Young Writers Society

4

It didn’t take me long to reach the Black Hills of South Dakota, and it only took a split second of looking at the rolling mountains covered in pine trees reaching for the sun to decide that I wasn’t going to be leaving there any time soon. It was prettier than anything I had ever imagined, and then some. I drove slow enough that people were passing me with every opportunity, but I wasn’t swayed. I drove with my head peering eagerly out the windshield, gazing in awe at the natural wonders that surrounded me.

The pastures I had grown used to were replaced with mountains covered in forests instead of fields of corn. The cows were replaced with Bison and the emptiness replaced with a sense of enclosure and security. Deserted roads became more frequented, dry and windy air turned into a moist still atmosphere, and, finally, the sense of hopelessly being stuck in the wasteland of the upper Midwest was eradicated. My heart had abandoned my body all together, jumping out the window my arm was stuck out of, and flying high through the South Dakota world.

I had to stop in a town called Custer to fill up on gas. It was a cute little place, surrounded by rolling hills and filled with happy-to-see-you tourists. I ended up talking to a cashier with a fake zeal in her eyes that would disappear almost immediately after people would look away.

“You’re not from around here,” she said, repeating my words with a slight laugh as she took my money and gave me change. “Join the rest of the town, miss. This place is full of tourists like yourself. We got everything everybody wants to see here.” The way she chewed her gum bothered me. She chewed with her entire mouth, giving me a great view of her throat with every garish bite.

“Okay, well, I was just wondering what I’d have to worry about if I, you know, went off into…” I pointed out the window at the hills covered in the blankets of pine trees, “that.”

She looked at me for a long second, chewing her gum like she were gnawing on a piece of leather, and eventually started to chuckle. “You make it sound like you’re headed out to Mars or something.” She laughed a little bit more, reached underneath the counter, and handed me a pamphlet with a bear and a cougar staring right at me on it. “You have to worry about what you’d expect to have to worry about. Read that, it’ll tell you more. We got bears and mountain lions, those’ll be your biggest concern. Wolves too, I guess. And, around here in Custer were got a lot of Buffalo, so you’ll probably come across a herd of them along the way. Don’t be worried about them unless they’re stampeding, okay?”

I flipped through the small pamphlet as she spoke, staring at the pictures of animals scaling cliff sides. “Okay.”

“How long you gonna be staying here?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know, really.”

The girl allowed herself a few moments to work on her gum. “Well, where are you gonna be staying?”

I stuffed the pamphlet in my back pocket and looked at her, smiling. “I don’t know that either. I’m just gonna wing it.”

The girl raised her eyebrows and looked over at a customer that was walking up behind me. “Well, have a nice stay,” she told me as she put on that fake smile once more and started talking to another tourist.

I stared off at the hills as I climbed into my truck and tried to decide on where I should go. I wanted to see all there was to see, from the cougars to the antelope, from the sunrise to the full moon, I wanted to experience everything there was in the black hills of South Dakota, but I didn’t even know where to begin. I drove around the city of Custer for a while, trying to find a way to get to the forests. Pretty soon I found myself driving down some deserted road that seemed to be leading me nowhere. The hills still seemed forever in the distance, and the sun was beginning to set.

Before long I decided to give it a rest, and I found myself pulling over to the side of the road and lying down in the bed of the truck, staring off at the sunset. It set differently than it did back in Freedhem, North Dakota. The clouds seemed more orange than they did back home, and there was a feeling in the air emitted by the sunset, a feeling of pure placidity that, try as it might, the North Dakota sun could never give me. I watched in utter silence as the light faded into pure darkness, and then I watched as the stars began to illuminate the earth.

The night reminded me of one from my childhood. It was a night that Mary and I had run off to the creek on the west side of town. It was our secret sanctuary, our place to escape the horror and bore of the world around us, and immerse ourselves in dreams of our own. Nobody else from our family knew of this place of ours, and, as far as we knew, nobody outside of our family knew or cared much about it either. It was completely and entirely ours, and we were quite proud of that fact.

It may not have seemed like anything special to most people, but to us it was the world. A thin stream of water, no wider than what we could jump across, flowed across the round rocks, filling the dry air with a soft trickle. It was as pure and as blue as the midday sky, never stained with weeds, algae, or even living creatures. It was a holy place, a protected place, and, though Mary and, most of all, myself, spent a large amount of our evenings there, we never dare disturb the peace and tranquility of the slowly running water.

I was ten and she was twelve that night. Supper was done, and after dishes were cleaned we had run out the door. We raced through town, dodged trees in the woods, and finally came to a stop along the edge of the creek. We sat down on the couple of large rocks we had called our own, and stared off at the sunset as it hid behind the thicket of trees.

“I still can’t get over it,” Marry muttered after moments of silence.

I had looked over at her. Her short, brown hair moved lazily in the evening breeze, and her eyes were lost in a different world, staring blankly off in the distance. I followed her gaze and found the sunset. “Can’t get over what?”

“The sunset.”

I furrowed my eyebrows. “What’s there not to get over?”

“It’s just so beautiful. Every night it seems even better than the last, don’t you think?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I mean, I guess.”

