Perfection (Jiskastya X OhGodOfWriting)

Spring, May 23, 2013

It was still quiet this early in the season, for the tourists that were this park’s primary source of income and excitement were not willing to brave the chill wind that raced down over the mountains from the north. But the park itself was wide awake as the morning sun crested the horizon, bathing the valleys in a golden glow and reflecting bright white from the snowcapped peaks. Herds of elk moved slowly along the valley grasslands, digging hooves into the snow to unearth the small shoots that had survived the winter and were beginning to peak above the ground. A wolf pack slipped through a pack of trees, moving together swiftly and efficiently. Their pups were just starting to emerge from the den, and the pack needed to track down a new kill to feed their youngest members. Many of the park’s bears were finally starting to emerge from their layers, blinking sleepy-eyed up at the bright sky, and rolling off in search of food.

Hunt’s Falls National Park was only beginning to be released from the grasp of winter, even though May was almost over. Within a month the tourist season would begin, and millions of people would pour in from all over the country, trying to see everything the park had to offer without leaving the comfort of civilization, not knowing that the true wealth of the park could only be seen hundreds of miles from the nearest proper road, bed, or bathroom. The park had been built up around the geothermal valley, the primary attraction of the park, although one carefully maintained road did lead to the set of 20 magnificent waterfalls that had earned the park its name.

Hunter Chase had been a ranger at this park for seven years now, and he knew that he would likely be here for the rest of his life. He had been lucky enough to be able to get a basic position when he turned twenty-one, only intending to stay for a year, live life a bit on the wild side, before returning back to his comfortable home in San Francisco. But he had fallen in love with the sheer, wild beauty of this park, the freedom he could find in its mountains, valleys, and rivers. He had only left briefly in the time he had been here, long enough to tell his parents that he wouldn’t be coming back. In his brief span back in civilization, he had been surprised at how cloying it had felt, everyone pressing in on everyone else, living through life to acquire as much wealth and money as they could before dying without having found anything in life. There was no connection in the bustling city, and Hunter had missed the natural god he had found far from civilization.

And so he had returned to the park, knowing that he could explore it for the rest of his life and never find all the secrets that the 10 million acre park held. It was a massive wilderness, pristine and untouched, and it would always stay that way, no matter how hard the humans tried to invade it. Because people like Hunt had cared enough to preserve it, to turn it into a national park and ensure that a piece of the natural world would always remain.

He begrudged even the necessity of the roads, hotels, restaurants, campsites, and small shopping complexes needed to keep the tourist population happy, although he had learned to come to a sort of peace with the necessity. The tourists were what kept the park going, and if the geothermal section of the park needed to become nothing more than one more city to keep the rest of the park pure, he could accept that trade. For the people who chose to come seek out the Rangers and get a backcountry permit were few and far between. In some ways it was a shame. It was those people who chose to go see the pure, pristine beauty of the park that would best preserve it. It was those who traveled around in a motorhome large enough to allow twenty people to live with a relative level of comfort, only able to fit on the widest of roads and guzzling the gallons, who didn’t care about anything beyond their own entertainment, that left the mess behind.

But Hunter had worked in the park for long enough, become enough a part of it, that he no longer had to deal with such things. His home was the backcountry office, the animal research facility, and the small ranger cabins hidden back in the wilderness, where rangers could be sent for months at a time and only see those few backpackers who chose to travel the park’s extensive trail system. It could be lonely, but Hunter felt more alive in those places than he did anywhere else in the world, with the rushing river, the wild wolf, the soaring eagle, and the pure god of nature to keep him company.

The sun finally crested the rim of the mountains, even though the sky had long been lit by its bright rays. Hunter Chase took a deep breath, eyes closed, arms spread, and head lifted to the sky.

((Character Reference: http://samkaat.deviantart.com/art/ro...vent-187363293 ))


From over the crest of a small hill came trundling a being too clumsy (for its size) to be an animal. She wore a pale blue Northface jacket, baggy blue jeans, and a heavy pack. Her hiking boots crunched inexpertly over the ground, not intending to disturb, yet doing so anyway. She was small and thin, with hair that was both muted and violently shocking: the color of an orange autumn leaf, too long off the tree. It was almost the shade of dark sherbet, and pulled back into a thin ponytail of no extraordinary length. Her skin was rosey from exercise and cold, and dusted with freckles. Breath puffed from prominent lips in the chill morning air.

She stopped at an area for no obvious reason, shedding her pack and crouching to the ground. Her hands, clad in fingerless gloves, tugged aside zippers to retreive a camera from her pack. It was black and silver, analog and yet digital. The revered Leica camera. It cost a fortune, and it was the only valuable posession the girl owned. She had hitchiked and backpacked to the park, and never used either means of travel to get out of it again. She had been there a month so far, battling cold and staying in the geothermal basin, and finding what she could to eat, from her little handbook of plants of the area. She had lost a lot of weight, and only managed to survive thanks to the handouts of other campers, be their gifts merited through friendship, or merely left behind in trashcans or campsites.

Jo avoided others when she could. She was here to document nature, and was always irritated to have to be distracted by her need for food. It felt artificial, not to be able to 'live off the land' alone. Yet she wouldn't hunt, even if she could have, and not much was growing currently. Normally, Jo loved people. She was outgoing and people tended to like her, thanks to her friendly nature and harmless looks. In fact, this whole trip seemed to her friends and family to be out-of-character. Jo finished highschool, scorned her scholarship, saved enough money for hiking gear, and then took off. Everyone tried to talk her out of her adventure, but none could avail upon her made-up mind. Peacefully and without argument, she had stayed her course. On her way out here, she had called her mother from payphones a couple of times, but they had not heard from her now for a month and a week. Jo was not worried, as she knew that her family was fine, but they were all quite worried about her back home, as they did not know that she was. In fact, they were sure that she wasn't.

