Shifting gears

Karen rushes back from the kitchen to answer her cell phone ringing on her desk, she cautiously slips and slides into her wool socks, comes to rest in her office chair, and swipes to answer.

“You got that piece for the well? We also need the FOB, BOB, and JPEGs; remember this is on spec! And that over the transom piece you sent me was a big help, it was just thick enough to take the wobble out of my keyboard,” her editor George Barnes of Romance Writer’s Weekly orders while chuckling.

“Yes…” she begins to reply but hears him disconnect.

Karen sets down her phone knocking over what her editor would call a slush pile, a mound of rejected query letters. Her head falls to the desk in exhaustion, despondent she wearily takes a bite of her bagel and continues to lie there regretting what she thought was her dream job.

“Oh, sweety you need to quit this job, it will be the death of you,” her mother suggests standing in the doorway of her home office.

“I know Ma.”

“You were up until three in the morning last night working, you have to give yourself a break!” her mother complains.

“I know Ma.”

“What you need to do is find you a good man to take you away from all this, so you don’t have to work so hard,” her mother suggests, “Lance was at synagogue last night.”

“Who?”

“That young man I was telling you about, he's a lawyer and volunteers at the food bank. He's a catch, but you had better hurry. Men like that don’t stay single for long!”

“Okay, Mom! I get it! You want your overworked, atheist daughter to hook up with some religious zealot so you can have your office back! I told you I am trying to find my place in the world of writing, but I am not having much success, and the one steady job I do get is too demanding!” Karen rants her feelings into the wooden desk wishing for once she could catch a break, or for someone to think her writing is as good as she thinks it is.

“Well, excuse me for wanting my daughter to be happy, with the way the world is today maybe they will let you marry that desk of yours and you can finally be happy! Here’s your mail!” her mother yells throwing her mail on the floor.

Karen pops the rest of her bagel in her mouth, slinks to the floor, and crawls pathetically to her pile of mail. She plops over, sits with her legs crossed, gathers her mail, and begins to go through it as she eats the remainder of her bagel. With the only long fingernail she has left she slices open the first letter, a bill goes in a pile to her left. The second is a rejection letter, it goes in the pile to her right. The third letter is a bit thicker and piques her interest, she notices the sender. Remote Getaways magazine, but she can not remember having correspondence with them. The most remote she has ever been is living in the Hamptons with her bitchy Jewish Mother after her parent’s divorced. Leaving her childhood home in New York City was like pulling a hungry puppy from its mother's teat. Poverty will make you subvert your principles faster than any other calamity, but she made peace with it.

“I only hope I am paroled soon,” Karen mumbles.

“I heard that!” her mother screams from the other room.

“Of course, you did, Jewish Mothers have superpowers for snooping. I’m surprised my mail hasn’t been read and redacted for my safety!” Karen jibes back.

She opens the third letter and pulls out a letter and a check. It’s telling that whenever a check comes in the mail a person will always look at it first before they find out what they need to do to earn it. Unfolding the letter she reads of a great opportunity for a young aspiring writer, two weeks alone in a remote cabin in the Adirondack mountains. She sets down the letter and raises the check. Ten thousand dollars to live in a cabin for a month, what’s the catch? She thinks. She sits thinking of her shit life, her stressful job, and her unfulfilling sex life.

"You know your life sucks when you are too tired to masturbate! she says laughing out loud.

“Fuck it! She screams jumping off the floor and storming away to her room with the third letter flopping back and forth within her grasp.

A couple phone calls later she is unemployed and headed for Five Ponds Wilderness in upstate New York. The tourism board has launched an effort to get more city dwellers to brave the wilderness and get out of their comfort zone, and they are willing to pay handsomely to have a writer camp and write about their experiences. She had been chosen along with three others being sent to various remote areas of the state, the articles will be published in multiple magazines and newspapers with a coordinated push in the spring to entice camping and the outdoors for even the most inexperienced. Driving the two hours to a small town in upstate New York and arriving at the Quality Inn has given her time to question the rashness of her decision. Then after sitting in a conference room and hearing about all the ways a person could get hurt or die in the wilderness, her depression begins to take root. Once again she thinks she may have made a horrible mistake she will inevitably have to call her mother to save her. Growing up in the city with a Father as a lawyer, and a mother as a professional enabler, she thought she had chosen a path far away from them, but she had no idea of the ways of the world outside of New York. Later that day in the woods behind the hotel Matt gathered the four of them for instructions. She sucked at everything her trainer Matt showed them to do, but at the end of an hour session with him, he felt confident enough to push her out the door of his van and drive off leaving her covered in dust. She looked up and witnessed the sun setting in the west and knew she only had a few hours to set up camp, which was a mile hike into the forest near a small pond according to the map. She hitched up her backpack and started the trek into a wonderful two-week vacation or her version of a female Deliverance remake. Every morning she had walked the four blocks to the local Starbucks to get her morning iced Mocha, so when she told them she walked every morning she may have led them to think she could walk miles in the forest and hills. As the sky grew darker and the forest became the nightmares of her youth her campsite was still nowhere in sight. When the only light she had was a sliver of what the moon could provide she stopped within a group of trees and set up in a spot barely big enough to accommodate her tent. In the morning she would find her campsite and get about earning the bonus money for a completed stay. The tent was not assembled to factory specifications, but it was up, exhausted she crawled in and went to sleep. That first night she was completely worn out that a bear could have fondled her and she would not have woken up. Only the morning light illuminating the fabric of her dwelling brought her out of slumber and the realization that it wasn’t just a bad dream. After eating a Powerbar she had stashed away for the trip she climbed out of her tent and looked on in amazement at the beautiful view only fifty more feet to the west of where she had made camp.

