Back Country Escape
Where I grew up, you’d been there for generations or you hadn’t. If you hadn’t, chances were you came here to escape something. My parents were escaping the hustle and bustle of big city life and its trappings. My pastor was escaping the coming apocalypse and the overreaching, all-seeing state. The nudists were escaping the societal constraints of clothes. Others, still, were escaping the shame of past failings. There were some, though, who came for no apparent reason. These folk had a haunted look in their eyes and a wild rush to make a new life for themselves as quickly and quietly as possible.
The Volands were such a family. They showed up one day, disheveled and dusty, with the look of low-class New Yorkers turned homesteaders. They had moved here for a second chance, and they were intent on shedding their city skin and blending into the local landscape. They quickly carved themselves a space in the red clay hillside of rolling farmland near us.
They lived just down the road from our pastor who was a hardy ex-cop from Alaska. As a rural officer he’d seen things, unsettling things and things he couldn’t explain, like odd geometric patterns cut in fields and spooked cows nearby. He eventually gave up police work and moved his family to Central America to serve as missionaries. After a few years in Guatemala, their family made their way up to our town. Our church was glad to have them; we were in desperate need of a shepherd. This was the late nineties, and the threat of a “global computer systems crash” loomed. As such, our pastor was intent on preparing his family and flock. At church he led us through the book of Revelation, making us aware of what lay ahead of us. We held earnest prayer meetings in preparation for Y2K and stockpiled dried goods and secured power sources in anticipation. When the transition from “99” to “00” arrived and life rolled along as usual, we were confused and a little disappointed. Nonetheless, our pastor found renewed zeal as he studied the connections between the seven-headed beast of Revelation and a “beast” far away in Belgium, apparently some kind of supercomputer given that name. He taught us what he was learning, and he happily welcomed newcomers into his little flock.
That’s how we met the Volands. They became part of our church “cell group”. After a while, they invited us over. They had no plumbing and their electricity came from a generator, but they seemed content—even proud—of what they’d put together. They showed us their goats and their garden, too. Then the family invited us into their A-frame house, which was tacked with tar-paper and tin. Their cooking and eating area was tiny; a rectangle of thick, semi-opaque plastic stretched over plywood served as the only source of natural light.
We moved from the dining area, the Voland girl my age pulling back a blanket that served as a makeshift partition between eating and sleeping quarters. A poster of Nick Jonas was pinned to the wall next to her bed. She gushed about how cute he was, and she proceeded to ask me which celebrity I had a crush on. I didn’t know what to say. We had no TV or internet so my exposure to pop culture was limited. The thought of falling in love with someone I’d probably never meet seemed silliness anyway. For a girl off the grid, she sure knew a lot about pop culture!
The Volands canned everything. Eggs, milk, and meat. Once my mom brought her sister from the city over to visit them. The ladies found Mrs. Voland over the stove boiling a bobcat her husband had shot. Its claws dangled over the edge of the pot, bobbing in time with the boiling water. Waste not, want not.
Late the next summer, they invited us on a backpacking trip into the national forest north of us. We had little gear, but we were used to roughing it, so we packed our sleeping bags and tent and headed to the Volands. The Volands had prepared, too. They butchered one of their goats and sun-dried its flesh to make jerky for the trip. With an eager smile they offered me some. Politely I nibbled an edge. Where I come from, you eat what is set before you without complaint. And sometimes you learn later that you’ve been served bear or other local wildlife.
Up to that time I had never heard the term “vegan”, but had I known what a vegan was, that jerky might have made me one right on the spot. The shriveled brown-pink parchment I held in my hand was just goat and only goat, unadorned with salt to preserve it or give it flavor. The shrill bleating of its living relatives rang in my ears and the pungent scent of their stool filled my nostrils. Gnawing that desiccated carcass felt all wrong. But with a polite smile I soldiered on.
We set off on our trip, slowly wending our way deep into the forested mountains, following the path of the river that ran alongside us. What had felt all wrong with the first bite of “jerky” now felt even worse. First hot flashes then cold shivers washed over my body. My insides roiled. A dull ache pulsed between my ears. With heavy hands and listless legs I helped set up camp at twilight. I tossed and turned all night, waking at dawn with relief. We’d soon be back to our cars and then home, where a warm fire and indoor plumbing awaited.
That morning we hiked back to our cars and said goodbye to the Volands. Then we didn’t hear from them for a while. After a few weeks of radio silence, we asked our pastor how they were doing. “They’re gone,” he said. “Packed up everything and left.”
We never heard from the Volands again. I sometimes wonder what happened to them. I guess there are some things you can’t escape, even all the way out here.