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Friday, December 7th, 2018 11:30 pm
Smoke Signals
(7/5/15)
https://archiveofourown.org/works/16903428



Her efforts were all in vain. It was stupid of her to believe she could remember those ridiculous long ago lessons in woodcraft and firemaking. Despair struck Darla hard in the chest for a moment. She might not freeze to death, if she were careful, but she needed fire for light and to scare off predators larger than the mosquitoes and black flies that had been biting and pinching her for what felt like hours and hours.

How did she get separated from the rest of the women on the rafting trip? She let her hand drift to the welt at the back of her head that the black flies had been tormenting. Quite a knot there. She recognized her own disorientation, dizziness, and difficulty with balance as likely symptoms of concussion. Thank god she still had her canteen and her “batman utility belt” as her lover teased her. She had a good small knife, water purification tablets, and a weekend-plus-one’s dose of her medicines in a tiny orange waterproof matchholder, all firmly attached at her waist. If only Darla weren’t so beholden to “better living through modern chemistry, she’d still have MATCHES in the matchholder instead.
“You’re going on a rafting trip with a professional guide and half a dozen other forty-something women,” she mumbled out loud to herself, “YOU won’t need matches, the guide will be prepared!”
She took a short drink from the canteen.
“No, much better to use the waterproof container for your meds, it would make you miserable and risk your life if you got THOSE wet or worse, you’d inconvenience everyone else needing to get a helicopter lift out from the campground!”

She groaned and leaned away from the tree she’d propped herself against to slump forward, elbows on her knees and hands supporting her head. Darla hissed as her uncautious fingers poked the large, sluggishly bleeding lump behind her right ear. It was very tender, as she already knew from allowing her giant head to thump back against the tree trunk earlier. She hoped it was just a bad bruise and a bit of a cut, actually cracking her skull seemed a bit much even for a clutz like herself.

Taking a deep breath she tenderly explored the extent of the damage with her fingertips, starting by barely grazing over the skin and progressing to gentle pressure. While the firmer pressure was very painful, it felt nothing like the pain from the broken arm she’d had as a child, and that was reassuring.

It was, however hard to think clearly. That was disconcerting, but at least she had water. Her most pressing necessities would be staying warm enough overnight, fending off any ambitious wildlife larger than these damn (OW!) biting flies, and caring for her injury.

She injudiciously shook her head trying to clear it, and whined again as it woke up the pain behind her ear. That was enough reminder. She couldn’t afford to fall asleep, she didn’t remember much about concussions but she’d certainly seen enough bad medical dramas to know that it was a bad idea to fall asleep for long without someone to check on her.

She was still feeling waterlogged a couple of hours after she’d woken up and pulled herself out of the river, surely they would be looking for her sometime soon?

She checked the surge of panic that thought brought to her by slow, steady breathing (hooray for yoga!).

Okay, she thought, time to do a quick inventory.
Knife? Check.
Meds? Check.
Water? Check.
Decent shoes? Check. Her waterproof hiking sandals had stayed on her feet, despite whatever had happened to land her in the river. (she wishes she could remember)
Protective clothes? Check. Being allergic to the sun, it turns out, had some advantages. So did shopping at the expensive outdoor outfitter for quick-drying clothes that were SPF 50. Sadly she’d apparently lost her hat, but her neck kerchief worked okay for now to keep the sun off part of her face.
Body? Check. She smiled wryly. Aside from a few scrapes and bruises and one viciously broken fingernail, her worst injury was the bash she’d gotten on her head, and even that seemed to have quit bleeding finally. Her thick curly hair was catching a bit in the drying blood, but that was far from the worst of her worries.

Flotation device? Check, although perhaps it would be a good idea to hang the bright orange life vest from one of the trees near the river for rescuers to see? With the broken latch on the vest she might not want to trust herself to the river again. Though she knows that is one of her possible rescue options: to rescue herself. She smiled in a small way. It would be a great excuse for buying one of those cute “Self-Rescuing Princess” tee shirts she had seen on the geeky art website her friend had sent the link to.

Sense of Humor. Apparently intact. Cool.
She gave herself a grin and gave the whole forest a double thumbs up.

Okay, what else.

Thinking and planning capacity, only mildly damaged. Witness: the list above. Other possible options: try to remember how to build a fire, how to make a shelter and bedding of some kind, in case rescue doesn’t happen before nightfall. Disturbing idea, okay.

