WEIRDNESS
Glenda -- I'm submitting Misdemeanor One to fiction class and will get a lot of good help there, I've already learned more about writing short stories than I knew from forty years before, and have five pages of journal entries to add to Harley's sad tale. Also in Parapsychology class tomorrow night (Tuesday), the prof can also raise his hand in a dream by conscious will and treats me like a fond nephew for doing it too, only the second person he's ever seen who could do it.
Tonight I looked at the sky and said "I love you" to God, and the clouds flickered with lightning! I said "I see you" and they flashed again. Any weird moments in your life recently? Occult mentalism? The parapsych. class showed a picture of a significant house and I had been there several times in Berkeley. It dwelt on Duke experiments and the rev. who married me last time was involved. The government is working through six labs on mind power toward war and espionage. Great strides.
I can't think of another thing that you'd really find interesting, too bad we can't be sitting around talking. That's always interesting. So I'll go, back into my cave of distance, with my peanut butter sandwich between my legs. Bad dog. Yangyangyangyang
You don't love me as well as I love you,
Ed
Bill
love, Mike
Mike --
No weirdness to speak of, lately. There was this one ghost that I saw, though -- one time since we last spoke.
I was working for the Dept. of Agriculture as a gypsy moth trap tender. They issued me a GPS, and a map filled with the coordinates of sites they wanted me to hunt down. I would drive according to the map, and get within the thirty-yard target zone by a combination of driving and parking and hiking and always stopping to let the GPS stop rolling and declare my coordinates, until I could get it to admit I was in the assigned area. Then I would set a trap or do a moth count on a trap I had already set. A couple of sites were just impossible to reach. But there was this one I had a feeling about. A hard road in West Portsmouth, flanked by forested hills along one side, and forested drop off on the other side. Down the middle, a narrowish, beat to shit, two-lane road from, well, Hell. One time I was passing through, looking for some way to interrupt the hillside trim to get about 1.2 miles inside it to the east, when I smelled a dead body. They are right about that. When you smell a dead, large-size mammal, you know it. Must be a cellular thing, like an instinct. Never knew if it was a deer or a HUGE dog, or a missing teenage girl or what. Another time or two, I spotted a little dog so scalded with mange it was a cruelty for it to be alive. Its eyes were like to be welded shut from the naked inflammation. I tried to catch it, but could not. Didn't give a hoot about stealing it from whoever would let it suffer that way. But it would keep going under something whenever I succumbed to the impulse to put on my flashers (no place to pull over) and do the gentle sweet talking approach. So I gave up on catching it and took to bringing something pungent and good when I went up that way. Pungent so the little blind loser could find it by smell. Usually something like a beef or chicken burrito with the works. Slow down when I saw the dog, toss the half unwrapped food off the side of the road away from the pavement. He'd DIVE on it. That and prayer was all the help he ever got from me. And one time I was trolling up and down that road still looking for the way into those hills, when I had to drive around a large rib cage with attached back bone. By large, I mean it would take probably a 3'x2.5'x1.5' box to pack it. Took up half of the hillward lane. It disappeared after a few days. No, I didn't call the cops. You never spent much time in West Portsmouth, did you? Anyway, one day I spotted a wide spot between the trees, and went for it. Eased my little gold civic with the bullet hole and the word "Honda" misspelled on the side in white paint -- best car ever -- up off the pavement, and over a couple of tree roots, and began tentatively to roll forward into the thicket. No room to turn around, and tree appendages raking the car on every side except the bottom, I crawled forward, and forward, and kept wondering if this is the stupidity I end up dying of (no cell phone).
Long after I stopped seeing the light from back where I came in, and when I still was about .8 mile from the drop zone, I spotted something hanging from a tree up ahead on the right. It was a dagger with apparently red paint on it. After that, I was rolling past skull and crossbones signs and turn back now or regret it briefly signs (spelled "breefly"), and a fake skeleton hanging in one spot and "Lot no. 13" on another hand scrawled sign. I figured I was rolling into a teenage hangout.
