The creek, his companion and his guide: what of it? It must join a river, or become a river, downstream, and large or small it must run at last into the sea.
His breath caught. He stared blankly at his fire, his mind held by that thought: the sea that lay beyond the coasts of evening. The darkness to which this living water ran. White breakers in the last of dusk and out beyond them the depths, the night. The night, and all the stars.
So vast and dark was that vision, so terrible the thought of the stars, that when it left him and he looked around again at the familiar rocks, sandbars, trees, branches, leaf patterns of his camping place, everything seemed small and fragile, toylike, and the flat, bright sky was very strange.
He often called the country the evening land in his mind, because of the eternal twilight, but he now thought that name was wrong. Evening is the time of change, the threshold of night.
The soft wind blowing down the valley of the creek roughened the surface of the pool. The vision touched him again: the broad dim step, the threshold land, and this silver stream across it running downward into darkness from what heights, what eastern mountains of unimaginable day?
He sat again bewildered in the twilight, feeling that he had known for a moment why he held that water to be sacred.
“I ought to go on,” he said under his breath. Every now and then he spoke, half aloud, alone; a word or a sentence once in a whole stay.
He had been shaving, and he got on with it. What seemed a day and a night’s worth here might be less than an hour in the daylight world, but his beard kept his time, not the clock’s. It would have simplified life to let the thing grow—though at eighteen he had worried about it, it was thick, vigorous, and brassy now, so that his mother was always telling him he needed to shave—but employees of Sam’s Thrift-E-Mart were not permitted to wear beards. He had had enough hassle about keeping his hair where he liked it, down about to his collar. So the last of his ritual at the willow place, before he packed up and hid his gear, was the shave. Sometimes he heated water, but if his fire had gone out he used cold water, clenched his teeth and scraped away; even then the touch of that water was kindly.
On Saturday night he told his mother he would be gone all Sunday morning on a long hike “in the country.” She complained again about the noise he made getting up early, but was not otherwise interested. He left at five in the morning, with a packet under his arm of expensive dried and freeze-dried food to transfer to his pack. He intended to stay a while in the twilight land, to leave what he knew, to go on.
He had never found but one path that seemed to be a real path or way: the one that led out of the beginning place, directly away from the gateway. He crossed from rock to rock at the ford, went past the dark bushes that the girl had stepped out of, a long time ago now, weeks, and started up the slope out of the valley of the creek. The path climbed, winding a bit but keeping on the axis vertical to the creek, the one direction he hoped to be able to keep. He had found that, even when momentarily disoriented in the woods upstream, if he stopped and let it come to him he had a general sense of where the gateway was—behind him, to the left, over that rise, or whatever—and this sense had not yet played him false. He had no plan now but to keep the gateway directly behind him if he could, and to go on until he was tired of going.
Up on the crest of the ridge the air seemed lighter. On the far slope the trees were tall and sparse, the ground between them open, without underbrush. Faint but clear enough to the searching eye, the path ran straight on down. As he followed it over the ridgetop he lost for the first time the sound of the creek, the voice that blessed his sleep.
He walked for a long way, steadily and rather doggedly, taking some pride and pleasure in his body’s ready endurance. The path grew no clearer but no less clear. Other ways branched off from it, deer trails most likely, but there was never any doubt which was the main one. He knew that if he turned around this path would take him straight back to the beginning place. His sense of where the gateway was seemed almost to sharpen as he went farther from it, as if its psychic law of gravity were the opposite of the physical one.
After crossing a creek somewhat smaller than the gateway creek he sat down near the noisy water and had a bit to eat; when he went on he felt cheerful, resolved to trust his luck.
All the folds of the land ran across his way. The valleys were dim; in the depth of the dimness always there was the voice of a spring or stream. The slopes were not difficult climbing but they got larger and higher as he went on, the upslopes always longer than the downslopes, as if all the land was tilted. When he came to a third big creek he stopped to have a swim, and after swimming decided to call it a day. He liked the phrase. It was perfectly accurate. He could take any piece of time he liked and call it a day; another span and call it night, and sleep it through. He had never (he thought, sitting by the coals of his brushwood fire on the shore of the creek) experienced time before. He had let clocks do it for him. Clocks were what kept things going, there on the other side; business hours, traffic lights, plane schedules, lovers’ meetings, summit meetings, world wars, there was no carrying on without clocks; all the same, clock time had about the same relation to unclock time as a two-by-four or a box of toothpicks has to a fir tree. Here there was no use asking, “What time is it?” because there was nothing to answer for you, no sun saying “Noon” and no clock saying “Seven-thirty-eight and forty-two seconds.” You had to answer the question yourself and the answer was “Now.”
He slept, and dreamed of nothing, and woke slowly, so relaxed he could hardly raise his hand at first.
From this third creek on, the land got rougher. The tilt of it was all up, and the tiny streams now chased downward beside or across the trail. The trail itself was clear. Whoever had made it, whenever it had been made, there was no litter, no sign of any recent passer, but the way was unmistakable, going up easily and purposefully, turning back and forth on the slopes but always heading the same general direction. Its purpose was all he had; he let it lead him. The forest had thickened, massive stands of fir, where the twilight lay heavy. There was no sound but the soughing of wind in the firs, an immense quiet noise. He crossed the small trails of rabbits or mice or other shy wood creatures, once he saw a tiny broken skull near the path, but he saw no living creature. It was as if each here kept its own solitude. The sense of his solitude came on him now as he climbed the long, dim slopes in the unchanging quiet. He saw himself, very small, walking through the wilderness from no place to no place, alone. So he might walk on forever. For the time beyond the clocks is always now and the way to forever is now.