Time to test the resources. She gathered her courage, braced her hands behind her, and shifted so her left knee was on the ground. GodDAMN her head hurt!

Just shifting that much was almost enough to knock her back on her keister again, between the dizziness and the pain. She breathed quick and shallow and kept her head up. Obviously hanging her head was not an option. Okay.
She shifted to hands and knees, fighting the swimming of her eyesight, the dizziness, and the pain in her head which seemed to rocket around inside her skull.

“Okay,” she said out loud, “Crawling it is, for now.” She slung her canteen crosswise over her shoulder, slowly, because her head was still throbbing minutes after even the gentle movement of shifting from sitting to go to all fours.

She looked around for deadwood that might serve for a walking stick. A straight pine forest wouldn’t offer much in that regard, she remembered from her long ago camping experience, but this trip, she remembered the guide saying, was through mixed hardwood and coniferous forest. THAT is a pine tree with long needles, THAT is a California scrub oak, THAT is a … bay laurel? Okay. Not much deadfall handy at the moment. More important is to experiment gently, see if standing is a up and coming attraction. She snickered at her own joke.

“Wow, you’re a really friendly room tonight! Thank you so much, make sure to tip your waitstaff, they work harder than any of the rest of us!”

One hand against the sticky bark of the pine tree she’d been sitting against, she kept her head level (Look, people, she CAN be taught!), shoulders back, spine straight, belly muscles strong. Carefully, with deliberately slow movements, she brought herself to standing, and if she was a little wobbly and even frightened, there was no one but the mosquitoes to judge her for it.

She gingerly shifted her weight back and forth between her feet, continuing her ongoing tally of resources. Feet, ankles, legs, check. Hips, ass, torso, somewhat bruised and still damp, check. Arms and shoulders, hands, pretty good shape, though that torn off fingernail was annoyingly painful and she wished she had a huge bandaid and neosporin. Neck, okay…

Starting to roll her neck was probably the second worst mistake she’d made all day, as the famous nausea that hits people with concussions finally made its appearance. She lost her breakfast and the water she’d just drunk, in violent, painful spasms behind the tree she’d been sitting against. When she finished being sick, she found herself sitting on her ass again, the last of the vomit still in her mouth. She spit it as far away as she could. Oh, her head. NOW her head felt like someone had been swinging a bowling ball around in there, bashing into all the walls.

Darla told herself with asperity to never mind how someone could swing a bowling ball around in there, it’s just a descriptive metaphor and she could just shut the hell up if she was going to be hypercritical just after she had thrown up.

Fumbling for the canteen, she took a cautious sip, swishing the water around a bit to clear the taste of bile from her mouth.

Nothing else was quite as important as calming the calamity raging behind her eyes. She scooched backwards gently to lean back again against her friendly friend the pine tree. Darla, honey, if you can’t come up with a better phrase than “friendly friend”, it’s definitely time to stop thinking for a bit and rest your poor damaged skull.

She made sure to not actually allow herself to fall asleep, but she did allow her mind to drift and wander gently, without thinking and planning, for a short while. Who knew that stabbing nauseating concussiony head pain is better if you don’t move suddenly? Huh, she snorted. Shocker.

When she pulled herself out of her lassitude and drifting, she spent a few moments massaging and stretching her hands and feet. One must take good care of what one has, she considered. These are valuable resources right now, these healthy body parts. She moved on to do what she could of her usual daily warm up before digging in at the gym. Thankfully she remembered not to roll her neck or tip her head before starting herself on another adventure in vomiting, but the extremely slow and gentle shoulder rolls and stretches that she could do while seated did seem to help with the tightness of neck, chest, and hips that she’d had since climbing out of the river.

So, she thought, if sudden movement of the head made her nauseous and/or throw up, she was going to have to be very slow and deliberate with her movements for the next while. Task one: top up the water supply.

Darla fished out the water purification tablet, dropping it in her canteen and closing the top. Keeping her head as still and upright as she could, only wincing occasionally when her head shifted painfully, she crawled back to the riverbank with the orange life vest. Filling the canteen at the riverside and hanging the vest up in view of the river were slow and ponderous tasks, carefully and deliberately undertaken. Since Darla couldn’t trust her head enough yet to keep herself afloat in the changing rapids, she figured giving up the padding that the vest provide for her tuchis was worth the chance of being noticed and hopefully rescued by a boater.

