Knife Ridge Tooth Museum
12 Jeffs’ Pizza and Ice Cream
Candle-Fly Camp: Choose Your Own Payment
Sara’s Garden of Tomorrow
Experimental RV Dealership and Service Center
Honest Cal’s Turtle Pond Aquatic Bed and Breakfast
Hike to the Hole in Nothing
Jake Peatmoss: Financial Combat and Unconventional Investments
None of them looked professionally printed.
There were also a few oddities jammed into the rack that weren’t brochures. A taxidermized frog on a wooden plaque with a small label readingAsk Me About Skittershine Swamp. A can of black beans with red pen corrections all over the label. A single flip-flop.
The teens were absolutely mocking him.
A cold feeling flooded into Green’s stomach. He had imagined thegas station as a doorway back to civilization, a break from the heavy presence of the tree-crowded road. But civilization meant shared cultural reference points. It meant mutually agreed-upon social norms and a familiar context. Whatever this was, it did not feel like civilization.
He noticed his hand was trembling, so he stuffed it in his pocket and focused on taking deep, slow breaths. He took inventory of his goals.
He was here because his old life stopped working for him.
He was here because an inscrutable nut bullied him into being here.
“I’m here because I’ve lost my mind.”
Breathe. Just breathe. Try to rationalize.
Change was always uncomfortable at first.
Change could be frightening.
Familiarity could be cultivated with time and patience.
He couldn’t judge his current path until he actually walked it.
Green plucked up the one and only brochure for Candle-Fly Camp. It advertised “real wilderness” and “a quick hike to each and every point of interest relevant to you” and “stay as long as you like” and “pay what you feel you owe.”
Well, it makes as much sense as anything else about what I’m doing.
Much of the flyer was handwritten, which deepened Green’s uneasy feeling, but the substance of the text matched his needs. There was an address. It was good enough.
The station door jingled and Green heard new voices.
He squeezed out of the brochure room and saw two college kids shopping the snack aisle. A third, a young blond woman wearing a puffy mint green jacket, hefted a bag of ice onto her shoulder and made for the register.
“Grab me some peanut M&M’s,” Mint Jacket called to the others.
“On it,” said a boy in a gray Ohio University hoodie. Green thought he looked twelve and was probably twenty-two.
Standing at the periphery, Green felt a pang of jealousy for the group’s confidence and comradery. They were probably on fall break, taking a little camping trip before their next semester started. His fearful wilderness was just a fun trip for a trio of twentysomethings.
They paid and jingled back out the door.
