Abaddon

The Geologist

A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

Proverbs 18:24

 My family had traveled to Abaddon for my brother’s wedding. We would stay there forty days before the wedding. This was tradition. Many important Binah milestones are marked by forty days of something. Marriages were marked by Forty Days of Farewell and Forty Days of the Beginning. The Forty Days of Farewell were important to people about to be married. They would be the last days that my brother would live with us, be a child, and he would have no responsibilities during that time. He was saying farewell to his childhood. After he married, he would be in his own home and begin his own family. He would be an adult with the responsibilities of providing for those entrusted in his care through marriage and birth.

I cherished the idea of spending time with my brother before he would begin a family of his own. It also gave me time to become better acquainted with Ruth as she enjoyed her last days of being an unmarried woman. She would laugh and play with me in the lake, but I knew that in a few years it would be her children with whom she would laugh and play, not her husband’s little sister. My brother and I would live like we did in the days before he started to work for my father full-time at sixteen after he was finished with school for the day. I relished the idyll of these halcyon days on the shores of Lake Abaddon.

There was also a new group of geologists there now that the mountain had caused some tremors in the ground. The U.S. Geological Survey had sent a team of geologists and volcanologists to study the mountain. I was eager to meet them and see what they were studying, especially since there was something going on. It was not the same activity that was present when they studied strata in the rocks. I was torn between being useful to the new team of geologists and spending idyll days with my brother who preferred to spend the days in Ruth’s company.

I found myself spending a great deal of time with the younger female geology students. They were closer to my age. They found it hard to believe that I wouldn’t follow in their footsteps and attend a university like them. It caused a slight gulf between us that I wasn’t sure I could bridge so easily. I still felt more comfortable around the female ones than the male ones. The male geologists just seemed different. It wasn’t so much the Binah custom of being cautious of talking with a man who was not part of my family or culture, but it was the way they knew I was a child and should be treated as such. To some of them, I was too young to concern myself with what they were studying. It seemed normal for the older girls, the ones about to be betrothed or of betrothal and marriage age, but not for someone as young as I was. Most were courteous if a little aloof around the young girls interested in the rocks. Some of the girls acted silly to get the attention of the young ones that they found attractive.

Then there was me; the one who wanted to know. I had read books from the library, but why should I only focus on what a book could tell me when I could hold it in my hands and see it, touch it for myself?

There was one geologist whom I disliked at first glance. He had shaggy dark brown hair, skin tanned from being out in the sun, and blue eyes that laughed even when he wasn’t speaking. He swaggered rather than walked, as if he had all the time in the world. The girls all thought he was very handsome and I had to agree, even if I found him annoying more than endearing. He would laugh and make jokes about how geologists have nothing ­­but time. “Geology,” he had laughed, “is a mix of waiting a long time for little changes, or seeing big changes in very little time.”

“What changes would that be?” asked Zipporah, one of the village girls. She was from Abaddon, and she was beginning to realize that men found her pretty, and she was, with her long dark blonde hair and hazel eyes. I felt plain when I stood next to her. She could wear her hair loose and toss it around with great effect. Who would notice the little brown-haired Binah girl with her hair in a long plait and the scarf covering her head? Sometimes I felt so ordinary when I was around the girls from Abaddon and Chamad. They were so different from me. They also liked to pretend they didn’t know anything so the men would feel important by teaching them. I noticed the new geologist found it annoying. He had at least gained a modicum of respect from me in that sense, but he still annoyed me with the way he carried himself, the way he laughed, the way he insisted on the girls calling him Mr. Baughman.