Rod Raglin, Forest
excerpt
Forest Publisher: Create Space Date: January 24, 2015 Length: 199 pages ISBN: 1511601574; 978-1511601573 |
Summary
FOREST - Love, Loss, Legend combines the intrigue of the wilderness, a murder mystery and a multi-racial romance and underpins it with an important environmental message.
Matthew and Raminder are young, idealistic and in love.
As soon as they can they plan to leave behind the small town and small minds of Pitt Landing. They will embrace life and experience the world, maybe even change it.
Man plans, God laughs. Raminder's father has a stroke and her commitment to her family means she must postpone her plans and stay in Pitt Lake. It's just the opposite for Matt. A family tragedy leaves irreconcilable differences between him and his father and forces him to leave.
They promise to reunite, but life happens.
Twelve years later, Matt is an acclaimed war correspondent. He's seen it all and it's left him with post-traumatic stress, a gastric ulcer, and an enlarged liver. He's never been back to Pitt Landing though the memory of Raminder and their love has more than once kept him sane.
He's at his desk in the newsroom, recuperating from his last assignment and current hangover and reading a letter from his father, the first contact they've had in over a decade. It talks about a legendary lost gold mine, a map leading to it, and proof in a safety deposit box back in Pitt Lake. He's sent it to Matt in case something happens to him and cautions his son to keep it a secret.
Matt is about to dismiss the letter when the telephone rings. It's Raminder telling him his father has disappeared somewhere in the wilderness that surrounds Pitt Lake.
Lost gold, lost love and lost hope compels Matt to return home to Pitt Landing, a dying town on the edge of the rainforest on the west coast of Canada. The forest is waiting.
Excerpt
Highway 7A, a claustrophobic two-lane strip of decaying asphalt wedged between two steep mountains. The deeper Matt drove into the narrow valley the more overbearing the slopes became eliminating light and space. The peaks snagged clouds, the shreds clung to the evergreens perched on crags, then descended in a foggy drizzle.
The forest presented an impenetrable wall of green and made it easy to imagine no human had ever set foot a hundred metres on either side of the road. Species could come to life, thrive and die without anyone except God ever knowing they existed.
The closer he got to his hometown the more the memories were triggered. There was the time The Reverend had driven high into the backcountry on abandoned logging roads to visit an elderly member of the congregation, and insisted his family accompany him. Matt's mother had left her four-year-old son in the care of her husband in the front yard and gone inside to set out the food she'd brought. She'd only been in the cabin a few minutes, but when she returned to the porch Matt had disappeared.
Dense forest surrounded the small clearing the tiny cabin was situated on. Deep, dark ravines fell away to the lake on one side of the property and extreme slopes towered above the other. The nearest neighbour was six kilometres down the road. After several frantic hours without a trace, his parents had to abandon the search because of the onset of darkness.
The cabin had no telephone and twenty-seven years ago there was no cellular technology. There was no choice but to head back down to Pitt Landing without their son. The authorities needed to be informed so a search could begin at dawn. A search the professionals knew would at best be a recovery rather than a rescue.
The call came in at six forty-five the next morning just as the searchers were boarding the trucks to head out into the mountains. A little boy had been found unharmed in the backyard of a local resident at the edge of town. It was Matt. Somehow he'd traversed ten kilometres of the most rugged country British Columbia had to offer - in the dark.
The RCMP investigated it as a kidnapping. No arrests were made and no evidence recovered except for the rumour of a footprint found in a flowerbed of the home Matt had shown up at.
A very large footprint.
Matt remembered nothing, but growing up in Pitt Landing he'd felt them out there, knew when they were close, their yellow eyes watching him.
Sasquatch country, the wildness of the terrain supported the myth, though if he wanted to see hairy ape-like giants Matt knew he only had to visit the local pub. He turned on the headlights of the Toyota 4-Runner. The mid-afternoon gloom matched his mood.
He passed the turnoff that lead to “Pitt Lake Hot Springs Hotel and Spa”. The new section of road veered east arriving at the lakefront luxury resort via an 18-hole course.
The town of Pitt Landing began with a smattering of dwellings, more abandoned than occupied, more hidden than welcoming. The sign warned the road was no longer a highway and to slow to thirty kilometres. After six intersecting streets, it ended at a three-way flashing red light at the beach.
From here, Beach Drive went left and right. The commercial area featured “slash” businesses; restaurant/motel, gift store/grocery market, tackle shop/service station and hardware/lumber yard and stretched for two blocks along the waterfront. Across the street and beyond a stretch of rocky shore the lake faded away into low cloud.
He was home and it was as he remembered: a shithole.
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Rod Raglin is self-published author, journalist, photographer, and a keen environmentalist living on the west coast of Canada. He's been editor and publisher of The REVUE Newspaper for over 40 years. Much of his work; thirteen novels, two plays and a collections of short stories, are considered literary/commercial and combine romance and action with environmental themes for exciting and entertaining explorations of contemporary culture.
He lives in Vancouver, BC, where he is, among other things, the publisher and editor of an online community newspaper and a paid facilitator of creative writing circles.
- Website: https://revuecommunitynews.com/rod-raglin-author
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Rod-Raglin/100013287676486/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/rodraglin
Copyright © 2023 by Rod Raglin
