Fiction by Allyson Hoffman
Colin had wanted to hike up the sand dune in Sleeping Bear National Park in peace. His feet were slow. His legs were tired. His knees ached as if he’d spent his past 20 years squatting behind home plate or curled in the hull of a small sailboat.
The expanse of sandy slope stretched endlessly above him. The few dune grasses seemed to wave to him — hello or farewell, he wasn’t sure. He could smell the fresh lake air, could picture the blue of Lake Michigan that awaited him on the other side.
It would be a beautiful place to die alone.
He expected that once he reached the top of the dune he would watch the world come to an end from there and not have to hike back down. Even if the world wasn’t coming to an end, he didn’t think he’d be able to walk the steep mile and a half back to his car in the empty state park parking lot.
He’d last come to the park with his boyfriend, Max, just a few months before Max died. They’d hiked for hours, pausing to kiss under the shade of peeling beech trees. That was years ago, before Colin’s knees and hips creaked and pained him every morning as he eased himself out of bed to stand.
His breath hitched in his chest, and he slowed his walk, leaned on his walking stick, and closed his eyes. The wind was soft against his stubbled face, cooling him from the Indian Summer heat. He thought he might rest there for a moment, though he was afraid to sit down before reaching the top.
The thunder of an engine roared across the wind. When Colin opened his eyes, he saw a red truck at the bottom of the dune, racing forward to climb up the incline. It nosed into the body of sand, and the driver reversed, tires squealing. The truck surged forward again, this time its front tires grabbing hold of the sand before sliding backward.
If he were younger, Colin would have told the truck driver and his girlfriend — he could see her dark hair blowing through the passenger window — to get the hell out of the park. If it had been an ordinary day, and not at the end of the world, a park ranger would never have let them get this far.
Gray smoke clouds billowed from the exhaust pipe as the driver backed the truck up again, and when he drove forward, again, he got stuck in the sand.
The woman threw open her door. She hopped down from the truck, crossed in front as if switch seats. Colin could see her arguing with the driver. He imagined they were young and in love, as he had once been, and he imagined this to be their last fight ever.
The driver finally slipped down from the cab and climbed into the passenger seat. The woman reversed the truck away from the foot of the dune. Then she pulled a U-turn and took off the way the truck came.
Colin had wanted to be on the dune alone, and now that he was alone, he wished for the truck to return. He supposed that if the truck had made it up the dune he might have raised his hands and asked them for a ride. The sand felt hot, blowing around his ankles. He sipped from his water cooler, one of those gallon jugs that had been advertised during every commercial break when the end was first announced. He was rationing the water, unsure of how slow his climb would be, how long the wait would be that night.
The roaring engine returned. Colin turned around and saw in the far distance, at the edge of the park, the red truck speeding across the sandy road. The woman was driving so fast she would either tip or crash, he was certain.
But instead, when she came to the foot of the dune, she had enough speed to keep going up, tires spinning bursts of sand as the truck went higher, higher, so steep that the truck was almost perpendicular to the ground, so steep that, if the truck arched back, they’d have a very long way to fall.
And yet they climbed, their truck growing smaller above Colin’s head until it disappeared into the space where the dune summit met the sky.
