Acid Rain by R.D Rhodes (ebook reader txt) 📕

I heard the door zip open behind me and Alex stepped out. He wriggled his feet into his boots and staggered wearily over.

“The fire’s out!” His bleary eyes looked at it then at me. “You should have just topped it up, if you wanted? Are you not cold?”

“No, no. I’m fine.” I said, but he had already turned towards the woodpile.

Alex added the fuel, and loaded up the cooking pot with water and coffee and sat opposite me on the other side of the fire, watching the flames grow and occasionally glancing my way. He rubbed his baggy eyes, then wiped those big hands over his face, then sniffed and snorted to clear his nose. He wore the same clothes he had on yesterday.

“Did you sleep okay?” he grunted.

“Yeah. I had an amazing sleep. Had so much space. Felt like a king-sized bed.”

“That’s good.”

His smile gave his grizzly face a momentary warmth.

“What about you?” I asked.

“Yeah, fine.” He pushed his arms up high and long. “I’m not a morning person though.” he smirked with his eyes closed.

It went quiet between us. The pot began to whistle. Alex slid it off the pole and poured out two cups and handed me one. I turned my eyes away, letting my gaze rest on the swirl of the grey-white world.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

I sipped the coffee, holding both hands tightly round the warm mug, and nodded in agreement.

“I work with kids a lot.” Alex said, his deep voice still lethargic. “I think I told you that yesterday. Sometimes, before a big storm, they can feel it coming. Just like animals their senses are heightened to the electric, or atmosphere, or whatever it is. They go crazy in the playground, you can’t contain them! They just run everywhere, laughing and screaming, throwing their hands in the air.”

I sniggered, picturing it. Then I heard coughing, and Harry appeared. Full of life. Face bright. Eyes wide. Clean-shaven. The complete contrast of Alex.

“Coffee?” Alex asked him.

“Please, man.” Harry said cheerily. He sat with us and his eyes tuned in on the weather. “What a morning!” he chirped. “Thanks.”

The canvas wrestled loudly above us. The wind wailed in frustration.

Harry broke our silence. “Why did you choose to come out in the middle of winter?”

Alex shrugged. “It’s the toughest environment to come out in. This and the rain. Best way to prepare.”

…“I like testing myself with it, too.” He continued. “Either of you read Jack London?”

I shook my head. Had never heard of him. I was surprised when Harry shook his head too.

“Well, he wrote some great stories about this kind of weather. This extreme environment. School killed reading for me, I didn’t want to touch a book for years after I left. But then I picked up one called Call of the Wild, when I was about twenty. And I fell in love with reading again. The way he described nature, the animals. The cold and snow. He was a real adventurer. Went to Alaska in the gold rush in the early nineteen hundreds. When he was still a teenager, I think.

“Cool.” Harry said. “I’ll have to read it.”

“I always wanted to go to Alaska after that,” Alex went on wistfully, “But this is just like Alaska to me. It’s wild. The snow. The conifer trees. The mountains. The rivers. The lack of people. It’s good to feel wildness. The only thing that’s missing here is animals. But I’m rambling.” he shook his head dismissively and smiled with self-deprecation.

“No, not at all.” Harry said. “The cities offer nothing. It’s always better to be out in nature.”

“However long we have it.” I added.

Alex sipped at his coffee. The amount of daylight radiating off the snow said it was about midday. “However long we have it.” He repeated. He took another drink and looked around at the forest and up to the treetops. He was thinking about something and looked unsure to say, but he opened his mouth anyway, “Jack London was an early socialist too. I think that’s the only way we can save these places now. Well, either we all die and nature is saved, a meteor or climate change will wipe us out and nature will renew itself, or we stop capitalism. And the more I travel around the world, and the more things I see and the more I learn, the more I become convinced of it. It’s so grating, seeing man constantly fuck each other over. Or fucking over nature, because it’s just seen as a resource. It has to stop.”

“That’s the thing though, isn’t it?” Harry said. “The economy and the environment can’t co-exist. They’re enemies. What William Wilberforce, the guy who helped stop slavery in the eighteen hundreds, went through, is like what we are going through now. He wanted to stop slavery because it was disgusting, obviously, and unethical and immoral and evil. But in parliament, they all told him it was not economically viable. Now the question is, Can we stop capitalism? Immediately? No! Because it’s not economically viable.”

“But it does come back to socialism,” I said. “I think, like Jesus was a socialist too, socialism is a state of mind, or maybe it needs to be. It’s not necessarily this rigid social structure. It’s about considering others. Putting others first, before yourself. Loving your enemies as you do your friends and neighbors. Not being selfish.”

“But how do we get to that stage?” Alex said. “There’s hierarchies everywhere, in the animal kingdom too. And they just fall into place themselves.”

“Raised consciousness” I was about to say when Harry snapped firmly, with a slight snarl on his face, “Bring it all down!” His black pupils gleamed with the statement as he looked away from Alex and into the fire.

But Alex’s eyes remained on Harry, knowing and dubious. The look lingered