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Mythology
Ooops, I've been awake way longer than 24 hours. Which apparently means I need to write and post a short story. Getting to be a weird little tradition. So here we go, pulling nicely from several different things running around in my head.
I pull into the campground, weary after three hours of twilight driving at highway speeds on gravel, dodging semis coming around blind corners. To my left is the sign marking the beginning of my real journey: 66 degrees, 33 minutes north. The Arctic Circle. I don't rest long. Intensity is important.
Supposedly, everyone wanders into mythology at least once in their lifetime. A pretty little piece of folk-wisdom, but at best 1 in 10 people ever have any contact. Numbers are higher in the more obscure, more wild parts of the world. There are places, fewer every year, where our reality grows thin and wispy, where other possibilities leak through. Places where the never was becomes the is.
I was 16 the first time I found one. It was during a school trip to Ireland. One night, after sneaking out to enjoy the benefits of a loosely enforced, much lower drinking age, I was walking back through a field near the hostel. At first I thought there was a group of similarly inebriated people over the hedgerow. But the noise I was hearing grew louder, and louder, until I was surrounded by frantic yelling, metal clashing, and terrible inhuman cries. It lasted for a few seconds, and was then blown away in the wind. I didn't understand it at the time, but I have since been back many times to catch the shadows of the battles of Mag Tuireadh.
I remove my gear from the car and start a fire. Piece by piece I remove my clothes and throw them on the fire. Glasses. Watch. Cellphone. GPS. Wallet. Passport. I stand there shivering as my previous life burns.
Some people are born with the knack for finding mythology. They stumble into it without trying, without wanting to. Some of us only manage with great effort. However we get there, we face the same dangers. Rifts sometimes snap shut as someone real crosses them, folded up into nothingness by the simple power of mortal observation. People thus stranded occasionally come back, days or years later. Changed.
Those who realize what is going on usually end up moving to very large, very boring cities. Not that there isn't urban mythology, but it's always well hidden. Cities have too many people for anything to stay unobserved otherwise. If you don't go poking around steam tunnels or rooftops, you're safe. Mostly. Things can be hidden in ways other than just physically... Four years ago I caught a glimpse of the Crying Lady at the other end of an alley in Mexico City. She had a limp street kid in each hand. I dove into a pile of garbage, waited until morning, and counted myself lucky that some frostbite was all I suffered.
When the fire has died back down I begin to don my new outfit. It isn't completely accurate, but every piece was hand stitched with a bone needle. It would be enough. My perceptions of myself were as important as anything else. Fully suited, I pull a log out of the fire and throw it into the backseat of the car. Without looking back I head away from the campfire, the burning car, the last glow of the sun. North.
I've now spent over 20 years chasing the myths. I climbed Mount Olympus and saw the shadows of absent temples. From a wind-tossed fjord in Norway I saw, for a second, the towering wall of Yggdrasil and wrapped around it a serpent as a thousand freight trains. Through a screen of reeds I watched a jackal and a woman who wore the sun search the Nile. That was the first time I was pulled into mythic time. I only watched for a few minutes, but several days had passed. Or none. It gets hard to tell.
I emerge from the last scrubby trees of the taiga onto tundra proper. The highway and the pipeline are invisible somewhere to the west. Forgotten. The wind bites into me, right through the caribou skins. In the distance, to the north, a tor stands proud, a natural monument in an environment where humans would never build one. I set out for it. North.
I have seen the tricks Anansi plays, echoed in strange forms by Raven and Coyote. I watched the rain summon Julunggul across the vast outback sky. Mexico showed me a full moon rise as Huitzilopochtli tossed his sister's head into the sky. Once, flying home from a profitless search in the Himalayas, I could almost see Japan drip off the jeweled spear of Izanagi.
My world narrows to the tor on the horizon. All else is white. The wind has not slacked but I no longer feel it.
I have come for them. Annigan and Malina. Sedna and Amaguq. The spirits of the north, strong and real. Reality has never felt thinner.