Mary broke her lock with the sun and looked over at me. “Oh, please. You’ll never admit that anything is beautiful. You can’t even give the sun this one? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“No, I think it’s pretty, I just…” I shrugged my shoulders again and leaned back on my hands. “I don’t know.”

“Maybe you just need some alone time with it and you’ll see,” she stated with a smirk. “Spend a couple of evenings alone with the sun and you’ll understand.”

I snorted at the irony that Mary couldn’t understand. Even she didn’t know that I spent every evening I wasn’t with her down at that creek with my pen to my notebook, writing until my hand was begging me to stop. I spent more time alone with the sun than I spent with everybody else in my life combined, but I couldn’t tell her that. I couldn’t tell anyone my secrets, because they were mine and only mine.

“Maybe,” I mumbled.

We spent the next half hour in silence, and the sun dropped several inches. I was lost in a land of my own, and I was entirely complacent until Mary had yanked me from it.

“Can I tell you something, Beatrice?”

I let out a sigh, sat up straight and looked over at her. “Sure, I guess.”

“I don’t like it here. I don’t like it one bit.”

I had just about started laughing. Mary was an eternal optimist, somehow capable of always being happy to look on the bright side. The thought of her actually complaining about something just seemed wrong on so many levels; I was almost sure that she was joking. But, as I watched her look solemnly off into the distance, I knew that she was telling me a secret of hers. A secret she kept hidden from everyone else in her life, and maybe even from herself, hidden underneath that shield of undying optimism. “I… What do you mean?”

“I don’t like it here,” she repeated. “I don’t like North Dakota, I don’t like our home, I don’t like our family, I don’t like any of this. I want out. I want to leave.”

“But, Mary, you love it here,” I insisted. “You’re the smartest kid in your class, you’ve got friends and you’re good at cooking… You-You’ve got everything going for you.”

Mary snorted. “Why couldn’t we have grown up in a city somewhere? Where I could have real friends and do real things? I could be in clubs, Beatrice! I could play basketball, be in a play, or… Or do something! The most we can do here is pick up trash alongside the road is we’re feeling charitable. I want more. Don’t you?”

At that point, I didn’t really know what I wanted. I knew I wanted a different life, one where I had friends and was able to live in a carefree bliss, but I hadn’t given it much thought. “I mean, I guess. It would be nice if there were more to do, I suppose.”

“But you like being alone, don’t you?” Mary let out a sigh. “I just can’t really stand the loneliness of this life; I’m not like you. I know I act all happy and stuff, and, I mean, I’m not dying here or anything, I just want more, you know? Is that bad of me, to want a different life?”

“Well, I don’t think so,” I replied. “We’re all free to want what we want, right?”

Mary shrugged. “I think so.”

“Then I think you’re fine.”

“What do you want?”

I looked at my sister with a furrowed brow. “What?”

“What do you want? Do you want a different life, a ton of money… what?”

“Oh,” I looked away, debating whether or not to tell her. “I don’t really know.” I was fighting myself. I had never told anybody what I wanted. Nobody knew that I wasn’t happy being a friendless loser who spent recess inside, writing stories. Nobody was aware that I dreamed of seeing the rocky mountains, the ocean, and the big city. Nobody would even dream that someday I wanted to be an author. “I guess I want a different life too. I want to leave so that I can start a new life. A new life that’ll be completely different than this one.”

“What do you want it to be like?”

Tell her, Beatrice, she won’t laugh. She’s your sister, she won’t laugh. You can tell her. “Well, I don’t know. I mean, I guess I want to travel. I want to see a lot of things.”

“Is that all? Don’t you want a job? A husband? A family?”

Tell her! “No. I don’t want to get married. I don’t want kids. I just want to travel and… I want to write.”

“Write?”

“Yeah, write.”

“Like, books?”

I nodded my head.

“Huh,” Mary leaned back. “You’d be good at that. You’ve got the right head to be a writer. You’re a thinker, you know? Yeah, you’ll be a good writer.”

I smiled. She hadn’t laughed. It may have been small, but I couldn’t believe how good it felt to tell someone what I wanted and to have that someone listen. I let out a deep breath of relief as I leaned back to lie down.

We stayed by that creek that entire night, talking endlessly about our dreams, our wishes, our desires, and our loves. The stars shifted around us as we poured our hearts out to each other, learning things that we never would have dreamed of. We cried, we laughed, we hugged, and, eventually, we slept on the cold soil along that stream.

We awoke the next morning and walked home in silence. I never heard Mary complain like that again. Never did she tell me that she wanted a different life, that she wanted to leave. And never again did I tell her about my dreams either. That night was the only time we ever truly let our hearts pour out as we talked about everything that we couldn’t talk about with anyone else.

The next night I went to the stream alone with my notebook and spent the evening writing. I set a couple minutes aside, though, and turned my attention to the sun. I looked at it like I had seen Mary looking at it. I let my eyes zone out, I tilted my head to the side, and I gazed blankly. It took me a while, but I finally saw what she saw. And I have never seen anything more beautiful since.