Miss Oregon marched onto stage, nodding curtly at Miss. Idaho as she passed. With a quick, clipped voice, she began:
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Once, my mother told me, there lived a man who learned his city had voted to build a public housing project on the grounds of his favorite park. Now, this was no ordinary park–it was the park of his childhood, where he’d climbed his first trees and watched his first meteor shower, fed his first ducks and snuck his first kiss under the shade of a willow tree! Horrified, the man leapt to his feet and raced to the park, but alas, it was too late. Ugly yellow bulldozers were already crushing the fresh grass, and the last of the trees were being hauled away in noisy trucks. “How could we be so cruel? Who are we to tear up the ground and harvest nature for its parts?” he lamented, but nobody listened. And so he hardened his heart to humankind and devoted himself to living among nature, among the animals and plants that would never dream of bending the world to their will.
He sold his possessions, bought an RV, and drove into the wild Oregonian mountains until he found a grassy field off a logging road in which to park and start to clear land for his farm. But what was this – another RV pulled up within a day, and a loud, boisterous family emerged with fishing rods in hand! My mother tells me that the man turned his back and tried to tune out the chattering of their children, but it was soon too much–too much noise, too much intrusion, too much humanness–and he drove right back into the city to sell the RV and buy the raw materials for a shack–sheets of metal, windowpanes, an old sink–and a truck to haul them in.
The moment he was lost from view of the dealership, he sped as far from mankind as roads would take him, down miles of gravel roads until the track petered out into the dark woods of the Cascades. There, he dug the foundation for his one-room shack and began drilling the metal sheets together. It was tiring work, and soon he chose to curl up on the dirt (my mother made sure to tell me it felt so right to sleep against bare earth) and nap. But he was awoken by a blast–a gun, shattering the silence and sending animals skittering down the hill! The hunters hadn’t even walked into view when the man threw down his hammer in disgust and drove back down the hill.
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He sold his truck to a used dealership and bought a tiny car, into which he put nothing more than a tent, a camping stove, and a water filter. His meager belongings so arranged, he drove into the dust of the Oregonian badlands, past hills of nothing but sagebrush as far as the eye could see. He pulled off the highway onto a sideroad, off the sideroad onto a barely-visible dirt trail, and then abandoned the car and carried his supplies over the desolate hills. The light faded, the night turned cold, and eventually the man pitched his tent and fell asleep in perfect solitude.
He was awoken in the dead of night by a nagging thirst–he’d brought a water filter, but he had yet to find a stream and it had been hours since he’d last drunken. Tired and disoriented, he stumbled outside and set off to find a source of water.
He hiked up hills and down valleys, tripping over sage bushes in the weak moonlight filtering through the clouds above. He heard something–a bird?--and set off eagerly in its direction, eyes aching as he tried to piece together shapes in the darkness, until he realized he no longer knew the direction of his camp.
And so he wandered and he wandered, the night growing colder and the burn in his throat growing stronger and his head growing cloudier. Eventually, something grabbed his attention – something neon and unnatural, swaying in the breeze to his right. Something distinctly manmade.
Bile rose in his throat, and his face turned blood-red with anger. He'd frozen and thirsted and abandoned his life to live among the last shreds of the untouched world, and still he could not escape humanity? With a roar and the last drop of his energy, he tore at the synthetic orange material until it was a scrap of fabric at his feet. The clouds above slid out from under the moon, and as the man sank to his knees from exhaustion, he beheld that the destroyed campsite was his own.
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"Jesus, guess the hippies got to her," the oldest producer muttered from his front-row seat.
Miss. Oregon's eyes swiveled to him. "Some of them," she said, matter-of-fact, and with that she turned on her heel and marched offstage.