Snow and cold and rock and lichen. The end of all things.
I walk north.
Always.
I pull into the campground, weary after three hours of twilight driving at highway speeds on gravel, dodging semis coming around blind corners. To my left is the sign marking the beginning of my real journey: 66 degrees, 33 minutes north. The Arctic Circle. I don't rest long. Intensity is important.
Supposedly, everyone wanders into mythology at least once in their lifetime. A pretty little piece of folk-wisdom, but at best 1 in 10 people ever have any contact. Numbers are higher in the more obscure, more wild parts of the world. There are places, fewer every year, where our reality grows thin and wispy, where other possibilities leak through. Places where the never was becomes the is.
I was 16 the first time I found one. It was during a school trip to Ireland. One night, after sneaking out to enjoy the benefits of a loosely enforced, much lower drinking age, I was walking back through a field near the hostel. At first I thought there was a group of similarly inebriated people over the hedgerow. But the noise I was hearing grew louder, and louder, until I was surrounded by frantic yelling, metal clashing, and terrible inhuman cries. It lasted for a few seconds, and was then blown away in the wind. I didn't understand it at the time, but I have since been back many times to catch the shadows of the battles of Mag Tuireadh.
I remove my gear from the car and start a fire. Piece by piece I remove my clothes and throw them on the fire. Glasses. Watch. Cellphone. GPS. Wallet. Passport. I stand there shivering as my previous life burns.
Some people are born with the knack for finding mythology. They stumble into it without trying, without wanting to. Some of us only manage with great effort. However we get there, we face the same dangers. Rifts sometimes snap shut as someone real crosses them, folded up into nothingness by the simple power of mortal observation. People thus stranded occasionally come back, days or years later. Changed.
Those who realize what is going on usually end up moving to very large, very boring cities. Not that there isn't urban mythology, but it's always well hidden. Cities have too many people for anything to stay unobserved otherwise. If you don't go poking around steam tunnels or rooftops, you're safe. Mostly. Things can be hidden in ways other than just physically... Four years ago I caught a glimpse of the Crying Lady at the other end of an alley in Mexico City. She had a limp street kid in each hand. I dove into a pile of garbage, waited until morning, and counted myself lucky that some frostbite was all I suffered.
When the fire has died back down I begin to don my new outfit. It isn't completely accurate, but every piece was hand stitched with a bone needle. It would be enough. My perceptions of myself were as important as anything else. Fully suited, I pull a log out of the fire and throw it into the backseat of the car. Without looking back I head away from the campfire, the burning car, the last glow of the sun. North.
I've now spent over 20 years chasing the myths. I climbed Mount Olympus and saw the shadows of absent temples. From a wind-tossed fjord in Norway I saw, for a second, the towering wall of Yggdrasil and wrapped around it a serpent as a thousand freight trains. Through a screen of reeds I watched a jackal and a woman who wore the sun search the Nile. That was the first time I was pulled into mythic time. I only watched for a few minutes, but several days had passed. Or none. It gets hard to tell.
I emerge from the last scrubby trees of the taiga onto tundra proper. The highway and the pipeline are invisible somewhere to the west. Forgotten. The wind bites into me, right through the caribou skins. In the distance, to the north, a tor stands proud, a natural monument in an environment where humans would never build one. I set out for it. North.
I have seen the tricks Anansi plays, echoed in strange forms by Raven and Coyote. I watched the rain summon Julunggul across the vast outback sky. Mexico showed me a full moon rise as Huitzilopochtli tossed his sister's head into the sky. Once, flying home from a profitless search in the Himalayas, I could almost see Japan drip off the jeweled spear of Izanagi.
My world narrows to the tor on the horizon. All else is white. The wind has not slacked but I no longer feel it.
I have come for them. Annigan and Malina. Sedna and Amaguq. The spirits of the north, strong and real. Reality has never felt thinner.
Snow and cold and rock and lichen. The end of all things.
I walk north.
Always.