The rain pelted my face in short sharp jabs as I stroked harder up river. I kept tilting my head from side to side trying to minimize the contact with my skin, but the cold wet howl of the wind against my ears added a different kind of torture to endure. My oars slicing through the water in rapid succession were a fraction of the pace my mind was racing.

I had to be getting close. I had just passed under the metal bridge which was outside of town, but when the trip started it was sunny and we road with the current. Fighting up current now in the grey early morning rain with death ticking in my ear gave the banks of the Owagatchi river a very different view from three days ago.

Three days ago Jim and I loaded up and hauled out for our annual Don’t ask kayak trip. A tradition we started 5 years earlier when college was ending and everyone around us was heading back to where they came from. To the family and friends they grew up with, and would likely die with, both the death of the people they thought they were once and in old age. Most of them talked excitedly of the jobs waiting for them, finally allowing them to actually get started doing what they’ve only been talking sideways about for the last four years.

Jim and I weren’t alone,in what felt like our alienation, towards this outcome we all knew was coming, but it felt like it then. An outcome we had all celebrated and berated in a steady cycle every week as courses, professors, and exams came and went. Turns out, for Jim and I, our bereavements are what we actually took away from four years of education, well, that and a degree saying we put enough time and effort into the system.

As everyone packed up and drove off one by one the same questions and sentiments were handed around like the fire whiskey we used to pass around the fires late into the night. It felt as if they were trying to get to know us all over again.

“So what’s next?” They’d ask, but they already knew what we would say.

“You going home for…” they’d pick a holiday that was coming up or one that would bring us within driving distance of each other. The gesture was as empty as saying it was nice seeing you to the teachers you bumped into from high school when you visited home.

So Jim and I suited up with plans of our own and dispatched it as needed under the enigma “don’t ask”. This umbrella of mystery between us gave us room to dodge the onslaught of questions which we couldn’t, and didn’t care to answer.

These same questions rolled around my mind from time to time in the years since, but on this river, this morning they pelted me with short sharp jabs. This trip had become our adult version of summer camp, except we were the only two members. The majestic Adirondack mountains, vast and if you knew the right places; reclusive, had become our landing pad these last five years.

In the dense cushion of white pine and birch trees Jim’s verbal manifesto felt out of place. Maybe the cushion of it all was what he was hoping would soften the blow of hearing he was taking everything we built and leaving with it. Maybe he hoped the miles of solitude would give us the time we might need to work through his guilt. But for me the stark contrast of ending everything where it all began was an ignorance that darkened even the brightest patches of forest around us.

I meant to separate myself from the shell of the person I thought I knew standing in front of me, but I didn’t mean to lose him. I never dreamed being lost was possible with as much time as we dedicated to the winding paths of the mountains around us. It must of been the dense fog clouding my mind, but the patch of wilderness was flat enough in both directions that each path I had taken turned into the one before it. Path after path I still couldn’t hear the hum of river looming near.

Another day I would of called it a matter of luck when I found my way back to not only the trail but right to Jim. Now, in hindsight it was only a matter of time, or the protection of Gitche Manitou, the Native American spirit legendary to these woods that had me stumble across the trail marker and Jim, white as the puffball mushrooms dotting the forest around us this time of year. Sweat beaded his forehead and the pain was so deafening he didn’t hear me approach until I touched him.

“Jim! What is it. What happened” I shot at him in one breath. He pulled his hand out of his coat pocket in silent agony showing me the crimson hole on his index finger.

“Holy fuck! How long?” I panicked.

“I started a timer,” he said as he handed it to me.

“I tried finding you before I headed back to the boats, but the pain is like nothing you read about, I can’t move my arm, every step I take it” he bit off the last words between clenched teeth.

We had trained for this in theory, this and other potential disasters we could encounter as hiking guides in our company these last five years. Rattlesnakes were rare , to say the least, and a bite more so. What I did know was details were not important as the stopwatch ticked closer to the 2 hour mark and the possibility of throat closer or kidney failure became not a warning but an actual reality.

“Get up! Lean on me, you need to get to a boat.” I demanded as I tried lifting his shoulder away from the trunk of the tree. His scream scratched against the air between us.

“I can’t. It’s reached my shoulder, I can’t fucking do it. You need to go.”

And I ran. I stood up, I dropped my pack and bolted away. Each stride felt unstable over the stone and root bedded trails that guided me back to our boats, and yet I pushed myself to go faster.

