by Joe Stanley
five
The jeep had done its own dutiful best, rounding the curving trails, jumping the gaps and clawing over the stones and roots. It had carried him upstream until it just couldn’t be pushed though the thick trees or up the steep slopes the river carved itself from. He parked it in a clearing, and joking to himself he called it base.
He set out from his camp, hiking along the riverbank. He wasn’t a biology student, but the plants and creatures he came across were strangely absent from the many samples he had seen. As he walked, though, he searched the bank and hillside for traces of people, not plants or insects.
Stopping to guzzle water from his canteen, the sheer impossibility of his task crept up on him. Just what was he doing out here? Did he really hope to find something lost? Or was it really that he was running, running away as he always had, from the desperate feelings he couldn’t ever seem to escape?
He realized how alone he was. He couldn’t do that before, his work had always kept him too busy. Now, out in this wilderness, he was as physically alone as he had really felt all of his life. He had been searching for something all this time, not fame or immortality or even the ever blessed truth. Really, he had been in pursuit of his self, his own identity, and his place in the world.
Suddenly he felt ashamed and wasted at the same time. He finally understood that if he had really had half the mind he wanted that here was written on every leaf of every tree a volume of truth. In the song of the birds and the buzzing of bug wings, in the crunching dirt beneath his feet to the water splashing itself across the stones in the river. Truth was all around, everywhere in everything.
If he had that wisdom he would see it and hear it. He would understand it and recognize it with out needing to quantify it or define it. It wasn’t the answer to a problem, but the answer to all problems, the proof that there were no problems. It wasn’t mere data, but something that gave comfort. It wasn’t just information, it was insight that put life into a meaningful perspective.
All the struggles and efforts of his life had only served to distract him from it. Everything he had ever learned prevented him from learning it. He wondered if there was still time to make things right in his life. He knew that while learning was hard, unlearning was harder still.
Starting now, he resolved, I will make all efforts to turn this around. He was comforted by the thought that this expedition had found something, perhaps the find of his life. At last he understood that even if he had nothing, he always had hope. When he turned to trace his steps back to camp, he made a find of an entirely different sort.
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