Mathew died at the age of fourteen, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to grow up.

Set in the primitive area of Idaho, “Growing Pains of the Dead” tells a gentle ghost story of a young boy named Mathew who finally gets a chance to grow up one hundred years after he died.

 

 

 

GROWING PAINS OF THE DEAD

 

 

ONE

 

 

In the towering mountains of central Idaho, storms sweep in almost without notice, sometimes dumping snow measured in feet in a matter of hours. In the summer, the heat can kill a human without water within days, and the steep slopes can trap even the most experienced hiker in a confusing mix of valleys filled with giant trees, thick brush, and fields of fallen rock. The area is now designated “primitive area” mostly because it is just too rugged to bother doing anything else with.

There are no towns.

There aren’t even roads.

We live in a valley called Monumental Valley in this primitive area, off a creek called Mule Creek. From mid-September to late May, there is no way for humans in or out of the valley through the deep snow. Even in the summer, only a small trail leads over the summit and to the small human settlements in valleys beyond the steep ridges. I understand there are huge human cities beyond those valleys, but I cannot imagine them.

Going downstream in the Monumental Valley, the trail follows Mule Creek until it blends into a river called “The River of No Return.” The trail ends there.

We have a very simple existence here, in our steep-walled valley. Once in a while a few humans visit, usually carrying too much weight in fancy-colored backpacks.

I like it when the humans come into the valley. They are always fun to watch, even though they never know I am there. A thousand years before my time, the first humans had come into the valley and stayed for a time. Then just over a hundred years ago my family settled here, to mine for gold, my father said.

A huge flood wiped out where we were living and the town we lived in, and the remaining humans just eventually all left the valley, leaving us to ourselves, wandering through the trees, waiting for something. Something none of us knew or talked about or even worried about. We do not worry about anything.

And we feel almost nothing as well.

I remember when my dad tried to show himself to a living human once, two men who had camped in a tent on the lakeshore above our old home. He tried to communicate, show them he was there, even tossed small rocks he could move into the water. It scared them and they stayed up most of the night acting real strange. In the morning they left at first light.

Dad just laughed, but I didn’t think it was funny. I want to understand why we walk these woods, why I never grow older, why I don’t leave the valley, even on the warm summer days when the trail is open and nothing blocks my way.

When I mention such things to my mother, who sits all day in the trees next to an old gravestone with the writing worn off by the weather, or my father, who wanders the main street of the old town under the water, they both just tell me that is the way of things.

When I asked them why we look like humans, but yet are not human, they told me we were human, once, but we died and can no longer be human. When I asked what death was, they simply told me it is the moment between being human and not being human.

I did not understand, and when I told them that, they smiled and said I was too young to understand. But on other times, they told me I will never grow older. Only humans grow older.

I want to grow older.

I want to understand.

There are fifty of us in this valley, from the summit to the raging waters of The River of No Return. We talk only rarely, and we do not often laugh. We simply sit or walk the deer trails.

The oldest of us is a mother with a baby, dressed in animal skins with colored beads made from clay. My father told me she has been in the valley for a thousand years, and she does not speak our language. I have never spoken to her, and in the one hundred years I have been in the valley, the baby has not grown, just as I have not grown. The mother has been carrying the baby on her back for over a thousand years. I cannot imagine that or understand it either, but there seemed no point in talking with my parents about it.