ocean boulevard | 5sos | michael clifford

iv.

chapter nine.

Once, when I was eleven, my father brought me on a camping trip, just the two of us. We must've trekked for hours, past flora and fauna, sheltered by the canopy of leaves and branches towering above us, our boots crunching against the twigs littering the undergrowth. We were in a forest, north of our metropolitan city and home, and I remember how quiet it was, how different everything was from the hustle and bustle of Los Angeles.

My dad had always been a devout Protestant (Methodist by denomination), but he never believed in forceful evangelism, which is one of the reasons why I was never baptized as an infant. He wanted me to 'discover the Lord and His Grace' on my own, just as he had. He wasn't against paedobaptism as a theological value. It was something more innate and personal to him. He was a firm believer in free will, and even more so in immanent divine intervention.

My dad could always find a way to link everything to God and His Word. Genesis 1:20 - 21 reads: And God said, "Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky." So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. So I suppose the camping trip could also be attributed to his faith, to his unspoken ideology that all of Creation was that of God's and that it was our sacramental duty to bask in it.

During the day, he taught me how to pitch a tent, guided me through the basics of starting a fire, and identified a couple of wildflowers for me. It was either late April or early May, so the forest was abundant with sweet alyssums, blue-eyed grass, mountain violets, dusty maiden buds, and even hollyleaf redberries. At night, he would jam his iPod into a dock, and we would spend a solid hour listening and singing along to Hillsong ("You stood before my failure / Carried the Cross for my shame / My sin weighed upon your shoulders / My soul now to stand"). He'd read Scripture to me, regurgitating the tale of Jesus' temptation as well as verses from the Book of Daniel. I used to listen to every word he said, picking at each detail and unpacking it in my mind. I was a believer not by sight nor by faith, but by influence and upbringing. Christ was my father's Savior, and so, by default, He was mine as well.

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Three weeks later, I am staring out into the open blue sky and its equivalent beneath when Michael approaches me, the bearer of bad news.

"Payton," he hisses, more panicked than ever before. "We're in trouble." I look at him dead square in the eyes and tell him that we've been in trouble since our cruise ship went down, but he isn't having it. "You don't understand. This is bad. Really bad."

I don't even bother trying to think of worst-case scenarios, since we're both already in the midst of one, and the bad news is going to come whether or not I try to avoid it.

"It's been twenty-seven days, Payton. We're running out of supplies."

Of course. I crawl towards our food supply, do a quick mental calculation, and am met with yet another obstacle in this endless maze: Michael is right; we have enough energy bars and water to last us three more days, at most. By the looks of it, we're not anywhere near land either. Although I can't actually tell, since I stopped taking Geography as soon as I could.

"Three days, tops." An impulse swells from somewhere inside my lungs, numb and forsaken. I shake it off before the feeling can spread. "We need to start trying to find land. Any ideas?"

Michael licks his lips, which are chapped as a result of the humidity. "I read somewhere that birds have a tendency to fly over land. We can try to see which direction they're headed in and figure things out from there."