Chapter Two

When I came to the mountains to live, I felt like life had driven me here. It was always a favorite place from the time that I was a small boy, but the most time I had ever spent up here was four or five days in a row, and then I was always accompanied by friends or family.

I had vague memories of my paternal grandfather – he had been the one to teach me about how fish lived in the streams and lakes. He taught me what they ate and where they could be found. He would look at the eddies and currents and could always see the fish before I could. He taught me how to float bait or lure into those places where they were most likely hanging out, how to set the hook when the fish hit the line, and how to keep the fish from getting the line tangled and getting away. My favorite – he taught me how to clean out the guts and prepare them for the frying pan. He died when I was about six or seven.

Dad and Mom had married a bit later than most folks. They tried to get pregnant for several years before my sister Carrie came along. Five years after that they had all but given up when I was born. They loved us – I remembered what a gentle manner Mom always had. Dad was a bit more stern and firm, but always took the time to make sure we understood why things worked the way they did.

Carrie and I were never close. I guess the age difference was the biggest contributor, but we also valued completely different things in life. Her husband Mitch was a successful trial lawyer who had made his name on a couple of big class action lawsuits, and now he had his own big law firm in Sacramento. They were in another universe. Big house, expensive cars, two children enrolled in private schools, and very few visits back home to Mom and Dad and little brother. I don’t think I ever felt animosity toward her – I simply didn’t relate.

The summer after my senior year in high school Mom got sick. The doctors told her she had cancer in all her lymph nodes and that it was too late for treatment. We made her as comfortable as we could, and she died as gracefully as she could five months later. Dad never recovered from the grief. He went to the mountains a couple of times with me the next year, but he stopped taking care of himself and soon had his own health problems. Two years after Mom died he had a heart attack while I was at work and didn’t make it to the phone. I found him lying in the hall. He had been gone for several hours already. I felt a hole open up inside me and I laid down beside his body and cried for an hour before I could pull myself together and call the authorities.

My parents hadn’t been rich, but they had stayed out of financial obligation. Carrie had no interest in the house or need of money, so I ended up stepping through the probate process myself and came away with the house free and clear in addition to a tidy sum to keep in the bank for a rainy day. The house just made me feel hollow, so I sold it and moved into an apartment closer to my job.

The next year was difficult, to say the least. I felt a deep loneliness and I didn’t know how to fill it. Dad and Grandpa had instilled a good work ethic in me, so I worked hard and that helped me through the worst of it. I was a systems analyst in the corporate office of a retail store, and there was always some issue that needed solved.

After work I would play my music and open up a book. It was just over a year after Dad died when I met Camille. I had stopped in to the music store where she worked to browse a couple of CD’s and she came over to see if I needed some help. We ended up talking for at least two hours in the store. It turned out we liked a lot of the same music. I had dated a few girls in high school for short periods of time, but it had always seemed like a popularity contest and I didn’t have the patience for it. I think the girls lost interest in me pretty quickly as well. This was the first time I had spent this much time with a girl my age in my whole life. When I realized what time it was the conversation got a little awkward because I lacked the social experience to know what to say and do next. But we managed to exchange enough personal information to ensure that we would get together again – Camille took the initiative on that.

At first she seemed to fill the void that I felt. She was attractive and witty. She was genuinely interested in the books I had read and the music I liked. We spent obscene amounts of time together – Camille again took the initiative on that, but I was easily persuaded. However we were both pretty naïve about the emotional ups and downs of a deeper relationship, so in a few months we had begun to experience the more challenging aspects of couple-hood and found ourselves mad at each other fairly frequently. Things would be going along alright for a while and then it would all fall apart over some issue that may or may not have mattered. This continued on until we had known each other for a year and a half.

I had become interested in survival in high school. When I met Camille I had collected as many books and field guides on the topic as I could find. I had a small collection of firearms, and a variety of other survival gear that I had either made or purchased. It wasn’t fear of a crisis that drew me to the subject – I simply found it fascinating.

I read a lot of books, but my favorite was the classic western or the spy adventure where a quick mind and performance under pressure were the keys to the hero’s success. When I was in the mountains, I would often reflect on these stories. Sometimes I would also think about something I had read in a survival book or field guide. But I had never really tried the ideas, tactics, and techniques I was reading about.

As it turned out, this particular passion for survival drove Camille crazy. She had an orderly and predictable family life, and her parents and siblings seemed to put a lot of stock in what other people thought about them. Maybe we didn’t have enough in common in the first place to form the basis for a relationship. Finally one night she just blew up at me and stormed out of the apartment. On my way home from the office I had stopped in at the military surplus store to look at a few things I had been thinking about purchasing. They had a well-built ghillie suit marked down to half the regular price – I had seen it hanging on the rack before and I just couldn’t resist. When Camille came over for dinner later, she asked what it was – it was just sitting there on the couch. I should have known better and put it away in the closet before she arrived. She just couldn’t imagine why a person would need to hide himself in the bushes or trees and spy or ambush or snipe or whatever you do in a ghillie suit. I said something lame about how you never know what might happen tomorrow and she said that she wasn’t sticking around to find out.

She was true to her word. She never came back. After about a week I tried calling her but her mother wouldn’t put her on the phone. Later that week I received a note from her asking me not to contact her anymore – it was over. So I didn’t. But the hole in my soul was back bigger than before.

The day after Camille’s letter I walked into my boss’s office and quit my job. I went home and started putting together a list of the essentials I thought I would need to survive alone in the mountains. I decided that I wanted to take the experiment very seriously as possible, so it would be important to make sure nobody knew where I was going. The last thing I wanted was a search party interrupting a perfectly good excuse to be a hermit.

I loaded my gear into my pickup truck and drove to the trailhead where my favorite haunts were located. It took me two days to take the gear in about five miles. I had broken it into several loads, and I hauled it up far enough that nobody was likely to stumble across my cache. When I was finished, I drove my truck back to my apartment and slept.

The next morning I told my landlord that I was going to be out of the country until fall but I wanted to keep my apartment. I paid him seven months rent and he agreed to check on the apartment weekly, get my mail, and take care of anything else that might arise while I was gone. I didn’t bother to check with Carrie – she wouldn’t even miss me and if she really wanted to find me she would eventually talk to my landlord. I threw my little knapsack over my shoulders and headed out the door. It took the rest of that day to hitchhike back to the mountains and I didn’t arrive at my cache until after dark. That was mid-spring of last year. It seemed like a lot longer.