6 Miles With Courage (14 page)

Ryan was no fool. He saw firsthand what a bear could do to a man and he had no intention of getting into
harm’s way. He had one thing on his mind and one thing only. Get to the top of the berm and move quietly forward.

He crept along the bear path, staying just off t
o one side just in case the bear should return. The path went left for just a short ways and then just as Ryan had hoped it went straight up the twenty foot berm. Ryan celebrated with a whisper.

“Yes
!” he said, moving quietly along a parallel path, all the way to the top.

Once at the top he quickly moved away from the
path and positioned himself at the top of the berm directly above where he had first encountered it. This put him
back
on course.

After taking a compass bearing he quietly slipped through the scrub oaks for a short distance where he met a wall of briers. This was the last plateau
, but it was the steepest and the most densely vegetated. To put it mildly it was going to be two hundred feet of pure thorn misery.

He pulled the bayonet out from his waistband and after looking back to make sure the bear had not returned he began hacking
at the briers.

“Ouch,”
hack, hack
,

“Ugh,”
hack, hack,

“
Dirty-rotten,”
hack, hack,
Ryan had not gone but three feet and his hands were full of thorns.

Even a
well-seasoned land surveyor with leather gloves and machete will get an occasional thorn while working in briers. If Ryan were to continue with his bare hands and bayonet, he would turn his hands and arms into “raw-meat” in minutes. Not to mention the fact that he was not making progress.

Other methods surveyors use
in making a line through the briers is to use a long brush axe or even beat the briers down into a matt with a long stick. Ryan remembered sitting around the dinner table listening to his father as he talked about clubbing briers to the ground using a dead branch. Putting the bayonet into his waistband he went searching for a long stick. He found one in the shape of a baseball bat.

It worked
great!
No more thorns in his hands and he was making real progress up the steep slope. Oh, there was the occasional “snag” on the calf by a brier rising up from the beaten down matt, but all-in-all it went rather well.

There was no denying, it was very strenuous work. Ryan stayed focused and relentlessly beat
down the briers. He was so focused that it wasn’t until he crested the top of the rise and stepped into the wild grass, that he realized he was standing on the edge of the upland. The club fell from his hand. He made it.

He
had reached the uplands!

He turned to overlook the canopy from where he had just emerged and faced the great river basin below. He could see for miles! What lies in front of him could wait. What lies behind him was to be celebrated!

The sky was grey
but it was sky, no canopy above only below. From his elevation of one hundred feet he felt as though he were flying again. He saw a similar scene just before the crash. He took a compass bearing and looked out three miles towards where his father awaits.

“I’m coming for you
, dad,” he said with tears of determination. “You hang in there because I’m coming for you and I’m coming today!” And with that he tossed his club to the ground and turned to take a compass bearing across the upland, and then that’s when it started.

It started as a warm feeling
around the abdomen and it was growing uncomfortable. He tried to ignore it as he fiddled with the compass.

He tried to set S20
°W but now the warm sensation had turned to hot and burning! He dropped the compass.

“What the
—” he said clawing at his waistband.

His hands found it. It was the bayonet and it was
almost
too hot to touch!

“Ouch!
” Jerking it out of his waistband and bobbling it from hand to hand he finally had to let it drop to the ground where he stared at it in disbelief. It was rapidly turning brown with rust, and a vapor began to rise up from the bayonet.

It was
rusting at a rapid rate.

It
was rusting so fast that it made cracking and popping noises as it broke apart, shattering into pieces. The pieces emitted a brown rusty vapor until there was nothing left but a powder in the
shape
of a bayonet.

“What
just happened?” Ryan asked himself, bending down to pick up the compass.

He was
staring at the pile of powder when a gust of wind blew down from the darkened sky turning the brown powder into a dust cloud that drifted away from the uplands. Ryan stood up and watched as it drifted down the brier path until it could be seen no more. Ryan turned around.

“What
is
this place?”

He was thinking
why did the bayonet disintegrate here and not in the swamp? Would I also grow old now and turn to dust? Am I
dead?
He starred at his hands wondering and waiting for something to happen, but as the moments past nothing happened.

His mind ran wild with thoughts.

Could it be that I did not survive the crash? Am I just a lost soul forever cursed to wander the swamp,
forbidden
to escape? Was the region of the uplands off-limits?

