I'm glad it wasn't you. I was fishing my pants out of the river. Only out of sight of the road for like five minutes. As i was carrying them down to a patch of willows to hang dry a white car, covered in dust and driven by a very focused looking brown haired man, came zooming down the road. Coming from the way that was blocked by a couple dozen downed trees with untrammeled snow beyond. The wrong fucking way. 

I nearly dropped by bindle-stick and soaking wet pants into the mud and bracken. "Morgan" i shouted but the roar of the river consumed my voice and the little white car was gone. There was nothing i could do.

There had been an equally unlikely black truck a few days before. Maybe i was just seeing things. It happens. The first night i hallucinated voices and distant music. I'm wondering now if i didn't somehow get a little acid in me the night before. 

Anyway. I had to know. I'd already walked down the road that day. Paying attention to tracks. On the lookout for predators. Pocketing a sharpie and tossing a tin can over the tip of my bindle-stick (again, predators) I hoofed back up the road with a keen eye for mud.

There were fresh tire tracks in the wet mud. There had really been a white car. Three options narrowed to two. It had been you or it hadn't. From another stand of willows at the end of the road i peeled strips of bark. These i then artfully arranged to spell MORGAN at the turn. It is challenging to bend freshly peeled strips of willow bark into the shape of a capital letter M. It looked more like "~organ" which was good enough. I sharpied a message on a nearby rock and made it visible. My tin can rattled merrily the whole walk back.

There was a fourth option. That the white car had been there. It chills me to think of that. Even in the relative safety of this shitty motel.

There was another car later. After the sun had gone behind the mountain but well before it was even aquatinted with the horizon. It was while talking to them that i realized i looked like a crazy person. It was these two women. My age-ish. Subaru. Big ole open suitcase in the back seat. The driver, Gabby, made sure that we were all on a first name basis (Gabby and her sister Abby and their dog Noah) immediately and used mine very often. Like how one talks to a semi-threatening crazy person. 

I explained about the trees. The ones ahead and the ones I'd cut through to get this far. The mysterious white car may have been mentioned. They were kind of flabbergasted that i was a) there b) alone and c) telling them about things that may or may not have been real. They asked me if i was out of gas. I mentioned that even if they got to the trailhead it was a hike in. Suggested that dusk might not be the best time to go hiking in strange woods. They exchanged a look. I did not say "are you expecting to wheel your fucking suitcase down there," but we parted ways soon after. 

There were no cars that night after Gabby and Abby. There were no cars the next day either. That was the day things started to feel a little spooky. It had rained for most of Saturday. The day of the white car was beautiful. That night though; it was like the woods were coming out again. Waking up. I built a fire of sticks and twigs. A smoky little fire made more so by the occasional cedar frond. It felt prudent to make oneself known. The phrase "redolent of man" kept running through my head.

On the day of the white car, Monday, 
I'd hiked up the river a ways. It was one of those woods where every dappling of light suggests a path. The kind of woods you can get super lost in. I tried to keep close to the bank. Within two hundred feet there was boot-sucking mud to contend with and i was thankful for my bindle-stick. The fallen trees were thick there. The soil was composed mainly of mulch. Generations of trees the young feasting on their fallen progenitors. I was able to traverse a fair amount of mud - and some spiky mace-like thing called Devil's Cock or somesuch - on the backs of fallen cedars. Morgan, if you have never walked gingerly across a moist old tree, tin can bindle-stick jangling, ten feet above the sucking mud. You should. Then you should do as i did: start worrying about broken ankles in the middle of nowhere and get off the logs. 

There was a bend in the river and an enticing roar. Just outside of the muddy area near the riverbank was a steep hill. It to was covered in fallen trees and the little dells left by the roots were full of mosses and ferns. The dappling was incredible.  The roar was worth investigating. Just around the bend was a violent waterfall. The kind of waterfall where you're like "yup, someone's gonna fall in that and die." Maybe it was more of a cataract. I'm not up on my water feature names. But it was probably five hundred feet of whitewater rushing over rocks with maybe two hundred of those feet being vertical. I did not get too very close.  It seemed like i was near the top of something. Some local maximum. There was unfettered daylight ahead. There was also a corresponding increase in foilage. I couldn't get through without probably getting lost. What with all the ducking, climbing, and, around-ing that would have been required. 

The way back is always quicker than the way out. Less eventful too. I did see one thing though that i hadn't seen before. In a little clearing (about the size of this motel room actually) with an extra helping of extra rotten wood in it there was this branch. It was maybe ten feet high and upside down. Like this huge claw scraping at the ground. It was stuck in there too. The tiniest little finger-tip branches were as big as my fingers and they had stuck in good. The tree that it had fallen from was poof! Gone. Blown down and rotted away while this grasping branch held itself up out of the slop. Lived to tell the tale.

So anyway Morgan. I'm glad it wasn't you. I'm glad we didn't miss each other. It sounds like the city got crazy while i was away. Next time we'll have to maybe plan ahead a little more carefully. There's a lot of summer left.