The best way to drive to Warm Springs is to be at least seven shots deep and preferably on some sort of deliriant. When one drives drunk there is a certain technique that must be followed. It ought be done with the eyes nearly closed. Curved roads bank in a way that naturally drives one’s car in the proper direction. On a straight road, given proper alignment, one can nearly release the wheel and they will find that, with little correction, the car will naturally follow it’s own impulse and proceed the proper way. If one averages out the uncertainties in their vision, they can easily ramble their way fifty or even a hundred miles down a stretch of treacherous road.

Many drunks, in their inebriation, believe that by seizing agency, by rushing forwards, they can do something – anything. But the truth is that when they are thinking they ought to go quite fast, or quite slow, the wonderful traffic engineers have opted to provide them with a superabundance of signs: there are signs that tell you the speed you should go if you have the reflexes of a rock and the motor-control of a toddler; there are signs that tell you where to stop so you do not get t-boned; there are signs that tell you where to be extra careful because there is a traffic camera. All the drunken man must do is read these signs and stay out of populated areas, and, not relying on their faulty senses, follow the gauges on their car to ensure their own safety.

There is no higher sport than drunk driving, where the undulled emotions are magnified so each thrill naturally present in driving is orgasmically abrupt. As I was saying, that night I had had far more than seven shots; I stumbled out of the bar, catching my sleeve and tearing open my arm as I fell on some jagged splinter. It was an icy night, and I jackknifed through the roads past Government Camp, singing loudly and laughing for the first time in a year. I had driven since the sky was red; now it was gray and I would have continued driving when I realized that I was beside a river I had never seen before.

Are you foolish enough to venture out to the dark forest? It began to snow and the voice called out at the edge of the road; through the feedback of my aux. Are you brave enough to venture out in the dark forest? There is always a kilometer of throw-rope in the trunk of my car; one end goes around your leg and the other to your door; you can follow the trail all the way back.

The canopy of the pines sit like crowfeathers arraigned to gather moss. The brick-colored roads were stained indigo by the filtering light and the nature of the cold. It is brighter than it ever could be in the city. So caught up was I that I did not realize I had stopped until my head was rested upon my steering wheel and the moon had migrated some distance across the sky. I reached for my phone to call someone. I reached for my door so that I could get out and walk. The phone had no signal and it was pinned by the branches of the tree. Though I rammed my elbow thrice into the flexible plastic, it would not budge, so I clambered through the sunroof onto the carapace.

Nothing grows regularly in the forest, each generation is a probabilistic cloud, spread-shot off the previous, but they always, eternally and slowly march past the graveyard of their fallen and rotted fathers. Up high only the pines grow, but I had hit some gnarled brushpine that stood like a wood-petrified conflagration. Such a seed also had been the progeny of progeny, foot by foot, century by century it had climbed up the mountain to just before this granite face. I had jammed the buffer-tube of time and caught myself just before the edge. This odd species of tree, native to the valley, had traveled millennia to be hit by my car and prevent me from ramming at forty miles an hour into a wall.

At that moment I was some distance beyond Government Camp; if memory serves near the fork in the clear creek. There was nothing that could be seen but what my pen-light could show me, and I sat in the unnerving dark, gathering my wits and shaking with excitement until I looked like a ghost as the agitated dust settled on me. I slid down and retrieved a can of soup from my car, before setting down the mount.

Every twitch of gravel on the forest highway sounds twice, as if there is a second pair of footsteps. As I proceeded down, the turnarounds began to blur together and shortly thereafter I realized that I was indeed bleeding from somewhere above my hairline. Reflective signs shone in the distance but I ignored them and simply headed forwards. I proceeded through as if it were a great arched tunnel, counting my steps and measuring their pace in the ever-intensifying snow. A thousand steps is nearly a mile; if I travelled that far and had no signal I would simply continue until I did or until the morning. If I grew so cold I could not proceed, I had a lighter and a knife.

Past the sign, the road was a repetitious pastiche of itself. Every ten minutes or so, there would be a hump that protruded like some dorsal fin, throwing out to hold back the wash of pine. The cats-eyes were fading, dulling away until only the yellow tips shew, and then they too were merely white. I only knew the road from the ribbed rails that surrounded it. I dared not to touch them even when my legs grew stiff. I knew that the ground would be warmer than anything metal.

I heard the sound of a train-station in the distance. Great shuttles departed and arrived with low rushes. The woods were thin and it was just beyond them, I thought, and realized as I pushed through the crowd that the spectacle was not a station, but a river. There are no great rivers on the south-east side of the mountain, so I pushed through the treeline to head for the source. It was foolhardy to now go in, past midnight, to the woods; there are no great predators this near the road but the woods themselves. To be courageous is to be foolhardy, and I was to die I would have always been a dead man – here I was alive by something that did not even have eyes to see what it had saved. I pushed into the treeline and found a narrow gap between two bundles of what once lived and now looked like narrow clusters of rebar pushing up from the pale packed ground. In that night wood it was ever quieter than the abandoned road. One cannot see more than ten feet in front of them if they are lucky, but I had gambled well that evening because there was a narrow trace that lead the eyes down to the spirited bank. There was a lure of flowers; odd ones that twisted upwards toward heaven in thin crimson halos like little sun-dogs of red. There was a great lake that flowed so wide I could not see the other shore. It was a sea in stealing motion. Beside it a tall woman and a man; beside them, moored to nothing was a boat, and she held a great tall staff with a still, twisting flag of steel upon it.

“…couldn’t be widened or narrowed regardless…”

And she looked at me and smiled.

“And yet it is quite wide, is it not? Don’t worry. There’s plenty of time. I’ll wait for you.”

And the two of them stepped on the little raft and were off, the staff she had pushing along the bottom of the – it must have been quite shallow – river. Everyone seems to be of the opinion that, somehow, by will and nothing else, they can bit into the brass of time and halt it for even an instant. Was I supposed to sprint down the hill, fifty yards, and dive into those fathoms after her? I cried out for her to wait and she simply laughed. Though I moved forwards with slowness, she waved me off and left me on that flower tainted shore. Was I supposed to doff my coat and un-hide my feet that I could hypothermically swim in that water after her?

I felt as if I had missed something beautiful and ephemeral that a man only comes to once in his life. I knew I might never see this river again; because when I turned back it was merely a common stream some odd yards from the road.

With that I stood and contemplated; I went to freezing stream and jumped across it, and the view from the other side was merely the shallow brush I had pushed through. I splashed a bit of water on my hand; the flesh did not rot, or wither. And so I passed on.

Down the road, the mile-markers counted off. I finally had signal around three in the morning, and called a tow-truck from Welches. I laughed aloud when he told me it would be an hour and affirmed I did not mind as long as he would grab me from wherever I was along the road. With sore legs I pulled myself to lie atop a slab of icy rock and where the thin crescent of the moon sat through a rend of the clouds I watched. I watched it pry apart and above was a vast expanse of stars that I had never seen before, for I had never laid this far from the lights of the city. That light had flowed from so far too.