A story about.. something
A long time ago, when I was young and foolish (as opposed to being old and foolish now) I went on an impromptu camping expedition one night with my friend Bryan Carnett. My dad had passed away the year before and I’d inherited his 1968 Dodge Pick-em-up truck, which I drove all over the country (the country being the county I lived in and occasionally down to Sacramento).
Bryan, because he spelled his name with a “Y”, was every bit as impetuous and free spirited as I, so we’d often go on these overnight excursions and not wonder in the least what our parents thought about it. In my case it was just my poor, beleaguered mom who’d lost her beloved husband scantly a year before and was dealing with a wild, out of control teen son who wasn’t dealing with losing his dad very well at all.
Bryan had a full set of parents, both of whom were terrific people but a bit lax in the department of discipline.
We’d thrown a couple of sleeping bags into the back of the truck which was the extent of our “camping gear” and made our way up to Stumpy Meadows above Lake Edsen, a very isolated and lonely place, wherein we found an old logging road and made our way back into the woods, surrounded by towering pine trees for miles around.
We pulled over into a little clearing out in the middle of nothingness and climbed into our sleeping bags in the truck bed. There we laid on our backs, staring up at the stars and contemplating all kinds of deep, philosophical things such as which one of us was going to get up the nerve to make a move on Traci Bordges (“Gorgeous Bordges”) and what kind of beer goes best with Kentucky Fried Chicken.
We managed to fall asleep somewhere in the middle of all that excitement and much later, I was awakened by the feeling that someone was staring at me – it was some kind of person nearly five feet tall who had 5-8 friends, all standing around the truck.
It was a moonlit night but the pine trees filtered out most of it, so it took me a few moments to realize that the majority of light illuminating our visitors was coming from some source on ground level behind a grove of trees to our right, which definitely hadn’t been there when we’d parked in the clearing hours earlier.
I nudged Bryan, who awoke and glanced around before reacting in the only way that a sensible, intelligent young man would..
He screamed.
This broke my seconds long pattern of stunned silence by causing me to scream too, and as we both screamed they scattered, heading off toward the soft pulsating glow of light coming through the trees, making a sound like startled deer tramping through the brush.
In the midst of our panic laden, piercing yells we managed to get out of the back of the truck and into the cab, where I faltered for my keys and somehow got them into the ignition despite how badly I was shaking. As the engine roared to life, I slammed it into DRIVE, and we drove out of there at a high rate of speed, narrowly missing trees and not looking back to see if the glow of light rose up and flew away or anything like that – we didn’t care what it did, we just wanted to leave very, very badly.
Neither of us had been this scared before and it hadn’t occurred to us that they might have been frightened too – I think we were convinced that they had run back to their whatever-it-was to obtain weapons and rope.
I must have been doing about 50 mph, which is pretty fast for a logging road, and it wasn’t until about 15 minutes later, when we’d gotten out onto the two-lane highway, that I slowed down and both of us had calmed down enough to speak of it.
Bryan summed it up for both of us quite nicely with a simple question, “What in the hell was THAT?” I told him I didn’t know, which probably would have gone without saying but we had to say something. We talked about it for maybe a half an hour as we made our way back to town, speculating as to whom they might be and where they’d come from.
We ruled out someone playing a joke on us, because that far out in the woods it’s a good way to get shot, which would have happened, had we been armed.
As we got back into town, we vowed not to tell anyone about it and I held onto that for years. I found later that Bryan had told his girlfriend, which elicited the reaction we’d suspected – she thought we were nuts, or better yet, stoned.
We were neither.
I finally told someone about ten years after the fact and they seemed to believe it, so that loosened up my inhibitions enough to tell a few more people whenever the subject came up. One person several years ago was so receptive of my account that he urged me to check myself for implants. Others have just simply stated, “Well that explains a lot” (knowing me).
These days I don’t care if anyone believes it or not, or what they think of me, so that makes it blog-worthy.
I’ve long since lost touch with Bryan so I have no idea if he even remembers it, let alone has told anyone else.
It happened though, and I know several things beyond a doubt – we weren’t drunk, stoned or hallucinating in any way and whoever was standing around the truck looking at us that night.. they were strange. Not a one was over five feet tall, so they were peering over the edge of the truck bed and their heads were abnormally large with eyes to match.
I remember long, spindly fingers grasping the edge of the truck and movements that seemed graceful beyond anything I’d seen before. The light from the trees was so soft and minimal it was impossible to make out details, leaving most of what we saw to be in shadows and silhouette.
The movie ET came out a few years later and, as my friends sat in the theater with amused looks on their faces, enjoying the film for the supposed science fiction that it is, I couldn’t help but feel a little creepy – some of the effects were all too familiar, especially.. THE HANDS.
I don’t know if there’s anything out there in those stars we see in this desert sky at night, but I suspect there might be. I don’t know who or what we encountered during that summer night in the seventies out in those woods, but I don’t think they were hikers from Sacramento who were up for a weekend jaunt.
I find a certain arrogance in people who state as a matter of fact that the human race is alone in this universe. How do they know that? I certainly don’t, which I guess makes me a cosmic agnostic.
A friend recently asked me if I made this up. I think she was really, REALLY hoping I did.
Sorry.. nope.
UPDATE - Bryan has since tracked me down, having found this post online via a name-search his son did on him. He remembers the event and CONFIRMS THE STORY.
So there.. I’m not crazy after all!
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