Mountain Qualia

NaNoWriMo Day 11

First, Tipi avoided walking in the stream itself, but with the trees and rocks in the way and the hurry he was in, he gave in. Once the cold shock rushed by and the heaviness of soaked shoes became a fact of life, he could make headway again on his path. Of course, he was not sure the Julian went this way at all, but the two women and the girl from his dreams told him that the boy would be. In the water, Julian would not leave any footprint or trace of any other kind.

Tipi listened to himself think. He took the word of a figment in his dreams and two labile women with their eyes closed. After a few hundred meters, he stopped. Julian couldn't have gone that far. Then he heard the unmistakable sound of rocks tumbling down into water and onto themselves. It was further up. When Tipi had reached around a corner, he saw a man with knee-high boots and an orange polyester shirt balancing a pile of stones. Tipi looked around if he could see Julian.

"Oh hey," the man said when he turned around to see who was making the sloshing sound behind him. The pile of rocks varying from fist-size to skull-sized tumbled again.

"Did you see a small boy come by here recently?"

"Nope. It's just been me and my rocks for the entire afternoon. To be honest, I tried to find a spot where I would not be bothered by a constant flow of loudmouth hikers." He looked at the flustered and ramshackle appearance of Tipi. "But you're welcome to sit and watch."

"I have to find my boy," Tipi said. He looked around. Should he go back or find the nearest path? He could be anywhere.

Water splashed behind him. "Tipi! Tipi!"

"Julian, where the hell were you?" He ran up to the boy and hugged him.

"I saw you walk away, so I followed you but you went so fast. I thought you wanted to get rid of me." He tried to hold himself in, but soon tears flowed. Tipi took the boy to the side and climbed on a large boulder where they could sit and rest. They also had an excellent view of the stone balancer in the water.

"What's that man doing?" Julian said when he had dried his tears.

"He's building a tower of rocks."

"I do that. But he's a grownup!"

"Whatever a child likes to do, a grownup likes to do too. The only difference is that a grownup will take it way too seriously. You build small towers and dams in the water. This guy is next level. Look."

The orange man found a flat rock in the center of the stream that stuck out just above the waterline so that water rushed by left and right but not over it. With a sleight of hand, he placed a fist-sized rock on the flat bottom. Then he grabbed a rather flat rock from a pile that had collapsed moments before and balanced it horizontally on the smaller round rock, but in such a way that one side of the flat rock stuck out to one side.

"That will never work," Julian whispered to Tipi.

"Watch." The balancer did not let go of the flat rock. Instead, he took another oddly shaped rock and placed it on top of the flat rock using the counter-balance to balance the whole. His hands caressed the stones, feeling when the rocks did not want to move on their own anymore. He let go, and the stack remained. Then he stepped away and took a larger heavy boulder with both hands and turned it over so that only a narrow protrusion stuck on the bottom side. Slowly, and carefully, the man brought the boulder over to the stable stack and after a long inspection of the surface on the top-most rock, he placed the boulder on top. He did not let go yet. In utmost concentration, he danced with the boulder for at least three minutes. Then he let go. The stack remained completely still.

"Whoa," Julian said. "It looks impossible."

The man first took a few careful steps back and then ran to a camera that he had set up beforehand on a tripod with a predetermined composition. He quickly took a few snaps and a short movie clip. Then, without a plain cause, the stack collapsed.

"Yes!" the man exclaimed. "Got it." He walked up to the two spectators with his camera and showed them the picture. "Complete balance."

"Until it fell down," Tipi said.

"Amazing," Julian said. "How do you do it?"

"You've got to feel it, kid. And years of practice. It's all in the grooves too. It looks like the top rock is balancing at a tiny point of contact only, for but its sides touch small dents in the rock below. So it's more like a small chair than a balancing a needle."

"Do they always fall down like that," Tipi asked.

"You're fun company aren't you?" the man said. Then he turned to Julian. "Some of them can last for years but the most spectacular heaps are the crazy ones. The piles you think are magic. They get the most likes." He showed a few pictures of gravity defying stacks on his smart phone.

"It will ruin their lives," Tipi said.

"Right. They put a like on my pictures to feel rotten."

"You sell them this image of balance, as if it is something that can be attained."

"You can attained it."

Tipi stacked to boring bricks on top of each other. "I can attain this kind of balance, but nobody is seeking that. They seek the balance when life looks like one of your contraptions. A great job, meaningful hobbies, noble friends, exemplary children, a solid bank account, far away travels, and some spiritual glue to stick it all together. They want to balance all that and they think it is something that you crawl towards and then have it, forever."

"Yea?"

"But it's unstable. It crumbles. Most often before you ever get there or else soon after you think you have it all balanced out." Tipi points to the camera. "In your pictures, the balance is eternal, but in reality it's instable as hell."

"What do you expect me to do about it? People know they have to work hard."

"You can work hard for it, and you can keep working to stay in equilibrium on top of your self-made mountain. But the minute you relax. You fall off." Tipi threw the two bricks he had stacked into the water. "If you can't enjoy the balance, it's not much of a balance."

"To each their own hobby."

Tipi had out outstayed his welcome with his critical words and turned to Julian. "I think we should move on now, the afternoon is ticking away." Julian, who had been poking with a stick between pebbles in the water returned to Tipi.

"Good man, how do we get to the nearest trail?"

He pointed them up a slope between a few large trees. They followed the direction until they ended on a graveled path wide enough for a car to drive on. They followed the path downhill for a few minutes. Their feet were wet and their shoes squeaked from the water that got stuck in all the pores and crevices of their footwear. It was becoming very uncomfortable and cold.

Something was lying next to the path. It looked like an animal. A dead one. "It's a pig," Julian exclaimed. "Ew, they're eating it." Several black birds hopped left and right around the open carcass of the diseased boar.

"They are crows," a voice said. Tipi shook up and saw the two bird watchers approaching. He had to curtail his instinct to get away from them as soon as possible. "People say they are an omen of bad fortune and death," one of the bird watchers said. "But of course those are just folk tales. Do you like birds, young man?" he said to Julian. Tipi grabbed Julian's arm, even though he was not sure what he had to protect Julian from exactly.

"Did you know," the other bird watcher started. "That a group of crows is called a murder? A murder of crows." He laughed.

Tipi didn't hesitate. "Run!" he yelled to Julian. Tipi turned Julian away from the boar and pulled him into a dash up the slope. They ran and ran. At the sound of loud cawing and wing flapping Tipi looked over his shoulder to see the murder of Crows scatter into individual crows. The two menacing binocular men had vanished. They ran on until they arrived at a crossroads.

Julian looked up at Tipi with sad questioning eyes. "I don't know," Tipi said to him, heaving heavily. "These guys looked like bad news." A crow landed on a low-hanging branch right in front of them. Tipi yelled and screamed at the animal until it flew away.