The Idea of an Essay, Volume 4

70 The Idea of an Essay: Volume 4 Falling in Love with a New Found Land Kyle Spencer Now that I was above the tree line, my only shelter became small boulders, not exactly ideal. Nevertheless, I knelt beside a boulder and began to examine my situation. My first step was tearing off the wet masses of cloth that were once my gloves. This action revealed my hands to be like a bunch of raisins, soaked in water, and stuck in a forty-degree cooler for an hour. Not my idea of a comfortable vacation trip. I moved around the rock until a diagonal force of cold rain pierced through my soaked jeans and sent shivers through my body. Whoosh-swoosh. Moving back into the previous position, the gravity of my position sunk in. The weather was driving rain so diagonally that, if I placed myself on the right side of the boulder, the rain would fly right over my head. Today, when I hear the sound of wind, whoosh, and rain, swoosh, memories pour in of that boulder and those conditions piercing through my clothes. I reached for sustenance but the rain got there first. The roast moose sandwich I had been eagerly awaiting looked and tasted like gravy, bread, and meat after a long bath. Not my idea of food. After wallowing in self-pity for fifteen minutes, the only other person as crazy as me to be out in such awful conditions staggered up to the boulder, my grandfather. -…- The sea looked on us with its ever-present unblinking eye as we, my brother and my eighteen-year old self, carried its victim, driftwood, across the rocky beach. We could see our grandfather starting a fire down the beach. If the World’s Most Interesting Man had a brother, my grandfather would fit the description. When a person meets him, besides his lack of hearing accompanied by the shrill shrieking of his hearing aids, they discover just how different he is from every other eighty-year old American Caucasian male. One of these quirks is a place. Instead of trekking south with the rest of his generation, he flies, to this date, probably more than fifteen