This is the first chapter of a work in progress, a book based on MASON, the college film my friends and I made.
Chapter 1
When walking the earth, the first thing to go is your shoes.
Roland’s shoes started to fall apart three days after he crossed the border from Missouri to Kansas. He was on a dirt road in the shadow of I-70, when the heel of his left shoe began to slide in a direction the opposite of which his foot was stepping.
After a day of walking on a shoe that wouldn’t plant firmly, Roland began to get annoyed and started to kick the heel into the road, as if he could snap the heel back into place. When his ankle turned and sprained, it painfully occurred to him that perhaps this heel-kicking idea wasn’t as smart as he thought. He hopped on his right foot to the side of the road and collapsed in the grassy ditch.
He slid the large knapsack off his back. This seemed like as good a time to take a break as any. A sprained ankle on a dirt road in Who-Knows-Where, Kansas. Crap.
Why didn’t I get new shoes before this quest began? he thought.
Roland knew that “quest” was not the right word for what he was doing, but then again, he had no idea what to call it. He might have called it a walkabout, except that Kansas wasn’t exactly the Australian outback. He had considered calling it wanderlust—the German origin appealed to him—but had come to the conclusion that his wandering had little to do with lust.
He debated himself tirelessly while walking, trying to either establish a definite purpose for his journey, or to conclude that his journey was not worthwhile and abandon it. He figured that, as a scientist (which he considered himself to be), he would be able to draw a logical conclusion with enough time devoted to thinking about it. Instead, what happened is that he simply created more hypotheses and theories about his journey which contradicted the hypotheses and theories from the day before. After several months, he could think of endless reasons why he was walking, but he didn’t know if any of them were true. He might have driven himself insane were it not for his clever conclusion that the ultimate purpose of his journey was to figure out the ultimate purpose for his journey.
This was, obviously, a ludicrous proposal, but he tried not to think about that.
Roland’s meandering had started long before he had turned it into his career. He had enrolled in a university with no idea what his interests were. He didn’t even know if he wanted to be there, but he was expected to go, so he went. At the time, he convinced himself that, at the very least, he could learn how to make a decent daiquiri.
He wandered through the different departments, taking classes in every field. Eventually, he found that the sciences appealed to him for the endless amount of thinking that it could generate. Science was interested in creating infinite theories and coming up with new theories just for the sake of something to do.
It was also the only organized religion he could get behind. He loved the fact that you could come up with a theory on Wednesday, and bash someone else in the head with it on Thursday. Science didn’t need ancient scrolls to reveal Truth. You could make it up as you went along, and no one noticed as long as you sounded smart when you made your case, and you lined up enough events to support your doctrine.
However, in true Roland fashion, he could not decide which of the sciences was right for him. He spent time in chemistry and physics classes, he studied psychology and sociology, he took complimentary courses like calculus and biology. Yet, after four years, he was horrified to realize that he was no closer to deciding what he wanted to do. After graduating with a major in chemistry and a minor in aquatic criminology—universities had a way of making every field of study sound interesting, such as the study of pirates—he did the only thing he could think of: he enrolled in a master’s program.
Three years later, he had a master’s in sociology and was on his way towards a doctorate degree when he first realized the crux of the problem. The realization came to him suddenly, in a coffee shop in South Bend, Indiana, while reading an assigned book for his aboriginal cultures course. He was reading how, in many native cultures, a youth would be sent on a quest; it was often a way to usher a child into adulthood, but beyond that, it often imbued one with a sense of purpose. His first thought was that he was glad this was not something he had been forced to endure. His next thought was how unlucky he was that he had not been forced to endure this. It was a short debate in his head, for it was then that he realized he had no purpose.
However, were it not for a few events immediately following this realization (which one could call either serendipitous or very unlucky), Roland might have continued on the same path, and lived an ordinary blasé life.
Instead, Roland soon found himself on the road, walking the earth, and questioning himself every step of the way. On some days, like today, he asked himself how this was any better than wandering the halls of a university.
As always, he came up with points and counterpoints, testing each one for logical validity. Yet, it didn’t matter what his conclusion would be, because he knew one thing for certain: he felt better walking without knowing why than he had in his life in Indiana. He was compelled to walk. Every day he felt closer to something, and the fact that his feelings were illogical or irrelevant began to matter less and less.
Roland took a second drink of water, then stuffed the bottle into the pouch on the backpack. He tried standing up and winced at the pain in his ankle. He wasn’t sure if the pain would go away, but he decided to err on the side of caution and look for a cheap motel, maybe just for a couple of days. He slung the knapsack onto his back and began limping down the road.
