Haunted Cosmos - What Is It To Be Alone?

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

Please enjoy this ninth inter-season episode of our Patreon exclusive show, The Dusty Tome. In this episode, we talk about a fascinating story!Love Haunted Cosmos? Get access to our exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, early ad-free access to main episodes, monthly AMA's, and livestreams with Ben and Brian by becoming a patron of the show: https://www.patreon.com/c/HauntedCosmosBuy the Haunted Cosmos book: https://www.newchristendompress.com/cosmos PS: It's also available as an audiobook!Want to keep nefarious fairy Bigfoots away and also avoid icky seed oils, preservatives, artificial colorants, and other nasties in your daily shower routine? Then check out the vast array of homemade soaps from our friends at Indigo Sundries Soap Co.! Go to indigosundriessoap.com to learn more—and as our gift to you, use code HAUNTEDCOSMOS for 10% off your whole order!This episode is sponsored by New Dominion Design Co. Visit their website here and learn more!This episode is sponsored by Zily Creative Works. Join the kickstarter here!This episode is sponsored by Backwards Planning Financial. Visit Joe's website here or give him a call (615-767-2555).This episode is sponsored by Squirrelly Joe's Coffee! Visit their website here to get your first bag free!  Share Coffee. Serve Humbly. Live faithfully.Finally, this episode is sponsored by Gray Toad Tallow. Visit their website here and use COSMOS15 at checkout for 15% off your order.Did you know that supporters of the show at our Sasquatch Photographer Tier and above (yes, that is its actual name) can listen to entire episodes early and ad free? That's right! And that's not all: Patrons at every level gain access to our patron-exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, with bonus stories, Q+A, and more.Support the show

One and welcome to the ninth installment of our interseason dusty tomes special releases. This week is going to be a great episode. I'm excited for you guys to hear it. And this means that counting today, there's only two weeks left, two episodes left, before we gear up for season four, episode one launch. That's going to be on October 16th. So there's going to be like a week off there thing. But we're really excited for you guys to hear that. our patrons just got access, well, the top two tiers of patronage just got access to that episode on Patreon yesterday. And so if you want to hear it, or if you want to watch it better yet, because we posted the video, then become a patron. You can get that very early and add free,

and we're really happy to provide that value to our patrons. I'm going to not talk too much and just instead hop right in. So thank you guys so much for tuning in. The show is simply not possible without all of you. it's incredibly humbling and meets the world that you would give us our time to listen to us, tell some stories. This show is brought to you by Indigo Sundry Soap Company, Backwards Planning Financial, New Dominion Design Company, Gray Toad Tallow, Zilly Creative Works, LLC, and Squirrely Joe's Coffee, and our supporters at Patreon, and all of our listeners. Thanks, guys, sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.

Imagine with me. You've just woken up on the morning of what you hope, will be the most adventurous string of days you've known thus far in your life. You brush aside the blackouts and enjoy the sunrise, walk like a cloudy ghost through the sheer curtains beneath them. Everything is prepped. Everything is packed. All that's left is to force some breakfast down past the excited nerves and drive to the port. Today is the day you finally push your solo trimaran out past the breakers in order to sail all by yourself above the black depths of Poseidon's ring into the islet of paradise that lays some 50 miles north of home.

You find the docks tranquil. The lissom's slipping sounds of water waiting with timidity through the boats tied there offers a most satisfying soundtrack to lay at the forefront of a growingly busy downtown and growingly bold seagulls flying in formation overhead. Old-style brownstones with manicured porches and blackened oak doors stand across the street from you. A brick road serves as the boundary. The sun is still low in the east as the Lady of the Dawn stretches her fingers like bloody streamers through the pale sky that itself looks tired. A slight breeze ripples through the air and makes the flag's corner rivets knock into the galvanized pole to your left,

