ONCE UPON A TIME there was a young and earnest couple who married and had, by some miracle, three beautiful children in quick succession.

The couple loved their children very much. They wanted to raise them well. They had the very best intentions. They especially wanted their children to care about the world beyond themselves. They wanted their children’s lives to be filled with faith and sacrifice for others.

And that’s exactly how they raised them.

The children wore face masks religiously, washed their hands many times a day; never went to parties except on Zoom; limited their proximity to other people at all times and regularly received their injections. Hand sanitizer was always by the front door. The father read updates from the healthy ministry aloud every morning and they all watched the news together at night. They were a happy family, bound by the mystical ties of the state religion.

The years passed and, before they knew it, the younger son was ready for college. (His siblings had gently passed away after years of chronic illness, but the parents were thankful that they had received their booster shots right before their deaths so they lived in quiet certainty of having done the best for them.) Their son packed his masks and a few other things and headed for his first semester.

So often, as you know, that first semester is dangerous to the faith of young people. And so it was with him. He made dangerous friends.

One day, his roommate stood by his desk and pointed to a fly that had sailed into the dorm room and was feeding on a speck of peanut butter on the desk.

“See that fly?” the roommate said. “If germs were as dangerous as they say they are we would all be dead because flies are everywhere.” He grabbed a fly swatter and SLAM! The little fly was dead. The roommate then broke out in maniacal and wicked laughter.

The son was shaken, deeply shaken. It was true! Flies never wash their hands and pick up germs everywhere. They are “vectors of contagion.” They should have killed off humanity a long time ago!!

The young are so very impressionable when it comes to new ideas.

The son returned home at winter break and then for the summer, his mother being eager for his help since the father was showing more and more signs of early onset dementia.

Just before the summer break ended, the son blurted out the truth to his mother: He wasn’t going back to school. He wasn’t going to take the next booster.

His mother’s eyes (he had never really seen her full face) expressed such grief that it tore right through his heart. And then anger. She was angry.

“How could you?!” she said. “After all we have sacrificed for you!”

There was too much sadness between them. He left home the next day, quietly in the early morning.

He had gotten two small inheritances from uncles who had passed away prematurely without children and he had wisely used some of the money a year before to buy a car. He headed west. He had no idea where he was going or what he would do. He just headed west. Oh, America! How beautiful you are! He loved his country despite everything. He loved it more than ever.

After driving for about five hours in the country, he saw a campground with cabins by the side of the road. There was a big sign that said, “Cabins for rent.”

He stopped, asked about the terms and decided to rent a cabin on the spot. “I think you’ll like it here,” said the owner, who had a grizzled face and wore no mask. His eyes twinkled mischievously.

For the first few days, the young man took walks in the woods, swam in the campground pool and set up a cozy little home in his cabin. He had a small stove, a refrigerator and one lamp.

On the fourth day, he met an old man who lived a few cabins away. The man had a gray beard and wore a floppy sun hat. He invited the young man to dinner. They sat before a fire in camp chairs and ate tomatoes and beans that the man had grown in a garden behind his cabin and eggs laid by his chickens, who lived in a coop there too. Everything was delicious.

The young man tried to bring up the subject of why he was there, to talk about the state of America and how it contrasted with things he had heard about the distant past, but the old man wasn’t interested in talking about any of that. He told the boy about the best paths to walk on and where to find blueberries. He took him to the garden and put a handful of chocolate-colored dirt in the young man’s hands. “You see that?” the old man said. “I created that without any tilling at all! I used wood chips and leaves from the woods.”

The boy knew nothing about dirt, but pretended he was interested.

For two months, they worked side by side in the garden, prepared for winter and went for long walks. Sometimes at night, the young man would go out by himself and sit on a swing that was part of a set in middle of the campground. No children came to the campground anymore so he might as well use them. He leaned back and looked up at the stars, so bright and clear. He inhaled deeply and swung back and forth, back and forth. His long legs looked ridiculous on the swing but he reached as close to the sky with his feet as he could possibly get.

For the first time in his short life, he felt free.

He was free from anxiety. A thousand daily occasions of possible contamination and all the petty rituals were things of the past. He was free from fear. He decided right then and there that he wouldn’t even fear death anymore. It was as if this conviction sprang up inside him from some mysterious inner source.

When they came to arrest him, he was calm and almost grateful. The old man walked with the officers to the car and pled his case for his friend, but it didn’t matter.

He was charged with being an “imminent threat to public safety” and convicted.

I know this may be hard to believe, but those days in prison were the happiest of his life, even happier than the months in the campground.

He made friends — the most interesting people were the ones in jail — and he wrote letters to his mother. They were reconciled and at peace. They loved each other very much, but he didn’t regret his move. Most of all, he found answers in his prison cell, answers to the most important questions of life, to questions he had never had time to ask because he had always been so busy “keeping safe.”

When he fell asleep for the last time in his prison cot, after the fourth booster, he was not afraid. He was ready.

Death was not the enemy he had been told it was. No, in his case, it was the reward.

— Comments —

Johanna writes:

Great story, Laura. What was perplexing to me, however, was how did the camp and its members avoid prison?

Laura writes:

Thanks. Great question. I will have to try and find out. Maybe they had fake “vaccine passports” and the boy didn’t believe in that.

Laura adds:

Okay, so I did a little research, talked to the family and everything.

Um, they said the owner of the campground was the miscreant brother of the local police chief who had connections and, even though he couldn’t stand his brother, was hoping he would come around.

As for the old man, he was ridiculous and old and they expected him to die soon. Things have since changed, of course, and old people like him are arrested, as they should be.

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