When did it go?

After so many years, it’s good to finally make a record of these things. I haven’t spoken much about them, but those whom I’ve told often seem to accept or reject it based on what they already believe. We had camped in a notch just below Rattlesnake Rocks, near Bear Ridge, that was surrounded by small hemlocks hanging on just below the treeline, protected by the wind from three sides. It looked windswept and level, so it would be easy to camp there, and difficult to find. I think about what happened that weekend as often as I cut my hair. Truly, even I don’t fully understand it, and I was there.

A journey is so often influenced by its beginnings, so it is no surprise that my lessons in humility started at a young age. My father wouldn’t even call it “Camping” unless we hiked a full day at his pace away from the car we’d arrived in, often finding a dirt road at whim, traveling in a direction he’d never been, as an adventure, because a rock fell over as he passed, or a bird started, or an eagle or a hawk or a vulture sat in a tree “oddly”. This journey had started with me buying a 1959 Dodge Power wagon. It might sound enigmatic, but I saw the power wagon as freedom. It was old and rusty in most places, but well maintained, and I jumped at the chance to get it. I had a small piece of land, with a house, a wife, a slightly new-ish baby girl, about two and a half, and a strong desire to show the beautiful rustic natural world that I had grown up in as a boy without having to hike for a day to do it.

The power wagon, even though it could not go anywhere fast, it could go quite literally just about anywhere. If there was even the semblance of an old logging road, it could keep plowing over small saplings and rough terrain. I ‘d seen what a power wagon could do when I worked on skidder crews up in some of those remote hillsides, and in the pit of my stomach, I knew that these places would disappear soon under the chainsaw’s unrelenting hunger. With the ‘59 Dodge, I could get a lot closer to the beauty spots with a much shorter walk at the end for my wife and still in mint condition child, but it was with some trepidation that we set out on our first journey in the truck with little Angel laughing between us on the barely padded bench maroon bench seat that bounced up and down with every bump. I had gone through the truck beforehand. The brakes had been shot, needing new pads and pistons, but with a little effort, the parts were replaced, brakes were bled, and we set out, having prepared ourselves with getting everything else ready, but there is always a slight disquiet when we step off into the unknown.

Autumn in the highlands is different from down in the low country. That’s one of the reasons that season has always brought lowlanders to seek out higher elevations in anticipation of brilliant fall colors. For those who live here, it is a time when we envy the squirrels. There just never seems like there’s enough time to get ready, then winter drops like a hammer, and some chores have to get put off until spring. Even though we were feeling the pinch, Molly and I knew that little Angel would only be this age once, and with how difficult Molly’s pregnancy had been, we thought best to not take it for granted that we could have more children, and extract as much from every single day with Angel as possible.

It was in that spirit we packed the truck with all we could think to bring from our larder. With Molly leading me as her army, we had just finished putting up most of the harvest from our humble farm. The root cellar was packed with potatoes and butternut squash, beans and a bonanza of pickles, succotash, stewed tomatoes, pickled peppers, pumpkins, peaches. The last thing we did was a massive run of apple butter that would get used mainly for trade, but we had packed plenty to taste test for our trip into the backcountry, and it’s pungent spice escaped the tightly pressure cooker canned jars, filling the truck cab with it’s sweet aroma as we slowly jostled our way around the tight mountain curves heading higher and higher. Little Angel could not sit still, and kept trying to stand up on the seat so she could see out the windshields, so as the road turned from asphalt into gravel, we were moving slow enough that we had to indulge her glee as she happily bounced with every bump, and pointed in every direction with words Molly and I had never heard her say. With curiosity and joy so abundant, we decided to follow the rocky, narrow road until there was no more road to follow.

It was Angel who found the camping spot in the notch surrounded by hemlocks on three sides. It was Angel that found it because as soon as I set her down, she bolted headlong and then crawled raptly into a thick growth of rhododendron before I could react, and I was too big to follow her. I could hear her chortling and bantering but I could not see her, and panicked, calling out her name as coaxingly as I could muster without yelling as I ran along the edge of the dense growth. We could not have seen it from the road, but there turned out to be a path, wider than a bear, that arched over to the perfect camping spot, and there, stomping on the ground grunting and gesturing wildly was little Angel, apparently excited by finding our camping spot. Just to the other side of some large rocks that formed the edge of the notch was a grade so steep, I could not have stood side hill on it without sliding down the hill. It was covered in gravel from the eroding hillside, but the rocks were large enough that I didn’t think Angel could climb them, so I wasn’t worried about her falling down the sheer slope. She continued to stomp and grunt her way around our little flat zone and suddenly pointed up to the top of the rocks and said “Hubla”. Then she looked at me quizzically and said, “Huba?” I didn’t think much of it, because she was just at that age when sounding out words resembled mimicry, and even though I was jogging ahead in panic, Molly soon followed, and I was quickly distracted as we began to site plan our camp.

