“Finally some good frickin’ horror”
Sorry, did I tell you last week that I had a very exciting announcement? Well, change of plans. Due to circumstances beyond my control, this very exciting announcement has been pushed back about, I don’t know, a couple weeks at least? And this isn’t a joke, or me complaining about writing the blog or being tired or something; I do genuinely mean that I had something coming up unrelated to this blog that I was going to share with you all in the blog, but its real-world release date has been pushed back. So, uh, I don’t know, I’m kind of bummed about it? So I’ll tell you all some other time. Check back later this month, or in March, I guess.
In the meantime, here’s the final part of “Pine Sight!” And wouldn’t you know it, it’s twice as long as the other two parts combined. I have this thing where I sometimes just start writing and it goes one of two ways; I hammer out words like a monkey with a typewriter and jumble together a couple paragraphs in an hour, or I kick up the octane and write myself into a frenzy, churning out a thousand-plus words an hour, writing non-stop until I come to my senses hours later and find that I am exhausted and, amazingly, have most of a story. Guess which one happened for Part Three? I’ll give you a hint; it wasn’t the first one.
Anyway, I won’t yammer on any further about it, because this is a long ending to the story. It’s not even just the ending, it’s the latter two-thirds of the damn thing. And we finally get into the scary stuff, too! Do you think that creepy guy is gonna come back? Will he be a deformed zombie-man with a thousand tentacles for arms and a penchance for blood? Or will he be a delirious, dehydrated solo hiker who pushed himself too far and has ended up in a life-or-death situation that could very well put our protagonist’s life on the line? Either of these outcomes is a thing you could find while hiking Yellowstone, so you should always be prepared when taking wilderness excursions. Read on to find out what happens to our Ranger Conroy!
This is the last part, but if you need to catch up, part two is here!
“Pine Sight,” By Andy Sima (2023)
Brief content warning: contains violence, physical assault, head injuries, allusions to PTSD.
Where we left off….
I gently tilted the throttle forward, and eased my way off the main road and into what was, more or less, officially backcountry. The distinction was debatable this close to the visitor center, but it did mean that if, against all odds, something happened to me, the other rangers would have to come get me with the other ATVs. There would be no golf carts or ranger vans here. The radio pinned to my shoulder cycled its way upwards in terms of level of importance.
In the single mirror attached at the vehicle’s handbrake, I could see the man still standing at the trailhead. He watched me until I could no longer see him as the trail curved around the pines…….
Spinning my head around at the moment proved fortuitous since the only part of the trail with any sort of danger, at least for the stretch that I was driving, was just beyond the first curve. Out in this part of Yellowstone, the trails were flat, packed earth through pine groves. Right at the beginning the trail dipped down into a shallow ravine that fed the Yellowstone river, and I had to feather the handbrake to prevent myself from spilling over forwards. Once in a while later I would hit washouts if I drove too close to the edge of the trail, but these were minor inconveniences.
Wind whistled around my face and carried away the sweat as I threaded my way between trees. Every now and then I would catch a glimpse of the Yellowstone River valley just off to my side. It was like the earth had been leveled and then gouged with a crude stone blade, carving a twisting, jagged line as if the beginning of an ill-fated surgery. Whites and yellows of the stone cliff faces cascaded down to the turbulent river below, and at every bend it looked as if the scar would open up wider and swallow the sky itself.
But the process, I knew, was thousands, millions of years in the making, and there only real risk was proceeding too close to the edge and becoming a personal shadow theater mockery of the earth falling away. The scent of sulfur drifted up from empty air.
Once the trail curved north, away from the river’s fathomless banks, I thought, briefly, of a story I had read when I first started in this field of outdoor education, of interpretation, to take the National Park’s term. I had cut my teeth on it at a historic site in my hometown, playing tour guide in summers between years of community college and then a truncated four-year program, at a time when my father worked late into the evenings and my mother scraped boxed mac and cheese from the base of the pot and the next child after me sold shoes at the mall. I learned little from that first job beyond how to command a group, a valuable skill nonetheless but not what I had signed up for. But it paid, at least comparable to flipping burgers.
A naturalist at a county park had been next, a glorified babysitting role for half the year, and there I had been introduced to that National Park Service’s own handbook of interpretation, written by a man named Tilden. Overwritten and impractical in the field as it was, I could still remember a particularly lurid story in the second, or maybe third, edition of the handbook.