like a miniature church bell from older and better days. Dogs bark and children laugh as they tease each other on their walks to school. The clicking and satisfying cadence of bicycle hubs rattle next to the little. the children and pass by you with Americana glory. A step back, so you think, might reveal the world to be filtered through some sepia lens of the soul. Oh, how you love this place, but oh how the wild calls with strange and compelling force. This will remain, but the weather windows providing safe passage for a first solo sailing trip will certainly not. And so with the final crates and packs tossed into the small space below deck, you blow a kiss to the smell of bread and

coffee flowing to you from the baker down the street, climb aboard, untie, and troll mildly through the harbor, all alone, and with the edge of the world before you. You've been planning this trip for months now. You've studied, you've practiced. You've been rebuked by men saltier and older than you. You've hugged your wife especially tight and have smelled the vibrant hair of your children. You've just watched with growing rocks in your throat as they chase you down the driveway, waving and skipping and shouting for their dad to have fun, to come home soon, to remember they love him,

and to not forget to bring back toys. You stopped before finally pulling away, rolled down your passenger window, and shouted goodbye at them once again, yelling through the happy beginnings of contented tears that you can't wait to see them again, that it will only be a couple of days, that you love them dearly, and of course that you will bring toys for each of them. But that was then. Now the therapy of chores and the need to focus drives the bittersweet goodbyes from memory as the harbor turns into an inlet and the inlet transposes into the real sea. Of course those memories are not lost, but as with all treasures, they can't be looked at forever, lest you forget the very real importance of what's right there in front of you. If that were to happen, then all treasures,

memories or otherwise, would be gone quickly thereafter. The first day passes and the gentle Hesperian wind of the west maintains itself. The sail sounds thick as it stretches here and there. The blue cool of the surface seems to glide beneath you in surreal motion. A tightening there, a crank here, a lean over the port side, and then a slight shift back to starboard. Dolphins guiding your way at the bow and a rippling ribbon of pearl white betrays where you've been at the stern. Everything clicks, and you think offhandedly that mundanity in autopilot never felt so good as this. Before long, in fact just before settling down for a moment of lunch and water, you notice a great milestone has already passed.

The little Edinic islet that is your objective looms just ever so larger in front of you than home does behind you, caught between the violent wheel, whose motion everything jars, of domestic joy and daring adventure, the two monoliths of land tell you clearly that you are even just a bit more than halfway there. But as you furl up the sail and unpack the food, and why not a drop of wine, too, you see the faintest shadow of cloud in the east. The afternoon begins with equal excitement, but less calm in the world around you. Of course, lunch can make one sluggish, especially when eating in the sun, and so you chalk up the mounting resistance you feel in the wind and waves to that, muscles made a bit too warm.

But after another few miles, you glance ahead again in a brief repose to the dance of solo sailing and see the shadow in the east has grown. It is a cloud of near blackness stalking the island that marks your journey's end, and it is growing and moving headed your way. It is then that you notice the thing that's felt off about the otherwise perfect day out.

You've not seen another soul. Sure, large freighters, and the massive yachts of the rich have been glimpsed by you much further out to see, but why has there not been another weekend warrior such as yourself? Why has the perfect Friday on the coast gone seemingly unnoticed to all save you? You step down into the room and pull out your computer, and once you open the updated forecast, your heart sinks.

The first thought you have is of your new daughter back home, but you cannot think of that now. In the hustle of the morning and in the unbelievable beauty of it all, you failed to check the forecast a final time. You had bet it all on the forecast from the previous night being true still today. If only, if only the woodpecker sighed, and the bark on the tree was as soft as the sky. You watched in stomach-churning dread as the radar shows the largest storm cell of the season, sitting just off your port bow and directly over the island.

The black shadow of dread is no small thing, and it's coming straight for you. By the time you close the computer, you feel the boat rocking with much more aggression. The sea is done with its warm welcome and is now licking its lips to draw blood. You take the short stairway back up to the deck. The rain is already pelting, and the wind is driving the drops like sheets of ice into the left side of your face. Water spills in small capillaries down the textured stairs, and you have the presence of mind to fuss to yourself about how annoying it will be when the carpet gets wet. The black sky surrounds you like clouds of ash and ilium.