“Son-of-a-bitch, I almost made it.”

Karen packed what she could and dragged the rest into the clearing, she couldn’t help but stand in awe of the view once again, and it was at this point she knew why they wanted more people to see this. An hour later in good light with her campsite complete she began the arduous process of trying to catch a fish for lunch. She was surprised at the amount of knowledge she remembered from the training class, she had found a stick, tied a piece of fishing line with a hook to the end, and caught a nice-sized fish within a couple minutes. This early success gave her the confidence she needed to strike out and explore her surroundings, to see nature in its most pristine state, and most importantly find something to write about. Later that day she sat fueling her fire and passions as she attempted to write words that would do justice to the awesome beauty of her surroundings. Five crumpled pages from her notebook have made it to the fire, her writer's block stems from difficulties in describing how animals here are curious and take food from her hand. The fear civilization has instilled in animals near the city isn’t as prevalent in remote areas like this, and the joy of existing alongside them is a joy to be experienced. The next couple of days fly by, and her wilderness experience is turning out to be a great success. Her writing would be too if she could find the right words, the right words that will entice city dwellers to abandon having everything at their fingertips and see and experience all of creation. That evening as she lay down in her sleeping bag, the thought came to her ‘I like it here’. It’s strange to think that a simple phrase can be so powerful, her worldview had been shattered. Dusk settled over her campsite and that is when she could hear a low growl off in the distance, she didn’t give it much thought, only every waking minute. The next morning, she awoke to the site of her campsite in disarray, she poked her head out of her tent and scanned the area as if eight mil. nylon fabric could save her from a five-hundred-pound bear. Reluctantly she came forth from the safety of her dwelling but was a cautious and nervous wreck all day. The next few nights went the same, her nightly visitor would come into camp looking for food, not realizing it was only a tent away. The fishing was bad, and she was on her last Powerbar with two nights still to go, she knew she had to do something the next day, like take a bath, she could smell herself.

The next morning she slept in, something so pure she could never get away with at home. Food and cleanliness were on the agenda today, and she remembered a trick Matt had shown everyone in training. Burn some fern leaves and then take the ash and wash with it, it is supposed to be an antibacterial soap. Karen walked down to a small stream she had played in a few days before, she began to take off her clothes but stopped. Even out here all alone her shy nature prevents her from revealing her naked body. With only her t-shirt and panties on she used her makeshift soap to clean herself in the stream. At first, the cold water was a shock, but then it grew to become refreshing. She enjoyed feeling clean again, so much that she fell asleep on the bank of the stream and woke as dusk began to take hold. She woke to the dance of lightning bugs over her head, but she noticed the night sky, dark and cloudy.

“Shit! I slept all day,” she cursed herself, cognizant that she needed to find food before it got too dark, and by the looks of the sky, she only had an hour at most before it would be too dangerous.

She gathers her clothes and runs back to camp to get her fishing pole and try to catch something before it gets too dark. As she crowned the top of the hill by her camp she is confronted by her nightly nuisance, five feet to her front stands a large black bear, very much a proud male.

“I bet the lady bears love you,” is the last thing she remembers saying before the lights go out.

The next morning Karen wakes to a different intruder in her campsite, but this time it is welcome. Matt has returned to pick her up and has driven the bear away. Finding her lying in the grass in her shirt and panties he brought her back to her tent and watched over her through the night.

“I bet you’ll be glad to get back to the city and become a big-time writer,” Matt says kneeling over the fire and cooking a couple fish he caught.

“Actually no, I've come to love it here.”

Matt begins to laugh and then moves over so she can gather around the fire and stay warm.

“Why did you laugh just then?” she asks.

“I warned them this might happen."

“What?” she asks eating a piece of fish.

“That being exposed to all this would change a person, and out of the four of you it seems to have happened to you and Jake,” he explains.

“I have to go back though, how am I going to make a living out here?” she regretfully asks.

“Come back with me, I write for the local paper, and we are looking for someone like you?” he suggests.

“Do you think they would hire me?” Karen asks desperately hoping this dream could come true.

“I have some pull with the owner,” he teases.

“It’s you, isn’t it?”

“You’re hired!” he offers.

"Am I dreaming, or did that bear kill me?" she wonders.

"I watched you top the hill and meet the bear, when you fainted it scared the hell out of him and he took off," Matt explains laughing.

"Some badass I am,"

Matt reaches over and takes her hand to comfort her, she has been through a lot. She had courageously cut her ties to city life and found a new path. His hand holding hers feels as right as her new love of nature, maybe this atheist experiencing God's creation has led her to new love.