There was a blind man at Crater Lake, Tilden said, who wanted to know the park. A ranger took the blind man’s hand and guided him through a to-scale model of the park, teaching, interpreting, the geology of it as he did, supplanting a hard plaster model for the real thing. He could see through his fingers, said Tilden. There are all grades of sight.
After bumping around between several years of seasonal work within and without the National Park System, after leaving my family and my father’s factory and my mother’s bare pantry and my own dispersed siblings, beyond all belief I ended up at Yellowstone. Tilden’s theories for teaching came up here and there, but we had moved beyond the realm of theory into practical application now. How to make visitors see the parks. But that story stuck with me. How do you make someone see something beyond just the organs of sensation, how do you make someone understand something they may not even be able to physically perceive? At times, it is easy. At others, unpredictably difficult.
My own sensory organs perceived the presence of the deer kill as I neared the trail intersection. The scent of blood and putrid meat filled my nostrils long before I could see anything of the animal. Pulling the ATV off to the side, I turned off the machine and stepped onto the hard earth and plugged by nose with one hand. The vibrations from the vehicle ceased, but my legs echoed a few minutes longer.
“Phew!” I said to the stillness of the forest. In response a gust of air, almost childish, brought the stench on stronger. I couldn’t quite see the deer from where I was parked. I looked around for anyone or anything that might have needed my attention. Crows, foxes, wolves, bears, hikers, families, dead things attracted a cross-section of the park with reliability. But the woods were still.
A boulder sat off the trail just up ahead, at the base of a small rise, not more than ten feet up. A fallen log stretched across the top of the incline, a gate of sorts. I presumed that the deer must have been just behind the stone, since everywhere else was flat and unmarred by viscera of any species.
Grabbing the shovel, hacksaw, and gloves, the smell got worse as I approached the boulder. I had been around dead things before, cleaned up other animals that had been splattered across the side of the road or crawled into a campground to die. Yet this was a smell of putrefaction, of bacterial fecundity, of summer rot. Blame it on the heat.
I stopped at a tree before reaching the place where the thing surely was. I covered my eyes and wiped the sweat off my brow in one movement, leaning against the pine. Burying my face in its grooved, scaly bark, I took a deep whiff in to clear my senses. Ever so briefly, the smell of decay was glossed over by the clean, fresh scent of the lodgepole pine. I breathed in, resin and wood mixing in my nostrils, air flowing upwards from the tree.
There was a tingle at the tip of my nose, and I opened my eyes to find a bit of sap had connected me with the tree in a more literal sense. Sticky and orange, my nose and bark united. But as I watched it, eyes crossed from the closeness, the sap seemed to retreat back into the wood of the tree. Like amber, encasing a bug and enclosing information, but the recipient was in reverse. The sap oozed its way in between a split in the bark, carrying beads of sweat. My sweat.
I thought to the outermost layer of skin from the tip of my nose. I had the alarming sensation that I had stuck my nose to a stop sign in the dead of winter and pulled away, leaving a thin layer of cells behind. Pink and exposed on the metal, they would hang there until the spring thaw. The distinction here, though, was that the piece of me left behind would not be on display. It was already gone.
I stumbled backwards, hands flying to my face. There was no sensitivity to my nose, no stickiness either. My eyes strained at the spot in the tree where I had been, but now I could see nothing. Smell was a different story, and the foul waft of the deer hit me anew. My stomach lurched. One single tear came to the corner of my eye. But I shook my head. I had work to do.
Hefting my tools, I finally decided it was time to clear out with this disgusting task. I strode up to the boulder, grabbed the side of it, spun myself around to face the mess, and found nothing.
Well, not nothing. There had clearly been something here, and recently. The detritus of the forest floor was red and soggy. Flies buzzed frantically about a clump of short, brown fur that was stuck to the edge of the rock. Their feet would tell them exactly what they needed to know.
“The hell?” I muttered, bending down to get a closer look. The ground was definitely disturbed, and more chunks of skin had peeled apart and distributed themselves around a circular bed. But to one side the pine needles were all oriented the same way, and the blood stains and ruined flesh trended upwards towards the rise and the fallen tree, and I realized with a start that something had dragged off whatever was here.
