Feral Existence

I.

The terror of boreal woodland reality is not what is visible above but the hideous swarms of a seemingly blind yet tactile, sinewy multitude hidden below the surface.

The first early morning snowfall had been powdery with a late afternoon thaw; freezing again each dusk with footsteps crunching through thin layers of glassy ice before sinking; this accumulation repeated day after day until the surface in sustained minus temperatures became hard enough to walk on without leaving impressions in now unfathomable layers of snow. The last blood of winter trees crackling all around, sudden numbness is a sensation beyond knowable pain giving preternatural strength to the legs. Rather than the weak, hopeful and insensate, the persistent, being wise with stoic resolve, trudge onward knowing nothing will change without warmth and search toward the intensity of starlight in the clarity of rarefied air signaling the cessation of storms.

The daylight trek across the endless clearing toward cryptic, crystalline scrawls of cipher on grey boughs sloped into a shallow ravine. Passing beneath a tangled, canopied corridor into deeper shadowlight, rhythmic breath vapors vanished and hair and eyebrows thawed in a sudden and startling encompassing heat. Instinct leapt forward into frozen air then curiosity returned to the exact spot and the same intelligence, neither animal nor human, in a state of perpetual bliss without complexity or memory. Familiarity made the alien trap seem normal like entering into the hearth blast of a structure. Though reluctant to continue onward, this was not paradise, this is where those who are nothing much anywhere else endure by attrition in a hellish death march disguised as a paradigm of forgotten good times.

A dreary yet challenging wilderness pierced by shafts of golden sunlight through silhouettes of titanic pines and rattling skeletal trees, the preceding days of November rain saturated roots slick and black and where rotten they had bloomed with vivid colours and unimaginable folds of fungi.

Seldom moderate, changeable, hungering from extreme to extreme, merely differentiated yet untamed by the awareness and invention of linear time the essence of all existence is feral; there is no one and certainly nothing pure about nature with exception of the traveler.





©2018 by L.P. Van Ness. All rights reserved.


"Feral Existence" part I [genre:cosmic fear] was published on this blogspot in November of 2018 and will be revised for print and include the remaining parts and the dénouement at a latter date.