In Return for Kindness

One New Year’s morning  I woke up so hung over nothing was real. The effect of drinking so much alcohol the night before was like keeping a giant sized pile of depression at bay with a stick, only to have the stick snap like a twig in your sleep, leaving you waking up covered with every demon of anxiety holding you to your bed with a ship’s worth of anchor chains. As I had learned with my walks during my divorce, I knew I had to get up and go for a walk on the mountain or I would surely die.

Moving through the cold air was dreamlike. The sun was out but it didn’t warm me. I could see the bare trees swaying in the wind but I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t smell the mud under my boots. I felt like I moved along one of the trails as a ghost might float through a hallway.

I came to a running creek. It is relatively rare that any of the creeks along the side of the mountain run with water. Fagan creek generally has water, but the falls don’t run much unless there’s been rain in the prior twenty four hours.

I followed the creek down and found a largish rock in the middle of a small, clear pool of water. I sat on that rock cross-legged and stared out into the woods. My skin felt like old leather and occasionally I would dip my fingertips in the water, smearing it on my forearm, touching it to my lips, and then returning my gaze down through the valley. My mind was on fire and I couldn’t focus on any single thought. My thoughts were like a crowd of people yammering while a boring speaker spoke insistently on a stage I tried to calm it. I could not.

Slowly, above the din, words would come to me, and after a while I wrote songs and poems and whole novels in my head. I was amazed my brain could do this as I’d never been able to finish anything I wrote. And here I was in the woods on a rock without paper or keyboard. Hung over. So hungover.

Mean, vicious thoughts careened through my mind and I allowed them to pass like bullets through ballistic gel.

Obscene things, queer things, equations solved, world hunger solved, and I saw the solution for world peace as tho’ it was so easy, such a simple thing.

Yet at the same time I knew these things were distorted like light refracted through gin ( gin and tonic).

And it came to me that I should take off all my clothes and sit on that rock.

Mind you, I was not on drugs, I was just that hung over.

I can hear the water trickling even now. The moment is crystalline in my mind. 

He spoke.

“Long night, friend?”

Because of my state, I was not frightened. My own cowardice had been numbed and was not yet fully awake.

I stared at him for a long time. 

He squatted by the edge of the creek, maybe ten yards or so from me. I recognized the boonie hat and wiry white beard.

“S’pose you’re gonna get naked and do a jig in the water now. I seen it before.”

My mind couldn’t shut off the flow of universal truths and warp drives and I couldn’t – or you could say I wouldnt – quite understand what I was seeing and hearing.

I smiled at him. “No sir, I’ll keep my clothes on for now.”

He returned my grin. He heeled off his muddy boots and waded in the calf deep water to a rock just beside me. Crossing his legs he stared into the water.

I tried to return to my revelations, but his presence created an open in the circuit.

I looked over to him. He kept staring into the water. With his left hand he reached inside his jacket and retrieved the stump of a cigarette while at the same time his right brought out a match. Striking the match across the rock it lit and he stoked his smoke. I smelled the sulfur from the match first, then the familiar smoke. My lungs ached to have a drag. Ached.

All the while he stared into the pool of water.

The air was still and the smoke from his cigarette stayed about his face, like a shroud. My mind wandered back through all the years I smoked. I remember my mother smoking. I remember demanding a dollar for every pack I cleaned out of the floorboard of her VW bug. I remember my father leaving one rainy afternoon, cigarette dangling from his lips and my mother frantically telling me to make him stay.

The demons had found me.

“Ask me a question, son,” the gentleman said quietly.

I wasn’t sure if I heard him correctly and tilted my head.

Never looking away from the water he said again, “Ask me a question.”

“Why?”

“Son, you’re gonna havta be more specific.”

“ I don’t….don’t understand – why do you want me to ask you a question? About cars? About women? Life?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You left me some chips and a bottle of water. You may ask me a question.”

Stunned that he remembered something that was a passing whim to me three years prior, I stared at him as hard as he was staring at the water.

“How long have you lived in these woods?”

“The question should be about the future, not about me.”

“Will humans ever get their act together and live peacefully?”

“Too broad.”

“Is The Flash faster than Superman?”

“Never, ever be flippant with me. You need to understand I am due your respect.”

I was getting angry. Here I was trying to soothe my conscience, get over a hangover, be alone for god sake, and this bum was crushing my groove.

“I… I… you’re not… why.. “

“Will I ever get over this pain?!” I blurted out. “Will this overwhelming self-doubt go away? Why am I not worthy of a faithful spouse? Why can’t I be with my children? Am I so forsaken as to live my life solely alone?”

He took a drag, chuckled and shook his head, said, “You got some issues, friend.”

“You have to ask me about the future,” he said, and blew two smoke rings, one through the other.

“Will I die alone?”

“Yep.”

Incensed I shot out, “What? What the hell kind of answer is that?? What the hell kind of psychic tells a man he’ll die alone?”

“I’m not a psychic.”

“Well no duh,” I said sarcastically.

