From a Distance

From 1979. I wanted to write a novel for the semester during my first year in college (I was 19), so I enrolled in a creative writing course, and asked the professor if I could do just that. He wanted a sampling of my writing before he would commit to giving me the entire semester to write one story, so I submitted this short story below and it did the trick. He gave me the semester to write a novel, and I wrote Dandelion Wine.

Both stories are built on the essence of Starsky and Hutch (but the professor didn’t know that). I also like to think I write much better now, all these years later, but I present this story in its original form (complete with bad edits and possibly typos), long before I had the experience of decades to polish my writing. I hope you enjoy it just the same!

–Dandelion (this is also how I came to use the name ‘Dandelion’ to write S&H fiction; this was the first story I wrote channeling the essence of our boys)

The sun was bright orange; late afternoon departed so quickly. Dean cursed silently to himself, wishing he could tear away from his discovery long enough to watch the sunset. But he rationalized it away—there would be another day to do so. Instead, he knelt in the rocky creek bed where a stream had cut a deep crevice two thousand years earlier and examined the skeletal remains of a Canis lupus carcass through the synthetic window of his helmet.

At least, he thought it was Canis lupus. He lowered his head in concentration, closing his eyes to shut out the image, hoping he could recall some fact he had learned and stored away, some bit of information he had almost forgotten that would help him make a definite determination. But nothing came to mind. His job was to report back to Mother Ship: Was there life on Earth? He was not here to do an extensive study on anything, no matter how much he may have wanted to.

A pebble rolled down the bank, breaking his thought train, forcing him to look upward to the horizon. “Michael?” he called curiously. His gloved hands were stroking the clean bone at his feet. Could he ever explain, even to Michael, how he had been affected by the penetrating gaze of the wolf photograph he had cherished since boyhood? As far as he was concerned the sunset could wait another day, and Michael would just have to tolerate his passion for being this close to Canis lupus.

“Michael?” he called again, raising his voice because his first query had received no answer.

Nothing.

It was then he felt the initial twinge, then a creeping chill along the length of his spine. He and Michael were professionals; if the man were there, he would have answered. But if it wasn’t Michael shifting sand at the top of the bank, then who could it be? Except for some species of flora, life had disappeared from this planet two thousand years earlier.

He rose to his feet and removed the communicator from his belt, speaking quietly into it. “Michael, are you there?”

Warm laughter answered him. “You sound as if you’ve seen a ghost,” came the friendly reply.

For a split second, Dean thought he had. On the bank above him, two yellow eyes met his stare. His heart seemed to stop, paralyzed by the sudden image. In a multi-second, the face was gone. Dean swallowed, feeling the adrenaline pounding through his veins.

“Dean?” the voice on the communicator broke his concentration.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” he managed to whisper, tucking the device into his belt again. He couldn’t move for a while as he stared at the bones before him, pushing away the suspicion he wanted so badly to believe: Canis lupus wasn’t extinct.

“That’s absurd,” he heard himself say, lifting his gaze to the bank again where he thought he’d seen those piercing eyes. But suppose … ?

Professionalism gave in to human curiosity. He scrambled up the bank nearly on his hands and knees, barely standing before he came face to face with the embodiment of his childhood dreams: Canis lupus, alive and well.

The animal was poised with a grace he had never imagined; it was a beautiful gray with yellow eyes, black-tipped ears and a thick ruff of fur around its neck. Nothing in the photographs had prepared him for such a wonder, nothing in such dimension, of such substance, or even flexibility as the wolf took a step forward, lifting its box muzzle to the wind for a whiff. It was difficult to say at that moment which of the two was more curious about the other.

Dean’s studies had told him the animal had been rendered extinct in 2003—along with just about everything else—and yet, he was certain beyond any doubt, that it was standing, right now, right there, before him.

And he felt no fear. Instead, he was awestruck, stunned by an awakening emotion he had never felt before. He couldn’t explain it, but he expressed it with tears and a mixture of laughing and crying, moving toward the animal, as if in a dance, compelled to grab it, to feel its fur in his hands, the strength of its muscles—but the wolf, perhaps confused, vanished into the brush as quickly as it had appeared.

Dean felt suddenly drained. The realization was almost too much to believe. If Canis lupus was alive … then what else was out there? he wondered. And how?

How did anything come from nothing?

