Setting Things Right

One-Sentence Story

by Louis van Houtte

“Please don’t come to the funeral,” his sister said when she called to let Alex know that their father had died, “it will only upset Mother and she’s barely holding it together as it is,” so after Alex ended the call—he cut her off—his first instinct was to flee, to just get on a plane and leave the country and get as far away from his sister and the rest of his family as possible

(when Alex had finally came out as gay to his Presbyterian family, his father had not only stopped speaking to him but he had forbid him to come and visit the rest of the family who all still lived in the same small town where Alex had grown up)

but he had no idea where to go, so the next day when his gym buddy told him about a re-wilding project in Scotland (you’re part Scottish, right?) where you could spend a week as part of a crew that was restoring the aboriginal Scottish rainforest that sounded perfect to him because having real work to do instead of just wandering around being a tourist would help keep his mind off his toxic family

(until yesterday he had deluded himself into believing that it was his father alone who was the reason he no longer had a family, but now that his father was dead, he had to come to terms with both the fact that there was no longer any possibility of reconciliation with the man and that it now seemed his other relatives—even his own mother—no longer considered him family)

although on the long, exhausting journey to the re-wilding center (a plane from San Francisco to London, another plane from London to Inverness, and a surreal bus ride through photogenic mountains and valleys, lochs and rivers, forests and meadows) Alex did have occasional moments of despair, thinking, what have I gotten myself into?, by the time he made it to the welcome dinner where he met his comrades for the work week

(a surprisingly diverse mix of people, a sturdy looking lesbian couple, a few hot but probably straight local men, a small, but strong looking non-binary person with impressive tattoos, two young college students from Glasgow who looked South Asian but had thick Scottish accents, and just one other American, a 90 year-old white woman who appeared to be in incredible physical condition)

and he introduced himself using his full name, Alexander Campbell, a middle-aged man with long brown hair and a red beard jumped up, saying was “Duncan Campbell,”and shook Alex’s hand, saying warmly, “We’re from the same clan, Mate!”, which led to a whole discussion by the group about the Highland clans, the Clearances, and the Scottish diaspora

(although Alex knew that he had some Scottish ancestry, it had never occurred to him before that he might have family—were clan members relatives?—who still lived in Scotland)

and then the next morning he learned that the crew would be removing rhododendron bushes from the area, plants he had once thought of as being magnificent due to their huge colorful blossoms and glossy green leaves but which in Scotland’s Caledonian woodlands, where they had naturalized, had turned out to be “noxious weeds”

(those beautiful blossoms and glossy leaves were literally toxic to insects and animals, and the plants were so robust and rapidly spreading that they were destroying the forest’s ecosystem by choking out the native flora)

and even though he had never been much of a gardener, as soon as he set to work on his first rhoddy he discovered that that removing the invasive plants was actually exhilarating

(using the upper body strength that he’d been developing in the gym to saw off branches and cut them up into pieces so they could be burned to ash in that night’s bonfire was very gratifying, but there was something especially rewarding about the final step of digging out the rhoddy’s rootball and wrenching it up out of the earth)

and when it turned out that on the final day of the work week, the last rootball he helped remove was the biggest of them all, he asked Duncan to take a photo of him with it, so he could stand next to it with his spade in hand, as if mocking those men who needed to kill animals and be photographed next to their carcasses to prove their “masculinity,” but secretly Alex wanted the photo as a reminder that he had the power to set things right—at least in his own little patch of earth—by pulling noxious weeds out by their roots, one by one by one.