The boat could have turned all the way around, but how could you know if it had? And so you pull out your compass and get a bearing, but the plastic hood of your parka is making it hard to see. Soon enough you learn that you have indeed turned sharply north, and though you do not dare a sounding, can tell that you are moving fast in that direction. Right for the shoals you know lined the way and paint doom just below the surface. The island is shrouded in darkness. Your home is no longer behind you.

It too is covered by the wall of death. You realize how long ago the morning feels now and how you would give anything to get back to it, to make yourself stop, to succumb to the pleas of your glowing children chasing you down the driveway, to not even put the keys into the truck. You do your best to navigate, but the storm cell feels more like a hurricane, and you remember the radar. It promises to continue bearing down hard for much, much longer. Her life goes on for a short while in this whirlwind hell, before you finally feel the bottom

of the keel scrape against the sloping shoals going ever closer beneath you. The keel breaks, then it breaks again. What wind can drive such a craft, so breakneck on such as this. The bottom of the trimaran grinds on the stone like a child grinding his teeth just because he learned he can, and suddenly all comes to a stop. Stuck upon the rocks, you realize just how strong the wind. is. It tears into you like a sword into flesh, cutting to the casing of the bone and the cold osteons that are buried inside of it. You're pushed and pushed over again. You slide on the deck

as it's battered by the wind and crushed against the rocks by ever-growing waves. Hesperia has become a vindictive mistress to you and her wind is hungry for souls. For hours you desperately try to turn your radio back on, but the jolted stop sent it flying so hard and breaking so much that this turns to futility. You fire off a signal flare into the sky, but it succeeds only a few feet to heaven before being ripped sidelong and apart and quenched utterly in the mist of pandemonium around you, hell's heritage, and then the levy grates. Through bolts of lightning and peals of wrathful thunder, the final wave grabs hold of the rains of the wind and crushes your boat with the greatest of these. You feel the artificial ground go from beneath you,

As cracks appear all over the deck that betray a nasty churning blue behind them, you fall slowly, thickly through the tumult As you fall you think first of your wife the bride of your youth and the crown on your head Her beauty her diligence her love and respect has warmed you at every other one of life's crossroads But where was she now? Your soul groans and dismay and asks again you my own flesh where are you now? Where am I? You fall that much further, toes dipping beneath the ravenous waves, and think of the little daughter. What flowing locks like dripping dew and honey could compare? What lily pad or laurel tree could match the wily and laughing glory of that young one.

May she be like a banner someday, unfurled like your sails used to be, pushed by the winds from heaven over on to Eden's shores. And just after you wonder who she might marry, you think last of your son. You've fallen up to your waist, the firstborn, the one who made you a father, his image so much like your own, engraved onto the tablet of your psyche, running across the kitchen to you home again from work at a job you seldom feel fulfilled at. But to him you are the greatest hero ever to grace the earth, coming home from yet another mission of danger and mystery and untold importance, come home to him again.

You realize how right he is. You see just how dangerous it is to step out from your door. You chastise yourself. The water is now at your chest, for so often being so hard on him. Your own son, the greatest legacy a man might leave, and you think with visceral honesty about just how much you long for him to surpass you and everything great. So it is. You then suppose as the water begins to touch your chin that the competition between a father

and son must be filled with tension for all their days. but it is a competition no good father would ever actually want to win. Just then, has the memory of your shirtless son chasing you with a smile the size of the moon down the driveway,

his brown curls bouncing in the morning's madness, your eyes descend into Carybdis and all the swirling of the upper world gets muffled by the weight of water that is the earth's oceans. And before you say a final prayer to your God and Father, you remember your son a final time,

