liminal

Ok! I am such a lame. I didn't take any pictures with my new camera on my camping trip because I forgot the instruction manual at home and I didn't know how to load the film.

However, I did a lot of bonding with my digital SLR. Camping was beautiful! The last night some really creepy shit happened though. Anyone, please tell me if you can come up with a better explanation for all this, because as it stands, I think it's going to torture me for the rest of my life.

So it was just me, my best friend Kristen, and my dog Harley camping in the desolation wilderness next to an old logging road in the Sierra Nevadas. Mostly just locals come there to ride their ATVs and fire their guns. On our last day there we didn't see anybody else at all.

We hiked down to this meadow, taking pictures like this



Ok, ok, most of them were more like this



When we got back to camp at sunset, I went off into the bushes for a pee when I saw a bunch of birds get spooked and flutter out of a tree about fifty feet away. I was a little worried about what had spooked them, especially because I had kinda had this feeling of being watched all day, and had even heard whistles as if some person were about to approach, but nobody ever did.

For about five minutes, Harley didn't seem to notice anything, but then all of a sudden he was staring intently in the same direction as where the birds had been. I grabbed my mace and a big maglight and we went to go check it out. He had his nose to the ground the whole time sniffing out some kinda trail, and pretty soon every hair on his back was standing up.

Part of me wanted to leave right then, but I knew Kristen really wanted to stay, and we managed to convince ourselves that it had just been some kind of animal that had by then retreated. Of course once it was dark and we were all cozied up in the tent, Harley started barking. Then at one point we heard this metal bowl we had left sitting out (but empty) hit the ground. I shined a flashlight out of the tent but couldn't see anything, and was too afraid to get out and look. I just kept trying to tell myself it was some kind of animal, raccoons, or a bear, at worst, pillaging our food. But still, I could hardly sleep all night, and Harley's intermittent fits of barking throughout didn't help.

When we got up in the morning, we found the bowl on the ground, the little wooden table it had been on was broken, but all our food, which had been sitting on the open tailgate of my truck, was fucking untouched. So something or someone had been hovering in our camp the entire night, and it wasn't there for food. What. the fuck.

The only explanations I can come up with are a) human stalker or b) Bigfoot. People have actually claimed to have encountered Bigfoot before in the area we were in. When we got home, I did some internet research, and whistling is supposed to be one of the sounds he makes. Dun da dun.

Anyone? Please convince me this was something other than a or b. One person offered the idea of a mountain lion. But why would it have stayed all night and not touched our food? I don't know but I am never going to that place again without a gun.

But to end this blog on a good note, here's some pretty pictures I took on the trip.