Chapter 26

After he had walked for most of the morning, he stopped again to look at his crudely drawn backcountry map, and decided that he would make his camp. Although he couldn’t be exactly sure that be had found the spot he was supposed to go to, he knew that there wasn’t another person around for miles, and he wanted to set up his camp. He found a flat spot in the bottom of a little valley and began to unpack. Thinking about what may be in front of him.

     As he sized up his location at the bottom of the valley, he thought about his friend the coyote, and how he may be a sitting duck down here if animals decided to attack. Right now he wasn’t all that concerned, although that did seem a kind of gruesome way to go. 

      He found himself thinking of Joseph Campbell again, and in particular a phase he called “the belly of the whale.” This stage referred to the biblical tale of Jonah, but was also reflective of a number of myths across different cultures. Essentially this stage was where a person felt they were in some kind of “holding pattern”, often in a dark and mysterious place without an immediate way out of these circumstances. 

     John certainly felt like he was in the belly of the whale right at this moment. He was at the bottom of a canyon, with limited supplies, a small knife, and 15 miles to talk straight uphill to get back to civilization. He knew he would be tested soon, both physically as well as emotionally.

     He built a small fire and laid back and looked up at the sky. He remembered the idea of “cloud busting” as he did, which was a technique where people reported being able to change the shape of clouds simply by willing it to be so. He thought about all of this as it related to perception. Perhaps it really all was about how we chose to look at things. As Oscar Wilde said a long time ago, “we’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

     As he continued to lie in the increasingly hot afternoon sun, he began to have visions of his early days as a child when he used to lie in his hammock in the back yard and look up at the sky, sometimes for hours at a time. Back in those days he used to dream of running away to exotic places, and would spend the time in his backyard trying to picture those places in his mind. 

     And here he was, at the very bottom of one of the greatest wonders of the world, wishing he could be back in that place one more time. Better to have lost and loved according to the poets, but he didn’t believe this for a moment. His life had consisted of very few moments of clarity, but several of those were when he had experienced real love. In the scheme of things it was a very small period of his life. A tiny fraction that he couldn’t visualize carrying him through the rest of his life. Right now he couldn’t see that.

     He drifted once again back to his youth, this time to his teenaged years, when he was having a difficult time with his mother and most of the rest of the world as well. He remembered feeling that life was never going to change and that he was destined to be unhappy for the rest of his days. The transactional analysts referred to this as a “tragic life script”, and at many times in his life John had felt he was destined to enact this script in his life.

    And yet he had surprised himself. He had made peace with his mother for one thing, and despite his current unhappiness, his life had been far from completely tragic. Maybe he still had the capacity to surprise himself.

He certainly hoped so.