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

dripping branches and the mist continued to sift between them all. Soon Harry woke up and came out to join me.

We went down to the loch and stacked up piles of rocks as targets, then threw stones at them, having competitions to knock them down. Then we wandered on up through the woods. Harry stopped before a rosehip bush and said we should pick some, that they had thirty times more vitamin C than oranges. We took an armful each and headed back.

Later we gathered some firewood, but everything was soaking through. We took some rocks from the stream and made a fire-circle. My frozen hands could barely hold the lighter. We both tried for about an hour, but neither of us could get the spark to catch. We put some of the sticks inside a corner of the tent to dry.

After that, we spent ages de-seeding all the rosehips, which we put in a pot with boiling water and some sugar. Harry said he’d made it once before, when he was twelve. The syrup didn’t taste too bad. Would be nice with the porridge, I said.

I stayed out while Harry went inside, absorbed in his new book. The fog thickened, enclosing the world until I couldn’t see beyond twenty yards. It gave me a strange, warm feeling and I felt hidden and safe inside it. I remembered reading John Lennon saying this kind of weather made him creative. There is something mystical about it, it’s true, I thought.

Hours later Harry came out for lunch, then went back inside. I’m liking it here, I thought. Those birds singing. The sound of that dripping water. And it’s so beautiful. I looked to the rowan tree five yards to my left, its leaves gone but blazing with its multitude of red berries. On my right, my favorite tree, an old oak, towered way up into the canopy and beyond, its orange leafed branches sprawled out everywhere, its trunk five times my width. I stared up and down its scaly bark. Something made me think it was aware of me looking at it, and I stared at it in wonder for ages. And all around me, amongst those trees and the birches and pines and the fog and the grass, amongst everything, there was some sort of presence that I thought I could feel myself absorbing, and being absolved by, the longer I sat out there. Any negativity I had, felt like it was being sucked out from me. The hospital, Glasgow, the journey up here, all felt a million million miles away, like it was in some past life.

Immersed in the trees and the birds and the fog, I felt an urge to write down what I was seeing, so I borrowed a notebook and pen from Harry and I came back out. In the late afternoon, the fog began to dissipate. The sun slowly broke through to light up the mountaintops first, and then everything else. The landscape changed right before my eyes, in atmosphere as well as appearance. And being there to see it, I felt connected to it.

Harry came out to join me again.

“Still happy to rest?” I asked him.

“Yeah. I’m enjoying this book. You?”

“I love it out here. How can you ever get over that.”

The loch looked like a postcard picture. “It’s even more beautiful than yesterday.” he agreed.

“I saw a buzzard earlier.”

“Did you? Was that what we saw yesterday?”

“No. I think that was some other bird of prey…What you reading now?”

He showed me the cover, Candide, by Voltaire.

“Any good?”

“It’s alright. It’s pretty funny actually. You know him?”

I shook my head.

“He was a French philosopher. He wrote during the enlightenment. He’s pretty famous. He actually said everyone should look to Scotland, to guys like Hume and Adam Smith, for ideas. Edinburgh was like the new Athens, at the time.”

I laughed. “Not a fan of Alan Smith?”

“Adam. Och, he- never mind. Wealth of Nations.” he muttered, staring at the loch.

The last of the fog lifted. The jagged summits looked like an optical illusion. I scanned my eyes down the azure blue to the silvery rocks, down the verdant green canopy mixed with yellow and orange, and to the pale blue water. I didn’t want to read. I only wanted to take in what I was seeing.

A warm ray landed on my face and I shut my eyes. Soon, the sun was sinking behind the mountains. Pink and purple splashed the canvas sky.

Before it got dark, we had another go at the fire, but the sticks were still too wet.

It didn’t matter though. We slept like babies.

Chapter 46

S oft thuds rapped on the roof and walls. I watched the drops run down the outside. I felt proud of myself, and of our shelter. I lay in my sleeping bag listening for a while, then Harry and I went out.

The ground outside was like an ice-rink. Heather and bracken poked through the slush and the red bark of the pines glistened in the early sunlight. We walked about two or three miles, actually on the road this time, till we came to a bridge. A river crashed under it on its way to the loch and we decided to follow it upstream. It had no path so we made our way up as best and as safe as we could. We reached a gorge and carried on up one of the cliff walls, soon reaching a spectacular sixty-foot drop. Beyond that, the gorge narrowed, and white rapids screamed down huge waterfalls. On the opposite cliff, three gravity-defying trees were bent ninety degrees over the angry water as it thrashed beneath, as if the water was a shark and the trees were goading it.

We found a safe passage down through a gulley and came to the water’s edge, clambering along it towards another