Flash! Fiction by Peter McMillan - HTML preview

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The Journey

It began the way they all begin. The tugging from somewhere out there, growing ever more persistent and difficult to ignore. The tether to home no longer there. All that keeps you around is the familiar, the predictable, the safe. What's out there is only vaguely understood. People talk about it, and most of them talk with the enthusiasm of explorers and conquerors. Few come back who have no story of great importance to tell.

When you're younger your instinct for comfortable certainties is so strong that it alone is sufficient to keep you home. But as your mind and body change and grow, independence and confidence develop and bring with them inner certainty.

Just as countless millions before you have journeyed out from home, so you, too, set out to conquer the unknown. In your haste to get under way, you set aside your quarrelsomeness and accept all the provisions that your family can put together. You know that you can discard what you don't need once you've got well beyond home. The weight and bulk of all this stuff—how can it possibly be necessary?—will not be easy to haul even for the 20 or so miles before you can dump it. But you promised not to insult your family on your way out—whether from guilt or fear of the curse, it's hard to say.

Dawn is coming. Ahead, the scattered clouds brushed along their rounded edges with lavender and pink highlights tell you that the sun is rising just over the horizon in the direction you're headed.

The air is cool and crisp. Apart from the soft crunching sound of the fine gravel underfoot and the non-melodious clanging of your load, it’s quiet. The sounds in the meadow to your left and the forest to your right are magnified in the morning stillness. There's no one 3

else on the road, so you're alone with the rush of thoughts of the young wayfarer just set out from home for the first time.

You don't even notice the extraordinary weight that you're carrying.

You've seen pictures in National Geographic and mail order cata-logues of what hikers and mountain climbers look like with their massive, fully-outfitted frame backpacks. You figure you would be satisfied to be travelling so light. However, your backpack is so chock full that if it had snaps instead of that sturdy double zipper, it would pop open and shoot all your belongings out on the road behind you.

You've got things dangling off the backpack, a set of pots and a large black cast iron pan, a tent, a fishing rod, a life preserver, a camera, a pair of snowshoes, an inflatable dinghy, a double-end paddle, a plastic mesh bag filled with pears, tomatoes, corn and pecans from the family garden, a four-foot long cardboard cylinder with a laminated map of the world, a parachute, and a sleeping bag rolled up and stuck on the top of the backpack just above your head.

And that’s just what is clipped onto the frame backpack. Trailing you at a dutiful distance of two-and-a-half-feet is a two-wheeled cart with a rugged mountain bike, bulky sacks and tins of dry goods to last for several weeks, and an overfull packing crate with exactly 100 books, including the Bible, a hodgepodge of titles from 19th century German philosophy, the history of economic thought, Russian literature before the Revolution, the nearly forgotten samizdat of post-war Eastern Europe, and Mr. Esslin’s theatre of the absurd as well as a handful of recently acquired titles on travel, bird watching, and wilderness survival and a prized first edition of the collected works of O. Henry.

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