The Dream Came True
When I was a child, my father was Superman in my eyes—a package-tour guide who ranged every corner of the world leading people along, a man who walked the alleys of cities others could barely pronounce as if they were the playground at the end of the street.
Whenever I watched the tourists strung out in a line behind him, flag raised in the airport departures hall, I thought it was the finest job in the world.
Father always stepped forward first when there was danger. Even when one of the party collapsed from altitude sickness in the highlands of Peru, he never lost his head.
"Breathe deep, and slow. Altitude beats the one who climbs in a hurry."
He steeped coca-leaf tea, settled on a route down, and gave the local driver his orders in a few clipped words of Spanish. And he always had one solution in hand. If that failed, a second. If that failed too, a third.
Before the campfire, the way other fathers tell fairy tales, he taught me these things. Lose the path, and you follow the water, not the ridge. Even running water is not to be trusted until you've boiled it. A fruit that a bird or a monkey eats is not, for that reason, a fruit a person can eat. And above all: the moment you lose your body heat, you lose your reason with it.
Every school break I shouldered a single pack and followed him around the world. Dawn over the Sahara, dunes burning past yellow into red. A green aurora shearing across an Icelandic night. And on that same journey, the split seams of a glacier, and the rapids that swallowed a gorge as they ran.
By the time I was about ten, I already knew that the beauty of the world and the terror of nature sit a hair's breadth apart. The loveliest views were, more often than not, the places that could kill a person with the least trouble.
So my dream settled, naturally, into a single thing. Not to follow roads other people had already laid down, but to be the first to go where no one else had been.
Not behind my father's flag. In front of him. In the elementary-school graduation book I wrote "explorer," and beside it my homeroom teacher added, small, in red pen, "What a fine dream."
Twenty-seven years have passed since then, and this is who I was.
One office worker, living in the reality that a dream is only a dream. My name is Park Jaehyuk. Thirty-seven. Section chief of sales management at a mid-tier trading company. Come Monday morning I was packed into the crush on Seoul's Line 2 Subway and swayed with the rest of them; lunch was whatever the company cafeteria had on for the day; after work I cracked a single can of convenience-store beer and put a documentary on.
Amazon Expedition. Crossing the Sahara. Surviving Alaska.
The people on the screen were walking the places I had wanted to walk, and I lay on the couch and watched them do it. My retired father, catching a travel program from the living room, would mutter to himself.
"That path's wrong."
Every time I heard that voice, I found myself fidgeting with the remote for no reason at all.
At twenty-nine I got halfway through an application to an Amazon expedition program and never did more than save the file. At thirty-one I was about to break my savings for a plane ticket to Patagonia when an alert came in for the interest on my jeonse loan—the fortune you hand a landlord upfront just to keep a roof—and I closed the window.
From some year onward I lived with the word someday always in my mouth, and that someday stood forever in line behind the next quarter's performance report.
It was a day the rain came down in sheets.
Rain that had poured since dawn had turned my commuting umbrella inside out. I stood at the crosswalk on the way to the station with the ruined thing gripped in one hand.
The signal changed. I stepped out. And in that instant the ground under my feet was gone. A manhole hadn't opened. The pavement hadn't caved. There was, quite literally, nothing.
The sound of the rain cut off at a stroke. My ears stuffed shut, and a stomach-turning sense of falling stretched on through a span of time I couldn't sort into seconds or minutes.
Then damp, hot air struck my face. When I opened my eyes I was lying face-down in mud. Rotten leaves mashed flat under my palms, and earth and mold and the sweet reek of fruit going bad rushed up my nose all at once.
Overhead, trees that looked to be ten times my height sealed the sky in a solid roof. Thick vines hung down like ropes, and a few broken shafts of sunlight fell through the leaves. At ground level, green leaves twice the size of my palm were stirring. I had never, in any documentary, seen a plant that grew leaves like those.
And I was naked.
No suit, no shoes, no underwear, no watch. Even the umbrella I'd been holding was gone. Moisture clung to bare skin, and though the heat was thick and stifling, my wet body was losing warmth at a speed that made no sense.
It was so absurd a hollow laugh got out of me. If this was a dream, it was far too vivid—right down to the sting of an insect bite working into my shin. I looked around and found no trace of where I had fallen. No hole, no light, no door. Nothing remained but the mud smeared on my bare body and the sound of my heart knocking against my ribs.
On any ordinary day I would have been running in circles, shouting. Strangely, my body remembered Father's order before the rest of me could catch up. I drew a long breath. Panic, and you die first. Grasp the situation before anything else. His voice came alive again in my ear. I pushed myself up onto mud-caked knees. First: see whether I was hurt.
