Honor Road by Jason Ross (best non fiction books of all time TXT) 📕

At first light, he’d leave this camp behind, so if he wanted anything more from the dead cars, he’d need to get it now. Dead cars were everywhere along the highway, but Sage forbid himself from going anywhere within 300 yards of the blacktop. It was far too dangerous—far too likely to lead to an encounter. He could out-run most full-grown men, but he harbored no illusions; they were almost all heavier and stronger. It would be years before his long, lean body could match theirs in a life-or-death struggle. Running and hiding was his survival advantage, for now.

Sage ripped up the rear seats of the Aerostar, popped out the zig-zag seat springs, and began construction of a pair of snowshoes. The snow in the flatlands were just the first frosting of winter—six or eight inches in most places and a little deeper in the shade. The mountains that loomed ahead had been basted by snow for over a month. He expected it to be several feet deep. He’d need to float on top instead of crunching through, like he’d been doing in the irrigation ditches.

Fear crept up his spine as he pictured the flickering light of his fire traveling across miles of snow-glassed ground. Even surrounded by cars, it might be visible from the highway. The snowshoes would have to wait. No matter how much he enjoyed the warmth, the fire wasn’t worth the risk now that full night was upon him.

He stamped the fire out, spread the coals and bundled himself against one of the elms. He scraped out the stones from the fire, dusted off the cinders, and plopped two hot stones in each drying boot.

Then, he watched and waited for an hour to make sure nobody approached. When he was sure he was still alone, he set up his bedroll in the Aerostar and drifted off to sleep.

Sometime during the witching hour, he awoke to snow flakes drifting down from the heavens. To his sleep-addled mind it felt like entombment. Even in his shallow wakefulness, he heard the gentle pattering of Mother Nature piling obstacles ahead of him. The coming storms would conceal his path home in the maddening drudgery of snow and solitude.

He thought about the little dog. His face flushed and his nose ran. A lone tear burgeoned in the corner of his eye, then lost it’s battle with gravity and chased a path down his check, off his chin, and onto the floorboards.He lay awake for a while, in the steel chill of the Aerostar, worrying the decision whether to forge on without the snowshoes or to dedicate the morning to their construction. There was no right answer, and nobody to help him decide.

Life and death hinged on decisions such as these. For once, it made sense to worry, but his worry tendered nothing but lost sleep.

Blue Mountains, 4300 feet elevation

Southeastern Oregon

As much as the road beckoned him, Sage saw it for what it was: a deathtrap. With the warm blacktop melting away the snow, the surface of the highway presented much easier walking than the forest—maybe half as difficult.

Sage floated on top of the snow in his homemade snowshoes, but it was no easy thing to traverse uncut snow.

Back at the circle of dead cars, he’d used the aluminum seat tubing as frames and the zig-zag seat springs of the Ford Aerostar as platforms for his homemade snowshoes. He sunk into the snow only four inches, but even that sapped his strength a lot more than walking on asphalt. He would’ve traveled twice as far on the mountain road, but then he could almost guarantee a bullet to the back of the head or a sudden ambush of bat-wielding men. Sage walked the path less travelled, always. To do anything else was a death wish for a five-foot ten-inch seventeen-year-old boy.

The snowshoes were already proving critical. Six times, he silently circumnavigated knots of desperate people stumbling along the snow-patched highway up the Blue Mountains. Sage ghosted around the groups, unnoticed. He’d yet to see another footprint out in the snowfields that paralleled the road. He traveled alone, so he traveled carefully.

But he ached to join one of the groups. He sometimes paused behind a snow bank or a screen of pines to listen to their chatter. They blathered, argued, jockeyed for control, complained about food or dreamed loudly about the “old days.” They were all desperate, untethered people. Sage knew if he threw in with any of them, his food would be callously devoured and he would be cast aside.

He seriously considered it anyway. He wondered if a person could literally die of loneliness.He had no choice but to stay in the same canyon as the winding, climbing highway. Scaling up and over, into an empty canyon, would burn too many calories and run the risk of an avalanche or a fall. The road passed through the easiest crossing of the mountain range—alongside a small creek that eventually opened onto a high snowfield up above.

Sage reached the top of the Blue Mountains in three days, never lighting a fire or even heating water. He ate freeze-dried meals cold, with only filtered water from the creek. Because he shared the canyon with other travelers, he minimized flickers of light, flashes of color and wisps of scent. He slept in his camo-pattern tent, partially collapsed to reduce its profile, and covered it with sticks and branches.

He got better and better at shaving risk off his movement, economizing his food and perfecting the silent catechisms of putting up and taking down camp. He traveled more and more at night. He was covering ground, but the truth became increasingly clear: he couldn’t keep this overland movement up forever.

Moisture plagued him, a relentless nemesis. Every sleep time, no matter how he configured his tent, condensation accumulated along the tent wall and dripped onto his sleeping bag. Sage woke up every hour to dab runnels off the ceiling with his dirty clothes, but the tent was