That Left Turn

There is a front of clouds over Irishtown Park that looks like the wave front of the tsunami that devastated Indonesia in 2011, a white, petulant boundary of vapour rolling over the blue with a wake of brooding grey behind its lead. It swoops over the sky like a blanket thrown over a bed, billowing and then settling down over the earth with long-term intent. Underneath it all, Jobe leaves his truck in the parking lot of the Forêt Acadienne trail. He’d gotten up at first light and driven out to the park so he could sit in the parking lot and sample a ripe and willing bottle of Gibson’s for his morning pick-me-up. Muzzy and buoyant, he descends into the mouth of the trail, happy to bob along whatever the woods had to offer that day. The park is picturesque in some ways, with its tourist-friendly bridges and streams and even an old dam for those fleeting insta-moments, but those views always drew a scourge of people, which only served as distractions and obstacles for Jobe to avoid, so when a side trail presents itself, he turns the boat in his head to the right and is soon scuffling happily down the trail’s throat. 

After a while, in his tottered state, Jobe loses the concept of how long he’d been on the trail. He calculates that he’d needed to stop for a piss twice in all that time but still he'd lost the time and has no idea where he is. Eventually he decides that he’d taken a wrong turn somewhere. None of the trees or rocks look familiar to him, although it’s hard to get his eyes to focus on anything as he could neither stand still enough nor train his eyes to focus on any one thing. He stands and studies his surroundings for a good long time, then finally decides with a sinking in his gut that he should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque somewhere along the way.