After adjusting the settings on her camera, enjoying the soft clicking noise of the wheel, and feeling the cold soaking into the knees of her pants, she set her camera on the ground, and lay down next to it. Her cheek was on the freezing grass, and her lips parted to breath in and out steadily. An eye the color of an olive leaf slid behind the viewfinder. From the other side, this iris was magnified, showing the marbled murky verdant color, flecked with brown and golden. Hazel, that noncomittal color that currently decided to feign green. It examined through the tiny window a world not unlike its own. A single, large maple-leaf lay upon the grass. It was brown and dead, yet gilded by frost. Every vein was an arching spire, a diamond-encrusted, vaulted cathedral ceiling for invisible fairy sprites, yet it was not unlike the other lifeless leaves her feet had already decimated to find this one.

Delicate fingers reached to adjust the focus rings on the lens, and it was like magic when the leaf jumped into clarity. A half a centimeter the other way, and it shifted out again, and a centimeter past it, and the grass behind the leaf sharpened, looking like an approaching army of marching soldiers. Another soft touch, and it was where she wanted it. The inside of the leaf was vividly, stunningly clear, and it ringed out into blurriness, until it filled almost the whole frame, topped by a fringe of blurry green and jumbled snatches of other leaves as a background. "Ansel Adams," she thought to herself. "Another Ansel Adams in the making," her teacher had said of her, and it had stuck with her.

She didn't know why she cared. If she wanted fame, she should have gone to Brooks Institute of Photography, where she had been accepted. She should have sought backers and publicity for this trip. Yet after high school, she couldn't bear more years of school, and politics, and more people deciding for her what was important, and refusing to let her be herself. Jo did not fully understand the source of her own feelings, but she simply knew that the vehemence with which she wanted to go on this trip would not vaporize with logic or time.

May 24

The cabin that Hunter lived in during the winter months would be a small thing by most people’s standards, a single room containing little more than a fireplace, a bed, and a simple square table. The wooden walls were old and weathered, but patched through the years to make sure that the cold wind of the winter months would not be able to work its way into the small home. It was a simple, strong, and cosy place, and one of the few places that Hunter had ever really found that he could call home.

It hardly mattered that the place wasn’t even large enough to allow three people to live within it comfortably, for not only was Hunter usually alone here, but the whole wide world waited just outside of his doors.

Right now, he sat on the roof, lounging back against the warm, dark colored slate, wand watched the clouds pass by overhead. It was one of the first truly fine days of the season, and Hunter felt a bit like a cat, lounging out in the sun with nothing to worry about. There was a peace and quiet in the wilderness that the city boy he used to be had never even been able to imagine. In these early spring months there was hardly a noise beyond the gentle whisper of wind, and sweet birdsong.

His eyes softly closed, lashes brushing softly against his cheeks, and he let the simple sounds of the natural world rush into him. At moments like these, bathed in warm sunlight, knowing that he didn’t have a single care in the world, it was easy to remember why he would be here for the rest of his life.

His eyes flickered open a moment later, as an unnatural rumble suddenly reached his ears. There was a familiar tone to it, a sound uncommon in the normally quiet park. In the summer months, when the small plane that tracked the wolf packs flew through the park, perhaps it wouldn’t have surprised him so. But there was also something foreign to this deep rumble of a plane engine, a bass to it that the small, two man, planes in the park could never touch.

His eyes tracked across the sky, and locked on to a white streak, slowly progressing its way through the sky. His eyes followed the gradual movement, and his brow wrinkled in a small surprise.

How long had it been since a commuter plane had passed over this park? Months, for sure. It wasn’t in the cross-path of any major flight routes, ensuring that the sky was mostly clear of the massive machines. For a brief moment, as he continued to watch the gleaming plane pass through the rich azure of the sky, Hunter found himself wondering where it was going. The people in it were likely heading somewhere foreign and exciting, preparing to dive into a new culture, experience something brand new.

There was a certain excitement to travel that the simple life Hunter now lead would never be able to compete with. The pure wonder of knowing that you were traveling somewhere so far away that, was this plane not there for transportation, you would likely never be able to experience the sights and sounds and smells of the place.

But as the plane began to dwindle in the distance, so to did Hunter’s curiosity. It had taken that plane less than twenty minutes to cross the entire park, edge to edge. And those people, so high up in their lofty perch, probably hadn’t even noticed what they were passing over. The journey, so augmented by the power of machinery, had lost something that no speed of travel would ever allow it to recover. It had lost the very journey itself, the pleasure in seeing what was around the next bend, behind the next hill, across the next river. It had lost the love of the journey itself, the surprise and wonder at the countless sights around you that said that, perhaps, the destination wasn’t as important as the route you took to get there.

Those people, trapped in their gleaming plane, cared nothing more for the journey than how long it would take them to get to their final destination.

But here, in the park, the sun still shone warmly, the wind still whistled through the trees, the sweet, sharp scent of pine and sap, flowers and life, still drifted lazily through the clearing where Hunter’s cabin resided.

Here, life was about the journey.