Something desperate made Jared do a desperate thing. It made him slip off the beach into the maze of churning breakers hunched in the mad black ocean. One moment he was perched quietly watching those people get drunk on his parent’s beer in the peripheral glow of the fire, and the next he was running along the beach, and the next he was up to his hips in piercing cold water, and going deeper—the warmth of fire and the party left behind for the embrace of the vast pacific. Now, after a long battle amid the sharp rock, and clapping surf that left him bloody and shivering uncontrollably, he clung to the flat head of a protruding rock and looked out across the expanse of dark water. Over his shoulder, the only thing he could pick out was the blinking speck of the bonfire. That’s when he realized what the desperate thing was. It was The Valley of the Shadow of Death. That was it. Geology class was such a crock. He knew Kelly’s invitation was meant to evaporate: a flippant throwback to the kid with the city of Portland tied around his ankle. But it wasn’t about them. On this rock, she along with the others were only soft winks in the orange fire. This was more profound.
He never thought of The Valley as a hot place, not like a fire or hell. For him it was always cold. Cold like television and pro sports, like suburban sprawl and the American way. Cold like school, like all those code words polite people used to stay polite. Societies are put together to obscure The Valley and he saw now that he had been trudging between it’s margins for years. And now there it was writhing in front of him. Finely unmasked. They stared into the fire and sang and talked, but he gawked at what stood behind them. It was the chance to trade all that in: climb into the gaping maw of leviathan. Because there is only one thing to do with The Valley of the Shadow of Death—get to the bottom of it. Scramble, claw, crawl. Find the final slough of despond, take your last living breath, dive in, and swim down into it’s muddy depths grasping for that one pearl handle, that opens into the piercing light of pure life.
And now here he was. This far out. The whole ocean set against him. His hands and feet dripped blood. But he knew there was a long way to go. Many dark hours lay ahead, because he could sense the bottom still further out. He recited the rest of the verse against the thundering breakers, and jumped into the rising tide.
