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For my Narrative Image class we had to write a memoir and create an image or comic to go along with the story. The following is the short story that goes along with the comic (Page 1: blindthistle.deviantart.com/ar… Page 2: blindthistle.deviantart.com/ar… ).
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Hunting in Montana was a right of passage. As soon as you were old enough to aim a rifle, you were given the choice to brave the temperatures and go on those early morning trips up the mountain. Of course, no one ever refused the invitation to go hunting, and neither did I when the opportunity was presented to me as soon as I turned six. Refusing wasn't really an option. If you refused you were perceived as weak, and I wouldn't give my brothers that satisfaction.
I felt slightly apprehensive when thinking about whether or not I would be able to hit my target if/when I was presented with one. However that apprehension was drowned by my excitement to be joining my father on what I imagined to be a grand adventure into the wilderness. I was awoken before dawn, with thick frost encasing the trucks outside my window. It was past cold, my nose hairs froze and I could feel needles in my fingers when I crunched through the frozen snow to start the truck for my father. As soon as I turned the key, I scampered back to the safety of heat surrounding the wood stove to let my body defrost.
I watched as my father packed jerky and tootsie rolls in a fanny pack, and my mother filled a thermos with hot chocolate for me. When my father stomped back to the bedroom to put on his layers of camo, I asked my mom "What if I don't shoot anything?" My mother replied patiently, "You know, I shoot things with a camera, not a gun." Although she hadn't directly answered my question, her words lessened the tension I felt. I decided that if the opportunity arose I would take the shot, but I would not seek it out. I would let it find me. My father returned to the living room and joined us huddled around the stove. "Your brothers are taking Ryan's Bronco up, so you're stuck with me Brat." I beamed at him and ran to my cold room to grab my layers and raced back out to the stove. Standing as close to the fire as I possibly could I pulled on my bright orange clothes.
When my father and I left, the sun was barely breaching the tips of the mountains that lay on the East side of the valley, the Sapphires. I hopped into the small Nissan pick-up and out of the frigid weather. The heater was loud and blew directly in my face, drying out my nostrils and making it painful to breath through my nose. The road leading to Willowcreek was paved but spotted with potholes that made me bounce in my seat when we hit them.
I watched the familiar scenery of ranches and trailer houses pass by with increasing excitement as we hit the dirt road that marked the beginning of Forest Service land. The road twisted, turned, rose and fell with the frozen creek, and the land rose up around us. The pine and fir trees became increasingly close together, the weight of the snow that frosted them weighing down their limbs. Everything was in a pallette of cold blue greys. As the sun finally crested the mountain top, releasing the brisk morning light onto the valley, but still leaving us in shadow.
My father turned onto a steeper dirt road with tracks that were obviously from much earlier in the morning. As we climbed the tiny mountain road, only big enough for one vehicle, I looked out onto the valley. The Rocky Mountains towered on the other side, forming a cradle for the valley between the Rockies and the Sapphires. I was struck by the size, the Rockies towered much higher than anything else as far as the eye could see in any direction. They eagerly grasped at the sky with its exquisite peaks, like hungry hands. They looked like proud, old men, bearing the scars of past fire seasons like battle scars that they refused to talk about. They really were purple mountain's majesty. I wondered if you drove up to the top, if you would be surrounded by a landscape of deep blue trees and dirt stained a lighter tint of indigo. The patchwork quilt of the houses and property was only interrupted by large strokes of trees that followed the river and sprinkled themselves here and there. It was a pure definition of the sublime. I felt an overwhelming amount of peace and feeling of belonging as I looked out the window. Then I realized how very far up we were.
We were reaching the point of the mountainside where the trees were becoming thinner and more widely dispersed. There was a sudden and very sharp drop at the edge of the road, and nothing to prevent our tiny truck from dropping off the edge of the Earth. I began to feel uneasy, I had never been afraid of heights before, but climbing the haystack, semi-trucks, the trailer, jumping off of the bridge into the Bitterroot River, or even the giant rock in the driveway was nothing compared to this. I could not control the flood of images of our very tiny truck very easily slipping off the eroding edge of the road and plummeting dramatically to land -crumpled- at the creek bottom hundreds of feet below. I tried to convince myself that one of the trees might stop us, but I only imagined our truck snapping the spindly things like twigs on our way to the bottom.
My father rolled the windows down and blasted the heater to smoke a cigarette. I was temporarily distracted by the absurdity of having the heater on while the windows were down, but I was grateful for the small gesture. However, I couldn't help but turn my attention back to our obvious demise.
