Balance
By Joshua Adkins
It is negative 10 today, and it was zero the day before as if nature operated with increments of
ten, not unlike our numbering systems.
“I hate winter.”
“Without winter there would be no summer. It would be one long season. People would have seasonal effective disorder year-round.”
“I’ve never even heard that ascribed to the equatorial climates. Does such a thing even exist.”
“It’s the manic version of depression.”
“The opposite still seems worse. Those poor Alaskan souls.”
“Have you ever spent any extended time in Florida? A deciduous forest is perfection!”
“It seems nature disagrees with you. All the good wildlife settles in the rainforest or the savannah. Nothing depressing there.”
“You just don’t get it. If we were in the Serengeti the novelty would wear off swiftly. Now on the other hand when we run across this buck, we will have encountered something exciting.”
“No, I think I’m a Serengeti man.”
“You can’t be a Serengeti man. It’s impossible.”
“Oh no I prefer the lion over the deer.”
“Why do you sit out here for hours on end, just to get the perfect photograph. A euphemism for a winter photograph. Let me put it to you like this. What if we ran across a Black Bear just now? What if?
“Where exactly do they hibernate?”
“It's theoretical! One in which a bear is not hibernating. A bear insomniac.”
“How long have we been out here for your buck? I admit…maybe… that it has greater meaning in the moment, but it’s a cost benefit analysis. Is all that waiting worth just one buck?”
“Why on Earth are you even out here?”
“It’s my only option. If I could go to Africa. I would go.”
“Let me ask you is The Old Man and The Sea better than Snows of Kilimanjaro. One giant fish. It makes the book.”
“Ahh, you have contradicted yourself or ignored something. Sparse wildlife in a ubiquitously warm climate. That reminds me, the desert ruins your theory. Absolutely no one wants to live in the desert. What if you come across an oasis every so often? Does it make everything else worth it?”
“This is some sort of paradox. You know I can’t be wrong. I think I’ve worked it out. It must have the opposite season. Otherwise, it doesn’t count. It’s part of your argument not mine. You say having warm weather year-round is preferable. It’s an extreme version of what you espouse. Not I.”
“But your entire argument is based upon scarcity. Nothing scarcer than an oasis.”
As if synchronically choreographed the two turn inward facing each other as to tell each one of their conversational prowess. Like someone shaking a giant snow globe in their immediate vicinity the surroundings became dense with large ornate snowflakes.
“This my friend is why you should love winter.”
Mitch turns his hands outward like they were a seasonal fly catcher, eying every snowflake before it melted as if there were an ephemeral snow embalmment oozing from his pours. He dismounts his camera from its housing and detaches his zoom lens replacing it with its counterpart instigating a still pose that can only be seen in the eyes of Mitch. He snaps his photo.
“Have you ever seen anything so beautiful but so practically encumbering as snow.”
The snow becomes so intense neither man has any periphery left.
“Is there anything whose overall aesthetic is as uniform conceptually but every individual part as autonomous as nature’s fingerprints?”
“It’s cyclic?”
“What is cyclic?”
“The aggregate of snow appears the same. Until you examine each and every snowflake do they become unique. Go even smaller and the molecules appear identical but magnify even further and they are made of different atoms.
“Yes but if you go even further they are made of different sub atomic particles.”
“Until then I guess you’re right. But what’s your point? It’s an obvious truism..”
“It’s cycles; It makes life worthwhile.”
Archie becomes a little convinced of Mitch’s hypothesis and tells him, “You know what you’re right. And this snow alone…it makes it all worthwhile.”
The snow becomes disorienting, neither party recognizes anything but the other.
Direction is like a courtroom of time; physical evidence lye in one’s senses and its circumstantial counterpart in the mind. The verdict is tentative, all depending on the evidence and how it is presented. When one is left with no fingerprints then all there is is hearsay.
Mitch annexed Archie’s next words without ever listening to what he said, “ Where is the compass?”
An unusual entanglement continued between the two. They finished each other’s words.
