Blake's+UFG

Blake Berry ENGL 408 Winter 2011 Paper #3-UFG I’m sure it’s basically a rite of passage for any young man to be confronted at some point about facing his fears. It’s generally accepted that one cannot live in fear. That’s why I was out in the woods…to overcome my anxiety that had been bugging me for as long as I could remember. I suppose my upbringing could be blamed, my parents were some of the least outdoorsy people that you could ever meet. All throughout my early years, I had never gone hunting, fishing or even four-wheeling. I was raised in the suburbs and I had always stayed in suburbs, even when moving from one state to the next. I suppose I should take the time to formally introduce myself, and to explain why I found myself wandering into the woods. I go by Luc. I’m 24 and a few years removed from college, working in retail. Don’t let the bit about the outdoors above fool you; I’m about as impulsive as they come. Once I got settled after graduation, my live-in girlfriend and I decided to both spontaneously pack up and move somewhere warm. Makes sense, doesn’t it? I suppose after all the years of being pale Midwesterners, we wanted to bounce around Florida for a while before our funds ran out and we needed to settle in somewhere again. That whole plan was going just peachy up until she decided that despite my willingness to sacrifice my job and lifelong home just for all of us to be happy still wasn’t enough to satisfy the thrills she needed before we both grew old. I woke up one morning alone, followed by two more mornings of waking up alone. And as all of us young children of the 2010’s know, one whole day without a text message is death incarnate to a relationship, so you can imagine after three days the message sunk in pretty deep. After that lovely and expensive trip to Cocoa Beach, the time came for me to return back to Michigan to rebuild the burned bridges and hopefully get my job back. As I began the daylong trip up back up north, my mind flooded over the possible directions this new life could take me. I argued with myself over why I would head back home after I had sacrificed everything to settle somewhere new. I began to feel like I had been beaten down and drained to the point of not having the strength to keep venturing out into the world. My decision to go back to Michigan was my retreat; my retreat from the fear of what other blows life would strike. I took the highway up through Florida, then Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and so on. I didn’t want to stop and sleep somewhere for the night, I didn’t want to stop running. I only stopped for gas, food, caffeine and the bathroom. It turns out my one bathroom stop turned out to be an eventful one. I was about 5 hours from home, after 15-plus hours of driving down the freeway all day and night. I needed to stop and take a piss, as I mentioned above. I looked at my watch, four in the afternoon. I decided to pull over to a rest stop. It wasn’t anything too spectacular; tourism offices with a few vending machines and of course the bathrooms, surrounded by woods, as most of them seem to be. I returned to my car after I used the bathroom I was the only person in the parking lot at the time, so it wasn’t another person stopping in need of a piss. As I walked to my car, something darted across the corner of my eye. I still don’t know what it was that caused me to turn my head, but I started to stare into those woods. As I said before, I grew up in an environment that caused me to avoid places like the forest. It’s not that I had any specific quarrels with nature; I had just never taken the time up to this point to find out why so many people enjoy things like hiking and whatnot. The autumn leaves had this crazy golden hue to them that formed all these incredible shades of orange and green. I also took time to observe how tall some of the trees you see in forests are. I wish I were more knowledgeable about what species of trees are indigenous to this region, but I won’t even try to guess. I’ve also always heard about how there are trees out there that stick around for thousands of years, standing guard to whatever lies on the other side of their woods throughout several human lifetimes. It may seem a little confusing to some about why I decided to start worrying about something so trivial in the midst of being abandoned and having a million other more pressing issues at hand, but there was just something about those woods that was daring me to go in and explore. I guess it was at this point where I had what you’d call an epiphany. My whole life I had been running or retreating from something. I was retreating back from Florida instead of staying down there and figuring out what the hell happened with Aubrey, I had retreated to Florida because I was afraid of settling into my job and being tied down, reluctant to take on that responsibility, just like I avoided the little things like what it was about these woods that was drawing me in. I was done running. I locked up my car, slightly paranoid about carjackers, I decided to take all my valuables in my backpack, and entered the woods. It was mid-October, and I needed to bundle up for the cold weather, It had been awhile since I could see my own breath. It was also notable how suddenly vivid the dead leaves on the trees appeared to be now. At the onset, it appeared to me that I was now going to suddenly be smitten by the grandeur of everything. I began to move away from the highway, getting away from the noises of traffic, and the farther I ventured into the woods, the prettier everything seemed to get. I was not familiar with this part of the state, and I had no idea when I would eventually run into another road or town, so this is what made this little hike all that more exciting. I kept seeing tons of things that I had never even taken to time to seek out before, I saw several different kinds of birds, I saw a hawk flying around in a clearing. I also came to a small brook that I followed for a little while to a pond where I sat for a while to just stare at the water. Seeing as how this was in the middle of autumn, I knew when I walked into the woods that I would have about five hours until nightfall, and as I was sitting by the pond, I had a few brief thoughts that were along the lines of “hey, I could’ve been home a few hours by now, I’m just prolonging my road trip by sitting here this long”. It was at this point when I