“I am an oracle.”

“A what?” I said incredulously.

“An oracle.”

“Malarky. Pythias was a woman.”

“Never met her, but the others passed down their stories.”

“Sir,” I started, “you have a good day. I gotta go.”

I stood and my foot slipped into the cold water. I absolutely hated getting my feet wet with no clear and present resolution of dry shoes and socks. I hated it. I was just short of all out rage. I was shaking in anger that my groove had been crushed by this bum, this hobo, claiming he was some sort of soothsaying future gleaning oracle. He was a damn bum and he stank of cigarettes and basement.

“You should ask your question.”

“I don’t know. Should I take 231 or 65 to pick up my kids next weekend?”

I took my shoe off and began wringing my sock out.

“Take 231 to 36 in Laceys Springs. Follow it to 65. There will be a problem on the Tennessee River bridge in Priceville, so you’ll want to avoid it.”

I snapped my head toward him. That was mighty specific. In my anger I huffed at him and started to put my damp sock back on. I hated wet socks. I was barely holding back rage, like a thumb in a dam holding back rage churned with a once-in-a-lifetime hangover.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw him stand as I yanked my wet sock onto my foot. I glanced at him, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of knowing he’d gotten to me. I’m certain, now, he saw it plain as the sun sees the earth through leafless trees in winter.

“Thanks for the chips, friend. Maybe next time you could leave a can of beans.”

And with that, before my disbelieving eyes, he leapt like a seasoned parkour athlete down the creekbed, lighting weightlessly from stone to boulder all the way down until he disappeared into the thickness of brown trees.

I remember walking back to the parking lot, pissed off at even the size of the gravel on the trail. Thinking silly things like, “Stupid rocks. Why did they use such big gravel for this trail? Stupid rocks.”

The next Friday rolled around and it was a frantic dash to the car to get on the road in time to pick up the kids. 

Over the years I found that 231, or South Parkway, was actually shorter, but the two lane trip took much, much longer than I-65. I was running behind and hit 565 at 3:30. This route was generally 30 minutes shorter, though 35 miles longer.

At 4:00 I noticed the traffic on 565 was a bit heavier than I remembered. When I hit the overpass to 65 I saw that it was backed up to the north, probably all the way to Athens.

And the “oracle” smiled at me in my imagination.

“Told ya’, friend,” he said.

I had been terribly hung over. I still wasn’t sure if I’d actually seen this man that morning. Had he been some sort of alcohol deprivation, detoxing hallucination? I couldn’t be sure.

Prior to my divorce I had no time for country music, classic or otherwise. However during the never ending torture of the divorce something changed in me, a lever was pulled or a switch had been thrown, and classic country almost literally spoke to me. I understood the lyrics, I felt the sentiment, and my grandfather’s love of the upright bass bloomed within me.

In 1968 a man named Bobby Brooks released a song called “Huntsville Lights.” It told the tale of a man looking out over Huntsville from Monte Sano, wondering in which bar he might find his lover. 

As I waited for the interstate to be cleared, frustrated at the inconsideration of the nameless, faceless cause of the delay, knowing I would be very late to get my children from Birmingham, Huntsville Lights came on the radio.

I saw that bum, that oracle, that hobo… that hobo oracle on Monte Sano, looking out over Huntsville at night, at the bright lights, and smiling, smoking a stump of a cigarette, knowing I did not take 231.

Iterations of the Oracle

Over the next few years I continued to go up the mountain. For a while there I had a mountain bike and took the trails over the plateaus. Mostly I hiked tho’. And I almost always took a can of beans with me.

It was a long, long time before I saw the hobo again. It took time, but we struck up an unlikely friendship. Late one evening after work, at dusk, I took the trail at the end of Owens up the mountain. Follow it to Fagan creek I found myself within the foundation of what must’ve been an old pump house or something along the north bank.

The hobo appeared, just appeared, standing on one of the rocks that had made up the foundation and said, “It’s generally preferred to knock before entering a man’s house, friend.”

By now he no longer startled me. I had come not to expect to see him, but more like comfortable knowing he was always there. He winked at me and told me to follow him up the mountain.

He’d started a fire behind the altar the kids and I discovered all those years ago. Our shadows danced back and forth on the undercut. I handed him a can of mini-ravioli and he got wide eyed. 

“Oh, I do like me some mini-ravioli,” he said, and opened the can.

Now, I’d been bringing him food for over a year, and I had not asked questions. I figured I’d wait until he gave me the go-ahead. But I was tired of waiting.

The can was on a rock next to the fire and he’d wait a few seconds, then turn it, making sure to warm each quarter side evenly. Without so much as a wink, nod or chuckle, he said to me, “Ask your question, friend.”

At that time there was really only one I had to know.

“Who are you?”

He took the can from the rock and withdrew a white plastic spoon from a shirt pocket. He pulled a little marinara and piece of pasta from the can and watched the steam rise. He closed his eyes, smelled the pasta, and began to tell me an incredible, unbelievable story.