time and rebuke the quote that had haunted you for so long. It went like this. And I think that's what a father is, a blade that never stops cutting. That's what they said. And you were struck to the core by it, but they were wrong. That's not what a father is. That's a son. The next morning ushers in a new pristine day. The passing vessel sees signs of the wreckage on their way to the same island you sought for fun. Some of that hole of yours just couldn't let go of the shoals that ate it up. You were only one mile from the shore and no one ever found you again. Brian, I got bad news. The other day, I was using one of the big box soap products to wash myself and I got this weird urge to go buy a Stanley cup and fill it with iced coffee and it started to feel a little cold in the house. I just wanted to

wrap myself up in like a heavy wool blanket. And then also, I started Googling ticket prices to Taylor Swift concerts. Ben, what are you doing? Don't you know that these big box soap companies just jam all their soaps full of hormone-disrupting chemicals? They're probably turning you into a girl. Well, I know that now, but what am I supposed to do about it? Ben, you ignorant normie. All you've needed to do is go to indigo sundry soap.com and support a great Christian family business that's making all sorts of soaps that are completely free of hormone disrupting chemicals and other nasties. Okay, I am literally going to Indigo sundry soap.com right now. Tell me what to buy. Ben, what I would recommend doing is clicking on bundles and then selecting the best one for you.

You could get the men's six-pack. You could get my favorite, the clay bundle. Ooh, I like the pipe and jug bundle. That seems cool. Or a men-six-pack, because that'll make me feel like I have something that I actually don't. So true, King. And you know what else I heard? Because they're such good friends of the show, Indigo Sundry's soap company is offering 10% off your order if you just use all caps. discount code haunted cosmos, no spaces. Wait, Brian, you're going way too fast. I didn't get all that. Is that information in the show description?

Ben, you ignorant normie, it's always in the show description. Okay, so I'm going to go to indigo sundry soap.com. I'm going to pick the men's six-pack bundle, and I'm going to use code haunted cosmos at checkout, all caps, no spaces. And if I forgot all that, it's in the description of the show. Of course, Ben. And if you just do that, then you will stop wanting to do all of those girly things. and maybe you'll, I don't know, maybe want to buy a classic car to restore or something dignified.

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including their brand new tallow sunscreen. What? Enter code Cosmos 15. That's COS MOS 15, all caps for 15% off your order. It's a long introduction. Forgive me. But it's a theme that is so difficult to nail down. a feeling that is so familiar to us all, but so hard to describe from afar, from not being

in it yourself. Hence, an effort to put you there and make you feel in terms compelling to me just how desperate it is to be alone. But it isn't just loneliness we are concerned with today. It's a specific type of loneliness. The kind that is so despairing and so heartbreaking, that it combines the nauseating claustrophobia that comes from helplessness with some of the most Potent sorrow one can fathom. There's something so apparently cursed and nefarious about suffering a helpless fate close to succor and salvation. Think of Odysseus on the island of lustful Calypso.

He sees the sea stretched out before him. He even sees other ships pass on the horizon. Maybe there are more Greeks looking for him. Maybe it's his own telemachus come to rescue him. But he can never join them, at least not until the goddess gives him leave. He's utterly alone, but not without hope. Only his hope must be counted as a false one. This is a chief dread of all mankind.

Think of Aeneas trying to rescue his family from the flames of fallen Troy. As Greeks, I as Odysseus, plunders the city, skewering men young and old on his spear, while he hauls the women and children away in shackles to be his slaves. Aeneas is given safe passage to the home of his father by the goddess Venus. There he finds Ancises along with his son, Asconius, and his wife, Creusa. He hoists his father onto his back, bids his son hold tightly to his hand, and bids his bride follow him closely while he leads the way to safety. But when he arrives, apart from the vengeful

destruction, he looks around in anguish, and finds Creusa is not there. Bidding his father and son farewell in case the flames take him, he charges back until the rest of the rest of the restruction. He charges back into the fray of Hades and calls, even in the midst of enemy hordes, for his darling Creusa whom he lost. Finally, he finds her and runs to embrace her. He tries to embrace her three times, each time bringing more violent rivers of tears down his face, only to realize that it is not her, but her shade, meant to bring him comfort and agony. Think of Eustace's scrub after he turned into a dragon of the dawn treader. He moves from self-pity to self-reflective. repentance in almost no time at all, and thus leaves us picking up where he left off and pitying him.

