After reading Price's blog, I'm tempted to follow suit and cough up everything that's been going down in the past couple of months. I think it's been long enough since it happened that I could retell the flash flood extravaganza with new fervor and spirit, but I'm gonna save it after all. I wish I could tell you all of my recent experience with a haunted campfire (seriously....no, this one is for real....I just about almost walked in on spirits dancing on Indian burial grounds and was molding mountainous formations out of my trail mashed potatoes and shouldn't even be here to tell the tale except that by the grace of God something kept Ramsey and me from reaching The Fire That Disappeared when we saw it that late, late night....our fire pit was booby-trapped even........okay, fine, I'll tell the tale. Keep in mind this is all a parenthetical diversion from my REAL blogging subject:
So there we were. Ramsey, a hobbit-like TrailWalker with energy emanating from his eyebrows to his fists and down to his quick little feet--no one since Cagefighter Kev has kept me laughing harder and moving faster on the trail. We were dropped off around 10 p.m. at a wash that was intended to turn into a road where we would find our band (we were instructed to take one boy from said band and walk with him to our final destination...two TrailWalkers, one YoungWalker...it's called a Walkabout). Anyway, we were dropped off at a different wash. A different wash that did eventually turn into a different road....a road not listed on any of our maps. This is where the haunting begins.
We walked up a hill and onto a ridge, following the road for a good mile and a half. We finally saw the flickering of a small campfire across the ravine from us. We stood at the top of a large hill with the road continuing onto the left of us, and the campfire straight ahead of us, slightly to the right and quite far from the road we currently walked. Just to the right of our place on the road was a large welcoming fire pit and several burned juniper trees crying out to be plucked limb by limb for firewood. Ramsey suggested we spend the night just the two of us and go to the campfire in the morning (he also told me I better not try to get in his sleeping bag halfway through the night because he'd go right to Price and turn me in. I told him to keep dreaming big).
The fire was quite far from us. The ridge fell away just past our fire pit and went way down into a thickly wooded and catclawed terrain where a creek supposedly trickled through. Then, up on the other side, halfway down from the ridge across the valley from us, the campfire flickered and smoked. When I went to check my traps behind a grove of trees down the road, I could hear voices from across the valley and Ramsey and I considered cutting through the valley and reaching the fire that night, but then decided not to when we both got pricked and cut by Arizona thorns as we test-drove the immediate foliage before us.
So we camped at the booby-trapped fire pit. Somehow, at least ten of the rocks inside the pit were the exploding type. Ramsey got thwacked right in the forehead by a thumb-sized piece of rock, and I laughed hard at his yelping and head-rubbing until I got my own pummeling as several smaller rocks hit my shoulder, my calves, and a three inch piece landed right into my bag of macaroni as I held it open in front of me. The heat from the rock melted the sides of my bag. Good thing it was macs and not my powdered milk or gatorade. I mentioned the idea of booby traps and Ramsey chittered at this and we both quoted Goonies for some few minutes: "Slick shoes? Are you crazy?"
The humor faded as flaming sticks and more rocks flew from the fire and Ramsey and I had to move our sleeping bags further and further from the fire as coals leaped from the juniper and continued to smolder and flicker wherever they landed in a five foot radius from the pit. We technically were too close to the fire, anyway, but I've never before seen anything like this exploding fire pit.
We went to bed somber and bruised, still hungry and cold because we couldn't sit near enough to the fire to take full advantage of it. The next morning I awoke to a bleeding red horizon...sailors take warning...and looked at my watch: quarter to seven. I got out of my bag and stretched. Ramsey lay like a slug about four feet away. I walked over to the edge of the ridge and looked towards the fire from the night before. I scanned the entire hill, squinting my eyes and cleaning my glasses, watching for any kind of smoke or smoldering red, any sign of life or movement on the hill across from us. Junipers grew scattered across the face of the land, but never enough of them to hide a group of people, and most of them were scrubby little things that wouldn't come much higher than a grown man's chest. In other words, you could not run nor hide on that hill. But damn it if there wasn't a single trace of any fire or person anywhere on that land across from me.
I woke up Ramsey and he was just as confused as I was. There was nothing. No trace. Unless whoever it was with the fire got up and did a stellar no-tracing job under the stars and moonlight earlier that morning......unless there was someone that crazy, that fire up and disappeared into thin air. Haunted. Imagine if we had walked into that campsite the night before. What dancing headless horsemen would we have found, and would they have let us walk away? Again and again we took GPS coordinates from our road in the middle of Tonto National Forest and again and again there was no road on our ridge according the maps we carried. We were a full three-quarter mile from the real road that ended up being far less developed of a road than the one we camped on.
Ramsey found a large knife in the scrub bushes just off the road, about ten yards from the exploding fire pit. The handle was aged and weather-worn, the wood gray and cracked, splintering at the bottom, but the blade was fresh and sharp except the top half which was missing, broken cleanly off. On one side of the blade, someone had etched, "Gene," and on the other side was, "Uncle".
Nothing since the story of the ghost wrench in 2003 with Joe Griffin has left me so speechless and curious. Ramsey carried Uncle Gene's knife with us until the end of the week when he passed the curse onto one of the boys in the Boys Band #2. A few other weird things happened last week....spotlights on the top of empty hills, noises in the bushes, etc.....but I do believe there was something in those hills last week. Wherever you are, Uncle Gene, we hold your name in remembrance and reverence. Rest in peace, man. Go towards the light.) <--end of original parenthetical
Okay, this post is already too long. I'll tell the real story of New Year's Eve and the hot house with a bottle of Olbas later. I have things to say about important issues. But ghost stories always come first on this blog. I'll end with a list of critters I have eaten on recent weeks on the trail:
Say's Stink Bug. Here he is in all his tan glory--the fabled cinnamon bug that some of you still don't believe me about. Let him walk around on your tongue until he gets nervous and lifts his back legs to let forth a refreshing spray of Trident cinnamon spray with a chemical aftertaste.
Grub. While our YoungWalker spent an entire day sitting by himself thinking and writing letters, Ramsey and I let out our pent up energy by damming up the creek to make a swimming pool and digging a big hole for our hot house. A foot and a half into the earth and Ramsey started finding grubs. He stuck one on his paw and thrust it at me saying, "Eat it. Tastes like peas." Never a girl to say no to a challenge, I furrowed my eyebrows at him, stuck the maggoty looking thing in my mouth and I'll be damned if grubs don't taste just like peas. Dead serious. Big juicy peas. I'm hooked.
Fire Ant. Cook these devils first. I had one bite the back of my throat on his way down as one last attempt at self-defense and I was a drooling, head/throat/ear-aching mess for a full three-hour hike. I put Olbas on my tongue, in my ear, under my nose, and along my neck to soothe my burning lymph nodes. Bad, bad news and SO not worth the lemony taste.
Crawdad. They're tasty. Ish. Tasty-ish. Fantastic with a garlic butter sauce.
Happy New Year, everyone. I should of come and found you on Red Creek, Price. Still, kind of nice to know we were both on somewhat nearby cliffs in the dawning sun writing letters to each other with frozen fingers. We need to get more Jim Croce for our roadtrip. Take care of that while I'm on the trail.
