The Mentor by Pat Connid

were holds, the odds were slim of me ever getting to the top.
 Likely, I’d get up just high enough to break my neck when I finally fell.
    A slight
breeze called my attention to something flapping against the rock wall, about a
hundred yards farther down the beach.  I walked toward it.
    Often, I’d
joked that living on a deserted island would be paradise.  Maybe not an island completely deserted-- just an island where the natives were simple and modern conveniences
would only likely frighten them.
    Like
Australia.
    There I'd
be with my Walmart t-shirt and button-fly jeans, and they’d herald me as a king
or, maybe, some type of casually-dressed, low-slung deity. Not the sort that
could conjure rain or smote an enemy but could make a hell of a daiquiri from
fresh pineapple and palm tree pruno.  
    I could
bring the savages forward a thousand years simply by introducing the drink
umbrella.
    As I got
closer to the vine banging in the ocean breeze, I wondered if some thirsty tree
might have dropped root down this way.  My best guess was that someone had
lowered it down, as a way to get to the beach.  Some boy probably climbed
down and fished with a spear all afternoon, wrapped his daily catch in an
animal skin sack (hand stitched by his sun-leathered grandmother), then as
night approached, he’d scurry back up the vine with the night’s supper strapped
to his back.
    When I
finally saw the rungs of the rope latter, the image of Jojo the Monkey Boy
vanished.
    I walked
over to the ladder and tugged on it hard.  It felt sturdy.
    Arching my
neck back, whew, that was a long way up.  And a long way to fall.
    The rungs
were dusted with silt, and it looked like it hadn’t been used in a long time.
 I had the notion to taste the white grit, not sure why, and it was
bitter.  Salty.  
    "Good
idea," I said, spitting bits of sand and dried ocean.  "I'm
dehydrating and decide to go all Lik-M-Aid on sea salt."
    I wasn't
excited about climbing the rope ladder, but a look up and down the shore line
offered me no other options.
    It was slow
going at first.
    Hand over
hand, hand over hand.  As I got farther from the ground I moved faster, steady,
but faster.  The twine of the rope ladder groaned each time I pulled
myself up a rung and, somewhere in my mind, I could hear the sound of microfibers
snapping.  
    One quarter
the way up, I wrapped my left arm through a rung and rested, staring out at the
ocean for a moment.  Even in the fading daylight, or maybe because of it,
it seemed the world was secretly being swallowed whole by the vast sea.
 Like we’d screwed it up this time, botched it, and the disappointed
planet was slowly taking it all back, maybe give it another shot down the road.
    I’d never
lived near the water.  Grew up in the Midwest.  Mom moved to Oklahoma
when Dad took off with a co-worker.  I’d just graduated from high school
and embarked on a road trip with a buddy to the west coast, hoping to work out
what to do next.  A few weeks after returning to Minneapolis, I met a
lovely, yet very naughty, young lady and we both moved to Georgia after she got
a commercial modeling job in Atlanta.  She did really well and we cobbled
together enough money to get her a good portfolio.  Once she’d made a good
chunk of change, she eventually moved to New York, ticket for one.  
    Georgia’s
been my home ever since.
    For me,
there’s something calming about the ocean.  It seems that we are still
controlled—if not controlled, then manipulated in various degrees— by old,
cave-born programming.  
    Years
earlier, I’d read an article about what some call “genetic memory” and, having
held similar beliefs most of my life, I bought into a lot of it.  This
faded blueprint of human behavior seemed to hold the answers to questions about
why people do the things they do.  The more conventional, over-thought
theories, at least to me, those didn’t have answers that rang quite as true.
    Maybe
staring out at the