White Oak Mtn Ranger
Active member
- Joined
- Aug 28, 2007
- Messages
- 28
FOG SHOT
In an instant it was over and for a suspended split second in one of life’s little strange time warps there had been a total loss of consciousness. I levitated, or better yet, simply hovered in the tree and attempted vainly to calculate the splitting of a second like there was some possibility that such a thing was really imaginable while suspended in an oak.
The minutes prior had defied any sort of real meaningful measure, seemingly turning to hours, but the ability capture that time had been endlessly brief. Focus had been confoundedly pin point in a rapidly descending parallax of some other worldly sort of swirling funnel cloud.
Breathing, although completely automatic, had been scattered like a volcanic windstorm somehow complicated by muscle twitch fibers that had miraculously reverted to a series of autonomic reflexive conditions that thankfully worked independently of the mind.
I blinked when the arrow left the bow and the fog closed in shroud like in that very instant, engulfing the arrow, the buck and the rest of the known planet earth.
The fog of war is what those that have been there call it. It’s the moment when you escape what you consider to be reality only to find that your recall processes attempt to desperately play back the mental video of what has just taken place.
No matter how hard you try to concentrate on the time warp of the last things you think you have just done, you are doomed to failure.
Examples of the fog are rampant. Dead civil war soldiers were found after huge battles, impaled with ramrods where the shooter, in his haste to survive, never took the ramrod out of the barrel. State Troopers of old were found dead at the scene of a gun fight, their revolver in their hands and six empty shell casings in their breast pockets. They had been trained for years on the practice range to police their brass after a reload and in the heat of their first and last battle they had reloaded, following their years of training, policed their brass and died because they had been lost in the fog of war.
First the noises come to you. Crashing leaves and under-brush sounds made by a moment of sheer panic and terror. You strain valiantly to collect crashing noises of the fallen but this too fails. Your ability to intercept sound fails sporadically due to absolute competition from the overly harsh vibrato your aorta spastically produces.
Sometimes this initial fog lasts far much longer than other times you have found yourself in it. I have never understood the difference in the repetition of the journeys and the longevity each presents, but each one is somehow uniquely different and each visit is equally disconcerting.
When the fog of the shot slowly, agonizingly slowly, drifts away and some semblance of cognitive reason returns it’s usually immediately replaced by doubt.
The aura of doubt is unequivocally as debilitating as the fog. When you’re slowly able to piece the instant together you find some manner of relief but the brief relief is smothered by the new fog of doubt.
Doubt follows you down the trunk of a tree like a bolt of lightening tearing at a limb and peeling big slabs of bark, zigzagging the trunk into the ground and digging a huge hole at the roots of what has just elevated you above.
Standing on the ground in doubt is disorienting. It really shouldn’t be but it is. Your first thoughts are that being out of the tree should be somewhat of a help with the fog and the doubt, but it’s not. Doubt acts like some old gray muzzled Seeing Eye dog that leads you to the last place you thought you saw your arrow slip into the darkening funnel of fog.
To get your bearings you inevitably look back up in the tree. I think this is really just to assure yourself that you were actually there in the first place, but you can’t easily overcome the doubt so you turn to look up in the tree. This looking up in the tree thing is nothing more than a feeble attempt at triangulation. It’s of no help with the doubt, but you vainly reason that triangulation is about all you have now that your psyche perceives the looming tsunami of doubt.
Slowly you scan the wavy surface of the earth for your arrow. The last few eons are slowly coming back to you in spurts and attempts at a return to a state of sanity.
There’s a thought. Sanity? If you had been sane to begin with why exactly would you climb into a tree at such an advanced age and perch in it like some wobbly earth bound predator? Why exactly would you wait above the earth for hours only to lose your mind to fog and doubt? How exactly does sanity figure into this weird equation of triangulated time warps?
After wandering about in ever larger alternating circles of doubt and forest floor you find your arrow fletching buried deep in a carpet of spent oak petals. Inevitably you look back up in the tree as if you need some kind of validation that the blood soaked carbon missile is something you had something to do with. It’s almost like someone else had maybe taken your place and done something that you were not really aware of high up there in the fog surrounding the tree.
Then you look at the blood soaked fletching and doubt is neither erased nor defused. How did you miss the fact that the arrow exited what you had just moments ago lost in the fog? Where exactly did the arrow go exactly and how exactly did you not manage to be a witness to such a thing? The texture of the blood and the smell of arrow are almost implausible as you lift the instrument to your nose. You instinctively want to taste but you repress the sensation and ask why.
Now your hunter/gather DNA hardwires into the fog and doubt like some kind of warrior ghost. Fits that resemble clarity rage about the surface of the leaves but the leaves offer no clue. Doubt descends like a freight train on a blown up trestle in a cowboy movie hurtling feelings of loss and guilt into the rocks of the deep canyon. You now clutch the bloody arrow for confirmation that it really wasn’t some fog bound apparition and wonder why you never heard the crash that you were sure you should have heard.
After wandering in what you consider to be the most methodically manner available and suddenly realizing that your have been wandering aimlessly for hours with your doubts, you succumb. There is no finality or closure to it, you just succumb.
Giving up is different, this is something else altogether but the upside of it is that it adequately replaces doubt. It’s guilt ridden and laden with feelings of hopelessness and waste. It’s a magnificently wrong kind of a feeling and it is as timeless as the era when hide covered men chased mammoth cave bears with sharp sticks and the biggest rocks that they could possibly hurl.
The fog never really clears like doubt does, it always behind your back lurking like calamitous near death. It lingers on our off shoulder with each hunt and somehow serves to remind us of all those lost cave bears.
It’s enshrined with all hunter/gathers of the ages that were just a wee bit too slow or ran out of sharp sticks when one or two more good pokes in the vitals could have carried the day if it hadn’t been for the fog.