In the once sought after reclusiveness of the mountains, I now cursed the black hole of cellular service that made my phone nothing but a toy. The metal bridge being a fifteen minute drive from Woodys Waterhole meant I should be getting service any moment so I banked the kayak and stumbled up towards the dirt road in an exhaustion I felt more than I mentally registered.

Time felt thick and frozen around me each second I waved my phone around praying for signal. When the connection finally went through, all the panic I had been fighting back in the woods and up river poured out of me.

“Help! I need immediate help! Snake bite. 2 hours, Ditcherville road, I’m calling from the metal bridge. Jim Walsh from Hangout Hiking. Can you hear me? Hello.” I yelled as if they couldn’t hear me, but blinded and dead with fear it was me who couldn’t hear them.

“Sir I need you to calm down. I hear you, sir I need you to listen” the woman said with the calmness of the tap tapping of Morse code.

“Yes! Ya I’m here. I hear you- call officer Tillman he’ll reach us the quickest. I’m here I’m listening” I dispatched in chunks as I slowly realized that this was it, this was all I could do. The racing waters, my racing heart, my mind had nothing to peddle against anymore.

“Dylan this is Miranda. Tillman has been called, I’ve dispatched out to three towns over. Helicopter request has been phoned in. It’s ok! Dylan it’s Miranda can you hear me”

Miranda shot out the stats in as few details as possible.

Miranda.

I had been so consumed, I didn’t realize the voice on the other end of the call.

“Miranda! Oh god, yes. I… I..” but I couldn’t speak. As tears choked the air out of me, I pictured Jim fighting for air 2 miles back against the base of a tree. I stopped crying mainly due to the physical exhaustion that won over the overwhelming emotions I had buried since I took of my pack.

“Miranda I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! We still have time, he’s going to be ok. Ok?” I ended with a question, which proved how little I believed what I was saying. Miranda was Jim’s fiancé, and from what I now knew, would be Jim’s new partner when they moved to Pennsylvania in Spring and opened their own location there. Miranda was from Walcott Pennsylvania and wanted to be near family as they began a family of their own.

Family. Pennsylvania. New location. Snakebite. Suffocation. Jim. Miranda. Words filtered in my mind like flashing lights. Miranda and Jim were family to me, and in the seconds it had taken me to collect my racing thoughts Miranda’s voice hung like static in the air

“Dylan.” She her voice cracked through the other end of the phone. This was our job, we all met in wilderness survival courses. We knew protocol, and understood what constituted an actual emergency.

My fear bleeding from one side of the connection to the other said everything I wasn’t. Jim had a mild case of Hemophilia, a blood thinning disease which usually meant nothing day to day. Mixed with the thinning properties of rattlesnake venom changed the typical time line of a snake bite emergency.

The dirt road under my feet, and the surrounding trees enclosing me like a womb, made me feel so small. I felt lost all over again. The sounds of the forest around me, that usually soothed my soul, made no sense in this moment. The wind blew as serene as ever, the water flowed with the gracefulness it had the day before. This against the adrenaline stampeding through me didn’t match up.

When I heard the patter of the helicopter, the world spun back into focus, the urgency of the situation was matched by the metal machine hovering through the sky. In an elegant swoop the helicopter swooped down river where I pointed with flailing arms. My journey upstream almost an ago from where we banked our kayaks would take them minutes to find.

I tumbled back through the brush lining the river and stumbled back in the kayak. Moving was the only option. I couldn’t stand here a moment longer wondering and waiting. With the current pushing at my back it felt as if the water finally was pumping with the same urgency as me.

The helicopter, unable to land anywhere near had swooped over head twice while circling in waiting. As I rounded near the bend of where highbrow trail met the Oswegatchie shore the rescue team was hoisting Jim through the air to the cockpit. Tillman stood on the shore, the helicopter leaving him behind. Trees bent without breaking, leaves fell like a blizzard, and the deafening thud silenced the world around it.

As quick as it all happened it stopped. I took control once again of my kayak and paddled over to Tillman knee deep in frigid October waters.

“He was unconscious, but his heart beat was consistent. They have everything they need in the cockpit, they’ll radio back when they get to Upcountry General” he yelled as I paddled, still racing, closer to him.

He took hold of the bow of the kayak and pushed it back where I just came.

“The fastest way out is backwards for you at this point, do you need to rest?”

He didn’t wait for the answer to come out of me, he didn’t need to. In silence side by side we paddled against the current with the rain pelting us in short hard jabs.