The Ozark Howler and the Search for the Snawfus

Chapter 1 - The End

He should have known better than to leave his smartphone behind.

Only a fool would walk into the woods for the first time in his life without a GPS device to guide his way through the twists and turns of the hills. Yet, here he was, reflecting that he must be a fool, and must make the most of it.

Ahead, the ground was pathless, and trackless as far as he could tell, as it had been for miles, and for a number of hours he could not count. If Henry had been an outdoorsman, he would have had some sense of the time, from the rhythm of his footsteps, from the changing intensity of the colors around him, from the angle of the sun in the sky and the shadows on the ground. Henry was, however, no outdoorsman.

To him, time was told by the numbers on a screen, or on the rare occasion when battery power was low, by the turning hands of a clock on a wall. It was told by the food available at nearby restaurants, shifting from breakfast specials to lunch buffets to relatively respectable dinner entrees. It was told by the pulsing patterns of traffic on the streets. These were the signals of the natural world for him. The sun and the seasons were strangers to his world.

Henry's world was Branson, Missouri, the country music capital of the world, a small city with almost no actual country left in it. The twang in the voices affected there had become a matter of political principle more than anything else, and a way to stay in character for paying crowds.

He had lived in Branson all his life, but country was for him a style constructed in civilization, a set on a stage, a playlist on Pandora, a Hee Haw sensibility that was no more authentic to him than the plume on the helmet of a Roman centurion. Country was a reference to something far in the past. He had never brought in the hay, shod a horse, or shucked peas, and he never would. Henry's version of roughing it was waiting at a red light without turning on a podcast to pass the time. His outhouse was his carport. His fireside tales were all told on Netflix.

Nonetheless tonight, Henry would camp for the first time, twenty years after he could have plausibly joined the Boy Scouts. He would camp without a campfire, for he had no lighter. He would camp under the stars, for he had no tent. He would camp with the whine of mosquitoes in his ear, for he had no repellant. Henry had almost nothing with him at all, except for himself.

There wasn't even lint in his pockets.

As Henry trudged slowly into the hills, he had a faint idea of what might lay ahead, but in the moment he was lost in the moment, so untethered from the structure of life as he knew it that he could barely sense himself moving through the landscape around him.

He walked up long slopes, moving continually forward, yet without seeming to make any progress. When top arrived, he couldn't tell. There were few actual peaks for him to reach, merely slow turns in the pitch of the soil and stones he pushed himself against. A few times, he noticed a stream tumbling far below him, but was  unable to understand how he had arrived there, though every step had been painfully thick with effort. 

He followed streams until their flow seemed to define what it was to walk on Earth, impossible to leave behind. Yet, eventually, he reached a bramble, or a fallen tree, or a great bolder, and following their obstruction, walked away from the water, drawn to a new destination: An exposed patch of bedrock, a break in a ridge, a glimmer of light through the young leaves, and the stream was remembered only as a memory from another life.

Henry was thoroughly lost in the countryside now, but in truth, he had become lost long before he reached it, long before he left his car with the keys still in the ignition, left the road for a logging path, left his home for the last time. Henry had been lost since the moment that morning when, even before the coffee could be made, his wife greeted him in the hallway with the words, "I want a divorce."

Henry was stunned but not surprised by his wife's request. He understood that he had ceased to hold any appeal for her, and now could not offer even simple utility, or good temper. He had wanted to maintain some dignity during his descent, but found himself unable to restrain his temper in the face of her sarcasm and contempt. He could not justify his irrelevance to her, and in poor compensation, he longed for her to feel some of his pain, and would say hurtful things that only hurt his own cause.

He knew he could have no more home with her, and yet, he could not imagine another home at all. His only response was not to respond, but to turn away, dress himself in the clothes he had set aside for work, grab his keys, and drive to work.

Work was a windowless office in a box of a building in a strip mall next to a vape shop, filling out and filing forms for a company that was organized around the mission of "providing supply chain management that exceeds client expectations". Henry had dutifully done his part to fulfill that mission for almost nine years, though he had no idea what exactly it meant.

On Groundhog's Day, his manager had informed Henry that he would soon be made redundant by an app called iSupplyMe, which would automatically fill and file forms for him, or rather, instead of him. Henry's job until the end of March was to train iSupplyMe's machine learning algorithms by having the software watch his work, enabling it to mimic him with its artificial intelligence.

Today was the first of April.

So, when Henry pulled into his favorite spot in the parking lot, he didn't go inside to gather his office supplies. What good were office supplies without an office? He watched the Human Resources manager walk from her car toward the front door, her reflection moving briskly across the mirrored windows to meet herself, with her hand holding an electronic ID card to pass through security, proving that she belonged.

Henry did not belong any more. So, he left his favorite parking spot and merged back into the morning traffic, following the flow of it, never struggling to change lanes, simply moving ahead until there were no lanes to change, until there was no more gas left in his tank, and stopped in a muddy rut, he opened the door and walked straight into the brambles.

He had nowhere to go, and so he kept going right into the middle of it.

So it was that after a few hours of this consistent aimlessness, Henry found himself at the bottom of a cliff face, in twilight. He had stumbled to the end of his pathless pilgrimage, arriving with darkness gathering and no plan for how to get through the night.

At this place, unmarked on any map, he stopped and sat on a flat stone that fallen from above. Instead of walking, he waited and watched, as everything around him turned utterly black.