The Path of Destruction

You are secure, confident, you know these woods and their pitfalls.  Your canteen is always filled, your boots are broken in, your pack strap is fixed with a piece of wire.  Your flint is well worn--as smooth as your fire building technique.   Your companions know your talents and your quirks, and you make camp each night in a well-oiled routine.  Efficient, practiced, unthinking.

Some might find your world to be harsh, dirty, dangerous, and filled with annoying mosquitoes but you KNOW it, you grok it, you are in your element and you know you can survive within it.

You know if it sounds like a bear its probably a squirrel.  You have learned you won't hear the bear, you'll see it first, and have to decide if you stand it off or retreat slowly.  Bears are campfire conversation now, an ever-present danger which has--by familiarity--become little more than a nuisance.  Your fears have been numbed.

You have reached a zen-like oneness with the reality of your environment.

The next bend in the path brings you to the edge of woods, too much light through the trees, and your boot comes down in a soft silent puff of ash.  Before you the forest is gone, burned, a smoking wrecked landscape.  A forest fire, unfought.  A controlled burn, they call it.  When there aren't enough resources or interest, when there isn't enough care, the fire is allowed to take all in its path.  There is not a tree left standing, not a living thing, the river is choked with burned wood and the water is bitter, it tastes of ashes and death.

There is one half burned log bridge, your party starts across, but it will not hold you all, like the ruined landscape, it cannot support your tribe.  It breaks midway with a gut wrenching sudden crash, you pull a few on your side to safety, and those left behind catch the coats of their own and pull them in.  You stare at each other across the gulf.

You wonder which troop will find shelter first.  They turn back, back toward the forest, to find another path, but you and your happenstance survivors must go on.  There is no way back for you.  Into the lifeless smoldering future you step.  Relying on faith that there is something on the other side, that you can reach water and shelter again before your canteens run dry.

You huddle beside a fallen black stump and make a cheerless camp, sharing what you have with the survivors.  You fill the holes in the practiced routine clumsily, you miss them--their laughs and their stories and their skills, but mostly you miss the innocence of the time when you were together and all you feared were mosquitoes and bears.  This total devastation was not on the map, it was not in the travel guide, and there was no preparing for it.

You tell tales of your lost ones, and they of you, at their fires.  Sleep is fitful.  You will not forget, and you will never be the same, but you must believe in their abilities to survive as you shoulder your burden again.  You know them, you grok them, and you know they will not fail.  Not bears or bugs or bullies can stop them.  This is what you have faith in as you trudge on--the journey has made us all strong enough to survive.