My palms were scraped and there was a shallow bruise on my shin; the bones were sound. Second, fix my position and my direction. Third, secure water, fire, and a place to sleep. In order. One thing at a time.
I looked to the sky first. Through the gaps in the leaves there was a single sun, the size and the color of the sun I knew. The shadows were short, so noon was close. Night would bring a moon, and I hoped that moon would wear a face I recognized. If the sky was the same, then at least I could read time and direction. The way the sun sinks is west. That alone was mercy enough to be grateful for.
This humidity, the height of the trees, the thick bed of leaf litter—it resembled a lowland tropical rainforest, the Amazon's kind. If so, the cold of the night would be more frightening than the heat of the day. Spend a single night naked in the rain and even a sturdy man comes apart. Before the sun went down I needed something to cover my body and water I could drink. Water runs downhill. I started walking the slope of the ground.
Sharp twigs, stones, and insects I couldn't name pressed into my bare soles. Torn feet were only a matter of time, so I stripped several leaves as broad as a plantain's, wrapped my feet, and bound them on with vine. Crude, but better than nothing. I snapped one vine and a sap ran out, white as milk. I bent to put my mouth to it and stopped. Milk-white sap is often poison. Drink only what is clear. A rule Father had taught me.
An hour's walk, perhaps. I heard water trickling. A small stream. I was glad enough to run for it, and instead I stopped and took in the surroundings first.
Animal tracks were scuffed in a tangle all along the bank, and one of them was the size of my palm. A cat's. The soil hadn't dried yet, which meant it had passed only moments ago. A chill went down my spine. A waterside is where something comes to drink. It is also where something comes to hunt whatever drinks.
I stayed low and held my breath for a long while before I let myself reach the stream. With nothing to boil water in, drinking it raw was a gamble, but dehydration was the surer death. I cupped a little of the flow running over a mossy stone—the upstream water—and took only a mouthful. Cold, with a raw earthy taste, it slid down my throat.
I had never in my life drunk water that good. In that same moment, for no reason I could name, the nape of my neck prickled. The feeling of being watched. I turned. Nothing but leaves, stirring.
At the stream I scooped a handful of mud and smeared it over my arms, my neck, my face. Once it dried it would keep the insects off, and blunt a little of the sun and the night's chill besides. Food, I gave up on. Laying a hand on fruit I had never seen was more dangerous than going hungry. I hadn't known the old saying—three days without water, three weeks without food—could be this much of a comfort.
The problem was fire. I gathered dry sticks and bark that might serve as tinder, but all of it was wet. In a forest after rain, the only dry thing is the inside of dead wood. I split it with a stone, scraped out the heartwood until my nails split, and bound vine and stick together to try making a Bow Drill.
I had watched Father demonstrate it hundreds of times. I had never once done it with my own hands. I worked the drill until my arms went numb, and not a single thread of smoke rose. Blisters came up across my palms, and where they burst, blood seeped. The thought that Father's hands would never have hurt like this, doing work like this, stung at the tip of my nose the way it does just before you cry.
The sun began to drop. The air of the forest reddened by degrees, then sank into violet. It was the hour when the sounds of day thin out and the sounds of night come up. Frogs and insects broke into cry all at once, and somewhere a beast I couldn't name called, low and long.
In a hollow between the great roots of a tree by the stream, I piled fallen leaves thick and worked my body down into them. To stop the cold rising out of the ground, what lies under you has to be thicker than what lies over you.
When night comes, a forest wears another face. Green that was beautiful by day becomes a black wall, breathing in from every side. For the first time I felt, in my own body, that hair's breadth Father was always talking about.
I was standing in the middle of a landscape I had once longed for, and I hadn't known it could frighten me like this. Even so, some small part of my heart was beating. This was a place I had wanted to reach for a very long time. Thinking a thing like that, in the middle of all this—was I out of my mind?
I set my teeth. It was still only the first day. Father would have laughed, standing here. He would have laughed, and gone looking for the next way.
"Survival isn't a hero's work. It's the work of a person who doesn't give up."
With hands that shook and wouldn't stop, I worked the last scrap of dry bark. A thin thread of smoke lifted from the tip of it. I blew, carefully, on my breath. A small ember breathed red.
"Hoo. One more time."
That was when it happened.
Suddenly a strange sound rang in my ear. Ding. Ding. Ding. What was this? The wondering itself lasted only an instant, and before my eyes something floated up—familiar, and yet strange.