing even then how short life is, how little time we get with those we love—though not knowing just how short his dad’s life would be and how very little time they had left together—Remington had taken several shots of his dad and put together a small photojournal piece he had never shown anyone.

Amidst photographs of his dad enjoying the day and the land and the son he so loved, Remington had penned these words:

Time.

We talk about buying it or saving it, but we can do neither. We all spend it at a cost of sixty seconds a minute, sixty minutes an hour, and twenty-four hours per day. It’s running out for all of us and there’s nothing we can do about it. We can break every clock we encounter, and our lives will still continue to tick away, counting down to the bang or whimper or big silence that bookends the backside of our lives.

Time is one of the most precious resources we have—a priceless, limited, finite gift we get to do with what we want.

Some people, like my dad, spend their time leisurely, like they have a limitless supply. These people spend time, waste time, kill time. Others, like me, spend it rapidly, filling every moment. These people never have any time to spare, they’re always out of time.

How we spend our time defines who we are. What we do with our days determines our destinies.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the time we get with our loved ones.

My wife Heather’s mother died recently. Suddenly, abruptly, her time with her family and friends was over. There was no more time to do anything—not a single second.

Experiencing Heather’s loss with her has served to heighten my awareness of the brevity of life in general and our time with our parents in particular.

Twice this week I rode ATVs with my dad across acres and acres of land that’s been in our family for over seventy years—land many other James fathers and sons have traversed—and as we did I thought what a gift this time we have together is.

If things take their natural course (and there’s no guarantee they will), then my father will precede me in taking that step alone into the great unknown, the way his dad did him. At some point he will be gone and I will become a fatherless son, and all I’ll have is the time we spent together.

Time well spent together—some of it on this very same land when I was a boy and he was a god.

Knowing how limited and precious and priceless time is, I continually question the ways in which I’m spending mine. Am I using the gifts that have been entrusted to me to help others? Am I doing enough? Am I leaving the world in some small way better than I found it?

I don’t get as much time with my dad as I would like, but as different as we are, as our interests are, all the time I do get with him, every second, every single one is time well spent.

N
ow, his time with his dad is over. Completely. Finally. Forever. He will never again walk these woods with the god of his childhood. Never. Not ever.

And there’s a very real possibility that this will be his last night—in these woods or anywhere else. He tries to consider that, to really let it penetrate, but finds he’s incapable of contemplating his own end. He can think about it on a superficial, surface, intellectual level, but not on a deeper emotional, spiritual, or existential one.

R
ust-colored facial discs around yellow eyes.

Dark brown feathers.

White throat.

Prominent ear tufts.

Bird of prey.

A great horned owl swoops down out of a loblolly pine, talons spread wide, and snatches up a small cotton mouse scurrying along the forest floor, its long tail whipping about as it’s hoisted into the air.

The squeals of the mouse are overpowered by the deep, resonant
hoo-hoo-hooooo
of the magnificent owl.