Just a child, now stuck in the form of a dragon with no apparent means of escape. He is alone. But he can still see his friends, still hear them talk, still try to communicate and interact. His is a despair long cooked in the decree of Aslan's father beyond the sea, and though he recovers in salvation, the image of bold and martial Riepeacheep laying beside the dragon. and Eustace to tell him stories and offer him words of comfort nonetheless remains in our minds as one of the saddest images of all time. Think of Midras, the eldest son of Feanor, high king of the Noldor and the Silmarillion.

In a disastrous turn of the battle between elves and the Dark Lord Morgoth, he's taken captive by the bow-rogs and given a punishment by Morgoth far worse than death. He's hanged by the right wrist, high up on the sheerest face. of the smoky and evil mountain thing Gordredrim. From there, he can see far. He can see the hopeless state of the world and his kin and his friends. He can see, but he can do nothing.

He can see and he can hear and he can cry out, yearning for rescue, but no one can hear him, and no one dares to approach those badlands of the north. And he was stuck in this abyss of gloom and sorrow for 30 years, forced to see and hear and know and be able to do nothing.

Forced to descry the green and blue and white of better lands, yet forced to languish and pain all the more because of them. Maidros would have eventually, after long ages of hunger and broken spirits, no doubt, died there on Thangorodrim's ugly face had it not been for Fingon's daring rescue. But even with that rescue, the point remains. For Tolkien tells us that Maitras was ever changed after that sadistic imprisonment. Indeed, in order to escape, Thing gone had to cut his friend's hand off. I suppose in this case, the body really did keep the score.

It is not good for man to be alone. But it's even worse for man to be alone with no hope or false hope. And maybe that is the shimmering purpose behind such tales of woe. Maybe we should be comforted even in our misery, for our misery tells us that it ought not be like this. As with any dark providence or chastisement or outright tragedy, we should be pointed toward the light. From whence comes man's true good, and to whence the soul of man desperately longs to go, even if, in his confusion, he does nothing but push it further away.

C.S. Lewis once said that hell is the steady drifting away from all else, until a man is left in the state he so long wished for to be an island. The threat of hell, in a very real sense, is the threat of ten. terrifying and terrible and painful loneliness. But it is a loneliness of a worse kind than any living mortal could think of, for it is a hopeless and tormented loneliness of the soul. Are you a Christian struggling to find companies

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from Zilly Creative Works. John Donovan was a mystery to people. The gruff and contrarian middle-aged man could often be caught brashly rebuking people he considered friends in one moment before bursting out into a belly laugh the next, even if that next moment was not one wherein laughter would be welcome or appropriate.

Despite this, he considered it his life's mission to help others, and he accomplished this mission by frequently organizing field trips for ill patients and local hospitals. He really seemed to thrive when he was doing this, which was very good for him, since he ended up making a sort of career out of it as a social worker. And yet, the paradox continues, the social worker always and only ever lived alone. He never had kids. He never married.

In his entire adult life, he never even dated anyone that we know of. He just found his lane and drove in it without turning to the right or to the left. Of course, his low bar for standard of living may have had something to do with his lack of real companionship. He constantly bounced around from one squalid apartment to the next, never caring to settle in a single place for longer than a year at the most, and always finding a way to leave the place even worse than he had found it. And this is saying a lot, seeing as how he always chose run-down places to live in in the first place. For a whole year he lived in a burned-down bank on the edge of town that had been partially abandoned and didn't even have heat.

