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Geoffrey Rodriguez Untitled
Erik frowns at the snow. The winter had been even harder than last year, and that had been the coldest winter that anyone could remember. Many people had gone hunting and never came back. The wolves seemed more numerous and bloodthirsty as years went by. With many more winters like this, the town could not survive. In his arms, Erik carries the meat that he bought from market. Erik’s footsteps drag in the snow, weighing him down. Without warning, his foot catches a root, and he tumbles down. He is shocked to see a frozen human head staring out of the ice. With a yelp Erik leaps back; adrenaline courses through his veins. For a second he thinks of running, but his curiosity overcomes his fear, and he stays. Thoroughly shaken, he kneels down, and begins to hack away at the ice surrounding the head. The corpse is oddly dressed and stranger still are its leggings. The more he examines the scene, the more extraordinary it appears. Deeper digging reveals two poles lying by the body, and near its feet are two blue flat boards. Questions rush to Erik’s mind, but night has fallen, so he decides to run back home. Erik’s wife is intrigued upon hearing about the body, so she insists that tomorrow they should set out to see the body together. Having come upon the cadaver, Erik picks up the blue boards. Their shiny coating and intricate striped design fascinate him. His wife meanwhile has tried on the jacket of the corpse and has fit in the boots. However, the boots are too rigid to allow for easy walking. After fiddling with some buttons and knobs, with no results, they are both puzzled by their objects, and are about to give up when Erik’s wife tries kicking one of the boards in frustration. Her boot clicks onto to the top of the board, and she glides across the snow. After clipping in the other boot to the other board, she is able to glide downhill across the snow with ease. They bring the boards home, and spend weeks trying to replicate them. Finally, Erik tries on his copies and makes it to the village in half the time it would usually take him. Many people start to ask for the boards, which allows people to live further from the village, and expansion begins… ********** Richard adjusted my goggles, and gazed on the plains of Utah, in the valley thousands of feet below. He had just seen an intriguing valley trail to the far right of the mountain. Richard skied down to the top of the valley, and his blue skis began to tear at the powder lining the V-shaped valley. He continued on for sometime, until there was split in the path, one way with a sign saying, “base area,” the other way unmarked. Richard chose the unmarked trail. It was about as wide across as half a school bus. To his left, a snow-covered slope led into a valley, and to his right a cliff wall stretched toward the sky.The trail seemed endless, and he wondered when it would connect to another trail that led back to the base area, oblivious to the fact that the mountain had well receded into the background, and that night was fast approaching. And with night came cold. Exhausted, worn-out, and chilly, he collapsed into the snow. His mother, waiting at the base area, was worried when he didn’t come in after the lifts had closed. She alerted the ski patrol, but because there was a blizzard moving in, they deemed a rescue attempt too risky. The storm came and went, and the ski patrol searched for him, but they came up empty handed. For thousands of years, Richard’s body lay frozen in the snow. His lifeless eyes would witness atrocities unknown previously to humankind. Bombs, fighting, and destruction reigned over the Earth. Then all was silent. Civilization was no more. Humans were little more than animals, relegated to tiny primitive communities, which knew nothing of the power that they had just a millennium earlier. It was in one of those communities that Erik lived. This however is not what happened. The real story goes something like this: Let’s rewind to the point where Richard was going down the nowhere Utah in the early 21st century.He had been going for probably half a mile, when he realized “What if this isn’t really a trail?” His brave and foolhardy side pointed out that it must lead somewhere, because it had snowmobile tracks. Doubt gnawed at him. His scared and cautious side imagined a crazy murderer with a chainsaw and snowmobile living at the end of the path. This side won the argument. Richard jumped off the path, almost expecting the sound of a revving chainsaw. Breathing heavily, he popped off his skis and ran (Perhaps run isn’t the right term here “falling-and-tripping-in-the-knee-deep-snow-while-still-moving-forward” would have been more accurate). Finally he came to a stream at the bottom of the valley and looked up at this looming hill that lay between the actual path and him. This would have been easy, had there been no snow, no skis, and no altitude which deprived the air of oxygen. But he did his best, and a painful half an hour later, Richard lay by the side of the trail. He stayed there for a good fifteen minutes; light-headed and hacking up a lung. Fortunately for Richard, he had survived this battle. Unfortunately, humanity could not fight off its love of hate, and nuclear holocaust reigned within a century. For thousands of years the survivors stayed alive in tiny villages. In one such village lived a man named Erik. He lived a hard life, until wolves devoured him on his way home from market. Had Richard, thousands of years earlier, taken the right hand path, frozen to death, and had his corpse discovered along with his skis, humanity would have flourished again when Erik came upon him. But because he realized his error, and took the path for safety, humanity faded away. [BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS, CLASS OF 2007 EDITION] |
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