realized that my peaceful escape must come to an end, I lifted up my wrist to check my watch, only to realize that my watch was no longer there. “Very odd” I thought to myself. I was almost certain that I had kept it on when I went into the rest stop. I would’ve noticed if it fell off, so I must have left it at my car. Either way, it was a cheap watch and I needed to get back to my car before dark and get back home. I got up from the side of the pond and walked back across the clearing to get back on the loosely outlined trail that I had followed up to that point. At this juncture, I started to realize why hikers tend to take compasses with them when they wander through new areas, because the path where I thought I had walked on before was covered in underbrush, I must have walked off in a different direction when I got up from the water’s edge. For being so near a major highway, this forest was strangely wild, there were no park benches or signage or any other indicators that people were here very often. As embarrassing as it is to admit this, I decided to check my phone and use the GPS app to pinpoint exactly how far off I was from the rest stop. As I slid my hand into my pocket, my fingers were greeted by an unexpected ZAP when they met my cell phone. “Very odd again” I said. I took my phone out only to discover that the battery was dead, which wasn’t a shock to me since Aubrey had apparently made off with the car charger when she took off in Florida. In addition to that, I always had a tendency to neglect my phone when it needed charging every night. At this point, I decided the most logical thing to do was to walk back the way I came from the pond and look around with what little sunlight was left in an attempt to find the right trail. “The brook” I said, that was what had originally accompanied the path to the pond in the first place. As I returned to the pond and started following the calm little creek, I peeked over my shoulder and caught one last glimpse of the sun before it sank below the tree line. I took this as an ominous sign that my peaceful hike back to my car was going to be no small task, and the previously calm and inviting forest became more menacing by the second. Throughout the entire evening, I had never bothered to stop and take a drink. There was a faint bluish light still left in these waning moments of dusk, and I crouched down by the creek to take a swig out of my water bottle. I could still see my reflection staring back at me from the shallow brook; I could tell that I was overdue for a shave. I heard the crunching of leaves in the distance. I looked up, nothing. I looked back down at my reflection, and this is where my story starts to get a little bizarre. As I mentioned earlier, the corner of my eye had been teased a few times today, I felt like a dog perking its ears up at noises nobody else could hear. Looking at myself in the creek, there was a crude, black shape hovering over my reflection’s shoulder. I jerked around instantaneously, only to see no shapeless blue hanging over me and only several more rapid leaf-crunching sounds. My heart began trying to punch its way out of my chest. What had I just seen and heard near that creek? I eventually calmed down after a few minutes and decided it was just a squirrel or raccoon, even though I hadn’t seen much wildlife in these woods since the few flocks of birds near the rest stop. That calm bluish light faded to pitch-blackness very quickly, and I needed to find the streetlights of the rest stop or freeway very soon. I took my keys out of my pocket, they had a small flashlight attached to the key ring, and I used that as my guiding light to maintain my bearings. I was starting to get a little bit desperate to get out of the forest. If there was one thing I avoided more than outdoor activities, it was being alone in total darkness, because there aren’t many things that are more alienating than that. I was a bit disoriented at this point, but I was fairly certain that I was on the correct path to get back to my car, I trusted myself. Sometimes in the past when I had found myself in darkness by myself, I got the sense that something was always right at my tail, ready to snatch me by the ankle and pull me back in the darkness for God knows what reason. Needless to say, I was beginning to get more of these feelings at this point. I picked up my pace, and before I knew it, I went from a deliberate gait to a steady jog. I kept that pace for about ten minutes, but I had to stop to catch my breath. As I was hunched over huffing and puffing, a cool breeze blew past me. The sound of the wind whistling in my eardrums was chilly. I heard that somber whistling sound suddenly take a different form. “Ruuuuunnnn”. I stood straight up and pointed my light in every direction. I pinpointed the sound coming from directly behind me. As my light was fixated on something that I thought was a tree trunk, I saw the bottom half of another black, hovering cloaked figure shuffle out of my light. I let out an exasperated scream and sprinted towards the direction where I thought the rest stop was. Tears began streaming down my face. This couldn’t be happening. Fear isn’t supposed to materialize, fear needs to be an illusion that you can see right through; it can’t take a concrete form. I prayed that my feet would keep carrying me to safety. The breeze with a voice began to blow in the opposite direction, in my face, hindering me from getting closer to the car. I ran over a small hill and saw some orange fluorescent lights in the distance. The rest area was in sight, and I wasn’t going to spend one more second in these damn woods. The wind picked up and I began to hear the voices again. “Staayyy…..Join Usss Luc!! We took Aubrey, Join Uss!!!” I finally made it to the pavement of the parking lot, the tourism office was closed, only the orange streetlights and the white interior of the bathrooms lit the black asphalt. I saw my car exactly where I had left it. I had finally escaped, and I was ready to go back home, back to my comfort zone. It was probably about 1 in the morning, and there was a low mist hovering over the ground. All of a sudden, I heard an electronic beeping noise. It was a familiar beep, one that I had used to wake up every morning for the last few years; it was my watch’s alarm. That breeze picked up again, and something darted out of the corner of my eye, I turned to my left, and all I could do was scream.