“I don’t know.”
“What about our tracks? And I don’t remember hearing about weather such as this.”
They leave the area in the direction they came, their only inkling circumstantial, all footprints now being drowned.
“It’s too thick we won’t make it today. Pull out the tent.”
Mitch commandeers his backpack from himself and out of frustration throws in upon the pure driven snow. The pack becomes smothered and swallowed up by the powder as if the ground were frozen quicksand.
Like a trainee watching his master of vocation on the outside, but his mind wonders on the inside, Archie watch Mitch set up the tent. Like on time with nature as the dusk begins to break, Mitch sets up the first portions of his instrument. Archie releases his pack and sits on it, rubbing his hands and blowing like as if a fire were in between himself and Mitch. His inadvertent gestures remind Mitch of the coming nights temperatures.
“I’m not sure we could find one dry piece of firewood.”
As if a movie set employee is dumping snow in front of the two, their immediate vision is halted from an additional blizzard of moving parts. Dismantling pieces of the tent, Mitch puts them in chronological order like he suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder. Archie in his jurisprudence remembers a tree with branches collected underneath it.
Picking through the snow, as he sees a squirrel, he mumbles to himself, “Little beasts spend their entire lives foraging and shaking in perpetual fear.” He thinks Mitch wrong that the most common of animals can be the most unique.
As he pilfers, he fixates upon a set of eyes so human like in their intrigue it could be described as beast like or anthropomorphic. Its antlers were so elegantly wielded and nourishingly soaking up the snow it was as if they survived on frozen water. The aesthetic of its breath were so malleable, it appeared to transform into different shapes, not unlike the clouds he couldn’t see. He stares at the open space just before the animal as if not to scare him with his intent. He reaches to grab the camera around his neck as someone who has taken off their glasses and forgot of their place.
His excessive movement seemed to calm the buck and the animal’s features became more beast like as the deer snorts. Archie can think of nothing more but to keep the animal closer than to snort back in some ad hoc mating call. Only his attempt was human, and the beast got mad and snorted a beast like heave spraying mucous over the face of our hero. He wipes the material graciously from his features, forming a disgusting countenance upon the look of himself. He wipes the remainder onto his winter pants and startles the animal as if small movements, not large ones ingratiated it to the interpretation of sinister motive. Archie notices this contradiction and pauses before waving his arms, screams for Mitch. The animal moves slightly and winters his accumulated snow from its body emboldening its porcelain underbelly.
Mitch interprets Archies shouting, eclectically abandoning his designs and following his voice as a jury member being led by a witness. His detector could acutely distinguish fear from enthusiasm as he is now curious. He wonders, and as someone miming a trek, his movements are unreal and over-accentuated. Unable to see before himself, he acts his way to his friend.
Reciprocating the airwaves Mitch reaching his soul, hurls a guttural, “Archie!”
They play tag with each other’s acoustics until their sonar correctly bounces off one another. As the forensics become more intense, auditory speculation leaves Mitch, only his vision blind. As he encroaches upon his friend the buck strangely scatters. However, a prism of interspecies insistence remain planted through the land.
Signaling to his cohort, he widens his eyes, defining surprise. Following, his mouth drops. He raises his hands mildly scratching both his cheeks as he deposits his imagination into words.
“Every once in a while, a man experiences something he will never forget. Not unlike those who were an experience to the JFK assassination, I will always have this memory and will propose theories to its attributing.”
Mitch places one hand perpendicular to his forehead to figuratively block the snow and places his other hand in front of that as if he is looking far downfield.
Like an inquisitorial professor he asks, “What happened, tell me what happened.”
Archie aggregates his emotions into the following, “I saw a buck.”
Mitch’s eyes enlarge and engulf his cheeks. He spins he head slowly swiveling, stopping and kneeling down, his eyes swallow his forehead, and he proclaims silently.
Embarrassed, Archie uniformly responds, “It’s as if it were being controlled by someone.”
