Face first into the trees

[Roger Smith]

It briefly occurred to Adam, as he slowly and painfully slid down the tree to rejoin his unwanted union with the ground, that he had never really...been around trees for just about all of his life. His early years out in the middle of fucking nowhere hadn't exactly had many trees around. Or really any at all. There had been that one tree kind of off in the distance...but it was pretty much dead from day one in Adam's memory. And that didn't really count anyway.

Even once he'd been roped into his whole SBURB session there had just...never been any trees. It was an incredibly minor thing, and to have the realization suddenly dawn on him only after having literally run face-first into a tree...the implications were not lost on him. They were entirely, completely ignored, but they were not lost on him. He didn't even stop to ponder over why there had never been any trees in the places he'd been to. He had been to a rather remarkable number of places, over a dozen planets, in fact....and never really seen any trees, unless you counted in the distance and off on the horizon somewhere every now and then.

That may have accounted for the fact of how he was more focused on just how unpleasant having his face slide over the rough bark of a tree felt more than just about anything else.

"Note to self....pay attention when among trees from now on...."

He didn't really have any intention to see if a second collision would be less painful than the first.