I had cut a tall slender sapling that was growing from the center of the dirt road we’d driven on, planning to cut it in half for tent poles, but when I tried it, it fit into the rocks surrounding our camp like the rib of a small sloop turned upside down, providing the perfect perch for my heavy canvas tarp, and I was able to tie it off tightly through the grommet eyelets to the hemlocks and around the edges of the rocks, almost sealing it tight to the ground. The gaps around the edges were so snug, we were not worried about our little Angel being able to crawl out from under it. It was on the return trip for supplies that odd things started happening. When Molly was unpacking the supplies from a box we had left in the front seat well, she noted that the apple butter was missing. I hadn’t noticed it, but also hadn’t packed it, and it wasn’t important enough for either one of us to worry about. We agreed it must have been left by accident and was still on the kitchen table, and it was getting toward late afternoon, so we decided to cook up one of the big butternut squash in a small fire just outside the tent, along with some of the salt pork, and fall asleep for an early start.

Little Angel woke us up in the middle of the night, wailing. Somehow, she had squeezed out through the tied off tarp flap and was standing at the edge of one of the big boulders, howling. When I asked her what she was doing, she pointed up at the rock and said, “Huba”. Just then, in the distance, I heard a sound that still haunts me to this day. It made every hair on my body stand straight out. It sounded like a cross between human and animal, with a resonant timber that I could feel across the distance. Angel howled again, and I grabbed her and pushed under the flap and back inside our shelter. Molly looked at our dark outlines in the dense blackness and whispered, “What was that?”. I could not answer. Angel, as if sensing our anxiety, plainly pointed and said, “Huba”, and satisfied, snuggled up against me sleepily.

We all must have fallen asleep soundly after that, because the next thing I remember is birds chirping, and the faint promise of more light to come. I was the first one up, Molly and little Angel were cuddled up together, so I set about prepping a new fire, and when that was slowly crackling, went to where I had stashed out food. Bear bagging food in the wild lands is an important rule to follow. I had cheated a little. There was a stunted old cedar tree growing out and away from the rocks that I had used to hang out food bag from. It was so steep, I thought nothing would be able to even stand there, but when I pulled the bag in, it seemed too light. I was right. The bag had not been carefully tied shut, but it had definitely been opened, and the other butternut squash was missing, along with the rest of the salt pork. All that was left in the bag were potatoes.

I didn’t think Molly had anything to do with the disappearance, but I asked her anyway, and as the details of our situation slowly became apparent to her, she started to get as nervous as I was. We had food taken from a place nothing I knew of could have stood, but we were hungry, and I had stashed some of the food back near the truck, so I walked the short distance back to the power wagon to find the other bag also opened, on the ground. I had bear bagged this one more traditionally, throwing a rock with the end of a long rope tied around it, high up in a tree, and gently dragging the food weighted bag until it was up around 40 feet. The rope had been tied to another tree nearby, but when I looked at that tree, it looked like it had been smashed over and over again with a large rock, until the rope broke.

Just then, I heard a scream coming from the direction of our camp. I ran over the rocky ground as fast as I could, and when I got there, Molly was almost incoherent. I managed to glean that our Little Angel had climbed up on top of one of the rocks and shouted “Huba!” before she jumped over the side, screaming all the way out of sight as she fell into another thick stand of rhododendron growing on that precipitous grade. I had to bite my hand to keep from jumping over the edge to go after her. I ran back to the truck. The rope I had left behind was my only chance to get down into that valley. All I could think of while I was running was “Don’t trip”. When I came breathlessly back into our little hidden camp, Molly was hugging little Angel tight and weeping. I couldn’t understand. I just wrapped my arms around them both and held them as if they would fly away otherwise. Little angel just kept rubbing her mommy’s tears, saying: “Huba”. As Molly calmed down, I learned that she had been crying when little angel seemed to climb up on top of the rock and called out, “Huba”. I looked over the edge Angel had dropped off and supposedly climbed back up. It was a steep gravel chute that would have taken me all the way to the bottom in about twenty seconds, and I would not have been able to climb out unassisted. I shuddered. What was going on?

Molly and I decided to pack everything up and cut our trip short. Everything was too confusing, and I felt insecure. It took me several trips to get everything back to the truck, and I just threw stuff in the back without packing, but Molly and little angel had stayed at the campsite, looking off into the distance. We finally made it back to the truck to leave, and there, on the hood, were the missing apple butter jars. They had been emptied, and sloppily refilled with honey in the honeycomb. The jars looked like they had been cleaned, and then someone took some big chunks of honeycomb, and just shoved them into the jars, leaving the outer edges of the honeycomb mixed with lots of excess honey on the outside of the jar. Molly and I looked in disbelief, but little Angel just pointed and said, “Huba”, looking very satisfied with herself. Then she jumped out of her mothers arms and ran to the edge of the road, and howled, turning in every direction and howling, finally putting her little hands on her little hips and said very proudly, “Huba.”

I went back to the site by myself a few years later, and the trail that had been wide enough for a bear to go through wascovered in boulders so large, it made it difficult if even possible to follow. Some folks have claimed I was making it all up, but I know what I saw. Molly and I never spoke of that trip with Angel, and she’s no longer little, although she’ll always be my little girl to me. She's always been a wild child, and that experience proved to be no exception.