The Other Side of the Mountain Ch.4

Chapter 4: My New Home, New Friends

I fell into a rhythm—somewhere between early retirement and post-traumatic rehab.
Coffee and bacon in the morning. Weather cursing and minor construction injuries by lunch. Afternoons were reserved for strictly medicinal marijuana, doctor’s orders. Dinners were hearty meat-with-sauce affairs, heavy enough to quiet the soul. And on the right kind of night, I might even howl at the moon—just to remind it I was still here.

I’d been in the new place a few days when Buford stopped by.

Surely God broke the mold when He made Buford. I’ve never met a man with that kind of presence—or size. His voice sounded like a mountain finally deciding to speak. He stood three heads taller than most houses and was easily three men wide. “Gigantic” doesn’t quite cut it. He usually carried beef jerky in his pocket like some kind of polite grizzly.

Buford lived to the west. His cabin looked ordinary from the outside, but the inside had been dug out several feet into the earth. It was like the house had sunken under the weight of the man who lived in it. I once joked he must’ve been conceived by a bear and an oak tree. He assured me both parents were human—but I remain unconvinced.

As we became friends, I learned to decipher the avalanche of his speech. He’d been raised deep in the high mountains by naturalist parents with creative ideas about child-rearing. Weaned on schnapps and thrown into toddler fight clubs by the age of three. It was all for “life skills,” of course.

What came out eighteen years later made badgers look diplomatic. Buford built a résumé that included bare-knuckle pit fighting and head skull-bouncer at the nastiest bar in the capital. Eventually, the violence lost its flavor. He found peace in botany.

Somewhere in all that tree-headbutting, he must’ve bonded with plants on a molecular level. The man could outgrow anyone in the valley. His ganja plants were twice his height and yielded twenty pounds apiece. For a high-altitude garden with a three-month grow season, that’s unheard of.

The first night Buford showed up, I was in the grow room—adjusting dials, fidgeting with fans, making sure my girls were cozy. The leaves glowed under the LEDs and danced to the rhythm of the fans. I should mention I was riding a sizeable wave of LSD, so the dancing—and the singing—didn’t concern me too much.

At one point, I sat cross-legged on the bare floor, admiring my work. As my hand brushed the ground, I felt it—cold. I froze. The plants were sitting on a platform of ice.

Panic hit like a freight train—wonder turned to dread in a single breath. I scrambled to lift each pot and wedge foam underneath before the cold could eat the roots.
Note to self: maybe don’t drop acid when you’ve got a horticultural emergency on deck.

Just as I saved the last one, a thunderous knock hit the door.

I opened it and came face-to-chest with a solid black shape. Instinct took over—I swung. My fist hit a wall of meat and bone. There was a low chuckle as the shadow bent down to reveal a face.

Buford smiled and winked. “Would you like a hand?” he rumbled.

I laughed, mostly in relief that I wasn’t going to die. My fist throbbed. I looked behind me at the cramped grow room. Then back to the mountain on my porch.

“I just saved a whole ecosystem,” I said. “You like cold beer?”

---

We sat outside on stumps he’d dragged over—logs wide enough to be dining tables in another life. The sun was dying behind the ridge and the clouds above it were catching fire. He cracked open a beer with the sound of a bear stretching, took a long sip, smacked his lips like a man trying to be interesting.

“Hydro or soil?” he asked.

“Soil,” I said. “It’s the only place I trust to hold a secret.”

Buford nodded with the weight of a man who thought secrets made things important. “Hydro’s faster, but it don’t teach patience.”

We watched the sky go cobalt. He was quiet for a moment, then shifted his log a few inches like he was about to say something holy.

“You know,” he said, “the valley’s got its own rhythm. Some folks go mad trying to match it. Others just vanish.”

I smirked and took a sip. “Maybe they just got bored.”

He didn't laugh. That’s the thing about Buford—he never quite caught the joke, but he always tried to deliver one. He set his beer down real careful, cracked his neck like a prophet stretching before the sermon.

“I’m one of the ones that stayed,” he said. “Because something’s coming. And the ones who belong here... we feel it in the soil.”

I looked at him. Big man. Bigger heart. Too big to see how much he didn’t need to prove.

The truth? The soil didn’t care who felt what in it. The valley didn’t care about sides. It didn’t need guardians. It didn’t need saving. It was just land—stolen and re-stolen, worked and buried and pissed on by men who thought “being from here” meant they owned something.

I was an outsider. But I lived like a vagrant and talked to dirt, so they let me pass as local.

It was all bullshit.

Buford stared toward the mountain like it was going to move. The wind had shifted. The clouds sat low, pregnant with somebody else’s story.

For a moment, I thought I felt the ground hum.

But that might’ve just been the next rush kicking in. Or maybe the valley noticed me back. Hard to tell.