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So, after that, I didn’t think too much about her anymore, with her only sporadically making appearances in dreams that happened late at night and left me waking up harder than a block of cement. I tried to block it out, convincing myself I was just fantasizing about a girl I would never be with, but it didn’t stop. She kept showing up over and over. Not all the time, but enough that her memory never faded away.
Even after I went to college.
I had chosen to go to college without a major, which was a huge leap for me. I almost always knew my goals and worked toward them with a ferocity that meant everything else fell to the wayside. I was okay with that. I didn’t particularly have many friends, nor did I want any, preferring the solitude and the company of nature. I would much rather spend a day in the woods, tracking a rabbit, than going dancing or drinking at a party. If I was going to be around people, I wanted to be near my ailing mother and my sister.
That mindset led me to choosing a smaller school, just north of Tennessee in Kentucky. There were still mountain ranges from the Appalachians nearby, and the school itself was more technical based. I liked the arts just fine, but schools with big programs tended to have the party atmosphere, and schools with big sports programs tended to have all the frat groups. I didn’t care for any of that.
So, a smaller school in Kentucky, where I could spend my off time working and volunteering at shelters and ranches or head back home to Ashford, was much more my speed. I got to know how commercial groups worked with livestock and how I could modify some of those lessons to track wild animals. Eventually, my combined analog and technological abilities at tracking started to mesh in a way that I was getting noticed while still in school. There was a once-monthly course at a university in West Virginia that was conducted by the US Fisheries and Wildlife Service and seemed to be my calling. I had already gotten information about their program and was excited to join it when I started my sophomore year.
The federal government wasn’t exactly my first choice for an employer, but it was hard to turn them down. The Fisheries and Wildlife Service was the biggest and most comprehensive group tracking animals in the country, and the pay was pretty good. Plus, they would put me wherever I wanted to live, so long as it was somewhere that I could do my job, and that meant I might even be able to move back home and be near my mom and sister. My mother was in poor health, and my sister was starting to act out. I wanted to be nearby to help as best I could before it was too late.
Still, I had a few more years of school left before I could think about where I wanted to be and coming home now was about being there for the holidays. If I made it through my freshman year with good grades, I could start the courses for the feds and maybe have a job waiting for me after I graduated. As it was, I was going home with great grades, a little money, and a duffel bag with three changes of clothes and a toothbrush.
The bus picked me up early that morning, and I settled into a seat, stuffing the bag against the window like a pillow and taking a nap. Usually, I tried to stay awake on bus rides as I was a pretty heavy sleeper. I had missed a stop before by sleeping through it. But since I started school and realized I was going to need to embrace technology at least on some level for the job I wanted to do, I got a fancy watch that had an alarm on it. The alarm vibrated me awake a couple of hours later, just before we pulled into Ashford.
Ashford’s stop was tiny. It was one corner, just down the street from Dina’s Diner in the heart of what would be considered downtown. The bus barely stopped and would have barrel rolled right through it had I not stood up the second the door opened. Not many people got on or off at Ashford. The place was like quicksand. Either you lived in Ashford, or you drove through it. Nobody seemed to ever just visit.
As I stepped off the bus and the doors shut behind me, I paused to take in the moment. Ashford was a tiny little town, nestled in the mountains, with views of the Appalachians from every corner of the town. It only had a few streets where shops and businesses were, but a long road winding from east to west would bring you either up the largest mountain on one side or to the shopping center area at the corner of town. It was where four different towns met at one spot, and since all of them were rural, they stuck a few stores that wouldn’t survive in one of them there to service all four.