* * *

Michael was relieved to see him, he could tell. “Thought maybe you weren’t coming back,” he said to him. “You’re not going to believe this, but I’ve been watching birds.”

Dean stared at him. “Impossible.”

“I didn’t think you’d believe me,” the younger man replied carefully. “But if you get off the plains, you can find them in the trees. You can hear them. Dear god, Dean, I would swear I have actually seen them.”

Dean swallowed his apprehension. Cautiously, he eased out his words, breaking the promise he had made to himself. “And I thought I saw Canis lupus. Timber wolf. Extinct 2003.”

They stood quietly together, staring into each other’s eyes with the mutual realization that had overcome them. In their silence, a breeze touched them. Slowly, Michael smiled. His admiration for Dean was showing. “Is it possible?” he asked. “Could there really be life on Earth? Fifty years ago they said this place was dead.”

“They said,” Dean observed, his voice subdued.

“You mean, they … lied?”

Dean shrugged, staring away toward an orange horizon. Why would they lie? His people never lied. But then …

“The last expedition was extensive,” he explained quietly. “Life doesn’t end in 2000 and then begin again two thousand years later. It had to have been here all along. They had to have seen it. The others talked about trees … if they were among the trees, like you said, why didn’t they hear the birds?”

* * *

A massive dust cloud billowed against the horizon, so dense it brought the Lander to a standstill. It wasn’t unusual to meet such turbulence; it was even expected on Planet Earth. Winds and rains and violent storms were a natural part of the cosmos. But the vibration that crept up through the Earth into the Lander was a little peculiar, so Dean and Michael emerged from the vehicle at a safe distance and stared intently toward the horizon.

Dean knelt on the ground and rested a gloved hand on the grasses. The Earth was trembling beneath his palm, and before his gaze, the sky was grey with dirt and dust. He waited, patiently, curiously, but not alarmed.

Michael knelt beside him. “Internal tremor?” he asked.

“No,” came the quiet reply. “It’s more like a surface tremor, but unlike anything I’ve ever felt before.”

On the horizon the dust cloud released a large brown mass, almost like a river, moving toward them, but then snaking away. Michael took a few steps forward to get a closer look. As the thundering mass grew closer, Dean began to feel that earlier chill. He, too, stepped forward, a smile creeping onto his mouth.

“Bovidae,” he whispered.

“What?” Michael asked, turning his head.

“Bovidae,” Dean answered him, raising his voice above the roar slowly approaching them. “Oxen-like. Hoofed animals. But there must be a hundred thousand of them.”

The short-horned, heavily-coated bovine moved across the plains past their intent gazes, kicking the dust high into the sky where it was swept away for miles. Bearded heads were low underneath the hump that shaped their massive shoulders, while smaller, muscular hindquarters drove them along at swift speed. In twenty minutes, the migrating herd still had not crossed their path. Dean laughed aloud, telling Michael, “Who’s going to convince me that herd reached that size in the past fifty years? You?”

Michael laughed with him, shaking his head. “Not me. Isn’t it the larger the organism, the longer the gestation? Then I’d say those bovidae, as you call them, have been around a long time indeed.”

Dean was still smiling. The shock of Earth’s life was beginning to diminish. He quietly touched Michael’s arm. “Come on,” he said delightedly, “we’ve got a world to discover.”

* * *

What had once been a flourishing city now lay in desolate ruin, beaten down by eons of rain and wind and storm. As it had done for centuries, the morning sun’s gentle warmth kissed the decaying, deserted metropolis, coaxing new life in its wake. Wild grasses peeked from under the cracked cemented river of byways, and grew out from behind the brick and stone exteriors of weather-worn and crumbling buildings two thousand-plus years old. Birds of varying species, spiders and insects, lived in the crevices and ancient awnings of man-made mounds of steel and plaster. A hare followed a worn path among the grass and moss-covered debris, pausing on its hindquarters from a distance to investigate the first human beings it had come across.

With as much curiosity, Michael and Dean watched the diverse animal species, pointing out their discoveries to one another as they picked a trail through the broken wilderness. Fearlessly, they had left the Lander behind and ventured forth into a domain unequalled by anything they had ever encountered on any one of their travels; to know, however, that the roots of their people had begun—and ended—here, was, in itself, electrifying.

“Can you read that?” Michael asked his companion. “I don’t know much about reading the ancient language.”