I stood back up straight and cocked my hat. “Makes my job easier,” I said to no one. I do love my job, especially when nature does it for me. I decided that it was better to make sure, though, so I pushed onward and followed the faint impression in the dirt left by a bloody mass being dragged off.
Crossing the crest of the ridge and stepping over the downed tree, I noted the lower half of a deer leg caught on one of the remaining branches. Definitely hooved, definitely the colors of a deer, and definitely too small to be elk. It surprised me I hadn’t noticed it earlier, since it was perfectly visible from the trail. Using a loose stick, I knocked the leg to the ground. That was when I heard the crying.
“Hello! I’m a park ranger. Do you need help?” I shouted into the forest. It was the pained, slow, blubbery sobs of a child, with a sniffling, hitching gasp and a second of silence. Not the kind of someone in immediate panic, but the methodical, hiccupy ones of prolonged suffering. The kind my younger brother had made in our bedroom after he shattered his ankle playing basketball, but dad had the car so we had to wait until the next day to go to the hospital. The sounds were coming, faintly, from farther off-trail.
“Hello! Where are you? Can you guide me to where you are?” My pace quickened and a battery of questions ran through my head. Who was this child? Why were they out here, ostensibly alone? Had anyone else reported a lost kid? No one had radioed me. Should I radio it in? How badly were they injured? Would we need to carry them out on a stretcher or could they sit in an ATV? Why hadn’t I heard them earlier? I could sense that something wasn’t quite right here. Why hadn’t I heard them earlier?
“This is Ranger Conroy to Canyon Village,” I buzzed the radio on my shoulder.
“Canyon Village here. Gopher it, Conroy,” Brett’s voice sailed through.
“I’m looking for a lost child and potential injury out at the Seven Mile Hole and Washburn Spur intersection. I can hear them but I can’t see them. Searching now. Can you get a first aid team ready?” I said, stepping over a broken branch.
“Copy that, Conroy, we’ll send ‘em your way. See you in, oh, twenty minutes or so. Don’t get bored now.” The radio clicked into silence.
“Can you hear me? I’m coming to help you. I have a radio.” I was reminded, briefly, of a friend’s campfire ghost story about stairs in the woods and fuzzy things in trees. But I put it out of my head. The ground had flattened out at the top of the little ridge, and the bloodstained trail grew thinner here as whatever blood had been left on the deer leaked out long before. The cries got louder, and there was a sniffling, hitching gasp and then a second of silence before taking up the refrain again.
“Where are you? It’s ok; we’ll get you out of here.” The rise descended back down again, about fifteen feet into a small clearing of woods, but even from the top I couldn’t see anything. There were a few more downed trees and stumps creating a series of potholes and pits, perfect for a child to fit into. They could have been anywhere. Idly, I also noted the ripped body of the deer just near the base of the ridge. It wasn’t important anymore.
“Hello? I’m here to help.” The sheer lack of response had become unnerving, despite the fact that I was definitely getting closer to the source of the sounds. Was I not loud enough? Could the child not hear me? Why hadn’t I heard them earlier? I cross over another fallen long, stepping into the clearing and looking around. It felt like the sound was coming from just behind one of these stumps. There was a sniffling, hitching gasp and then a second of silence.
“H- hello?” I stopped in my tracks. My head swiveled and spun, looking for anything in the woods around me. But it was clear for almost a quarter mile in any direction. My metaphorical hackles rose on end as another question came jarringly into focus. Why did it sound like the cries were all the same? But they were so close now. The safety of this kid had to be my first priority.
“I’m almost to you.” I grabbed a rotted stump for support, and moved forward towards where it seemed like the sound was coming from. It was just behind this log now, the kid must have been sitting right there. I leaned forward, bracing myself against the log to look over and see the child that had been crying.
There was no child. There was a tape recorder. The mesh screen of its speaker bowed in time with the sound of the cries. The tape deck, antique cord looping around and around inside of itself, clicked and spun backwards quietly at the end of that sniffling, hitching gasp, paused, and started again. The black “play” button was curved inward.
