Save This for a Rainy Day

Leah winced as a dot of light leapt from the edge of her compass across a pale blue iris. With a squint, she reexamined her bearings. Three hundred and twenty-eight. Letting out a slight sigh of defiance, she unfurled her brow and lifted her chin to refocus forward. It was a steep climb. Roots jutted from the hillside. They were jagged and gnarled, some menacingly shattered into shiv-like protrusions. Few ancient growths dotted the scene. These were sage pillars of wisdom. They were somehow at once equally leviathan but hauntingly delicate. So immense as to dwarf the onlooker by the shadow of limb alone. So hollowed and fragile as to be felled by the smallest of arboreal wanderers. What remained was a thicket made of saplings. Groupings stretched in unison—a still but violent competition for a drink of the sun. Vines crept down from the taller trees, wrapping around the bases and trailing off into the soil. Their gravity seemed to pull them towards a race of a different sort—a languid descent in search of relief from their infinite hang.

Leah unclenched her left hand, loosening the tensely coiled black notebook gripped therein. Already at a point past sanitary concern, she swiped her right thumb across her tongue. Strange, she had thought to herself, how back in the comfort of home, that same earthy bitterness might be unpleasant—an unwanted visitor amongst the artificiality of a packaged morsel. But here, surrounded by creation, the remnants of what might have been the forest floor or tree bark bonded her to this place. She pinched together the newly lubricated surface of her thumb and forefinger on an exposed page. Squeezing until her middle finger could creep into a supportive backing, she lightly turned a page brimming with bold and confident typography. These were the haphazard scrawling of a man. You could tell in the way that they were more concerned with the punctuation. Ten words worth of letters in before nary a thought of the elegancy of the script. It was as a rickety train track through a blasted mountain range. There in the margins was an accompaniment of a different kind. This lettering was flowing. It was looping. It was a bird's spiraling plunge whose engine was fueled by the breeze. The inks on these pages were separated not only by hand but by decades. They were separated not by blood but by generations. They were father's, and they were daughter's. She had read this last page over and over to no avail. She had continued to ascend, but no amount of changing verticality had brought her to any new horizon or discovery. Her eyes achingly retraced the strokes dashed across the page.

"There in a cave on the highest of highs, by brightest of light or darkest of night, lies the bounty in a space where no eyes might."

The small and unassuming black notebook she returned to her pack had been willed to her by her late father. The first page read, "Save This for a Rainy Day." They were antiqued and yellowed by time, but the notebook itself remained otherwise untouched. The only signs of wear were the valleys and ridges of wrinkles caused by an intensifying grip as exhaustion settled in and confidence waned. "I'll try one more climb.", she whispered in desperation. She had been on this last riddle for the better part of a half of a day. Leah had deciphered preceding lines into the numbers three, two, and eight. These were the birth month and day of her mother. The second to last was a puzzle that led her to believe that these three numbers were a compass bearing that she was to follow. A multitude of hours into a northwesterly ascent with no affirmation can be trying. A certain amount of disappointment can bewilder even the most tenacious among us.

"One more hill.", she grunted. Consider it in contrast. On one end of a balancing act of exercise was her body. Bruised but hardly broken, it was at that place where the mind reassesses its gratitude for softly filled materials. These woods were no Yosemite, and her father had been no D.B. Cooper. And yet, she had been hiking and climbing for two days. It was an impassable trek for the lackadaisical, an excellent workout for the outdoorsman. Her vocal cords, on the other hand, were begging for excuses. She subjected them to a fair amount of consistent use and abuse. Whether it be a correction of a colleague or reprimanding of her daughter, Leah often found herself in an outspoken role. It was this very detail that made the whole excursion seem alien. It wasn't the roughness of the forest bed through her tent at night or the clicks and whirs of the innumerable insects and their nightly chorus. It was the quiet of herself. It was to take a single thought and ponder it letter by letter without the distraction of rabid request. It was the internal swallowing the external. It was peace, that commodity which is most difficult to find in the exuberant landscape of modern society. Unfortunately, she had four days. She was almost two days in and needed their equal to return on time.

With a deep breath, Leah began her steady, final climb. Using the wicket-like roots as steps, she raised one foot over the other. The branches strained and groaned as she leveraged them. The green of spring and youth kept them whole. Beads of sweat formed and fell. It wasn't the hottest of days, but the angle of rising and difficulty forced her to rely more on the lift in her arms than her legs' grounding. At long last, her eyes breached the curve as it flattened into a peak. They darted anxiously as she continued forward, scouring her surroundings for eccentricities. There was no cave. There was no chest. There were no burrowed holes. No arrow, no x. No glint of silver nor gold. She sank to the ground in disappointment. The weight of defeat bore heavy as her time expired without spoils. She sat for a while, catching her breath and collecting her thoughts before the arduous return to civilization and normalcy. She planted her fingertips into the lushness of the soft green grass that blanketed the crest—pushing down in anticipation of standing, three familiar and equidistant chirps emanated from her pack. She scrambled to fish it from the chaos of what was gear intended for four days of wilderness survival. "Hello?", She beckoned. "Hi, Leah.", came a distinct and familiar voice. "We've done a lot of discussing over the last couple of weeks. We would like to formally propose an offer for you to run operations when you get back." She remained respectfully quiet as she listened to the extent of the deal, inside bursting with excitement. One calm agreement later, Leah returned the phone to the abyss of her pack. She melted back into the pillowy surface of the clearing. It had been two days of nature in a forest of Spring revival punctuated by a most pleasant digital distraction.

She had come to the woods expecting a buried treasure or an heirloom of sorts. Perhaps a hidden joke from her father that at the very least would become a keepsake. Instead, she was leaving with a new title, an expanded role, and ears eager for direction from her newly rested voice. However, most importantly, she was going with tranquility. A sense of calm that only separation can provide. The treasure at the end of her father's hunt wasn't some material possession. It wasn't a bauble or trinket. It wasn't jewelry. It wasn't something coated or plated in value. It was empathy for the self that can only be provided through a journey of discovery in solitude. Oh… And a twenty thousand dollar bonus.