Rennie’s Log Slide Dream: Part Two

The shock of hearing a voice shot through her. She jumped up as if ready to fight off a carjacker.

            “Take it easy. I’m just a fellow Log Slider.” He was an older guy, probably close to eighty, thin with deep vertical lines in his tanned face, handsome. He wore a Detroit Tigers baseball cap, a thick blue hoodie, the kind construction workers wear, and black jeans. On his feet were a pair of flip flops, good ones, like someone might wear at a resort. He sat leaned up against the dune under a grassy overhang. He’d been there a while. There was a book laid open on the sand. Rennie read the title upside down. Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake. She’d just finished it.

            “Oh. You scared me. That’s all.” Rennie said, smiling. “I didn’t think anybody would be down here this time of year.”

            “Same here. You scared the crap out of me. Thought you were an avalanche.” His laugh was a loud party laugh, the kind that made everyone delighted and glad they came. “And what brings you here, if I might ask?”

He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his hoodie pocket, drew one out, tapped it on his watch and lit it with a Bic lighter which looked like he might’ve just found it on the beach.

            “My bucket list. Always wanted to do Log Slide but not when other people were around.” He nodded in agreement and Rennie continued, “What about you? You look like you’ve been here for a bit.”

            “A couple days. Thinking about things, you know. That takes some time.” He looked almost Hemingwayesque when he said this and Rennie wondered if he was a writer. “And I’m also taking care of some other business while I’m down here.”

            “Fishing?” She laughed. Nobody really fished from the beach on Lake Superior. “Ah. I get it. You’re a rockhound. Well, this is the place for it, although the pickings are way better down at Agate Beach, but I bet you know that.”

            “No. No fishing or looking for agates. Done all that, for sure. No, I came down that crazy dune on my ass to end my life down here.” He looked at her steady, right in the eye. His eyes were blue like Superior and as clear. Age hadn’t clouded his eyes, his eyes could have been those of a twenty-year old. And they were beautiful, his eyes. She shook her head to break the spell.

            He’d clearly nested down here at the bottom of Log Slide. Tucked himself in to ponder, she guessed, but was he planning on dying here from some disease or was he going to end his own life? And how would he do that?  Was there a gun under that heaped up sleeping bag, a knife? Was he going to walk into the surf and drown himself?

How he would die seemed mysterious but not that he’d chosen this place to do it. Rennie often thought she’d be content to lie down on Superior’s beach and fade away when it was her time. Not today, though. Today her plan was to head back up the dune. Check this big item off her bucket list. Well, it wasn’t really a bucket list. It was a triumph over fear list, a totally different thing. Not being a scaredy-cat, that was it. That had become her life’s work as an old lady.

            “You sure that’s what you want to do? Die down here on the beach by yourself? I can call someone? Family? I’ve got my phone right here.” Rennie held up her phone. “If it’s too hard going back up, we can call for help. They’re good at rescuing folks.” She wondered whether she should just go ahead and call. What about his wife? Did he have one? Or his kids? He must have friends. He was too friendly to not have friends.

            “I’m not depressed. And no, there’s nobody you need to call. There’s nobody to call. Everybody’s gone. Anyway, this has been my plan all along. This is how I want to wrap it up.” He shifted how he was sitting, wincing as he rearranged himself on the sand. “I’ve got cancer up one side and down the other. It’s a miracle I got my crapped-up-self down here, to be honest. And if you’re looking for a gun, don’t worry. I got some good pills.” He laughed again, that big party laugh. She decided that she might love him.