The Wild by Joanne Rixon
April 17, 2075
Wapato Hills Park
When Edison Elementary lets out, Zephyr Tan’s second grade class bursts from the school building like water breaking through a beaver dam, and he’s at the front of the wave. First, second, and third grade are in the new building and share the new playground that extends from the first floor gym into a multi-story playspace with moving tunnels and ladders and a soccer pitch on the roof, which the second graders can look down on from the windows of their classroom.
Last year, Zephyr and his best friend Carmen had turned the tower on the third story of the playground into their own little fort, and always gone up there after school. The playground referees keep the covered playgrounds open for five hours after school ends, so kids can get exercise and have fun. There are also three other soccer fields and two baseball diamonds but mostly kids like the climbing nets and the team swings. The playgrounds get crowded.
Usually Zephyr and Carmen find kids to play with for a few hours until Zephyr’s brother Paul picks them both up before dinner, but today Carmen is at the dentist. Rowan and Timothy started their game before lunch—the game where they call Zephyr weird in all the different ways they can think of. When Carmen gets back tomorrow she'll tell Timothy that he's the one who smells like a ferret, but today Zephyr just wants to escape to another planet.
He jogs past the playspace and around a soccer pitch toward the trees. The Wapato Wild is a park, technically, but the part of it that’s next to Edison Elementary isn’t very park-like. Carmen says it used to be a neighborhood, that when her mom was a kid there was a big fire that burned a whole bunch of houses down to their foundations. Afterward the city built safer homes in towers for families who lost their houses, and for years and years people weren’t allowed into the park at all, while it recovered from being burned down.
Zephyr doesn’t know if that’s true or not. There’s no sign of any houses in the Wild, just a narrow little path through thin tree trunks. The park sign says, “Stay On The Path,” and has pictures of wild animals that live in the park, but the gate is wide open.
Underneath the branches, the low gray clouds are blocked out so well it almost seems like the sun has gone down. Gloomy shadows layer in the stillness. It makes Zephyr think of Princess Tesserine traveling the galaxy, looking for her lost sister on alien planets. If he was in Princess Tesserine of the Five Hundred Solar Systems, this would be a planet where no human had ever been before, and he’d be searching for a clue to find the location of the interstellar gangsters who were looting vulnerable planets and scamming aliens who didn’t use money and kidnapping Tesserine’s sister.
Zephyr arrives at a branch in the path and takes the right-hand fork. He zips his coat up to his chin, shivering, and presses the button to turn on the warming layer under the fabric. His coat changes color from blue to neon orange when he tells it to, too. The kids say an old bear still lives here in the Wild, along with the skunks and nutria and pine martens, but he’s not afraid. The farther he goes into the woods, the taller the trees get, like as tall as the third floor classrooms where Zephyr will have third grade next year.
In science class, Zephyr and Carmen learned that trees can live for hundreds of years, and they keep getting bigger the whole time. These trees are Douglas Firs, which aren’t actually firs, or pines, or spruces; they’re their own thing. Like Zephyr, who is also just his own weird thing. Except Zephyr doesn’t have a lot of other Zephyrs growing around him, just Carmen, who is like a maple tree growing next to a Douglas Fir. Which is okay.
He also has his brother, Paul, who is in high school. Paul wouldn’t be a maple tree. He’s more like a sequoia: sturdy, solitary, never complains about anything. If someone called him a smelly ferret, he’d just shrug and be okay.
Zephyr doesn’t feel okay. He cranes his neck way back and looks up the trunk of a tree at the sky. Birds fly between the branches, dark shadows against the bright sky. This tree might be a sequoia; it’s pretty tall. If he had a spaceship, he could be that high right now.
If he even had a glider, he could climb this tree and then jump off and glide away, just like the kids at Paul’s high school who go downtown, go up skyscrapers and climb over the fences at the edge of the rooftop parks and glide off. You’re not supposed to, obviously, but Paul tells stories about these kids who go gliding all the time. They fly all the way through the buildings, down the hill and out to the edge of the water and land on the floating docks by the Puyallup Rivermouth or Ruston East train stations. Then they run right onto the train and get away before anyone catches them.
Some of them do graffiti, too, Paul says. Paul says it’s all dumb and they’re going to get caught, but secretly Zephyr thinks it sounds fantastic. When he’s in high school, he’s going to be one of the kids who goes gliding off the skyscrapers and has a graffiti name that’s recognized all over the city.
The path takes him along the south side of the upper half of the Wapato Wilds, and opens out at the Grassland Bridge. This bridge is low enough that if you tried to jump off it with a glider you’d probably just crash into the trains underneath, the big artery of train tracks that runs through the city. The bridge is really wide, like the width of two whole blocks, and the railings are twice as tall as Zephyr and solid concrete, so nobody can see over the edges and you can barely hear the trains.
This is as far as he’s ever gone into the Wild by himself. His class came here, back in September. They saw deer and a porcupine and planted native grasses with an enthusiastic woman who was a park ecologist, who taught them all about re-wilding. Now it’s spring, and all around Zephyr’s feet are wet green plants he doesn’t know the names of.
Paul knows the names, or he would if they had flowers blooming. You don’t have to know all the plants until high school. For now, Zephyr sees two kinds of grass: short, and knee-high and soaking his pants. All around the grasses are bushy stands of arcing vines that are starting to grow leaves.
A man with a shaggy dog and bulky blue headphones in his ears jogs past on the main walking trail. Zephyr’s path is hidden behind the tall grasses and bushes; he doesn’t think the man saw him at all, and he likes feeling like Princess Tesserine sneaking through a city of enemies with only her trustworthy companion Luto beside her.