Somehow, this didn't seem to bother Donovan or strike him as weird in any way. When it wasn't the bank or places like it, he'd coast through the tiny closet rooms worth no more than $300 a month, again, always leaving the sty filled with more mud than it had been before. He was the type of man who, by rights, would never properly fit in to a more well-ordered society. Lucky for him, he was born when he was, and so he ended up leading what was, again, to him, a fairly normal life. He made a good wage, did great work at his job by all counts, and dedicated his free time to the one hobby that he was really willing to go all in on,

hiking and backpacking. But even then, he often preferred to fly solo. This tendency towards solitude makes more sense when one digs a bit into Donovan's past. Of course, blaming one's failings on what happened to them before is never the way of the mature adult. But the things that have happened to us still serve as valuable. data and context for helping us see ourselves more clearly. The same goes for others too. Donovan was born to working class parents in Pittsburgh around the time the world was trending towards mass Western apostasy.

As such, his father abandoned he and his mother when he was an infant for reasons unknown. After this, his mother died before his 10th birthday. And so, before Donovan went to live with his aunt who worked odd hours in a restaurant, he would be forced to sit in for her entire shift. floated in and out of several Catholic orphanages. Like I said, context. This past also bore the later fruit of Donovan taking great interest in church history. He probably would not have called himself a Christian and was certainly not a churchman, but he appreciated the richness of the Catholic faith and was, as they say, a little stitious. So it was that he found himself lighting two candles in a chapel

inside the limits of the San Diego de Alcala mission on April 1st, 2005. One to St. Christopher, patron saint of travelers, and one to St. Anthony, patron saint of the lost. Though not a believer, he figured a little faithless ritualism might help him in the feat he was about to undertake, one of his most ambitious yet, a through hike of the Pacific Crest Trail. The PCT stretches for 2,653 miles from Campo, California to its northern terminus at the U.S. Canada border. Originally hoping to do the hike with his friend, Ken Baker, Donovan instead spent his final night in the city of Campo, preparing himself mentally for the added strain of going at it all alone. Baker, you see, was not like Donovan, where Donovan was reckless, slow, and oftentimes incredibly inept at navigating in wilderness areas.

Baker was calculated, fast, fit, and methodical in everything he did. He was an archetypal engineer from a generation that produced undoubtedly some of the best engineers in the world. Due to this tendency towards over-preparedness and due diligence, Baker warned Donovan that they should postpone their start date by three weeks to allow for a final storm cycle to blow through and give them clearer trails to start their journey by, but Donovan was impatient. He felt he was already on borrowed time by waiting to do this stuff in his later years. He was 59, just a few days away from 60, and had only taken up hiking in his early 40s as a way to lose weight and stay fit as he aged. He readily admitted that he was not as experienced or as well-built, or as skilled in bushcraft

as his friends, but he didn't care. Did he sometimes meander off a trail only to end up going the wrong way for hours before realizing his mistake? Yeah. Did he consistently slip behind the pack and stumble into camp well after dark? Yeah. Did he sometimes get completely downright lost? Well, again, yes. But he also hiked the entire Appalachian Trail over the course of some 10 years, ticking off large sections at a time. He also hiked the 500-mile Colorado Trail in one big push. He had done those things, felt the immense high of succeeding in them despite the many obstacles, both forced and unforced, and was yearning for more. What better way to usher in his 60s and a life of retirement than by conquer

what was to him the final boss of them all in the PCT. So no, he wouldn't wait. He would go right on ahead. Baker could catch up later if he wanted to, or meet him somewhere further down for a head start on his own attempt. Donovan was not stopping for anyone. He therefore threw the ultra-light pack and minimal supplies and rations over his shoulders.