Dean studied the chiseled letters on the archway to a large, nearly weather-resistant stone building, and cocked his head. “I think it reads … Museum of Natural History.” He squinted his gaze, squeezing his memory. “Yes, I believe that’s what it is. Say we take a look?”

Dean followed Michael into the dark interior. The marbled floors beneath his feet puzzled him. He was amazed by the smoothness of stone, and yet he was certain it felt even smoother to the touch. “If Earth …” Michael started to speak, but stopped.

“Yes?” Dean coaxed him, watching the younger man play with the blanket of dust on the floor. He removed a light from his belt and waited. “You were saying?”

“I was thinking … if animals are alive out there … and if our ancestors came from Earth, suppose we can breathe the air? Suppose I could just take off the glove and touch the shine?”

Dean smiled at him. “I’ve been wondering the same thing. But I believe we’re on an investigation, not a suicide mission.” He leveled the light for them and followed Michael’s lead.

It had been more than just a wonderment for him. Since that first glimpse of Canis lupus, he’d wanted to remove his protective gear—dance in the sun’s rays, as it were, and breathe in a natural air. But it could prove to be a fatal exercise. The challenge, he decided, would be to keep his want from becoming an obsession.

Broken glassed cases lined the large, open hallways, housing preserved displays of flora and fauna. Most of the man-made or artificially enhanced portrayals of fauna were of species never seen or even heard about on Mother Ship. They were amazing forms of ancient—and now perhaps living—creatures from a time that could only be imagined.

They discovered a large room containing hundreds of thousands of photographs, not strewn about, but placed in such a way, Dean wondered if perhaps they were expected to find them. They spent hours sharing the images with one another, wondering about the thousand words every picture told. They opened books and skimmed through words, compiling tidbits of information, leaving room for their own enormous theories and speculations.

Dean’s hand trailed a path across a dusty page, revealing a photograph that caught his immediate attention. He nudged Michael and pointed to the picture.

“Those are the animals we saw this morning,” Michael exclaimed, encouraging Dean to read for him.

“American bison,” Dean began, reading the grayish, faded print to his best ability. “It says here, ‘they once roamed the continent in the 18th Century in numbers exceeding fifty million before being exterminated in 1889 to 540 animals, a massacre matched only by the extinction of the American passenger pigeon.’ That must be some other creature, I guess. I never heard of a passenger pigeon.”

“Read that again.” Michael stepped closer.

“‘They once roamed’—”

“No, the part about when they were exterminated.”

Before Dean answered, he understood what had confused Michael. “‘In 1889.’ Yet the Period of Extermination was 2000 through 2010. According to this report, bison were massacred—a term I don’t understand, but I assume means mass extermination or extinction—more than a century earlier.”

Shaking the dread he was feeling, he read on, highlighting what he was learning. “In the earliest part of the 18th Century, Europeans and Native Americans slaughtered the animals in large numbers, using their hides for clothing and meat for food. But there were also thrill-seekers, like Buffalo Bill, who shot the animals from passing trains to win contests, and left a thousand rotting bison on the plains behind them …’”

“They killed them?” Michael shot out, angered.

“Fifty million of them,” Dean added solemnly. He braced himself against the book, hoping his feeling of nausea would subside. “They wore their skins…used their flesh for food.” He was angry, not just over the horrid discovery they had made, but for the histories they had never been taught.

Nowhere in their schooling had there ever been anything about the dark side to the society from which their people had evolved. The Period of Extermination, they believed—until now—had been brought about through changes in weather; periods of floods and storms and internal quakes that destroyed and exterminated most life on Planet Earth. In the wake of natural holocaust, Homo sapiens had managed to survive long enough to project itself into space where it had been living for the past two thousand years.

Suddenly, their search wasn’t such a romantic endeavor. In a frantic, frenzied, dread-filled investigation, they uncovered more photographs that told horror stories beyond their nightmares. It wasn’t even the animals, they learned, who had been killed in human quest for greed and profit—there were even exterminations of humans. Mass executions. Mass starvations. And wars that opened eternal wounds.

“This,” Michael managed to say, “breaks my spirit. While some ate the flesh of their animal kin, others writhed and died in the agonies of starvation. To kill an individual of another life form is a disgrace … but to neglect the needs of your own? And to kill for personal and political gain? How could this be possible? How could it be justified?”

