A Ghost Story - Part VI
Image: Nick Linnen
Jennifer was eager to dive into the woods and hike as soon as possible. Thoughts of her father kept tugging at her, but the cabin they were assigned to was secluded and comfortable, and being in such a distant location from Austin made her feel -- falsely -- as if things were actually okay. She had never been in a place as remote as this. On their first morning, she went straight to the reception desk to ask for a map of the hiking trails. All they had was a flimsy piece of paper with lines pencilled in showing three or four trails looping from the fish camp into the vast expanse of woods and back again. “Where’s the entrance?” she asked. The young man at the desk explained in some detail how to get there, but when Jennifer and Jim went looking later that afternoon they had trouble finding the trailhead. They searched for about fifteen minutes and when they eventually found an unmarked entrance hardly noticeable in a line of trees edging a parking lot beyond the last cabin, they slapped hands and into the woods they went.
It was about three-thirty. They only intended to go a little ways and come back for a real hike the following day. But the moment they entered the woods they were so enthralled by the terrain that they couldn’t stop walking. It was as if they had gone, in a split second, from one world to another -- the fish camp with its open views over the lake to a cloistered wall of trees, hundreds and hundreds of trees. Since they hadn’t planned to be in the woods for long, they’d brought very little with them, just their phones and a bottle of water. Neither of them talked, but there was an unspoken agreement between them that this short hike was delicious and they had to keep going for awhile. Ten minutes tops. The trail was rudimentarily marked with small red flags; they were aware of two or three paths leading off from it, but figured if they stayed on the original trail, they’d be fine.
Image: Jess Snoek
And for a while they were. The woods were so captivatingly beautiful and the trail felt so good beneath their feet that they kept going and going. Ten minutes became fifteen and then twenty and then half an hour.
Both had eschewed watches on vacation, but when they looked to see what time it was, they realized their phones had stopped working -- no signal this deep in the forest.
There was still plenty of daylight, but the sun was beginning to slant westward and its rays were drifting less and less strongly through the tops of the trees. Jennifer figured they had been on the trail for about an hour now. The flags marking the way had grown intermittent. They passed a beautiful little lagoon and she wondered if it was the same she’d seen five minutes ago or a new one. And then she realized that everything -- every tree and rock and brief clearing in these woods -- looked identically the same and they had no idea where they were. They hadn’t seen another human the whole time they’d been out here.
Cover photo: Andy Holmes