Baker had introduced him to the more lightweight alpine style years before, cinched the straps down, buckled the waist strap until his hips carried the load and set off from Campo. What lay before him for the first push was 100 miles of Mojave Desert. Donovan felt like he was in heaven, and then the storm came. The creaking knees and the cramping shoulders started to diminish. Once he looked up over his latest sandy ridge and saw, towering above him, the jagged heights of San Jacinto, shrouded in a cloak of black cloud that stared down at him,

menacing mountain. It was the first real obstacle on the journey to the PCT's log box far to the north, a test of the fitness of hopefuls who had just walked across the desert. The desert might trick weaker men into thinking the steep crags and ice walls of San Yacinto are more forgiving places, but harder your stock knows better than to think so little of the world's high and wholly reaches. Rising 10,000 feet over the course of just seven miles, meant that San Yacento, far from being the most threatening peak on the journey to come, was nonetheless a milestone gateway into the north.

Other through hikers, seeing the monstrous clouds hovering over Yacento like God upon Sinai, opted to wait out the worst of it in the small town of Ittlewild that lay at the mountain's base. The snow was already reaching a depth of three feet at the higher altitudes, and the winds were only raising the volumes of their howls. To climb the mountain in these conditions, with gear only fit for a warmer weather attempt, was nearly suicidal. but Donovan didn't care. One time, as I sat on my own front porch with my father-in-law and looked at the Wasatch Range stretched out before us, he remarked,

Who could see that and think themselves great? The mountain just glances down at us and says, hey, I'm bigger than you. When you're gone, I'll still be around. And then I replied to him, ah, yes, but the man is the one who can stand on top of the mountain. Both of these things are true, which reveals the great paradox of following. man. He's still the dominion taker, but he forgets his smallness at his own peril. Mountains are good reminders of that smallness. Donovan, and his confused philosophy of life, forgot this. And so, in the sight of other hikers who had wisely chosen to rest and wait in

ittlewild, Donovan launched with gusto upon the winding five-mile charge up fuller ridge, a narrow and steep spine of rock that, if followed, takes one tantalizingly close to the saddle point, which gives way to the summit after a bit more hard climbing. Around the middle of that day, as Donovan inched ever closer to the maw of darkness and whirlwind that waited for him, he encountered three hikers coming back down the same ridge. They had turned back and were making for the safety of town as quick as they could. They tried to persuade Donovan to come with them,

but as they said, they weren't going to change his mind. He had foregone the ice-sacs, he had foregone the climbing and anchoring gear, he had foregone the extra layers of clothes, He had forfeited his life and was rolling the dice, prideful man. Further up, the ground grew light from the dusting of snows even yet further above that tumbled down like manna from heaven. Here, at about 8,000 feet in elevation, Donovan ran into another pair of outdoor enthusiasts, a mother and sun team who were braving it out at the edge of the storm to get some compelling shots of the landscape on their cameras.

Though their meeting with Donovan was rusty and filled with tension, mostly from Donovan. of the The mother-son pair clearly noticed that their older companion was not in any mood to be alone. They trudged on ahead, weaving off the trail into the deadfall, and always staying just under the brunt of the storm, and Donovan lingered on about thirty feet behind them, wearily following in their footsteps. Finally, the mother and son took the path of a small creek leading up hill, took a few final shots just beneath the saddle atop Fuller Ridge and turned towards the town to escape the weather

themselves. They gave an amicable but wordless wave to Donovan on the short way back down the hill toward him and later looked back to see that he had already gone up past their stopping point into the fray of the storm. To them, he seemed like a ghost disappearing into the ethereal mists of shadow that swallowed him up in cold and wet. In all of it, Donovan did not look back. 12 days later, friends who were going to meet Donovan at a resupply stop off the PCT grew concerned when he didn't arrive on time. They put in the word at the ranger station that their friend was missing. A surge was launched.

John Donovan was never found. The mother and son photography team were the last people to ever see him, or at least they kind of were. The story grows dim and fuzzy like the air that Donovan vanished into. The black abyss he ascended towards. those safety and companionship welcomed him just a couple miles below. But that is a story for another day. Join us next week for part two of our lonesome walk through the tombstones of tragedy and intrigue.

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