He continued to watch
his hands waiting for some kind of rapid aging. Then on the back of one of his hands a large mosquito lands. She dipped her head and sunk her stinger into his hand but he felt nothing. He watched as her abdomen began to swell and turn red. Then with an instinctive swat he smashed her to bits revealing a bright red crimson stain.

He stared at it.

The sky grew darker, the breeze grew stronger, a turkey gobbled in the not too distant palmettos. Ryan looked around at all the life.

“Wait a minute!”

“I’m not dead!” He said wiping the blood from his hand, “Dead people don’t bleed.”

He looked down at where the
bayonet was —he remembered his father—what happened to the bayonet didn’t seem to matter much anymore.

Yes it was something that according to the laws of physics should not have happened. But then a lot of thing
s have happened that should not have happened. He resided to taking the matter up with his science teacher the very next chance he got.

N
ow it was time to get back to the task at hand and that was getting across the uplands. After taking a few steps to retrieve his club he set a course to continue.

Ryan
turned his compass to S20°W and on that bearing was a dense palmetto patch 100 yards ahead. Ryan set his sights on a pine tree beyond the patch and heads towards it for a reference. It would be his “bearing tree.”

Forest
Road 77 was slightly less than one mile away. A brisk walk down a sidewalk that length would take thirty minutes and a nicely trimmed path through the woods might take forty, but Ryan had neither a path nor a sidewalk. However, Ryan was not exactly a stranger to the woods.

If
Ryan knew anything about the Florida-wild he knew a little about the uplands. He and his buddies had gone “man-camping” in the past. He knew a little about the dangers. The wildlife and the vegetation are familiar making him more comfortable here than down in the swamp. With a little
hop
in his step he heads towards the palmetto patch.

Ryan has been around palmettos all his life but he has never tried to make a straight path
right through the middle of them. A well trained surveyor with a sharp machete and the right technique can make good headway through a palmetto patch. A beginner with a dull machete would beat himself to death before making any progress. Ryan
was
a beginner without a machete at all!

Ryan tried to penetrate the sprawling thicket first by walking through it
and then by beating on it with his club. He was getting nowhere fast.

The Saw Palmetto is
a palm with a fan-type leaf. The leave stalks are armed with teeth just like a saw, hence the name. Without protection these teeth will rip open your skin. The palm itself grows to heights of three to six feet with intertwining trunks. Rarely do trunks grow straight.

Rob would come home from cutting line through palmetto thickets and tell Ryan at the dinner
table how tough it was. Rob told them that the fruit did not taste all that good but that it was a good source of food for the wildlife. Sometimes Rob would go back several months later to re-open the line and the palms had grown back even thicker than when he had cut them down the first time. It wasn’t that the trunk grew quickly but it was the leaves. It is a palm that lives a long time with some trunks being hundreds of years old.

None of that mattered to Ryan however as he was tearing himself up trying to make progress.
He beat the tops of the palmettos and he beat at the bottoms. He tried to push them over which only led to scraped hands and arms. He tried to low-crawl underneath them but he didn’t get very far. Nearing total exhaustion he turned to see how far he had come. It was no more than twenty-feet. It was time to stop. Ryan had to come up with another plan if he was to move forward.

He remembered a lesson
he learned from history class. In the battles of old, if you could not march straight up the middle than it was time for a flanking move. That is to say it is time to move up the side. The trouble with moving up the side is that it is easy to get lost. Ryan wants to follow the compass bearing, and so far he has with incredible accuracy.

Moving in small increments and always checking his bearing Ryan shifts to the left. He shifted about two hundred feet and was
just about to head back to the right when he came upon an opening and a game trail leading towards the bearing tree in the distance.

It worked! He had found a way around the thick palmettos.

The game trail was a well-used deer trail and he moved along it with ease. He watched the thick palmettos on his right as he walked. Had he continued to
beat
a path he never
would have made it through in time to rescue his father.

There was
something on the path he could have done without however, and that was the many deer ticks that were attaching themselves as his legs brushed the grass near the trails edge. He was unaware of them and it was something he would have to deal with later.

