Chapter 1: A Treatise on Camping
It is a bit of a tradition to start this type of story with camping. I don’t really know why that is, but it might just be how these things go. Anyway this is what happened to me and, I swear, it is all true.
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It was a good campsite with sandy loam soil. The morning’s intermittent misting rain had drained quickly enough that the early spring sun was enough rid of the small hilltop clearing of any residual moisture by midday. We hiked through a maze of the limestone slump blocks, small caves and sandy washes as we pushed our way back in time. The maple and oak strewn forests common in the area gave way to the hemlocks, beeches, hickories and black birches that took up residence in these forests before the last ice age. They have survived ever since within the shelter of the sandstone cliffs and gulches. No destination or purpose to the hike or really the trip itself, but enjoying a long weekend in the hills.
The evening was cool enough that the fire was welcome, but not strictly necessary. It was also mercifully dry. The cliffs and hills typically trapped moisture like a bowl in the evening, as the forest exhales its misty, piney, peaty breath once the heat of the sun has faded.
The moon rose large, hung low and gave the forest a peaceful silvery sheen. Good food, good drink and mostly good company made it easy to lose our sense of time. The stars drifted by on the clear night, but my alarm came far too early.
I started awake as the insistent mechanical chime burst through my dreamscape with the punch of adrenaline that an unexpected interruption while sleeping can bring. Through the fabric of my ultralight single tent I could see that the moon was still with us, still looming large over our little leisure expedition, which put the chiming alarm even more out of place.
If the unexpected alarm was a curiosity in the gloom, then the chorus of deep, sustained booming noises that immediately followed were a matter of urgent consideration. Opening my tent flap, I could see loose particles of the sandy loam soil dance with the vibrations in pulsing through our camp.
Opening my tent flap a little further, I could make out something moving in the dim skies west of our camp. It looked like a fair number of those ancient hemlocks and birches sheltering beneath the sandstone cliffs were marching along the path down the hill to the south of our camp. Obviously not the first thing that I expected to see, but after a rapid puzzle through all of the earthquake, landslide and sinkhole based scenarios and microburst of uncomprehending terror, I had to suspend my disbelief.
I can remember dreaming once, decades before, that I had some kind of Sayian-like powers and that the whole world was out to get me. I was always trying to hide in plain sight and I was always getting caught, but I got a little better each time. They were just normal people and they couldn’t stop me, but they certainly could inconvenience me. It got lonely and eventually I heard my own voice over a store intercom letting me know that I was asleep and that the world was a dream. As a sufferer of chronic boredom with extremely limited social skills, I spent plenty of my waking and sleeping hours dreaming of all manner of fantastical things, but this wasn’t one of them and it didn’t feel like a dream. This felt real and dangerous in a way that those dreams never did.
Then one of the trees stooped down, picked up my car and winged it at a nearby block of sandstone. As the rest of the trees started to follow suit with the rest of the cars, my mind quickly cleared of old dreams and unexpected chimes. We all have our own stress response and when things get bad time stretches out in front of me and it feels like I have every opportunity to reason through all the options. It is actually a kind of nice feeling, but it never lasts too long. The same held true in this case, as watching a Hemlock launch your Forester at a cliff really helps you get centered and stay present.
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Do trees hate cars? Not sure. Possibly relevant, but not really immediately relevant. If you throw enough cars at enough giant rocks, will one of them eventually explode. Definitely relevant and definitely yes. That one goes to the top of the list. Even at the top of the hill dirt, small rocks, safety glass and the occasional bit of automotive debris rained down on our campsite. The air was thick with dust and the acrid, pungent smoke of burning plastic and oil and hot metal. Visibility was momentarily low, but it was obvious both that it was time to go and that leaving by car wasn’t an option.
I scrambled out of the tent and reached a couple of larger rocks near the edge of the southern decline of our hilltop campsite with a quick, graceless stumbling crawl. As the dust thinned I was almost relieved to see that the trees' motivation in their automotive caber toss was something beyond simply cutting off our best means of escape. I say almost relieved because the sandstone giants that seemed to be pulling themselves together from the very slump blocks and boulders below us were extremely off putting in their own right. As quickly as they emerged, they began to return fire with a gusto that equaled the arboreal fury that had just cost me my crossover SUV just moments before.
Maybe three minutes had passed since the first chime. However, everyone was up and at ‘em early with a strong interest in a brisque predawn hike. I grabbed Queakers, my day pack and my camp lantern from my tent, struck a course directly opposite the chaos below and legged it post haste. A quick look back confirmed that everyone was right behind me, though in various stages of disarray.
No one was really said much of note during that initial flight from our campsite. I don’t think anyone really knew what to say. If anyone had a theory, they kept it to themselves. We all focused on putting some distance between us and whatever the hell was going on at the bottom of that hill. That is not to say that everyone was quiet. There was a good mix of intermittent hysterical yelping and some unintelligible whimpering, but no real talking.
Queakers was also having none of these shenanigans. She had initially been shocked silent, but her canine pride and indignation were aroused once we made it a safe distance from camp and she was barking her head off as I carried her over my shoulder. She was making it extremely difficult to navigate whatever old game trail we were on in the mix of moonlight, lantern light and rough terrain that made our path more shadow than light. However, I wasn’t going to set her down. She was the dog of my dreams and I wasn’t going to lose her here.
There was no sign of pursuit, but we kept the pace even as the noise began to fade behind us. The moon was edging down toward the horizon and, as the minutes ran on, shock gave way to confusion, panic and disbelief. Fortunately we shared a tacit agreement that we’d keep pushing until there was no doubt we were in the clear. As we were fleeing, I didn’t have a single thought that wasn’t about how to keep the pace, where to move, where it might be safe to stop and how to get there. I typically have an excellent sense of time, but I couldn’t tell you how long it took for us to finally pause in what was by then a still and silent wood to consider what to do next.
We were in a large clearing and I could hear a stream winding its way through the trees in the distance. We hadn’t fled to exhaustion, but plenty of us were close and once we stopped moving it was going to be hard to get moving again quickly. Jim collapsed next to me on his back, knees arched and pointed to the sky. Karen, Kelly and Sarah had Queakers in a death grip snuggle. Queakers was pretty relaxed and devouring the attention, while simultaneously using the opportunity to beg for jerky and canteen sips. Nothing special there. Erin and Karl were nervously eyeing the treeline as Lyle and Lando did a quick circuit of the meadow to get the lay of the land.
I was surrounded by friends. Friends who miraculously had not only survived that surreal scene in the woods below our campsite, but were uninjured despite the doubletime night hike and the detonation of at least one car. I lay on my back, quite tired from lack of sleep. I looked up at the indigo sky tinged with purple and pink and then brilliant golden yellow as the gray clouds lit with another dawn.
Yeah. Chalk another one up for camping.