by JZ Murdock

Created on: September 19, 2007   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

Marking Time

-Please note that based on a true event, this story has some rather unsettling scenes in it, but nothing truly graphic.

The snow had been falling all around us. It was unusually cold. It was 1968. Often, I think back to that seminal day. Looking even now out my study window, staring into the snow beyond, I struggle with those two weary banes of every thinking person: those melancholy and nostalgic memories.

Where am I now? What have I accomplished? Have I done enough?

The usual questions one asks of oneself when the "blue-study" strikes. Whenever I feel I am getting nowhere; whenever I feel I am only "marking time" in life, searching out nothing in the adventurous veins of all possible human existences, forsaking only my friends, and family, for the time being; it is these thoughts that always come back to haunt my memories.

That cold winter day, so long ago, I had been sitting on an ice covered boulder. My backpack was beneath me in a vain attempt to maintain some semblance of body heat, at least at some reasonable temperature. I remember wondering then, how 13 years ago, on what was the day of my birth; I could possibly have foreseen this event.

"Indeed," I wondered, "had I foreseen it, would I have taken steps to avoid it?"

I thought not. It had been my determination to find adventure, wherever it may lay. Life, at the time, was such a bore to me. I was tired of my bookworm tendencies. I wanted to Experience, to drink first hand of the Cup of Knowledge. Up in the clearing behind me, near the trees, I could hear the grunts of several of my fellow Civil Air Patrol Cadets, straining themselves to their limits.

Gently, an evergreen tree swayed before my eyes in the chilled, winter's breeze.
Images of a book I had recently read kept flashing before my mind's eye. It was a story from South America. You know it. Everyone's heard of it by now. In 1972, a team of an Uruguayan soccer team from a Catholic school had been traveling from their home country to their opponent's homeland of Argentina. In route they had crashed into the Andes Mountains. To survive (also the name of the book on their experiences), they had been forced to eat the frozen corpses of their recently deceased team mates, raw, in order to get the highest caloric value possible from their flesh. Those with relatives on board that flight had vowed not to eat a family member until none of them were any longer living on that mountain. I recently saw the cinematic version of that story, tastefully

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