It wasn’t long before he had reached the bearing tree.
Pulling out his compass, Ryan picked a new bearing tree and headed off through the now low-sprawling palmetto and sparse pine trees. Other than using his club to knock down an occasional spider web the walking was easy. He did this from tree to tree as he had done in the swamp. Then he came upon a most peculiar sight.

In
front of him was a much larger pine tree than the others. It was dead and all that remained standing was the first eight feet of the trunk. In fact all that remained was one face of the tree and it was scarred with lines running down at an angle. Along these lines or hack marks, nailed to the tree were old rusty metal strips. At the bottom of the strips a clay pot was also nailed to the tree.

Ryan had seen one of these clay pots before.
In fact he remembered seeing it at his father’s office in one of the glass cases near the atrium. It most likely was a relic. This one, the one on the tree, looked exactly like the one in the case. Ryan gently lifted it off the nail and holding it in his hands he remembers his father putting the pot into the case. He was only about 9 years old.

“
Daddy what’s that?”

“That Ryan is a turpentine pot and it is about 75 years old.”

“Can mommy use it for her flowers?”

“No because there is no hole in the bottom for the water to drain out” Rob said as he took the pot
out from the case. “Here let me show you something about this pot,” Rob said as he handed it to Ryan.

He held onto the pot firmly as his father explained. “You see that hole on the side near the top?” Rob asked.

“Yes,” Ryan answered as he nervously held the funny little orange pot with the grooved lines in it—he certainly did not want to drop it.

“That’s for a nail to hold it to the pine tree.
After scrapping the bark off and cutting into the tree they would nail metal strips onto the tree to direct the sap into the clay pot. Then they would gather the full pots and take them to a camp where there was a thing called a ‘still’ where they would make turpentine, rosin, and tar for things like paint and medicines.”

“Can we go and see the place?” Ryan asked
.

“Oh no
, they don’t do that anymore Ryan, they stopped doing that sometime in the 1930’s.”

“Oh, ok,”
Ryan
handed the pot back to his father, and went off to join his friends
.

Ryan turned the old pot over and dumping the rotten leaves out of the pot
, hung it back in its rightful place.

He no sooner let go of the pot when the rusty old nail gave out and the pot headed for the ground. Ryan caught the pot just before it would have broken into pieces. He gently set it beneath the tree. Perhaps if Ryan had not come along when he did the pot would have fallen and
broken. Which lead Ryan to ask the question, how long would a nail hold a clay pot to a tree before it rusted and could no longer hold the weight? The answer, about 85 years!

A gust of wind from the approaching front cooled Ryan’s face and snapped him out of his nostalgic moment. He took a bearing and looked around for the next bearing
tree. He spotted one on top of the ridge ahead. He ached from thirst.

Snaking his way towards the bearing tree he weaved through the low palmetto and scrub tree
s without incident. Oh, he scared up a covey of quail and sent a turkey running, but before he knew it he was standing at the tree on the ridge. He had come a quarter mile with only three quarters to go before Forest Road 77.

From this vantage point on the ridge he could see for the next
half mile and what he saw gave him hope. What lie before him were virgin pine trees like the one he found with the clay pot. Big and beautiful and very old specimen pines. Their branches were gathered high up near the top signifying their age, their trunks tall and straight. Below the pines the undergrowth was minimal, more like grass. This allowed Ryan to nearly see across the entire half mile.

This was
old
Florida as Florida was before the palmetto became so prominent. Far in the distance the view was hazy. It was either caused by smoke, rain, or just the dark clouds. For a second, Ryan thought he had seen a cabin in the distance on his bearing. He looked hard but he could not see it again.

“
Most likely an illusion,” he said. Lowering his gaze he noticed a small spring pond just slightly to the left of his bearing and only one hundred yards away! If there was one thing Ryan needed right now it was
water!

Florida springs come in all shapes and sizes. Some are small being just a few feet across and others form lakes. Some are green and some are blue. They can be shallow or they can be bottomless reaching down into the depths of the aquifer. In fact if there is one thing they all have in common it is that they have an upwelling of
72 degree water be it summer or winter.

The water from a Florida spring comes from
an underground river of freshwater flowing deep below the lush sub-tropical landscape. It pushes its way up through the enormous limestone caverns forming ponds, or as locals would say “boils.” A crystal clear Florida boil is a sight to see. It surely was a sight for Ryan’s sore eyes.