The Push & the Pull Read Online Free PDF Page B

closely at house, farm or derelict store might slow his accelerated speed, might diminish the cleansing wind. Too elated to pay attention as he enters a valley and too consumed to do so as he leaves, he only becomes fully attentive at some point just before the drop levels out. Some valleys are long and invite observation, contemplation, even social reflection. Two different Protestant churches in a single valley, us and them behind nearly identical white clapboard buildings. Other valleys are more fickle. The inviting drop. The spurning climb.
    The longer a valley is, the more likely he is to look left and right, topry his gaze out of the road’s grey chute. So only now, inertia slipping from his pace, the next climb beginning to loom, does he notice a bright orange periscope breaking the green wave of the next forested ridge. A fire tower.
    Although the fire tower isn’t very close to the highway, it is in North America, so there’s no doubt it’s accessible by car or truck. If they can reach it, so can Andrew.
    His pannier zippers begin to jiggle as he forsakes the highway asphalt for a gravel side road. Minutes later, these same zippers beat out a steady percussion as he leaves the side road for the half-overgrown bush trail he hopes runs up to the fire tower. The tower would be useless if it were in a valley, not on the peak of a ridge, so he must now scale the same height as if he were still on the reliably homogenous asphalt but must do so on the wildly varied terrain of a switchback bush trail. Dirt crumbles and coughs beneath his crawling tires. Every skittering rock and each additional turn pose an unavoidable question: why? Because he wants to see the forest, not just the trees. Because a map isn’t an adequate image, and he wants to see where he’s headed. Because bike and tower are both simple metal exoskeletons, every bone naked. Cars are still audible on the highway below him, racing past with their closed doors and lowered hoods, with their unseen chambers housing unfelt explosions. Metal and sweat send Andrew crawling away from human evolution into ancestral skeletons and non-electronic technology.
    A circular saw blade whirrs inside each thigh. Water sloshes down the croaking pipe of his throat. Away from the highway’s busy trough, the May air hangs still on the trail and lets the midday sun find its strength. A sharp turn and a steep ascent obscure the once-looming tower. Finally, a scimitar of curve and climb thrusts him toward the tower’s multi-legged base.
    The uniformly long grass of this small, treeless clearing is infrequently cut. Barely pedalling now, lungs scraped clean, he reaches, touches and finally stops at the tower’s warm metal legs. He unclips, drinks again.
    Dismounting, he is tackled by the usual pain. The cupboard doors of his trapezoids have sprung their fit. The back of each knee straightens onto a coarse grinding wheel. His shipwrecked pelvis.
    Like those of many urban fire escapes, the ladder on the fire tower does not extend all the way to the ground. The deterrent gap of roughly three metres would be enragingly anticlimactic had he slogged here on foot. As is, he’s able to roll the bike beneath, climb onto its top tube and debate a tremendously unwise standing vertical jump. He just makes the standing jump from the bike to the ladder’s lowest rung. The padding of his cycling gloves, the gloves that he forgot to remove, is palpably soft, so clearly vulnerable, so much like his own skin amid the stronger ribs and tibia of the metal ladder and its surrounding cage. Fists just catching, idiocy barely confessed, he finally rests, hanging, his cramped shoulders easing apart in the still air. Ascending the ladder, he leaves his helmet on despite the sweat gathering within it.
    A cylindrical cage of metal ribs surrounds the ladder. His laboured exhalations are almost chuckles, not quite tears, at the comparison between his body crawling up