Mitch pats the snow in his hands savoring the past. He elegantly wipes the individual particles from his appendages, keeping control of the items as if they were precious dust.
Seriousness incorporates a gaze into Archie as Mitch tells him, “What do you mean?”
Only defining his gaping mouth with his tongue he tells him, “It’s as if someone were inside of the beast.”
Mitch were an honest man’s actor.
“What do you mean. Like something had possessed it? Aliens?”
“No, I mean this bucks consciousness seemed to have been expanded somehow. Listen, Mitch… I know how it sounds, but this were no ordinary buck. It seemed to examine me.”
Mitch’s eyes progressively encapsulate his mouth, and he simply replies, “This could be the Moby Dick of deer.”
“Mitch this animal seemed to care about me. I’m not so sure how I feel about you shooting him. You know I’m the photographing type. I know you like to hunt, but Mitch this is no ordinary deer.”
Mitch becomes silently animated, then he responds, “How many times have I told you. If you become a vegetarian; I will become a photographer. You act like I’m Jeffrey Dahmer, and you only eat your victims. Its outrageous. I use every ounce of these animals.”
“Mitch I don’t know how he survived all these years. And he is the biggest one I’ve seen yet.”
“You mean the biggest this season, or…?”
“I mean ever.”
“How were the points.”
“Enormous. The biggest I’ve seen. The most I’ve seen.”
Archie, Mitch and the buck’s tracks have all since vanished to the snow.
“Mitch forget the deer for one second. What will we do. He is used to the wild. We could die. I can’t remember which way we came, and I can’t discern our tracks any longer. They just have vanished along with the buck’s. And Mitch I hate to bring it up, but this could never happen in a safari.”
“You wouldn’t have seen a buck like the one you saw either.”
The edge of Archies mouth bends in with an ostensibly artificial movement like a poker player giving a false tell, and he complains of the cycle of days, “I suppose there would be no day without night either. Well, you’re getting all your balance. This temperature is dropping precipitously.”
“You know I don’t think night and day are balanced, ironically enough. There can be night without day, but it takes darkness to have light. Light can only exist with dark, space time to incorporate itself. There is always darkness my friend. Light is fleeting. ‘At first there was darkness and then there was light.’”
An hour passes as they wonder into pitch black, nude of all utility other than the clothes on their backs.
“You mentioned space time. I feel as if we are stuck in an infinite of winter. It may as well be another ice age throughout the planet.”
“I bet there are two poor saps in the desert right now wondering aimlessly.”
“You know you mentioned darkness earlier in an eternal context. The same is true for cold. It doesn’t get hot at night in the colder regions, but it sure gets cold at night in the desert.”
“So you are saying there are two other cold men in the desert right now?”
“I guess that would depend on which side of the Earth they are on.”
“I mean what is the null hypothesis. How would the universe have to operate?
“The Earth would need not to rotate.”
“No, not for their to not be a cold desert with us, for the temperature situation to invert.”
“You would need some sort of invisible Sun on the other side of the earth. That would make it warm at night, instead of cold.”
“Do such stars exist?”
“I mean how would we detect them, don’t we do that by light?”
“By mass like we do planets, or maybe that’s only planets.”
“Yes, but this theoretical star maybe doesn’t have a mass that is reasonably detectable.”
“Hmmm, maybe so but still it could be a star made of infrared heat.”
“Seems easily detectable.”
“Yea if your next to it! I mean what puts off infrared heat? What exactly is it?”
“Its something not on the visible light spectrum. Gamma rays on the other end.”
“Hmmmm, balance.”
“Tell that nonsense to a guy being killed with gamma rays.”
Mitch takes his flashlight out wields it firmly like holding a sword, clicks its utensil, sticks the dumb end in his mouth, takes his fingers and paints into the thick snow.
His artist draws a circle in the middle of two larger ones and places an orbital path around one star while saying, “Notice the absconded body, you can’t orbit two stars at one when they are on either side of your celestial body.”