I worried for several more minutes. Fiddling with tootsie roll wrappers as I binged on their hard, chewy goodness. Trying not to think about the gaping hole of space beyond the truck window that should be flat ground. Staring at my tiny hands unfolding the fifteenth tootsie roll wrapper. They were small and too soft, I had always had a problem with how soft they were. It wasn't logical, a rancher's hands weren't supposed to be soft. They were supposed be square and calloused with scars from the abuse of manual labor. Then I looked at my father's strong square hands on the steering wheel, covered in faint old scars from trucks and barbed wire, and the newer scabs and then it hit me. I realized that our only salvation rested in the hands of a giant. (Now, for a very long time I have been convinced that the Sapphires were merely giants that had laid down and gone to sleep during the age of the dinosaurs. There was just a build up of flora from thousands of years.) I determined that one of these giants would hear my pleas and throw of his blanket and catch us.
I imagined him to be over 150ft. tall, towering over the creek bed; tall enough to rescue me if our pick-up ever did drive off the edge. He had huge square hands and fingers of thick, light brown, soft leathery skin. Kind hazel eyes framed by big bushy eyebrows, crow's feet and laugh lines. His mouth and neck were hidden beneath a large, wiry, salt-and-pepper beard that looked as though it could be hiding several birds' nests. His hair matched his beard, but was thinner and crawled down to his broad shoulders. His clothes were similar to an old miner's apparel. Stretched across his barrel chest, he sported a pair of grimy dirt stained overalls. Under that layer of grime was a muddy, sweat-stained, red shirt that was worn down to the thickness of paper. I named him Gareth after my favorite brother. He walked carefully, not to crunch too many trees, and spoke rarely with his deep gravelly voice, he preferred to rely on his expressive face and gestures. He was my first and only imaginary friend.
He bent down to our level and smiled at me reassuringly, and I sat back in the bench seat and let go of a breath I didn't know I was holding. My nerves started to settle and I could sense the humming of my muscles starting to relax. I hadn't even realized how tense I was until I started to calm down. I glanced at my father crunching the cigarette in his fingers until the orange ember at the end extinguished and he chucked it out the window. He looked at me with a quirked eyebrow, "how you doin' brat?" I gave him a cheeky smile, and he coughed out a laugh, "that's what I thought. Just a bit further and we'll meet up with your brothers at the top."
------
Hunting in Montana was a right of passage. As soon as you were old enough to aim a rifle, you were given the choice to brave the temperatures and go on those early morning trips up the mountain. Of course, no one ever refused the invitation to go hunting, and neither did I when the opportunity was presented to me as soon as I turned six. Refusing wasn't really an option. If you refused you were perceived as weak, and I wouldn't give my brothers that satisfaction.
I felt slightly apprehensive when thinking about whether or not I would be able to hit my target if/when I was presented with one. However that apprehension was drowned by my excitement to be joining my father on what I imagined to be a grand adventure into the wilderness. I was awoken before dawn, with thick frost encasing the trucks outside my window. It was past cold, my nose hairs froze and I could feel needles in my fingers when I crunched through the frozen snow to start the truck for my father. As soon as I turned the key, I scampered back to the safety of heat surrounding the wood stove to let my body defrost.
I watched as my father packed jerky and tootsie rolls in a fanny pack, and my mother filled a thermos with hot chocolate for me. When my father stomped back to the bedroom to put on his layers of camo, I asked my mom "What if I don't shoot anything?" My mother replied patiently, "You know, I shoot things with a camera, not a gun." Although she hadn't directly answered my question, her words lessened the tension I felt. I decided that if the opportunity arose I would take the shot, but I would not seek it out. I would let it find me. My father returned to the living room and joined us huddled around the stove. "Your brothers are taking Ryan's Bronco up, so you're stuck with me Brat." I beamed at him and ran to my cold room to grab my layers and raced back out to the stove. Standing as close to the fire as I possibly could I pulled on my bright orange clothes.
When my father and I left, the sun was barely breaching the tips of the mountains that lay on the East side of the valley, the Sapphires. I hopped into the small Nissan pick-up and out of the frigid weather. The heater was loud and blew directly in my face, drying out my nostrils and making it painful to breath through my nose. The road leading to Willowcreek was paved but spotted with potholes that made me bounce in my seat when we hit them.
I watched the familiar scenery of ranches and trailer houses pass by with increasing excitement as we hit the dirt road that marked the beginning of Forest Service land. The road twisted, turned, rose and fell with the frozen creek, and the land rose up around us. The pine and fir trees became increasingly close together, the weight of the snow that frosted them weighing down their limbs. Everything was in a pallette of cold blue greys. As the sun finally crested the mountain top, releasing the brisk morning light onto the valley, but still leaving us in shadow.
