Early in the morning, with a winter-weak sun just starting to light up
the snow on top of the big mountain ranges, he decided he should definitely
go over to one of the other cabins and wake somebody up.

At some time during the long frosty night it had snowed heavily. For a long
minute he stood huddled and shivering in the doorway and just looked at it
all lying out there so smooth, thick and fresh, fluffy and white. It was
starting to sort of glow under the pink and orange sky. He wished he could
still enjoy the thrill of the first real snowfall of the season the way he
used to. Once upon a time... Yeah, but he couldn`t.

He liked the horses, liked taking care of the horses. It was the people that
made him sore. Last night it had been another one of the big phoney parties
they had on the dude ranch, where everybody dressed up conformist-weird and
worked very hard at having their pretend kind of poser fun. Nothing but those
recycled-plastic jokes, as if they were all in a conversational marathon
where nobody stepped out of line and the fastest talker would win. All the
voices had their own little self-conscious echoes too. Toward the end all the
echoes made the big fancy room with the stone fireplace seem extra hollow.

Then he had slept badly, dreams with a lot of frozen smiles swimming at him
like grinning sharks. All the beer he drank had only jangled his nerves. Well,
most probably it could have been the cognac. He had started out drinking
cognac because he thought it would impress her.

She had hinted at things last night at the party, in front of a bunch of people,
found one or two chinks in his cheap rusty armour and needled him. Of course
she also managed to get at least one double-barrelled word in that he would have
to go and look up later on, like she always did. The whole thing had left him
with a sour aftertaste. Then he woke up in an ugly mood and knew he had to go
and talk to her right away, set her straight. Or do something...

Like a fool he thought that if he could only manage to win the argument just
once she would be his again. All his again.

So, stepping out without coffee or anything, he started walking across the big
field. The sky darkened and it started snowing again. He stumbled and tripped.
He fell down in the snow-banks and cursed out loud. When a sudden gust of wind
blasted ice-pellets straight into his face, he blindly used his long skinny
legs and blue jeans to plow his way through the heavy, knee-deep snow. Then he
got to her place and she let him come in out of the cold. She poured him some
coffee and laughed in his face.

And during all that long disappointment of a winter everybody on the ranch
allowed their feet to follow the crooked trail he had made that morning, even
the occasional bright-eyed visitors. All those people who thought they were such
spiritual and sophisticated individualists went back and forth that way,
following his blundering footsteps, their happy mindless chatter echoing between
the mountainsides.
So he figured he had lucked out in one way at least, happened to learn something
valuable after all. It was something subtle and important about human nature,
the lesson driven home every time he watched anybody stubbornly follow that
crooked trail.

Finally, springtime turned the wandering trail to bumpy ice that thawed in the
sunny afternoons and froze hard again overnight. It became almost impossible to
walk on it, which made it just a little bit too difficult to go over there and
see her. Well, okay, he guessed he had to admit that all that angry sex routine
of hers was getting pretty old. He felt drained and empty, stale. Yup. He felt
stale, utterly lacking in spontaneity. Her word.

And the day came when he stepped out of his doorway in his old beat-up cowboy
boots and duffle coat and just stood on the worn planks of the porch with his
hands in his pockets and stared at the trail. It sort of wavered and gleamed
and glittered in the morning sunlight. Then he blinked hard, took a deep breath
of the warm springtime air, and lifted his eyes up above the mountains that
corralled them all in.

The sky was deep and distant and clear and blue. It was old as eternity and new
as this minute. There was one cloud that looked a lot like a white wing.

He turned around and packed a couple of bags and left without a word to anybody.
And he took the first bus out of the nearest town the next day, headed to far-off
anywhere.

08/10/2018