The Set Sun Blood At Dusk

By Brady Snow

Becoming increasingly disillusioned with city life, Collin Forsett and his friends embark on a backcountry snowboarding trip where they rekindle a friendship with an outcast ski-god and self-declared "shaman," Connor, whose dubious grasp on reality threatens them all. Then again, considering those alarming visions Collin's been experiencing, Connor might be on to something.

An insider's peek into the grand bacchanal that is a Colorado ski town at the height of the season, The Set Sun Blood at Dusk, is both an earth-bound travelogue and a mystically probing novel about friendship and the nature of human grace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483506944

Book preview

Benoit.

-I-

It came as a surprise one day when I walked to my mailbox during an early season blizzard and found an envelope with an image of a rattlesnake on the stamp. I was sick with a cold and I don’t know what compelled me to leave my couch from a movie and walk barelegged through sleets of whipping snow to get the mail. The letter was from Connor Fulsinger, postmarked in Blanding, Utah. I drew tight my bathrobe, ran inside and slid my Scottish Claymore letter opener into the envelope. Connor had placed a pinch of red sand inside. His letter was written on a blank piece of regular printing paper in a red ink.

Dear Collin-

I’m over mountain climbing and snowboarding for the time being. There are no epiphanies when you reach a summit. I thought I’d be able to understand how the land is laid out, how it all flows together, and in that somehow come to grips with the order in all things. Yet every peak just showed me a hundred more to add to my list of peaks to climb. At some point one has to move on if they’re going to explore the great wide earth. I’m much more into exploring the Canyon Lands now. The feeling of the West has a stronger pull on you here than it does in Colorado. And sunsets are better. There aren’t massive mountains obscuring the openness of the continent beyond and the light at dusk has a different kind of energy. If you’re up high, you can see clear 100 miles over a maze of red stone mesas and canyons. I am moving to the Redlands of Utah, my job has switched me to a hotel out here. I’ll have more time to explore a new terrain and immerse in the thick of it all. I want to donate my soul to the West, throw it into the warm horizon slightly southwest of due west, into that soft glow of beyond in the spaces where dusk goes to rest. I just thought I’d let you know in case you were ever in the vicinity.

Sincerely,

-Connor Fulsinger

The letter appalled me. It wasn’t the severity of his self-centered ramblings or the distance of his tone, but the fact that it was a letter. Friends never sent me handwritten letters. Perhaps an e-mail to notify a friend of a pending move, but a hard copy in a stamped envelope was rare. Cell phones or e-mails are the most convenient means of communication. But it was Connor. I had a coughing fit and was still very sick so I blended a handful of vitamin-C pills into a blueberry-blackberry-mango-pear smoothie with peach juice and vanilla yogurt and went to my balcony to sip the fruity mush.

The storm had parted quickly. It had only left a dusting of snow and it was already melting. Visibility had returned and there were only a few clouds over the West. I coughed but I lit a cigarette anyway and watched the lighted night, the stars choked out by the electric-orange smolder of the city. The full moon was up and there was a warm breeze from the South.

I checked my phone to see if I still had Connor’s number. I found it as a call came through. It was Bill, another friend from growing up. Before I could ask how he was, he announced he was coming to Colorado for a visit. He had an interview and a day of shadowing at a big company. His buddy knew the manager and had recommended him for the position. The job was in sales, selling industrial machine parts in Colorado Springs. He asked if he could crash at my place.

I only have the weekend but if I get the job, I’m bringing my snowboard and we’re going for that powder on the Western Slope you and Connor always talk about, he said. Bill had never visited Connor or me in Colorado and always complained about missing out on the mountains.

Do you think it’s a good idea? Moving to Colorado? he asked.

If you want to live in Colorado. Do it, I said.

From my balcony, I watched the moon emerge from a bank of dark clouds. I could make out the shapes of the mountains west of the city.

I understand why you and Connor got out of here, Bill said. I’m over this place. I’ve gotta get out to Colorado.

I told him his timing was off. I had just moved out of the mountains to Denver and my work was going well. He asked if I’d seen or talked to Connor. I said I hadn’t. Bill said he’d call me once he was in Denver and that he’d see me soon. I finished my cigarette and smoothie and went inside to refill my mug but decided to drink from the pitcher and I wondered why I didn’t mention Connor’s letter to Bill.

I sat on my couch and read it again. Of all the states he moved to Utah. And just as snowboarding season was about to begin. I googled Blanding on my iphone. It was south of Moab and Arches National Park in the middle of nowhere. It suddenly occurred to me that I had paid no direct thought to Connor in the year or more since I’d moved away from the Western Slope. He had once been a haunting presence in my waking life but had since come to exist only on the fringes of my sub-conscience memory.

Connor Fulsinger and I attended the same pre-school in Minnesota and I can recall us playing together in a dry rice bin with toy dinosaurs. We did not interact extensively again until sixth grade when our families vacationed together during spring break in Florida. Bill’s family joined us. We all became good friends. When we got driver’s licenses, we’d go on joy rides during Midwest snowstorms. Wearing ski goggles and full facemasks, we’d drive with the windows down, thrusting our faces into the streaming flakes while we blared our favorite music. This was thrilling to us. I’ve read and heard it said that if one can hang out with someone without saying anything and still feel as if they’ve had a meaningful conversation, then that person is a true friend. Connor was this to me. We were tightly knit.