When the man is gone, Zephyr keeps wandering, deeper into the unknown. He’s never been here, although he’s been to the neighborhood on the other side. Right on the south end of the Wild is a cluster of skyscrapers sheltering people blown into Tacoma by tornados and hurricanes. None of those kids go to his school—they have their own in one of the buildings there, t’aqa Elementary, which means Salal Elementary. But there’s an urgent care in one of the multi-use towers. Last year Paul broke his wrist trying to do tricks on his friend’s gyrocycle, and the auto-scheduler sent them to that urgent care so they didn’t have to wait. Zephyr went along and sat in the waiting room while Paul got his wrist fixed.
The trees at the other end of the bridge are huge; ferns and berry bushes completely cover the sloping ground beneath them. Zephyr only remembers the names of the delicious ones: evergreen huckleberries, and salmon berries that are growing in their new leaves for the summer. Blackberries are an easy one, they grow everywhere and are the only berry bush that tries to stab you.
Like aliens, Zephyr thinks. Alien plants on an alien planet that Tesserine has to trek through on foot because her spaceship needs to be repaired and she’s lost and trying to find someone…he ducks under swooping cedar branches, feeling like an adventurer when his path turns sharply away from the main trail and east toward the lake.
Deeper in the woods, the trees are impossibly tall and the bushes fill up the spaces between them like helmeted guards with space lasers patrolling the wall of a fortress. The ferns are bigger, too, and the path winds around moss-covered boulders, glistening with rain that has slowly dripped from the tree tops long after it stopped falling from the sky. Roots knob up out of the leaf-covered ground and catch at Zephyr’s feet, and twice he steps in some kind of animal poop. Probably just deer, not bear. He’s pretty sure.
It reminds Zephyr of the first season of The Five Hundred Solar Systems, when Princess Tesserine is rescued from the fire as a baby after her parents are betrayed by her uncle, and Nomo, the guard who rescues her, has to go on the run through the galaxy to keep her safe, and they get stuck for five episodes on the swamp planet Squaquag.
Crows call from the treetops; squirrels yell at him from overhead. Zephyr has a better coat than Tesserine did, at least, one that adapts to the weather. He finds a good stick, solid and straight and without branchy bits on it, and he uses it to smack away the blackberry vines that reach over his head, nearly blocking the path.
The smack of the stick is satisfying, like crunching on potato crisps or freeze-dried zucchini slices. Too bad he doesn’t have any snacks with him, but he ate his zukes at second recess, instead of playing velcroball, because Carmen wasn’t at school today.
He doesn’t want to be grumpy, though. He wants to be bold and valorous like Princess Tesserine. The blackberry vines turn to alien snake monsters, reaching out tentacles to grip and grab and tangle. Zephyr strikes out—thwap! Snap! Swoosh! Crack!
At a break in the blackberries, a rock that comes up to Zephyr’s waist interrupts the flow of the vines. The blackberries part around the stone, and when Zephyr cuts the plant’s limbs with the stick, a tunnel opens along the side of the rock.
Zephyr advances.
The top layer of thick, green vines grew last summer and wintered over, and is now sprouting fresh green leaves and thin branches. Beneath those branches, a tangle of brown, dead vines breaks easily. Zephyr discovers that the arc of green holds itself up, even when the brown underneath is cut away.
Zephyr chops and chops until there is a cavern he can crawl into. He pushes the broken vines to the side and keeps going, deeper into the shadows. The cavern extends through a tunnel, along the hillside the length of Zephyr’s body, and then widens again: the inner heart of the secret. The fortress’ vault. Zephyr has won it from the wild. The hostile thorns could not stop him.
He sits, heart beating fast. Carmen is going to think this is so galactic. They could come here after school every day. They could camp out here and stay the night and never go back to stupid second grade.
Maybe he falls asleep for a little bit, but he wakes up when he hears rustling. A twig snaps. Footsteps, heavier than the noise a squirrel or a rabbit makes in the leaves.
“Zephyr?” It’s his older brother, Paul. He doesn’t want to answer, to give away the secret.
“Zephyr?” Paul’s voice cracks. “Zeph? Come on, Zeph, please be out here.” He trails off.
Paul doesn’t usually sound worried like that. Zephyr feels guilty.
He scoots back along the tunnel, making plenty of rustling noises as he goes. When he sticks his head out of the first opening in the vines, Paul is quickly rounding a tree, his hat and coat bright with lights in the dark woods.
“Zeph! Holy crap, Zeph, what are you doing all the way out here? I’ve been walking for thirty minutes!”
“There aren’t any bears,” Zephyr says. “They told us in school that they aren’t ever going to have bears in the Wild, just coyotes and foxes and bobcats.”
“Just coyotes!” Paul throws his hands up. “Do you want to fight a coyote!”
Zephyr shrugs. He could probably fight a coyote and win, he’s pretty sure.
Paul sighs and folds up his long legs to sit on the rock, which is a nice flat rock for sitting on now that Zephyr has cleared away the blackberry thorns. “What are you doing out here, anyway? You were supposed to wait for me after school.”
“Everyone was playing.”
“So, what, you thought you’d just disappear?”
“I didn’t think you’d worry.” He can tell Paul’s really upset, so he doesn’t snap at him for thinking Zephyr’s a baby who can’t walk in the park alone. “My coat told you where I was, anyway.”
Paul pulls Zephyr into a long hug. Then he pushes him away and holds him at arm’s length. “Were you out here pretending to be Princess Tesserine? Were you exploring an unknown solar system?”
Zephyr tries to look innocent, and fails.
“Oh my stars,” Paul says, just like Luto, Tesserine’s most faithful companion, and Zephyr hugs him back.
END