Book Description
An Aquarian Tragedy is the story of an age and some of the people one could readily find in it. It is fiction yet absolutely authentic. It relates with equal candor both the booby traps and the blessings of those wild times, times that both the Left and Right in today?s society are determined to see never happen again. The youthful human spirit never soared quite so high? could never crash in flames quite so easily? as it did in those days. There were many such roads to the discovery of self back then. This is the story of two of them.

Excerpted from An Aquarian Tragedy by James Mundell. Copyright © 2006. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Excerpted from Chapter Three: Ralph's Last Voyage

Arriving at our fail safe point, we were given the happy news that Albuquerque was the destination and as the last beams of light faded from the mountainscape, we settled back to enjoy what would be a warm and secure, if not in my case a very comfortable, night. Sometime during the ensuing thirty miles, however, the three of them again studied their maps and in compulsive and scatterbrained fashion again changed their minds. Their lack of experience being on the road through hostile country had been painfully obvious back at the roadblock. Now, however, their free-for-all, take-it-as-it-comes approach to their trip caused two brother freaks to be ejected onto extremely inhospitable country at a very bad time of night. By the New Mexico code, this was unthinkable. No one would have dared subject a brother to such treatment. So much for weekend hippies. Barely concealing our fear and disgust, Mark and I thanked them, took our belongings and stumbled out at the interchange of Interstate 40 and U.S. Route 89… Flagstaff.

We ruefully watched as the taillights faded into the blackness to the north, then contemplated our position. We couldn’t have been left in a worst spot by rednecks. One lone fluorescent light marked this part of the interchange and that had the effect more of turning us into two black shadows against the black forest than disclosing our whereabouts. Not a single structure stood anywhere in sight and, on top of that, it was getting very cold. Then too… there was the Flagstaff law…

Trying our luck first a few hundred feet up the highway, then a few hundred feet down, in an effort to overcome the adverse lighting effects, the result was the same… complete failure. Few vehicles were on the road at all. Most probably didn’t see us, while the rest could have cared less about picking up two unsavory characters looming out of the blackness. Within the first hour the wind picked up considerably as a heavy white swirl to the east signaled that a snowstorm was bearing down on us. I shivered uncontrollably in the medium weight field jacket. Our extremities were rapidly numbing. Every semi that passed unleashed a frigid backwash of Arctic air and cinders that penetrated our inadequate clothing.

Another hour passed and the blizzard was fast upon us. Icy tears from the bitter wind streamed down our faces. My fever was raging to the point I could barely stand up. Mark sensed the danger I was in and began talking loudly and rapidly, trying to hold my attention… to get me to concentrate. I couldn’t reply. My blazing throat seemed completely shut. The first snowflakes were blowing all around us. Our predicament was desperate but relatively uncomplicated: we could either be arrested, if lucky enough to be seen, or die.

The wind battered me senseless. Barely able to think at all, my mind nonetheless sent one last desperate message. I recalled an article or story I had read about the phenomenon of freezing to death. Unlike what I had thought, that you simply got colder until the lights went out, the article said the victim of freezing felt a luxurious warmth right before the end. The victim would then lie down to his inevitable but unexpected doom. Immediately before my mind blanked it said watch out... the time is at hand. . . . Down the road we saw headlights. As the car passed under the fluorescent light next to ours, we saw dome lights. It was a cop! We waved frantically as the car sped toward us. We prayed for the miracle of the Flagstaff jail. We were still the black shadows against the black forest and standing behind a wall of swirling snow as well. The cruiser sped by us.

I was very weak. Utterly devastated. We silently turned into the furious wind and watched, bent over and squinting, as the tail lights got smaller, then disappeared. We turned around. Our eyes briefly met. That’s that, we silently told one another above the howling wind. We put a hand on one another’s shoulder and gave a squeeze, we put our backs to the wind. I thought back to the time I was twelve when the two of us, along with our mom, were nearly killed by a giant wave at sea after our dad foolishly took us out in his new boat in the teeth of small craft warnings. Only one other boat had been out there that day… it had gone down with all five aboard. I vividly remembered the golden peace that had settled over me when I knew death was at hand. Many times since that day I wondered why and for what reason we had been spared when the others weren’t. On that darkened highway with every fir tree groaning under the weight of the ever thickening wind-lashed snowfall, I now knew… I had been preserved, and my brother with me, to die in this miserable place…