My father turned onto a steeper dirt road with tracks that were obviously from much earlier in the morning. As we climbed the tiny mountain road, only big enough for one vehicle, I looked out onto the valley. The Rocky Mountains towered on the other side, forming a cradle for the valley between the Rockies and the Sapphires. I was struck by the size, the Rockies towered much higher than anything else as far as the eye could see in any direction. They eagerly grasped at the sky with its exquisite peaks, like hungry hands. They looked like proud, old men, bearing the scars of past fire seasons like battle scars that they refused to talk about. They really were purple mountain's majesty. I wondered if you drove up to the top, if you would be surrounded by a landscape of deep blue trees and dirt stained a lighter tint of indigo. The patchwork quilt of the houses and property was only interrupted by large strokes of trees that followed the river and sprinkled themselves here and there. It was a pure definition of the sublime. I felt an overwhelming amount of peace and feeling of belonging as I looked out the window. Then I realized how very far up we were.
We were reaching the point of the mountainside where the trees were becoming thinner and more widely dispersed. There was a sudden and very sharp drop at the edge of the road, and nothing to prevent our tiny truck from dropping off the edge of the Earth. I began to feel uneasy, I had never been afraid of heights before, but climbing the haystack, semi-trucks, the trailer, jumping off of the bridge into the Bitterroot River, or even the giant rock in the driveway was nothing compared to this. I could not control the flood of images of our very tiny truck very easily slipping off the eroding edge of the road and plummeting dramatically to land -crumpled- at the creek bottom hundreds of feet below. I tried to convince myself that one of the trees might stop us, but I only imagined our truck snapping the spindly things like twigs on our way to the bottom.
My father rolled the windows down and blasted the heater to smoke a cigarette. I was temporarily distracted by the absurdity of having the heater on while the windows were down, but I was grateful for the small gesture. However, I couldn't help but turn my attention back to our obvious demise.
I worried for several more minutes. Fiddling with tootsie roll wrappers as I binged on their hard, chewy goodness. Trying not to think about the gaping hole of space beyond the truck window that should be flat ground. Staring at my tiny hands unfolding the fifteenth tootsie roll wrapper. They were small and too soft, I had always had a problem with how soft they were. It wasn't logical, a rancher's hands weren't supposed to be soft. They were supposed be square and calloused with scars from the abuse of manual labor. Then I looked at my father's strong square hands on the steering wheel, covered in faint old scars from trucks and barbed wire, and the newer scabs and then it hit me. I realized that our only salvation rested in the hands of a giant. (Now, for a very long time I have been convinced that the Sapphires were merely giants that had laid down and gone to sleep during the age of the dinosaurs. There was just a build up of flora from thousands of years.) I determined that one of these giants would hear my pleas and throw of his blanket and catch us.
I imagined him to be over 150ft. tall, towering over the creek bed; tall enough to rescue me if our pick-up ever did drive off the edge. He had huge square hands and fingers of thick, light brown, soft leathery skin. Kind hazel eyes framed by big bushy eyebrows, crow's feet and laugh lines. His mouth and neck were hidden beneath a large, wiry, salt-and-pepper beard that looked as though it could be hiding several birds' nests. His hair matched his beard, but was thinner and crawled down to his broad shoulders. His clothes were similar to an old miner's apparel. Stretched across his barrel chest, he sported a pair of grimy dirt stained overalls. Under that layer of grime was a muddy, sweat-stained, red shirt that was worn down to the thickness of paper. I named him Gareth after my favorite brother. He walked carefully, not to crunch too many trees, and spoke rarely with his deep gravelly voice, he preferred to rely on his expressive face and gestures. He was my first and only imaginary friend.
He bent down to our level and smiled at me reassuringly, and I sat back in the bench seat and let go of a breath I didn't know I was holding. My nerves started to settle and I could sense the humming of my muscles starting to relax. I hadn't even realized how tense I was until I started to calm down. I glanced at my father crunching the cigarette in his fingers until the orange ember at the end extinguished and he chucked it out the window. He looked at me with a quirked eyebrow, "how you doin' brat?" I gave him a cheeky smile, and he coughed out a laugh, "that's what I thought. Just a bit further and we'll meet up with your brothers at the top."
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Subconscious Questioning Nostalgia
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What a poignant memoir. Thank you for sharing this.