She rested her head again while perched on the bank, swirling the water in her canteen, and drinking enough to let her take her meds. After a bit, she started gathering up a bit of deadwood on all fours, carefully, tossing it ahead of her in the direction of her chosen resting spot further up the slope. Clearing a campfire circle, and working at building a fire, took up close to an hour, and she found herself halfway sincerely thinking, “thank god it’s summer, and this isn’t a Jack London story.”

Fire was achieved, slowly and painfully, at the cost of splinters and sore muscles. She revisited old bittersweet nostalgic memories of her Scout leader, Robin, who’d passed away at 60 from multiple sclerosis, and who’d taught her to sing and camp and recognize edible plants as a teenager. She kept the fire fed as the sun slowly slid down the afternoon of its slope toward the tops of the mountains. She meditated on old friends she’d lost touch with, as she maintained her smoky smoky fire, feeding it pine needles and leaves gathered from the neighborhood as she cleared the fire circle. She’d found one sturdy stick long enough if needed one for a cane or for whacking.

She was hugely relieved to realize, eventually, that it was a Good Enough Fire. Shortly before dusk filled the river valley, Darla started to hear the outboard motor of a boat that had come to investigate the fire, and then heard the rescue team, calling from the river with a megaphone.

She hadn’t been that glad to see another person’s face in maybe YEARS. (But then, she admitted to being a slightly crotchety introvert, given her druthers.) The big smiles and hearty “Hello!”s they exchanged as two strong State Park Rangers hopped out of the boat and started towards her were joyful and relieved. Darla made some very horrible jokes including “we’ve GOT to stop meeting like this” while the one checked her for injuries and pupil dilation and the other extinguished her smoky fire.

Then she put herself in their competent hands as they helped her walk gingerly down the slope back to the water, the boat, and the way home. She had only been lost for six hours or so, maybe seven.

Her head hurt, bandaged as it was, and she was in the ambulance to the hospital for a final check up and probably an overnight stay due to the concussion.
But the pleased expression on her face stayed constant, because she did it. She rescued herself.

Damn STRAIGHT she was going to buy that geeky t-shirt and wear it with ridiculous pride. She’d earned that title.

NOTE: this tee shirt: http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/b3e7/
labelleizzy: (write first edit later)
Friday, December 7th, 2018 09:56 pm
KILROY WAS HERE

Oh god, we were SO FUCKING STUPID.
So naive.

those long discussions around the campfire or around the HDTV, cold beers in our hands, hot nachos in the fucking microwave, laughing and joking about the fucking "zombie apocalypse". How we would have this job or that job, how we would hole up in a Costco store, because it would have everything we'd need to survive and even enjoy life after the world ended. The skills we already had or could learn quickly in order to be valuable enough to win our way into someone else's fortified stronghold.

We had NO IDEA. We had NO IDEA what we really needed, what we really knew how to do, how fucking SOFT we were.
How much EVERYTHING would hurt. How much WORK just bloody EVERYTHING would take, how much thinking and planning and acquiring.

How much FEAR. Terror. Absolutely shit-your-pants terror.

We used to say, "I'd get a really good knife, and really good boots, and this kind of backpack and that kind of rifle" without really understanding.
What happens when your knife gets dull? Well, you sharpen it. How do you sharpen it? Do you KNOW how? do you have the right tools? can you recognize something else you could improvise as a blade sharpener, if you run across it? and can you use that blade, even dull, to do what you must to survive another day? It's hard work, gutting a carcass, butchering an animal for meat...

Same goes, obviously, for the REST of all our dumb-shit assumptions about how privileged and lucky and SKILLED we were.

What happens if someone TAKES your tools from you? Those books you treasured, that were the reason why you thought you'd gain admission into someone's guarded bolthole? The boots, the knife, even your CLOTHES. What happens if you're not strong enough to protect them? To hold onto them?

Knowing how to brew beer isn't very valuable when there's not enough fucking FOOD. Nobody really cares about booze when they're starving. Knowing how to bake bread is useless, so are gardening skills, if you can't settle down anywhere longer than a week or two for fear of the scavengers. Wildcrafting is a blessing, and I'm glad every day for what I learned from my beloved Girl Scout Leader, of all things. What she taught me when I was fourteen makes the difference now between hungry and starved to death.