“For part of the year then..”
Mitch becomes facetious and spuriously tells his partner sarcastically, “Or you can have one inferred star on every side and you have warm days and nights. Or a moon that is always shown on the dark side of the Earth that is powerful enough with infrared to warm us.”
“Someone is mad they have lost an argument, now your being of telling me something trying to outdo my theoretical nature. Think about it Mitch we are dying, and your egotism has lent itself to hubris.”
Mitch stands and erases his painting with his foot before grabbing the flashlight from his mouth, pressingly clicking its button.
Archie asks him to get their headlamps and Mitch puts his hand into his pack procuring both their items and each clicks its end staring at each other.
Archie tells him we should just leave our lights on that they won’t make it another night anyway before he posits, “You know the better question is how do you have warm nights and cold days?”
“You know I don’t think it can be done. Light puts off energy and energy heat. I don’t know. I’m at a loss. Maybe with a greater atmosphere or lesser atmosphere with the same star situation.”
“I can assure you cold days are possible; it happens all throughout the solar system. So have we been walking in some semi figure eight or are we making progress toward something.”
Hours pass and the dawn begins to break.
“Looks like we have rotated.”
“We could have revolved and still be in this mess.”
They are staring at each other and different hemispheres as Archie taps Mitch.
“I’m telling you turn around and wave, not slowly like your hunting, but try to communicate and engage him knowing we don’t speak deer.”
Mitch’s instincts pulled him around like a statue that were slowly being rugged upon.
“Mitch if you don’t show him something soon he may leave!”
Archie attempted to drown out Mitches surreptitious movements by getting on all fours and running around like a deer. This calmed the beast and as Mitch noticed this he two got on all fours only keeping his head upward staring at the giant deer counting his points too numerous to identify.
“Archie can I get up and act liked a crazed man or will this scar him off, I’m becoming stiff.”
“I think it will be okay. He seemed to like large movements, but then I snorted like a deer when I stood before him and he stayed. Maybe you should try that again.”
The deer began to walk the way of the pair as if disallowing for an interspecies barrier. Bravely Mitch starting to feel odd of the Deer’s interest, slowly erects and wildly waves his arms, and the animal looks him and approaches as if he wanted to be petted, not unlike a dog. This intimacy, even from Archie’s history of the animal, made him amazed, and he stalled himself only looking to Mitch, hoping that the animal lets him touch his coat. The deer stood so large, but and as elegant as the creatures can be, so was his size proportionate to this. Mitch extends his hand shaking from not fear but an odd excitement that was created from the type of amazement that paralyzes a man. Like he had stumbled upon a dinosaur and it allowed him to pet it, the deer shocked both him and Archie so much the only movement were the hand of Mitch. Archie unfreezes and as if the Deer were playing with their minds, now it were small slow movements it liked. Archie to test his theory as if the animal contradicted itself it must have personality. He began to wave his hands around once more. Now the deer didn’t like it and moved backward. Archie immediately slowed his waving and now this calmed the animal. He slowly approached the deer’s side and with his hand placed it on its coat rubbing him, and with his nose the deer appreciated this to Mitch who got the reward from Archie’s rubbing. Not absolutely, and so far from it, but in meaning both their eyes were much larger than the animal, then looking at each other’s faces, then back upon the deer. The deer begin to get even more excited and turned to Archie, only pressing his absconded side to Mitch, asking them to pet him. Archie felt the animals wet nose, it tugged it’s head upward to flop Archie’s hand further up its head, but as if Archie knew he needed an itch to scratch, he scraped his fingers back and forth making him vibrate from the sensation and place his face even closer to the chest of Archie.
“Mitch, can you believe it.”
Archie tells of his agreement, and takes out his camera and tells him, as he snaps a photo, “You see its is about rarity. If a cat did this no one would care.”
“ I wouldn’t have lied to you. It’s about finding that one Unicorn.” But he didn’t want to shoot it. He realizes this, and they both agree with one another.