“THE OPTIMISTIC CRAG” by Ethan Harris
 
The will to go on is the most powerful element of human nature. Where there is no will, there is no life. There is no hope. There is no breath. There is nothing.

Where there is a will, there is a way. Last night I watched a documentary of how three fifteen-year-old boys clambered across a mountain ridge, when the temperature was almost high enough to cook an ant as it walked across the ground. They ran out of water. Then their teammates fell behind, including an old seventy-something year old man who was their guide. They saw mirages, they froze at the coming of rattlesnakes. They reached the very top of a ravine, where 70 meters below a river was gushing. A river—Life.
They could not scale down the ravine. There was no where else to turn do, no way down. One of the boys hoisted his pack over his head and watched it tumble down into what seemed more an abyss than a ravine. And he wiped the sweat off his hands onto his shorts and began clambering doing the sheer face of rock, encouraging the two boys behind him. It was heart-stopping to watch.

A torture in the sun, their tongues like wood pressed against sandpaper, their said. They lay under a jutting rock on a jutting ledge, grateful to be out of the sun’s noonday glare, ready to die. Waiting to die. One of the boys asked for a pen. The other boy refused to give it to him—you don’t need to write a letter. We’re not going to die. He didn’t say it because he believed it, but because he was too exhausted to reach for the pen.
Until one of the boys—the one who’d thrown his back—had a vision. Of his funeral, of his open coffin, of his parents and younger brother sobbing around him. Freakish, a nightmare. And he got up all of a sudden, as quickly as he could, and continued down the mountain. The other two followed him.

When they reached the bottom, they kept going. Around each bend, they could hear the gushing water very clearly, but they couldn’t see it. One of the boys could no longer see from dehydration, and he collapsed. Soon, he would die.

But the other two made it. They found the water. They rushed back and forth, trying to revive the third boy. The second time they rushed to the river, they saw a random group of men and women cannooing along. The adults heard their cries, rushed to help, radioed for assistance, and saved their two lives.
Man versus nature… man’s emotional will versus nature’s blind existence.

“Angreek87″