"As a man tramps the woods...
He can stand on a rock by the shore and be in a past he could not have known, in a future he will never see.
He can be a part of time that was and time yet to come."
William Chapman White
"Ryan! Get up here and get your seatbelt on!"
Through the fog of sleep Ryan's brain clawed itself awake. There was an urgency to Burns' voice, a hint of panic under his usually calm demeanor. Ryan grabbed his glasses off the rigging beside him. He swung himself over the center control console into his seat.
Ryan couldn't see anything in front of them, save for reflection of the console lights on the interior of the windows, and the moon off to the west: a fat crescent arc scythed against the black backdrop.
Burns' brow was knit in concentration, his already narrow face drawn tight in concentration.
"What's wrong?" Ryan asked, fasting the harness across his chest.
Burns flipped several toggle switches and eased the yolk forward. "We're losing altitude," he replied, eyes never leaving the window. "I can see a lake up ahead. I'm going to try and set her down on it. I need you to be prepared for a potentially rough landing."
Ryan leaned forward in his seat, to the extent that his harness would allow. He tried to block the console light with his hand. "How can you tell that."
Burns extended a long, narrow finger and pointed. "Observe the light below and ahead? Reflections of our traveling moon. By my estimate, that stretch of water shall serve us the space for an impromptu landing. It's my intent to circle so we're inbound lengthwise, to maximize our landing strip." He angled the yolk to the side, feet on the pedals, and Ryan heard as much as felt the plane respond. There was a change in the engines' roar as the massive aircraft banked slowly to the right.
The moon crossed the window, and Ryan could finally see the area Burns was talking about.
It hardly looked large enough.
Ryan leaned against the force of the craft, trying to catch a better glimpse as it passed out of view. Burns' eyes flicked toward the chronometer, then the speedometer. He began counting off seconds, voice barely audible over the whine of the propellers. Counting, measuring distance through time and speed.
The moon was somewhere to the side now, out of sight. Ryan glanced at the compass, trying to get a sense of bearings.
At just over ten seconds, Burns through the plane into a hard left, hurling his body against the yolk. He strained against the seatbelt. With an annoyed snarl he unhooked it, and pushed his entire weight against the controls.
With a whine and a shudder the plane followed his commands, metal skin groaning as the aged joints tried to handle the stress of his maneuver. At the same time, the aircraft gave a terrifying lurch.
The nose dropped.
Ryan felt his stomach rise. It settled somewhere in his chest.
"Do you want me to do anything?!" he yelled over the cabin noise.
"Just… hold… on," Burns answered though his clenched teeth.
The plane continued to drop and twist, then Ryan saw it: the lake, now clearly illuminated from behind. East, they were heading east! From this angle, it looked easily long enough to handle them.
The plane was low now, just skimming the treetops. Ryan could see the swirl of motion. Burns struggled to hold the plane steady, threading a delicate balance of altitude and speed. Too slow or low, and he'd clip the trees. Too high, too fast, and they'd overshoot the lake into the forest beyond. Beads of sweat had broken out across his forehead, but he didn't dare release his hands to wipe them away.
A single trickle made its way down across his cheek. He ignored it.
They were over the water now, Burns leaning to see out the side window, gauging altitude off the reflection.
"Precision," he muttered as he dropped the plane, threw the throttle down, and pulled back on the yolk. There was a rattling scream as the flaps along the trailing wing edges rose, increasing surface area and drag. The engines, cycling just above idle, provided little power for lift. The plane dropped.
Ryan had time to see the reflections of the running lights against the surface of the water, like bits of shattered glass in red and green. The leading edges of the pontoons hit the surface with shocking roughness, bouncing the plane back into the air like a skipped stone.
Burns snarled out some profanity that Ryan couldn't hear over the blood pounding in his own ears. He felt them lurch sideways, as the plane started to roll. The left pontoon struck the surface of the water, and dug in, throwing them both sideways.
Restrained by his harness, Ryan had just enough time to see the edge of the forest rushing past sideways before the forward edge of the right pontoon hit, caught, and slammed them straight. Ryan's head rebounded off the side window with a sickening crack, and he remembered nothing more.
Ryan Hall Smithers, son of Waylon and Lydia, had no idea how long he'd been unconscious.
He was however aware of the splitting pain in his head.
It's like I had one bitch of a migraine, and that bitch gave birth to a bunch of little baby migraines, he thought as flexed his arms carefully. The world seemed to be swaying slightly. He felt physically ill. He opened his eyes, then wondered if perhaps they were still shut, for the world seemed just as black either way.
After a moment, he became aware that the rocking motion was not in his head. There was a slight, but constant push and pull beneath him. As the buzzing in his head quieted, he could hear the gentle sound of waves lapping against an aluminum hull. In any other context, it would be a soothing and pleasant sound; but here, it was anything but.
Ryan tried to sit up, and found himself restrained. He struggled, disorientated for a moment before collapsing back into his seat.
"Where the fuck...?" he groaned. Stiffly, he reached up and rubbed his throbbing head. There was a sizeable welt forming on the right side of his skull. That explains the headache, he thought with a wince.
There was no blood, no sign of outward trauma. Ryan had been in enough fist fights in his younger years to know the difference between a solid hit, and a potential concussion. This, mercifully, was the former.
"I would kill for an ice pack right now," he groaned, realizing his glasses had been knocked off. "Did anyone get the number of that bus that hit me?" he asked.
No one answered.
He wasn't expecting one.
What had happened? It was starting to come back to him slowly. Yale, graduation. His father left early. He was getting a flight back with Monty. There'd been a crash-
Monty!