Dean was staring into the photographed face of a child yearning for food. On the inside, he was choking on emotion while a tear spilled and melted on his helmet window. “They killed the beasts,” he said, a cry in his voice, “and they killed each other. Or let each other die. I don’t understand, Michael. I really wish I had the answers for you, but I don’t understand. How can I understand?”

He lifted his head to read the inscription beneath the large colored photograph of Earth taken from the Moon. When his gaze never wavered, Michael asked him to read it for him.

“It says, simply, ‘Love Your Mother.’ Oh, Michael, what a strange and sad paradox we were.”

* * *

The gloom lifted when they emerged from the darkened hallways of the archive, and stepped out into the early afternoon sun. Birds in high-topped trees greeted them with song, their shrill voices ringing throughout the crispness of a vast blue sky. Dean stretched his arms over his head and closed his eyes, absorbing the sun’s warmth. Then he laughed off the irony.

“This is paradise,” he said playfully, nudging Michael as he stepped past him and followed their trail to the Lander.

Climbing aboard the vehicle, they were carried many miles, at high speed, across the continent in search of new discoveries. They passed beautifully-sculptured rock formations, commented on the shadows cast by billowing clouds, and paused along the journey when they were temporarily captivated by wild flowers growing in seemingly endless fields.

The abundance of bird species in every corner of the globe astounded them. They met with enormous flocks of small and large birds; followed on foot, across mountainous terrain, the trails of wild goats and bighorn sheep. Standing on a hilltop overlooking a lush green valley, they watched in awe a herd of horses racing the wind.

But it was the sea that drew them in. The froth of ocean spray, the rhythm of gentle breaking waves, the cries of seabirds along the rocky shore, captivated them in an endless silence of wonderment and joy. Dean sat upon a weather-worn rock formation and watched Michael wander across the sand before him, staring toward the horizon where the sun was a few hours from touching the sea.

The technology that enabled their mission also isolated them from the odors, the clearness of sound, the ability to touch their environment, and had finally begun to annoy him. Cradled in isolation, Dean felt the resentment and bitterness, the unyielding urge to remove his clothing and gear, and seek refuge in the beauty and protection of Earth.

“Michael?” he called, getting to his feet.

Michael turned around.

“I’ve got to know how she feels,” he said, approaching Michael on the beach. “I can’t go back to the Ship without knowing how this feels.”

Michael stood quietly while Dean removed his belts, unfastened, unzipped the suit he was wearing, and stepped out of it, in bare feet, to stand on the cool sand. His senses were flooded with a magnification of sound, the abruptness of smell, the sharp, awakening sensation of touch; his bared skin tickled from cool breezes, and the rich odor of salt penetrated his nostrils, depriving him momentarily of his first breath of natural air.

Michael cautioned him to breathe slowly, taking Dean’s forearm in a strong hand to steady him. He suddenly laughed, amused with Dean’s facial expression, no longer alarmed. “It’s cold?” Michael asked, trying to get Dean’s attention, but it was to no avail.

Dean was staring toward the horizon, his eyes widened as a myriad of sensations swam through his blood and swept over his nakedness, entering every pore. Moved beyond words, he, too, began to laugh, then to dance, to skip across the beach with Michael trailing him. “Fantastic!” he cried, as an ocean wave greeted him when he dropped to hands and knees in the sand, and filtered it through his fingers. “This is just incredible!”

Michael was standing nearby, amused and awed as he watched Dean transform from professionalism into delightful insanity. Dean sprayed him with water, then with wet hands, he touched his tongue and tasted the bitterness of salt and seaweed. Like a little boy, he sat firmly on the oozing ground and allowed one wave after another to roll over him, taking the sand out from beneath him when the ocean called it back again.

Now Michael was laughing. “I’m not as brave as you, Dean. It has turned you into a madman and one of us must remain sane enough to get us home.”

“Ah,” Dean noted, this time seizing the belt fastener and releasing it from Michael’s waist, “and therein you err. This is home, mind you. We’ve been insane until now.”

“That’s a matter of professional opinion,” Michael told him, rising to his feet, eluding his seducer.

Their relay of words and gestures were energetic and sportive. Dean’s effort to coax Michael into joining his nakedness, his experience of a wondrous environment, led them into a jovial gambol along the shore of a living beach of ancient rock and weathered driftwood. Convulsing with laughter, Dean finally overtook his entertained comrade, dragging him into the wet sand, where he removed the man’ s helmet without much resistance, and delighted in his companion’s reaction.