My eyes widened, and I stood up straight, and suddenly felt very, very vulnerable in this empty, exposed woodland. I swiveled on the spot, spinning around to look in all directions for any sign of movement. Adrenaline rushed to my ears, and I strained to hear any possible sound. An uncomfortable, primal sensation of being watched crept from my legs up my spine to the base of my neck, spider legs of dread tapping on each vertebrae in rapid succession.
“Hey, Conroy, just checking in, you found that kid yet?” The radio squawked, horribly loud, in my ear. I kept my mouth shut in a thin line and turned down the volume of the radio with one hand but stopped short of turning it all the way off. “Shhhhhh,” I whispered.
Still, there was nothing. I began to back away from the site, checking over my shoulder with every step backwards. I would have to crest the small rise and make it back to the ATV, but I didn’t want to turn my back on this clearing. There was something there, I just couldn’t quite see it. Again and again, my vision was drawn to a tree standing near the base of the fallen trunk that had first concealed the tape recorder. But there was nothing there, it was barely wide enough to conceal a person behind it. I stepped backward again, and my eyes raked over the forest.
I sensed movement. I snapped back to the same tree. My blood pumped, roared in my ears and made my fingers swell up. It was like my eyes zoomed in, their apertures contracting and focusing on that one tree. It was as if… as if…
Eyes. Eyes opened out of the side of the tree. From nothing but bark, eyes. They were too big. Too wide. Too white. Yet the very human blue of them seemed to swirl and change in the light. The eyes opened, and then a mouth, lips painted the same brown of the trunk, ripped a wound in the false bark in a silent scream. Nostrils flared, cheeks puffed, skin covered in caked, scaly makeup, and I could see the shape of a face. And then shoulders, arms, chest, legs, a body, and a man, impossibly camouflaged, dressed in a ghillie suit of tree bark, stepped out from in front of the tree. There the whole time. He didn’t make a single sound.
My jaw dropped, every inch of my skin buzzed, my own eyes exploded in what must have been a cartoonish mirror of the man’s own uncanny gaze. I turned, screamed, and immediately ran for the top of the ridge.
I crested the hill, smashed my shoulder on a tree at the top, scratched my shins on upturned branches, and flew forward. “No, no, no, no!” I didn’t look over my shoulder as I crossed the flatness of the hill, but I had to slow down to jump over the fallen log at the other end. Scrambling over it, almost losing my balance, I turned and looked behind me.
He was running now, had just appeared over the far end of the mound, eyes huge and red, black, deep mouth hanging open. His arms punched the air, his knees cleared every obstacle, and his ghillie suit shook like a haze around his entire frame, as if he had stepped out of another world, a world of bark, into our own and the veil of reality folded around him. Every time he crossed in front of a tree, it was like his body vanished, and he was just eyes, a mouth, screaming eyes and gaping mouth, I couldn’t pinpoint where he was, he was in the trees, and then he would run from in front of one and I could see him, sprinting through the forest. The trees quaked.
I hurdled down the hill, went flying around the boulder, and used my weight and the blood-stained rock to angle myself back onto the trail. My ATV was right there, hacksaw and shovel be damned. I hopped on the vehicle and-
There were no keys. “Shit, shit, fuck, shit.” I jammed my hand into every pocket I could think to check. Catch on three. But I couldn’t find them. My keys were gone. I jumped to the ground, took a last-ditch effort to scour the dirt of the trail below my ATV, and looked up in a panic.
The man was standing on top of the boulder, eyes looming from the sun-dappled canopy. He held his arms over his head, and pieces of bark fell from his suit and clattered to the ground. I screamed again, turn, and ran down the trail.
There was a whump and I heard his feet his the trail behind me, and then there was the sound of him sprinting after me, and I could barely distinguish the sound of our boots smashing the earth from one another, and my arms were stretched out forward as if the reach for something, and I turned my head over my shoulder as I ran and I could see him behind me, and like the distant roar of a train coming through a tunnel I could suddenly hear that he wasn’t silent, he was awfully, terribly loud, like the whole forest, trees, stones, earth, sulfur-scented air were all screaming in deep, horrifying unison, and my eyes met his and
A root grabbed me. Trees speak through roots, I thought absurdly as I toppled forward. These are my last feelings. Fungus and plant, sensory and communicative, giver and receive, they are pathways of nutrients and knowledge. I fell.
