Free Dreamseeker's Road by Tom Deitz

the white gauze shirt he’d worn to class knotted around his waist above frayed khaki shorts, and a towel draped across his head beneath his University of Georgia Foresters cap for no better reason than funkiness—he even looked the part.
    Of course he had no beard to speak of, and certainly not a phony waxed one. And he doubted Moses had sported a black nylon backpack bulged near to bursting with hooks, or a boombox blaring Tori Amos’s latest. But he had known something about magic, which was what those books concerned (Ms. Amos, too, he suspected). And the prophet had likewise, by good report, often toted a staff—which Aikin also did: a near-twin to the rune-inscribed, copper-shod hiking items Dave and Alec lugged around. Dave had made all three, in fact; his had been a Christmas present five years back and still showed no sign of wear, though he used it constantly.
    He stared at it for a moment and tried to evoke the scene from The Ten Commandments in which his hoary analogue had parted the Red Sea. He had no such ambitious body of water, of course—was about five thousand miles too far west, for one thing. But he did have the Middle Oconee. In fact, he was standing in the middle of it—but not in water up to his neck, or with uncanny cliffs of it towering to either side like so much Jell-O.
    Rather, he had the dam.
    Forty yards of decaying concrete, it was, and a yard wide at the top: easy enough to walk across if one kept one’s balance, and his was very good. Before and behind, water rushed, shushed, and occasionally rumbled through Whitehall Forest, a sprawl of preserved woodland belonging to the University of Georgia School of Forest Resources a few miles south of Athens proper. Deer lived there—and squirrels, coons, ’possums, and chipmunks—as though sixty-odd thousand beings higher up the food chain didn’t call the same county home. Yet two miles of ill-paved road to the north put you at the key-card gate behind the brick Victorian jumble of Whitehall Mansion; and just beyond that, you hit Whitehall Road, that a touch of sleight of hand involving road signs transformed into Milledge Avenue—Athens’s fraternity row—a few fields and a bypass farther on.
    But eschewing a single pull-tab gleaming in the sun, there was no sign of frat folks here. Only the roof of the newish cabin he shared with three other majors up the slope to the left, and beside it, the longer shape of Flinchum’s Phoenix, Forestry’s assembly-and-banquet hall, hinted at civilization.
    And—again—the dam.
    Water swirled through at least three breaches in its upstream face, but none actually reached the summit-slab, though the tangle of flood wrack at those places made another kind of barrier. A tumble of blocks, steps, and arches at the north end showed where a mill had been abandoned. The ruins were bloody evocative, too; and more than once Runnerman’s sister, Myra, had posed some member of the Gang there, in whatever odd (and usually skimpy—or absent) costume struck her fancy, often as not engaged in mock combat, all as grist for her fantasy paintings.
    Aikin’s fantasy, however, lay not in any evocation of the parted Red Sea (with the bondage of academia in hot pursuit, more cruel than Pharaoh’s legions), but in the Promised Land on the farther shore. For there, the dam terminated in a coarse-sanded beach below a wooded ridge, beyond which lay more forest. Of course, it wasn’t that far to a brace of suburban backyards; but here, at least, the illusion was preserved.
    He wondered, though, how long he’d have to wander in the wilderness before he found what he sought. And whether he would receive commandments or confront the golden—well, what he sought was gold, but it definitely wasn’t no calf.
    Three days had passed since the hunting expedition…since the dream. One he’d spent back in the mountains, hanging out with his folks through supper before stuffing himself into Dave’s old Mustang for a harrowing