This Can't Be Right

This Can't Be Right-Part 1

The Missouri woods had been home to Jimmy Thornton throughout his nine years of life. They were his playground. They were his breakfast and dinner table. They were where he went to play out dreams of being a pioneer like Daniel Boone or having adventures like Tarzan of the Apes.

Jimmy never thought of his forest or of nature as fragile, and if anyone had expressed the idea that it was fragile around him he would have thought they were joking. While the forest was a playground, it also was a tough, persistent wily adversary, always ready to obliterate the traces of humans and restore its dominion over the tiny wounds in its canopy that Jimmy's family hacked out for fields and gardens through back-aching hand labor and held open through long days behind mules or oxen.

There were no Indians in Jimmy's woods, except when his Cherokee grandmother came to visit. There were no bears or elephants or apes or ape men. There were wolves and panthers, what most people call mountain lions. Jimmy heard their calls in the night, and if he was hunting when he heard those calls his dog bristled and tried to get as close to him as he could, wrapping frightened body around his legs.

Jimmy hunted alone at night now, a privilege he received when he was eight years old. He could have been Daniel Boone except for the missing Indians, the missing bears and the one-room school house he attended faithfully in the fall and winter after he helped bring the harvest in.

At nine years old, Jimmy was both an adult and a kid in those hills. He could shoot a rifle or pistol as well as any man, work a man's long, hard day behind a mule. He was a hard, toughened, smart nine, not the soft mommy's boys his dad told him cities breed. Jimmy had never been to a town bigger than Greenview, population two hundred; never been outside the hills and forests except in his books and imagination.

That imagination sent him to roam deepest Africa with Tarzan the Apeman, fight Indians and bears with Daniel Boone. his real life is exciting enough, but we always want more of what we like, and Jimmy savored adventure, sought more.

One day he got more, in a way that left him shaken and puzzled the rest of his days.

It was morning, with a thin mist rising from the grass and a thick dew covering each blade, sparkling in stray shafts of morning sunlight that pierced the forest canopy far overhead. There were ancient giants in this section of the woods, thousand year-old oak trees somehow missed when the loggers came through sixty years ago. Most of the forest was younger, sixty to eighty years old, still impressive but without the majesty of the older trees.

Jimmy's mission this morning was to rescue Jane from Arab slave raiders before she met a fate worse than death at their hands. He had only the vaguest of ideas about what a fate worse than death involved, but since his good friend Tarzan had been bumped on the head once again and, as always, flashed back to his days among the man-apes, somebody had to step in and do the rescuing.

The forest transformed to a jungle in his eyes. A big fox-squirrel chattering at him from the other side of a thick oak tree became a group of monkeys. He imagined he heard the roars of the man-apes and the answering challenge of Tantor the elephant. Then he noticed something strange, something that existed not in the real world of the forest or the pretend world of the jungle. The dim sunlight was flashing like a firefly--brighter, dimmer, brighter, dimmer. It was as if clouds were dimming the sun and then passing, but the rhythm was far too fast for that.

Jimmy tried to get a good look at the sun through the leaves, but couldn't. When he glanced back down, it was to a thickening and rising of the mist. It was now all around him, higher than his head. As it grew higher and thicker it also grew dim shapes, some moving, some huge and still. The trees around him were barely visible through the mist. The mist pulsed in rhythm to the sun's brightening and dimming--thicker, thinner. Human faces formed in the mist, swirled away, then reformed. The huge unmoving shapes became buildings, towers of crystal and shiny metal rising out of sight, then swirled away to become mist again.

With every pulse, the sun grew dimmer and the people and buildings around him more solid. He reached out toward a wall, but his hand encountered only mist, then a tree trunk. The bark didn't feel right though. It yielded to his touch, stretched like chewing gum. He hastily drew his hand back and stared. His fingers seemed indistinct, with mist swirling off of them.

Jimmy would have told you that he feared no man or beast and he would have meant it, but the swirling mist tapped into deep fears beyond anyone's bravery and he ran blindly. As he ran, the objects in the mist resisted him, a soap bubble of resistance at first, then a feeling of running through water. He slowed and weaved his way through the ever-thicker mist, avoiding the towers and now the people.

The towers and people no longer looked like mist. They weren't solid either though. Swirls and ripples ran through their walls, their bodies, their faces, stopped then moved again. There was still mist, but now it formed the outlines of trees swirling away and reforming but always mist.

Jimmy came face to face with a girl about his age, with golden hair tied back in a bow. She was dressed like a boy, in dark red pants and a matching shirt, with a thick black belt around her waist. She stared in his direction, not really at him, more through him. She said, "What a peculiar mist. It looks like a boy." The words sounded distorted, as though he was hearing them from under water. She smiled and said, "Hello, handsome boy of the mist." Through the distortion, he heard her strange accent and felt the warmth of her voice come through.

Her face swirled, steadied, swirled again, then faded gradually in pulses until her golden hair and red clothes were hints of white. Her face was briefly visible, still smiling, as the towers around her swirled away into mist, which then faded slowly back to the ground, leaving only faint hints of building shapes in the dew.