Morning all, last week of early rising. Let’s see what we kick this week off with shall we? Timers set and off we go.
Not quite sure where this is going yet. Need a few more minutes.
Monday, May 12th: He could see the ice forming.
He could see the ice forming. The temperature was dropping fast. The lake was deep and a strange blue color. As the ice started in the shallows and slipped towards the center the color changed, White sliding into the blue. He shook his head and turned his steps back towards the bunker. He crunched his way back over the snow. His foot prints left imprints in the half inch of snow they got the day before. He glanced at the sky. The dark clouds were massing and he suspected that they were in for another load of snow tonight. He knew soon his steps would be obliterated by the new snow fall. Often Evan felt as though he was constantly being erased by the world around him.
He had been removed from his normal haunts and sent up to this outpost. His communication was limited with supplies coming in with the mail and then going out once every six months. After a year, most had stopped writing to him and he had stopped trying to get news and answers to questions from friends back home.
Radio communication slowed as well. There were once a week check ins when he first arrived. Then they went to once a month, then once every three months. With his last supply run four months ago he was told that the radio would only be used for emergency communications and everything else would come through the supplies.
Even the weather here seemed to erase him as soon as he made even the smallest of marks. This was one of his down days, he could feel it coming. It was a day where he regretted every decision that got him sent to this outpost and wondered if he was just sent out her to die alone in the ice and snow. The entrance to the bunker was hidden from sight, barely a blip in the landscape.
He suspected that after the entrance was created someone took a long time deciding where to place boulders and other landscaping items in order to make the entrance look like it was part of the natural formation. He smiled at the thought of the engineers who had to turn their attention to landscape design.
Evan opened the door to the bunker and stepped inside. He heard the hiss as the seals disengaged. He closed the door behind himself, bolding it into place as the seals reengaged. Nothing from the outside world could reach him. The wind and new snow would erase his footsteps and it would be as though he had never existed. ‘At least for a while.’
He descended into the bunker and recorded the observations he had gone out to make in the log book. His tsks for the day done, he retreated out of the main area to his private living space. There he began to peel the outer layers from himself, reducing his size to something more normal. When he was down to just his outer garments and the thermals he wore over them, he moved into the kitchen area and put the kettle on.
If nothing else, the solitude was letting him get a lot of reading done. Warned of the isolation and down time before he left, he downloaded several libraries worth of material to his tablet and as slowly working through the world’s literature. When he grew tired of reading, he was teaching himself a new language. It helped exercise his rusty voice and in a strange way make him feel less alone. ‘Maybe it is the instructor’s voice,’ he thought. Between that and the audio books, he hadn’t heard another person speak since the supplies were last dropped off.
Ten til Midnight 