This said, Connor was in no sense a normal kid. First off, he was pale and highly freckled, his lankiness extended to the extreme, and he had a blaring red flame of a shaggy hairdo. He had tendencies towards obsessive compulsion and was bi-polar, always going through extreme mood swings. These things, along with a highly active imagination, enmeshed him in a version of reality that was very much his own. Connor could not see himself how others saw him, surviving only within the constraints of his own fantasy world and not beyond what he immediately desired. Naturally, he developed a unique array of eccentricities. He was always shifting his focus between outrageous obsessions: drawing maps of imaginary fantasy lands, enacting battles from the colonial era of history, studying books on cartography and the geography of North America. Once he told Bill and me that he believed he had the force and that the Earth was an outer rim territory planet of the Star Wars universe and the Jedis were coming to recruit him some day. He had some faults of character, just like everyone, but despite his extremities and his oddness, he was friendly and easy going and had a wild, enthusiastic side that made him very pleasant and interesting to be around.

Nevertheless, he was gullible and an easy target for games. Bill and I had our fun with him. When things didn’t go the way he wanted, when we disagreed with his outlandish claims, he would enter into dramatic fits that we knew he secretly enjoyed enacting. We would always get a kick out of pissing him off because we enjoyed the thrill of him chasing us with sticks, baseball bats or shooting at us with his BB-gun. Accepting differing perspectives was always an affliction of his, yet you could always count on him for a good time and a heavy dose of laughter.

Connor and I both enrolled out of state at a college on the Western Slope of Colorado deep in the mountains, a small town but close to a secluded ski resort. We said goodbye to Bill and our life in the Midwest and we road-tripped out together to pursue an education while managing to live the snowboarding lifestyle. Our freshman year was a wild blur of partying and snowboarding. We had a lot of fun and Connor’s wild positivity and spontaneous antics were very much intact. He was in the finest of form.

Yet in our sophomore year, he entered a downward spiral of character. Whatever the issue was, it took root very slowly, almost as if nothing was changing, but it flooded him to his core. He and I moved into a house off campus with another friend. He stopped going to parties and took to reading all the time. This wasn’t a bad thing but he became very introverted and timid in social interactions. We went snowboarding together at times but I saw less and less of him as I continued to have a life while he grew distant. When I announced to him I’d be living with two other friends the next year, he decided he should study abroad. Connor went to Mexico and I didn’t see him for a year.

When he returned Connor had changed for the worse. During his travels, he had participated in the rituals of shamans deep in the network of the Copper Canyon. This spurred in him a dangerous obsession. Back in Colorado, he lived alone in an old cabin outside town and adopted strange studies. He spent much of his time hiking alone in the arid breccia of our town’s surrounding foothills while interpreting the omens dictated by the wind, the clouds or the sudden sight of crows. Sunsets entranced him. He wanted to drink the image with his eyes and follow the sun west as it swept the land with the day’s final light. I think it was the feeling that dusk gave him. He became addicted and grew more and more fanatical about the natural environment. It wasn’t wrong to be a nature freak. But without outside influence, any obsession can quickly become delusion.

Connor held his fellow men to the ideal of impeccability, to being in full awareness and communion with the natural system. Always he preached that we had forgotten the ancient ways. An instant evolution in mankind’s spiritual perception was his deepest desire, yet he did not see the danger such a rapid growth could bring. He was impatient and came to associate his ideal for mankind with his current state, giving him an air of superiority over others. Often he would decide something was true and make it a doctrine of his. Anything outside his beliefs was a threat and he would not hear another opinion nor give it merit as a possibility. To me the saddest downturn was that he came to view happiness and the distractions of a social life as weaknesses deterring us from our true purpose of spiritual development.

Faults and imperfections he saw as the means of our own demise. This only bred arrogance and perpetual anxiety that fed on itself. He came to believe that the wellbeing of the world was his responsibility. I thought it was all a cover up for his insecurities. It had a devastating effect. What he feared was the truth about his own debilities and hence his own development and future. When an inconvenience arose in his life, he took it as an insult from the cosmos.

He couldn’t handle life’s challenges with a grain of salt and was closed to the idea that our faults, imperfections and struggles may actually have value. Secluding himself in his wood-heated cabin on the edge of the forest for the duration of our harshest and coldest winter, the chimney always turning out a trail of black smoke, he became overly sensitive to the harshness and chaos of an ever-changing world. Whereas most people handled the ups and downs of life with humor and by having a social life, Connor withdrew himself to protect his fragile ego. Fortifying himself from influence from the evolving world, he was cut off from valuable information that could have redirected his outlook.

It all worsened into our final year of college. Being too superstitious and negative towards me to even consider my help as positive, he felt his perspective was the one true view of justice and order in the world. It was too much self-absorption for me to be around. He never laughed and just before graduation, after not seeing or talking to him for several months, he confessed to me via e-mail how he could only experience things from drastic extreme to drastic extreme, never finding any balance in the middle, and that perhaps this down phase of his life was required to balance the positivity of his younger years. I refrained from joining him in his self-indulgence and told him to lighten up. He didn’t. His metaphysics hobbies and studies, stirred with a high ego, gave him the audacity to think he had reality all figured out and that everyone not privy to his perspective was in some way inferior.

It could be said that everyone needs friends, that friends reinforce one’s true being. They give you the means to gauge the resolve of your own essence and will. If this is so, Connor was void of this at a crucial life pivoting point. I was there for him, but he disproved of my lifestyle and he took my advice as a threat. Naturally, our friendship came to an end. Connor became lonely in his ways and came to view his obsessive nature as something that held him back from happiness. He tried to break his obsessions, which in essence were his