Travis picked the campsite, not me. He’d used Google Earth to find a clearing along the route we were taking the bikes and decided this was a) by the river, b) had a great view of the sky, and c) was about halfway between where we were coming from and where we were going.
Unfortunately, a) the river meant mosquitoes in the fall, b) who cares about the sky when you’re in the damn forest, and c) while it was indeed about fifty miles in with fifty miles to go, those first fifty miles were utterly unforgivingly brutal. Between the first river crossing and the crumbling shelf road, I was done twenty miles ago when we happened into what would have been a perfect site. Sure, more to cover the next day, but we wouldn’t have to fight the mosquitoes exhausted.
But Travis picked the campsite and talking Travis out of a campsite he already determined in his mind was perfect was like teaching all the damn mosquitoes how to do the cha-cha.
“This is the place?” I asked taking off my helmet and turning off the GoPro camera.
“Perfect, right?! Did you doubt me?”
I looked around sighed deeply inside, but said “Naw, Travis, this is great.”
Oh, also, the place was creepy as hell. You always felt like someone was watching you – that hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck feeling? Constantly. As I was setting up camp I’d use the blunt side of the hatchet to hammer in a tent stake, set the hatchet down, tie the tent to the stake and reach for the hatched only to find the hatchet was now ten feet away. Or the knife I set down after cutting onions with disappeared only to reappear around the fire. Nothing you could say definitively, but enough weirdness that you knew something weird was going on.
“Man, this is a great campsite, right Dave?” Travis – who apparently is completely unappetizing to mosquitoes – asked.
“Great site,” I said liberally applying DEET.
As I mentioned, we were exhausted, so it wasn’t long after chicken tacos that I told Travis I was going to bed and retired to my tent and promptly fell asleep. I awoke to the sound of something rummaging around our campsite. Not rummaging like, say, a bear or pack of marauding racoons. More like something exploring it. I reached for my .45 (yes, I carry a gun when I’m out in the middle of nowhere – don’t judge me!) and my flashlight and eased out of my tent. I turned the flashlight on and froze. My helmet had been lifted from my handlebars and was hovering four feet off the ground. As the beam of my light illuminated the levitating helmet, it flipped around to face me, and I saw the red light indicating the GoPro started recording.
“Travis!” I yelled which must have startled whatever was levitating my helmet because my helmet spun 180 degrees and shot off into the forest. “Travis! Help me, I’m chasing after my helmet!” I yelled as I tripped getting into my camp shoes before tearing off in the darkness after my helmet.
From the GoPro footage, this is what happened: the camera turns on facing me and my blinding flashlight. I yell “Travis!” and the helmet takes off into the woods, bobbing despite the GoPro’s image stabilization. I can hear something – presumably, whatever is holding it – padding though the forest at breakneck speed. You can vaguely hear me bellow to Travis about chasing my helmet as the helmet tears through a bush and swats past branches and back along a clear trail until it smacks into something hard. And drops to the ground. As the helmet hits the ground and the camera briefly cants skyward, the full moon illuminates the hard thing the helmet ghost hit – something more than seven feet tall and covered in dark fur.
But only for a second, as the helmet careens down a hill. The camera spins nauseatingly as the helmet rolls down the hill, bounces off rocks, and careens off tree trunks until it hits a rock by what sounds like the rushing river. It tilts forward and for just a moment you can see what looks like the ghostly image of a woman at the rivers edge openly weeping.
“I see it! I see it!” you can hear me yell from up on the hill and the woman fades into blackness.
You can hear Travis and me scramble down the hill and pick up the helmet and camera just as a bright light illuminates part of the forest we just came from. We look up for the source of the light and the camera traces the brightness up to an enormous black triangle-shaped craft hovering over the forest. The light turns from white to blue and you can hear a bellowing as the big hairy creature is levitated up the beam and disappears into the ship. The lights extinguish and the craft silently accelerates at unreal speed into the night sky.
Probably too freaked out to remember to turn the camera off, you can hear Travis and I trudging back to our campsite in stunned silence. I set the helmet back on my bike but apparently, I should be a cinematographer because the camera perfectly framed me and Travis in front of our tents.
“What was tha–” Travis starts, but I cut him off.
“Travis, this campsite is terrible!” I yell “This mosquito-infested, ghost-ridden, alien abducting campsite is an awful, awful place!” I yelled.
Travis stared at me, mouth agape.
“Seriously, dude,” the ghost of man wearing off road motorcycle gear glows into view between us. “This place is getting weird even for me.”