I'm always hungry now, I'm always worried about getting hurt bad enough so I can't run anymore. I haven't had any of my meds in over two years, I've got half a tube of neosporin left and fuck-all chance of scoring any more. I'm getting slower, I hurt more often, I'm lonely as fuck. I'll never stop grieving my husband and my home and the comforts I once took for granted, but I just don't have any fucking TIME to FEEL. Every moment has to be spent in working out how am I going to survive this day, food, water, shelter, taking care of myself, whether I can trust anyone at all. Despair would dog my footsteps if Despair could keep up with me. I move fast for an old broad. Fuck that, I move fast period.

What the fuck am I even doing? Who am I even writing this for? I have no idea who's going to read it, but I'm stuck here anyway till it's dark and I can sneak away through the shadows. Might as well, I guess.
heh.
One thing my shitty childhood was good for. Learning how to hide, to sneak, to find all the places nobody would think to look for me. No, I'm not sharing my secrets. Find your own damn bolthole. Oh. Heh. If you're reading this, I guess you DID find your own bolthole, just that I was here first. Hi.

I'd tell you to keep the faith, but I don't think anyone has faith in anything but themselves anymore. I'd tell you to keep up hope, but I know you know that's a stupid, useless thing to say. I can tell you I'm thinking about you, because it's true. Random Stranger Reading This, I hope you're less hungry and less alone than I am. RSRT, I hope you have someone or something to love and take care of. RSRT, try to be kind. My only happy memories from the last two years are of random kindnesses. Someone scratched directions to a waterhole that hadn't gone dry. Someone left bedding in a bolthole. Someone left the last few pieces of fruit on a tree... that might not have been kindness, that might have been someone who was too big to climb out onto those thin whippy branches at the top of the tree... someone little like me could still get up and out to them.

Once, back in the day, I was fat and prosperous and happy. I thought I was ugly, being fat, I had NO fucking IDEA. I was so lucky then. I was loved, and safe, and pampered and treasured, and I had no idea. Now I'm tiny, wiry, strong, and fast. I have had to be, to survive.

Random Stranger Reading this, despite everything, have hope. Life may be shit right now, but if we all keep going, something has GOT to get better. Maybe I've been off my meds too long, and this is a manic episode, maybe it's just I've exhausted all my fear and I don't fucking have time for anything that doesn't keep me going.

I do have hope. I don't know why, but I do. It's almost dark now, I can barely see to write, so it's time to pack up and head out silently to my next bolthole.
I hope you can pass some hope along to the next person you meet, and I hope they're worthy of you trusting them.

Good luck, and gods' speed to you.

"kilroy"
labelleizzy: (bunny writer)
Thursday, July 9th, 2015 08:35 pm
Smoke Signals, from a prompt on @NaNoWordSprints (started 7/5/15, completed 7/9/2015)

Her efforts were all in vain. It was stupid of her to believe she could remember those ridiculous long ago lessons in woodcraft and firemaking. Despair struck Darla hard in the chest for a moment. She might not freeze to death, if she were careful, but she needed fire for light and to scare off predators larger than the mosquitoes and black flies that had been biting and pinching her for what felt like hours and hours.

How did she get separated from the rest of the women on the rafting trip? She let her hand drift to the welt at the back of her head that the black flies had been tormenting. Quite a knot there. She recognized her own disorientation, dizziness, and difficulty with balance as likely symptoms of concussion. Thank god she still had her canteen and her “batman utility belt” as her lover teased her. She had a good small knife, water purification tablets, and a weekend-plus-one’s dose of her medicines in a tiny orange waterproof matchholder, all firmly attached at her waist. If only Darla weren’t so beholden to “better living through modern chemistry, she’d still have MATCHES in the matchholder instead.
“You’re going on a rafting trip with a professional guide and half a dozen other forty-something women,” she mumbled out loud to herself, “YOU won’t need matches, the guide will be prepared!”
She took a short drink from the canteen.
“No, much better to use the waterproof container for your meds, it would make you miserable and risk your life if you got THOSE wet or worse, you’d inconvenience everyone else needing to get a helicopter lift out from the campground!”

She groaned and leaned away from the tree she’d propped herself against to slump forward, elbows on her knees and hands supporting her head. Darla hissed as her uncautious fingers poked the large, sluggishly bleeding lump behind her right ear. It was very tender, as she already knew from allowing her giant head to thump back against the tree trunk earlier. She hoped it was just a bad bruise and a bit of a cut, actually cracking her skull seemed a bit much even for a klutz like herself.
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