Backwood Folk

 His roommate vanished to Europe for six weeks, leaving Gustav on his own in a cabin in the Ozarks. A cabin on top a mountain with no neighbors for three miles, and only dirt roads to and from. A place where cell phones don’t even bother to turn on. All he has at his side is a Labrador named Buster. Can he survive six weeks alone in the wilderness with little to no human interaction? Each week he will document his further descent into the hermit life, and possibly his development of insanity.

WEEK TWO

Well in a lot of ways things went smoother, and things went to hell, and things went right. It was just one of those paradoxical weeks where everything did something completely contrary to how you might have planned it. I won’t go into the detail of the front part of the week, just cus it involves stuff not suited (or really even interesting) for public forums. Which does a lot to make it all morbid and sad sounding doesn’t it? Well don’t you worry, it was a fantastic week, just with a lot of moving bits that would be boring to read about. Basically I drew a lot of stuff.

The weekend however did encounter a different dynamic when Saturday came round. Now, the day begins with me being a zombie. (Yes my sleeping patterns are long documented as atrocious) Luckily its a new form of undead sleep deprivation. No longer is my lack of sleep from spending each night terrified by random noises that clearly have explanations. No longer do I fear the motion light. Nope, now it’s the fear that I didn’t spend my days doing enough stuff. So I end up in the way late hours of the night and way early mornings of the next morning just drawing my hand into cramps. It’s one of those phases of intense productivity that results in a crash down the line (looking forward to that one) I’ve certainly never been one to really ration my energy. So I’ve been getting to bed at four if I’m lucky, and waking up as a grumpy overworked coal miner. That transformation is really stunning. This morning I was awoken especially early, and reminded of an obligation I had that day to meet with some fine folks from UCA whom I’m toying around a future project with. Cue a hundred grumbles and a tangent.

Now, the journey I had to make wasn’t an especially long distance, just a mountain over. But as things are in the Ozarks during spring, it became a burden. All of Newton County is invaded by Texans and Missourians, and flat-landed Arkansans. Vehicles sputtering slowly across once vacant roads appear all over. Their drivers brake often and brake hard. Sometimes they put their car into park in the middle of the road, and a camera hovers up to the driver side window to steal a little bit of our vistas. Now if you were to picture me as a xenophobic miser, sitting in his beautiful part of the world and not wanting to share,  you’d be right. I am one. I didn’t used to be, but those were more innocent days. Those were the days when living in the Ozarks in the spring didn’t mean getting caught in a traffic jam on a rural county road just adjacent to a dirt road. Now if one of our elk pops along the side of the road, an immediate rush of cars park on the sides of the roads or in some not rare enough cases, on it. I’ve counted well over one-hundred cars there, just to see the invasive sons of bitches.

Now if this was Yellowstone or something a-kin to the drive by National Parks, that would be one thing. But this is right smack dab in a valley where people live. I do think it’s more ignorance on the side of the tourists than malice or indifference. I sometimes wonder if people from the populated parts of the world recognize that the Ozarks are actually inhabited by people with shoes, indoor plumbing, and cars. That sometimes Ozarkers do have to be somewhere at a specific time just like the real world peoples. And one hundred tourists suddenly breaking to see an elk that actually turn out to be a cow frankly will turn the most stalwart good natured person into the biggest curmudgeon.

Finally I arrived at my destination, encountered two biologists with a rattlesnake in a bucket, and had a nice evening dinner with a few back to landers. It ended up doing a lot to calm my more tourist hating tendencies.

When I drove up my dirt road to get home, my dad was driving down the mountain. Apparently he had just dropped in to pick a few things up and say hello while away. However instead of me, he found the owl. The owl that never blinks. The owl that never looks away. Just staring deviously at you.

To explain less cryptically, upon my father’s arrival to the cabin there was an owl standing in the grass in the yard. The entire duration of my dad’s visit was observed by the strange bird as it ominously sat contently on the ground. My dad approached it, and it kept it’s place. It’s only movements were the tilting of its head as it sized him up. Two big unblinking eyes sat in its swiveling head, and I’m pretty sure my dad saw within them the death of a every loved one he still has and natural disasters to come for the next ten years. Because seriously, an owl plopping down in your yard has probably got more sinister motivations than checking him out.

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When I got home, it was gone. This didn’t comfort me.