My head hit the trail with a thud, and I was suddenly in immense pain.
And then that deep booming force of sound, of sight, of smell, of taste, of touch, was upon me, and there was blackness, and then a horrible light that I couldn’t see but obliterated my entire body.
All in the same single instant, the ground heaved upward, rock and stone and dust and water cascading not down into the tear but up and out as if the very body of the earth had grown tired of everything crawling on its skin and exploded outward, an impossible force of heat and terrible geologic might that was absolutely and unmistakably volcanic. I could feel the entire world around me, the massive caldera of Yellowstone erupting, but it was too much, all too much, I couldn’t see it, I couldn’t hear it, I couldn’t smell it, I couldn’t taste it, I couldn’t touch it, it was overwhelming, it was a force beyond imagination and it ripped my screaming mind from my skull and splattered my brain across a rim of rock the size of God and then I could feel, could feel its terrible perception on me, it knew me, it knew every part of me, and I was there and the whole world was bright but not bright because I could do nothing but perceive it not with any of our faulty organs, and it perceived me.
And then I knew that I was moving, and I could feel the movement of my form, my splayed parts across an unfathomable distance but I knew where my body was, and then spiraling, cochlear since of balance and I knew I was spinning end over end and the thing was pushing me up, up, up, and it was hot, hotter than the core of the sun, hotter than I had ever known anything to be, and the pain was impossible and I wanted to tear myself into tiny pieces but I already was in tiny pieces and no time and all of time were passing through me and then it felt me again and a jolt of electricity of the kind of storm clouds over an eruption and it turned and spun and polarized the electrical charge of the iron in my blood and there was wave after wave of something else pulsing and pulling and prodding with a touch that wasn’t touch at all but an invasion.
And suddenly it was touch, and I could feel at the back of my arms a force spinning me around and around, the taste of the magnetic blood was cold in my mouth and I could hear an awful ringing at a frequency only identifiable on a stellar scale and smell the scent of sulfur pulled from the very rocks miles beneath the skin of the earth and then suddenly I could see, and I was in a blazing inferno of light and dark and smoke and I was falling down into one singular giant eye, pupil pitch dark in a spinning vortex of lava and orange and then it wasn’t an eye but it was a mouth, a gaping pool of acidic water starting out a spinning fiery orange and then yellow and then green and then bright blue, the bluest possible blue, and then a deep, endless, abyssal black and I was falling, falling, falling, pulled into this gullet of earthly magnitudes like the tomb of beings sealed for tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of years and it was a darkness that knew no bounds and knew no light and was complete for it was the darkness beneath it all and it could sense me, and then-
And then the real, conscious darkness of closed eyes became my reality, and my head throbbed.
My eyelids sprang back and the light of the sun was knives, and everything swam. A dark figure, face the brown of the pine with impossible eyes and mouth, loomed over me in three-fold. He was crouched over my body, his knees pressing into my arms. These shapes collapsed into one and I was staring into the blue eyes of the man who had been chasing me, and I realized I was crying.
I sobbed and turned my head away. “Puh- please,” I choked out, tears mixed with what was probably blood and salt meeting my lips. I felt a huge hand, chalky and matte, grab my chin and pulled my head upright.
Through crushed eyelids, I saw the face of the man as he held my chin. Slowly, with the measured speed of water cutting through stone, his mouth closed and his eyes returned to normal proportions. He released my chin, and brought one finger to his mouth, and said “Shhhhhhh.”
With the other hand, he hefted a tape recorder into view. He pressed the curved-in “record” button. The button popped back up to its neutral position, and the tape deck inside ceased documenting.
Before the sound, there was a humming in the earth, a vibration that bumped and stumbled with every jolt of rock in the dirt trail. The man on top of my snapped his head up and leaned back on his haunches in one single movement. Distantly, I could hear the shouts of other people and what seemed like not one, not two, but four or more ATV’s. I heard the sound of running footsteps.
I closed my eyes and new tears flowed outward. When I opened them again, the man in the ghillie suit was gone. I closed them one more time, and then there was a new figure kneeling over me. I screamed and flung my arms to my face, but eased off as a familiar voice soothed, “hey, hey, it’s me, Brett, you’re ok, we’re ok, we’re all ok, we’re gonna get you out of here, got it? I need you to listen to our folks here and help them out so they can help you, ok? They’ve got some questions they want to ask. Don’t sit up, don’t move, but can you wiggle your fingers and toes for me?”