Ryan's flailed at the buckle for his harness for a moment, then finally found the release. He floundered sideways across the central console, indifferent to the levers that jabbed into his ribs. He felt something cool, soft. The leather of Burns' jacket.
Headache temporarily forgotten in a surge of adrenaline, Ryan reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. The small light illuminated the cramped cockpit.
Montgomery Burns was slumped against the left side of the cockpit, one arm thrown against the control panel, the other tangled at an unnatural angle through the yolk. His eyes were closed, face even paler than usual. Blood had dried of his head, a raw and clotting gash across his left temple.
"Hey, Monty." Ryan nudged Burns' arm. The man didn't move.
Nervously, Ryan reached up and laid his fingers across Burns' neck, worried for what he might find. Burns' pulse beat slow but steady beneath his skin. Ryan exhaled in relief and leaned back. He pushed himself up, careful not to bump the old man. What was one of the first things he'd learned in his high school first aid class; don't move the victim or something like that? Unless they were in imminent danger, of course.
Phone clutched in his hand, Ryan shoved the hatch of the aircraft open and looked out. The tiny LED barely illuminated the night world beyond.
Ryan swung himself down onto the pontoon, and checked his phone. No bars. He held it up, panning left then right, hoping against hope for a signal.
"Come on," he whispered, feeling his temper rise with each passing second.
His please went unanswered.
"FUCK!"
With an animalistic scream of frustration Ryan hurled his phone away into the night.
A second later he immediately regretted his decision.
He swore again, softly this time, sliding down against the cool skin of the pontoon, tucking his legs up, Turkish-style, as Burns' called it. He put his head in his hands, letting the darkness surround him.
...
One of the strange things about both the wilderness, and vision in general, is the under-appreciation most give to the former… and the over-reliance they place on the latter.
Ryan Smithers never had sat like this before, alone in the blackness, in the middle of a Canadian forest, with nothing but his own thoughts for company.
At first the silence seemed absolute, the night as opaque as night.
As he sat, Ryan found himself becoming aware that the world was anything but. As he sat, face buried in his palms, the nighttime world opened up, painting itself in his mind's eye.
In the distance, he heard the soft trill of small frogs along the shoreline. A chorus of high-pitched soprano peeps and trills, which gave him a sense of the lake's boundary. At times a deeper trill would ring out, adding a depth to the amphibians' concert. He smelled the scent of fresh water, but on the breeze the wet earth beyond. He could see the marshlands they called their home. And beyond that, the tree line of the forest.
Somewhere in the woods, an owl called, wispy voice singing forth eight notes. It sounded as if he were asking a question. Even deeper, came an answering call. His mate, or perhaps an adversary, asking the same eight-worded line.
From the other side of the lake, a low call began, rising in pitch to a haunting, flutelike call that trailed off at the end. A wolf? Ryan felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle.
No, he thought as the call repeated itself and he listened to the echoes. It's over the water. Some night bird making its rounds across the lake, under the night sky.
Ryan felt the slight rocking of the plane as it bobbed in the water, became aware that the tail section seemed to shift more. He heard the faint splish of tiny waves against the shoreline, the faint grind of the pontoons on sand. In his mind, he saw the beach they'd run aground on. Across the water, he heard the noise of a jumping fish. A soft, delicate sound as it must've grabbed some insect from the still water's surface.
...
When Ryan finally raised his head, and opened his eyes, he was shocked to discover how small the world suddenly became. The noises seemed to fade, the motion of the plane and the scents of water, woods, and soil, while still there took second place.
Ryan also realized the world was not as dark as he'd first perceived. Without the artificial glare of his phone dulling his eyes, his pupils had widened and adapted to the dim landscape. Under the light of the crescent moon, he saw the outline of the trees against the sky, the weeds at the water's edge, the wide swath of sandy beach they'd come to rest upon. The stars added their own light, not to be outshone by the moon. Ryan tilted his head back, open-mouthed in awe.
He'd never seen anything like it before!
Growing up in the city, Ryan knew there were stars in the night sky, though from Philadelphia he rarely saw them. Most nights the sky was a dull orange glow from the lights of the city reflecting up. The sky around Yale was similar; so many lights that the night sky was muted.
At Burns Manor, set atop Mammon hill and secluded as it was from the rest of Springfield, Ryan had his first true sense of the night sky.
Even that paled in comparison to this!
The stars shown down, glittering like crushed diamonds against a dark blue backdrop. It was blue, he realized, not black like he'd always assumed. And stretching through it all, the trailing arm of the Milky Way; a swath of stardust made from the faint light of a thousand suns lifetimes beyond his own.
It took his breath away.
In that moment, Ryan had his first glimpse of the cosmic scale, and the tiny part of his role in it.
"Whoa…" he breathed, reluctant to even look away.
Ryan could've spent all night there, hypnotized by the siren song of the great beyond, were it not for the beginning tingle in his legs. His feet were starting to fall asleep.
With a grunt, he unfolded himself and stood up, wiping his hands on the sleeves of his pants. He had responsibilities. With one last look at the night sky, he hauled himself into the plane.
The hold was darker than the world outside. Ryan groped along the wall till he found the storage crates. He fumbled with the latches, working by touch alone. The wool blankets were where he remembered them, a large stack. Carefully, he draped them over Monty Burns to keep the old man warm against the night air.
The blankets from his nest were still on the floor. He'd use those for himself. He wasn't sure how much sleep he'd manage to get, but there was nothing more he could do tonight.
Ryan pushed a roll under his head, and closed his eyes.