With .2 miles to go, panic won out and I decided I HAD to find a way to turn around, and quick, when magically I was suddenly in broad, sunlit day again, completely without warning. I had rolled out from under the final bit of incredibly thick tree cover into a natural amphitheater that made me feel like I was seeing a UFO all by myself. Knocked me out. About 2 miles across, the surrounding hills formed a natural, and from the look of it, a perfectly round bowl. The field all the way to the distant hills was as flat as crop field, except it only wore yellow high grass for crop, up to about the middle of my thigh. Uninterrupted. The giant, round flatland looked pet-able, all uniformly furry like that. And on my left, just about ten feet off the path and about thirty feet beyond the trees was an old, faded, pale-blue, farm house, like something out of the Grapes of Wrath.
I could not figure out if somebody lived there or not. If so, then they likely would shoot me if I got out of the car. No car was there, and no garage. Still, maybe they was the types could live off what wandered by out here. Decided to go for it anyhow: get out, post a trap on the nearest tree, dive back in and pull forward, going 180 degrees in the flatness and head out as fast as I could trundle over tree roots half the height of my car. See what happens.
Made it.
Emerged after awhile back onto the actual paved road, to find evening just about to settle in, and got the hell out of there. I knew I had to go back three more times. Twice to count moths in the trap, and then once more in September to collect the trap and turn it in to the State.
Next time I crawled in there, I wasn't so worried; but when I pulled out into the daylight, there was a van and a pickup truck, and two young men about twenty years old standing by the vehicles discussing something, just about thirty-five feet from me. I acted as though I didn't see them, got out, checked the trap, turned, did a take on them and smiled and waved and pointed to them as I moved forward, like I had a question for them, and dove into the car and commenced backing out as fast as I could go. Lucky I didn't lose the muffler.
Third time I went, I was worried. Would the drug traffickers be there again? Would they come in behind me and block my retreat? But the coast was clear. I checked the trap and got back in the car, and began to lock in the results of the check on the GPS, so it would send the coordinates. We were always supposed to log in results on site so they could verify we weren't doing the job from the couch in front of ESPN. Mostly, I did. But as I was punching in the numbers and etc., I saw a man out of the corner of my eye approaching from the field. Son of a bitch. How could I have missed a full grown man in that empty field? He was getting closer, and I was afraid to look up. Did he have a gun? Was he the homeowner, or a thug tending some illicit crop? He was about one hundred feet off to my right, walking straight toward me, and I decided to try the same trick again. Finish locking in the GPS, look up and see him, beam and raise one finger, reaching for the door handle as though to get out and ask a question, and then floor it. I quickly shifted into reverse with minimal motion. I knew where the tree roots were by now.
So I lock in the results, and he has arrived, about twelve feet from the front right corner of the car, and now he has stopped walking and is just standing there. I am all quasi-absorbed in my fiddling about. Peripherally, I can see he is about six foot tall, wearing faded jeans and a white button up shirt tucked in with the sleeves rolled part way up. Dark hair, seems fairly short, at least not down to his shoulders, but I am not positive he is not holding anything in either hand. He is just standing there now, facing the windshield, and that seems confrontational to me. Showtime. I theatrically click "send" and drop the GPS on the seat beside me, looking up with my brow furrowed and on the cusp of faking my first awareness of his presence and bursting into a pleased smile.
Emptiness.
Waving, thigh-high yellow grass. Forever.
I am alone.
I don't know how many fractions of a second it took me to unfreeze and assimilate that there wasn't even an interruption in the top of the grass, indicating where the guy could have dropped straight down onto the ground faster than the speed of looking up. The grass was as always, uninterruptedly fuzzy and golden. As Jeff Goldblum said in Deathwish "Nobodynobody!".
I felt bizarre in a bizarre kind of way. Like embarrassed the way you would be if you were shouting something fakey and insincere and suddenly the music stopped and everybody heard you yelling it and it sounded so fakey and insincere as it echoed that you want to slink away. But who was I embarrassed about? I was alone. Frozen in the barest first twinkling of a fakey insincere "Oh! Hello!" that had proved completely unnecessary.
The last time I went there, that September, was a story for another Halloween.