I smiled, weakly, and choked back another sob. “I just… I just hit my head. I just fell. I’m ok. I can stand up,” I said. But the dizzying spin of the world revolving as I tried to lift myself brought me crashing backwards. I moaned and rolled my head to the side. Brett put his hand on my chest, and someone was taking my pulse and blood pressure. Two pairs of heavy, booted feet shot past me on the other side.
“Hey, uh-uh, don’t move,” he said. The warmth of his hand was reassuring.
“How did you get here so quickly?” I asked, moving as little of my mouth as I could while still speaking.
There was an awkward pause, and Brett’s hand disappeared from my chest. There was a quick exchange of words over my body as he talked to the medic at my side. “It’s been almost half an hour since you called in that missing kid.”
My eyes flew open in horror and recognition, but I didn’t move. “There is no kid,” I yelled, suddenly. And then, “What do you mean a half an hour?”
Over his shoulder, Brett directed a statement to someone I couldn’t see. “Let search and rescue know we found Conroy. We’re still looking for a kid. Contact law enforcement and update them.” He turned his attention back to me.
“There is no kid,” I repeated.
“Shh, hey, that’s alright. Don’t worry about that. We’ll talk about something else. Did you find the deer?”
“What do you mean half an hour?” That wasn’t possible. I’d only been out for a few seconds when I hit my head. Anything longer than a few minutes would mean significant brain damage, but besides the shooting pain and ache behind my eyes, I felt mostly ok. I couldn’t possibly have been out of it for more than a minute, at most. But the memory of what I had seen- no, not seen. The memory lingered.
Brett paused, and the medic began to gently palpate my neck, down to my shoulders, then my fingers. “You called in the injured kid. We started getting stretchers ready, and I called back to check on your status. We didn’t get a response. Then you started screaming, and we could hear that over the radio, and then, well, that’s when we guess is when you fell.” He pointed at something just past my feet, and I inclined my head over so slightly to see it. “That’s what you tripped on, I guess,” Brett said, gesturing to a knotted arch of root that broke out through the packed surface. The skin of it had been worn bare by thousands of feet. “After that, we could hear you crying until we got here. For about twenty minutes.”
A single sob escaped. I brought my hand up to my face, which the medic gently pushed aside as she told me to open my eyes. A beam of light flooded my vision, first one eye and then the other, and I flinched backwards. “Did you see the man?”
Brett’s face, silhouetted behind the medic’s light, turned grim. “Yeah. We saw the man. We’re getting everyone off the trails around Washburn now. We’ll find him.”
As they loaded me up onto a stretcher, a medic explained that they needed me to keep my neck as straight as possible and not move if I could help it. I smiled, grimly, and looked at Brett, who was now just about at eye level. He smiled and scratched his beard. Four people, one at each corner of the stretcher, huffed as they carried me away from where I had fallen.
“Good luck finding him. He blends right in,” I said. And then I closed my eyes to the light of sweltering afternoon, sweat dripping from my brown, and turned my attention to the questions of the medics as they carted me off.
“Animals have amazing senses, some even more finely tuned than ours,” I said to the assembled crowd of the amphitheater. The still, hot air refused to move for even the most ardently-fanning tourist, but at least the temperature had dropped a few degrees since the height of the summer. Sweat still grabbed at my skin, salt stinging at the raw spot at the tip of my nose, but it wasn’t as bad as it could be. As it had been.
“They use their senses just like we do, to perceive the world around us.”
It had been about a month since they carted me out of the woods, forehead slick with not just sweat but my own blood, iron and violets in my mouth and a concussive ringing in my ears. And yet all the scans they did suggested only a minor concussion, no worse than a high school football player. I would be dizzy for a week and should avoid using screens for prolonged periods of time, the doctors said. But I could go back to work when I felt I was ready, they added.
“They hunt for food, smell for water, look for shelter, adapt to changes.”
Considering the circumstances, the park offered the rest of the season’s pay, on top of worker’s comp, if I wanted to leave early and go elsewhere. But I declined. How could I do anything else? I had spent the better part of a decade scraping by to get here, to Yellowstone, while my parents judged me from across the country. While my shoe-selling brother joined the teamsters and made four times over what I did. I love my job. I would never want to end a season early.
