Short Folk #2: Lower Carthew

Note: This is a great story to illustrate one of the main ways I like to write. I'll take true occurrences and then make them more abstract, both in the story behind the story (what I lived) and what happens in the plot and narration of the story.  I like to think of it as turning the focus dial on the camera lens from fine to coarse. I love the freedom it gives me and the "universality" it tends to add to the pieces.  So, that said. here's today's short, 506 words.

"We skirted the boulder field where the ice-age glacier had finally melted, leaving in huge piles the heaviest of its rock cargo, and descended past the lip of Lower Carthew Lake, the sound of it’s waterfall always to our right as we side-stepped down the dry shale of the switchbacks. 

            There was a man climbing up towards us on the same switchbacks, apparently making the summit from the other side. Not a very common thing to do. We met up about halfway and, as is common with other hikers in rather lonely mountain passes, we stopped and said hello, shaking hands. He was an older man, wiry, with white hair and a single, thick, wooden walking pole. He had a wry grin on his face when he recognized my father. His name was Tim and 40 years ago growing up in a tiny Alberta foothill town he had been best friends with my father’s only, older, brother.           

 

      They started sharing stories of my grandfather hiking and fishing with them in these same mountains; of shakes and hamburgers he had bought them in the townsite afterwards. Rare reminiscences that my father, now a stranger to this area and a man who lives largely in the present, had never shared with me.  Then my father asked him how he was, how his experience of life had been, the sort of intimate questions you can only ask someone after having known them and then, for forty years, not known them.

       Tim sat down on the tilted shale and talked about his wife and his children and his divorce, and then a period of wild years in his forties—always dropping names of people my father might have known or remembered—my father always half-faking familiarity in order to keep the conversation going.  Then Tim got more hushed, but more adamant, urgency and a wildness coming into his eyes. He asked if he could share something personal that he had never told anyone. Then, without waiting for an answer he told the story of how he had lost his faith, and then, after a heart attack, when he was recovering in his hospital room, a darkness in the corner of the room had collected into a sort of humanoid shape of pure evil. And it had spoken his name, Tim. As if it knew him, as if he was a friend. It scared him straight back into a better life.

There were a few more minutes of conversation and then he and my father hugged and he winked at me and then he moved on up the mountain. I don’t imagine I’ll ever see him again. So many conversations and its funny the ones that stick with you. And I’ve never shared this with anybody, and I know its silly, but in strange rooms or moments when I’m afraid for my own mortality I still look in the corner shadows for signs of movement—to see if the darkness there wants to coalesce and starting calling my name."