“Oh, dear god,” Michael gasped, the sky turning round overhead, the amplitude of sound and smell enveloping him. “Oh, Dean,” he nearly cried, laughing in spite of his joyous tears, “I’ve gone mad, too!” and he struggled out from beneath Dean to undress in the coolness of late afternoon, to allow the Earth to awaken his being to the true sense of self, to know, finally, that Earth was not just Dean’s home, not just home for beast and bird, but his home, too. He belonged there. They belonged there.

* * *

Pressing his back to the cool grass, Dean stared through the leaf-covered tree toward the sky. It had been, perhaps, the most relaxing moments they had encountered since their arrival on Earth. The sun was warming, but the shade pleasing. They would have to go back to the Ship soon, so these last few hours were spent in relative silence, sharing a bondage no other human being could imagine.

But there was a decision to be made. They both knew it.

“What are we going to do, Michael?” Dean asked, a sudden blanket of grief overcoming him.

“What do you want to do?” Michael’s voice had drifted over to him. It was concerned, almost as if he had already contemplated Dean’s direction.

“I want to live here forever,” Dean answered, honestly, “but to do so means we tell them there is life on Earth. And even though we are far removed from the mindset of a people who killed for personal gain, I cannot predict tomorrow.” He sighed then, propped onto an elbow to see his comrade. “But I can’t say goodbye, either. It will break my heart.”

Michael nodded. He understood.

Beautiful, beautiful home, Dean thought, staring away across a green field of grasses. The burden of their decision was too much to bear. “If we tell them,” he hypothesized, “perhaps we are opening the door for a recreation of the tragedy that came before us. If we don’t tell them—as apparently all other expeditions chose not to do—” He couldn’t finish the sentence. His gaze caught sight of a red fox pouncing through the field after grasshoppers, and he felt the pang in his heart. “It will kill me,” he said, instead.

“Then we side with caution, as did the others?”

Dean forced a smile. “Sometimes you are wiser than I,” he commented, quietly.

Michael grunted in disagreement. “Having a question doesn’t make you wise,” he reminded his elder, “it’s having the answer.”

* * *

Dean handed Michael a yellow flower, releasing it when it was finally accepted. “Taste it,” he encouraged him. “They grow among the grasses. I watched the bison this morning and they were eating them. They seemed to like them.”

“Have you eaten one?” Michael asked, not certain it wouldn’t kill him.

“Yes,” Dean laughed. “Do you think I’d sacrifice you?”

Michael popped the flower into his mouth and chewed, his facial expression reflecting the distaste he felt.

Dean laughed again. “They’ll grow on you.”

“Hmm … like a fungus, a deadly, cancerous fungus?”

“At least they taste! Isn’t it fantastic? Even if you don’t like them, you have a choice not to like them.”

They were sitting in the shade of large trees. Dean had his back pressed to the trunk, facing Michael. He’d eaten several flowers already, and was feeling rather contented. “It doesn’t take much to fill you,” he said quietly, “and there are tens of thousands of them in one acre.”

“Yes, but can you live on them, that is the question?”

“Hell, no,” Dean grinned. “But there are so many more things to eat and live on. But if you like them, they’re plentiful.”

They’re plentiful.

They’re plentiful.

THEY’RE PLENTIFUL.

Like bison. And passenger pigeons. And whales once were.

Dean cupped his mouth with a trembling hand, but it was too late to halt his words. He could see Michael staring at him, blankly, but he couldn’t focus on his face because his eyes were rimmed with tears. Choking with the remorse he felt, he managed to utter an “I’m sorry,” but it wasn’t directed at Michael.

He was sorry.

Sorry for the painful realization that he was no more removed from a people two thousand years gone than he was from the nation he had emerged from.

Sorry because suddenly he knew the answer to their nagging question: There would be no paradise for his people.

* * *

Earth was as crystal clear from space as it was from its surface. Soft browns and blues and swirls of white cloud masses. A perfect circle revolving on an invisible axis, accompanied by the cratered moon reflecting brilliant sunlight. Dean pressed his forehead to the window plate. And wept. For many, Earth was just a passing planet, the skeletal reminder of selfish, short-sighted nations.

For Dean and Michael, Earth was more than what met the eye.

Earth was alive.

Without them.

* * *