“Their bodies are finely tuned to survive here in Yellowstone, in a place that can be, at times, one of the harshest environments in the United States.”
The doctors also added that it wasn’t unusual to experience intrusive thoughts during recovery. Thoughts like how the magnetic imaging that peeled apart my skull, my brain, my insides, was only a fraction of the perception that the thing under the earth had. Thoughts like how I knew certain truths, in the deepest, darkest part of myself, the part light and sound and pressure couldn’t reach but the thing under the earth could. Truths that the search and rescue operation to find the nonexistent missing child, and the concurrent manhunt to find the ashy-skinned blue-eyed man who had attacked me, would never turn up anything. And if they did, it was only ever destined to be bones and, if they were lucky, a cassette tape. If we were unlucky, well, they have ghost stories to fill in the gaps.
“Whether it’s the mule deer, with their big satellite ears,” and here I held up one hand and cupped it above my head, “or the discerning palette of the wolf’s nose,” I stuck my hand above my nose and imitated a snout sniffing out prey, “or the picture-perfect eyes of the bald eagle,” I rolled my hands around my eyes like binoculars, “we could learn a thing or two from the way animals pay attention to the world around them.”
The radio at my shoulder suddenly started to blare with static, not so much as breaking the silence of the amphitheater but crowding it out, pushing with a nascent wave of motion and force that surely, surely must have entered the ears of the crowd like the rising tide. And as that static turned to crying, to strangled breaths and moans and a sniffling, hitching gasp that I recognized not as that of a child but of my own, I thought surely, surely, someone in the audience would say something. Would ask why my radio was playing back the sounds I had made, over and over, while the man crouched above me and the world engulfed below.
But as I turned the volume down on my radio and the crying was silenced, there was barely more than an awkward cough from someone off to my right. “I’ll be here until two,” I said, grimacing and wiping away the sweat from my forehead. But there was nothing to wipe away.
The audience members clapped politely, stood up, and shuffled off slowly into the heat. Now, at this end of the summer, we tended to attract folks who no longer had children, had yet to bear children, or had only been children themselves half a lifetime ago. No one came up to feel the bison pelt at the table in the center of the sunken rings of benches, but one older couple waddled their way down. I smiled wanly.
“What can you tell us about the volcano?” The old man asked. His probably wife, eyes invisible under a stiff visor and puffed hair, stared in my general vicinity.
What could I say about the volcano that hadn’t already been said? That wasn’t spelled out more eloquently somewhere else in the park? I could tell them the facts and figures and the unlikely nature of another eruption within any conceivable human time frame. I could tell them that it’s moving eastward, slowly, on a geologic scale, but then so do continents. I could tell them that people gather in spaces like Yellowstone because they are drawn to nature, drawn to appreciate or acknowledge or enrich or worship, understand beyond just our senses, drawn to the things we can hear, touch, taste, smell, see. But we are also so much drawn to the things we cannot.
I thought back to Tilden’s blind man, scouring the land with his fingertips, skirting around the edge of something vastly more immense. Sight is one sense of dozens, perhaps hundreds. What is sight to a forest? To a stone? To water? To wind? To a thing that shapes ecosystems, landscapes, mountains, continents? There are all grades of sight.
Everyone wants to know about the volcano. When it’s going to erupt, or if it ever will. There’s power here. Beneath my feet, with something that isn’t quite sensation, I sense it anyway.
I closed my eyes and sighed. I love my job. I opened them, slowly, and said, “We know it’s there. I know it’s there. You know it’s there.” And with the blind, limitless perception of a sunken deity, it knows we’re here, too.
Well, that’s the end of that. At least he didn’t die this time! I told you, mom. I promised that he wouldn’t die in this one. And I was truthful! Ranger Conroy is not dead. I wouldn’t say he’s better off than he was at the start of the story, but then, well, this is horror writing, isn’t it? It’s kind of a genre thing that it doesn’t often end well. We can’t all go feed the horses, I guess.
Anyway, tune in next week for when I talk about existential dread of a very different dimension. The dimension of THE INTERNET :O See you soon!
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