In an instant it was over and for a suspended split second in one of life’s little strange time warps there had been a total loss of consciousness. I levitated, or better yet, simply hovered in the tree and attempted vainly to calculate the splitting of a second like there was some possibility that such a thing was really imaginable while suspended in an oak.
The minutes prior had defied any sort of real meaningful measure, seemingly turning to hours, but the ability capture that time had been endlessly brief. Focus had been confoundedly pin point in a rapidly descending parallax of some other worldly sort of swirling funnel cloud.
Breathing, although completely automatic, had been scattered like a volcanic windstorm somehow complicated by muscle twitch fibers that had miraculously reverted to a series of autonomic reflexive conditions that thankfully worked independently of the mind.
I blinked when the arrow left the bow and the fog closed in shroud like in that very instant, engulfing the arrow, the buck and the rest of the known planet earth.
The fog of war is what those that have been there call it. It’s the moment when you escape what you consider to be reality only to find that your recall processes attempt to desperately play back the mental video of what has just taken place.
No matter how hard you try to concentrate on the time warp of the last things you think you have just done, you are doomed to failure.
Examples of the fog are rampant. Dead civil war soldiers were found after huge battles, impaled with ramrods where the shooter, in his haste to survive, never took the ramrod out of the barrel. State Troopers of old were found dead at the scene of a gun fight, their revolver in their hands and six empty shell casings in their breast pockets. They had been trained for years on the practice range to police their brass after a reload and in the heat of their first and last battle they had reloaded, following their years of training, policed their brass and died because they had been lost in the fog of war.
First the noises come to you. Crashing leaves and under-brush sounds made by a moment of sheer panic and terror. You strain valiantly to collect crashing noises of the fallen but this too fails. Your ability to intercept sound fails sporadically due to absolute competition from the overly harsh vibrato your aorta spastically produces.
Sometimes this initial fog lasts far much longer than other times you have found yourself in it. I have never understood the difference in the repetition of the journeys and the longevity each presents, but each one is somehow uniquely different and each visit is equally disconcerting.
When the fog of the shot slowly, agonizingly slowly, drifts away and some semblance of cognitive reason returns it’s usually immediately replaced by doubt.
The aura of doubt is unequivocally as debilitating as the fog. When you’re slowly able to piece the instant together you find some manner of relief but the brief relief is smothered by the new fog of doubt.
Doubt follows you down the trunk of a tree like a bolt of lightening tearing at a limb and peeling big slabs of bark, zigzagging the trunk into the ground and digging a huge hole at the roots of what has just elevated you above.
Standing on the ground in doubt is disorienting. It really shouldn’t be but it is. Your first thoughts are that being out of the tree should be somewhat of a help with the fog and the doubt, but it’s not. Doubt acts like some old gray muzzled Seeing Eye dog that leads you to the last place you thought you saw your arrow slip into the darkening funnel of fog.
To get your bearings you inevitably look back up in the tree. I think this is really just to assure yourself that you were actually there in the first place, but you can’t easily overcome the doubt so you turn to look up in the tree. This looking up in the tree thing is nothing more than a feeble attempt at triangulation. It’s of no help with the doubt, but you vainly reason that triangulation is about all you have now that your psyche perceives the looming tsunami of doubt.
Slowly you scan the wavy surface of the earth for your arrow. The last few eons are slowly coming back to you in spurts and attempts at a return to a state of sanity.
There’s a thought. Sanity? If you had been sane to begin with why exactly would you climb into a tree at such an advanced age and perch in it like some wobbly earth bound predator? Why exactly would you wait above the earth for hours only to lose your mind to fog and doubt? How exactly does sanity figure into this weird equation of triangulated time warps?
After wandering about in ever larger alternating circles of doubt and forest floor you find your arrow fletching buried deep in a carpet of spent oak petals. Inevitably you look back up in the tree as if you need some kind of validation that the blood soaked carbon missile is something you had something to do with. It’s almost like someone else had maybe taken your place and done something that you were not really aware of high up there in the fog surrounding the tree.
Then you look at the blood soaked fletching and doubt is neither erased nor defused. How did you miss the fact that the arrow exited what you had just moments ago lost in the fog? Where exactly did the arrow go exactly and how exactly did you not manage to be a witness to such a thing? The texture of the blood and the smell of arrow are almost implausible as you lift the instrument to your nose. You instinctively want to taste but you repress the sensation and ask why.
Now your hunter/gather DNA hardwires into the fog and doubt like some kind of warrior ghost. Fits that resemble clarity rage about the surface of the leaves but the leaves offer no clue. Doubt descends like a freight train on a blown up trestle in a cowboy movie hurtling feelings of loss and guilt into the rocks of the deep canyon. You now clutch the bloody arrow for confirmation that it really wasn’t some fog bound apparition and wonder why you never heard the crash that you were sure you should have heard.
After wandering in what you consider to be the most methodically manner available and suddenly realizing that your have been wandering aimlessly for hours with your doubts, you succumb. There is no finality or closure to it, you just succumb.
Giving up is different, this is something else altogether but the upside of it is that it adequately replaces doubt. It’s guilt ridden and laden with feelings of hopelessness and waste. It’s a magnificently wrong kind of a feeling and it is as timeless as the era when hide covered men chased mammoth cave bears with sharp sticks and the biggest rocks that they could possibly hurl.
The fog never really clears like doubt does, it always behind your back lurking like calamitous near death. It lingers on our off shoulder with each hunt and somehow serves to remind us of all those lost cave bears.
It’s enshrined with all hunter/gathers of the ages that were just a wee bit too slow or ran out of sharp sticks when one or two more good pokes in the vitals could have carried the day if it hadn’t been for the fog.
