On Friday evening, we went for a nice drive to watch the sunset. After turning down a nice country road, we found an even nicer one. While listening to A Picture of Nectar, we saw an eight point buck silhouetted against the western sky as the sun set in purples & oranges. It was so beautiful, we thought we’d do it again on New Year’s Eve.
After firing off a few rounds from Sara’s uncle’s Glock (Sara also took some shots with the rifle before it mysteriously failed to fire), we hit the road again looking for a new sunset spot. It was not to be. And the moral of this story will be “Don’t trust the map on the GPS!” It looked as though the small county road would circle around & come back near the house so all seemed fine. We were able to get a couple nice sunset photos w/ Saturn (I think) in the background & a cool tree in the foreground. It was soon afterwards that things took a turn for the worse.
The road ended as the map showed it would. We took a left as the map suggested we should. We were happy & all was right w/ the world. Then, had we been able to listen, I’m sure we would have heard “Dueling Banjos” from behind a tree. The road was paved for a moment which was a surprise, but after it turned back to dirt, things got weird. The road twisted & turned up the hills & down the hollers through mud & sand in ways the map didn’t suggest. It then became a narrow, 2-track road. Things seemed a bit creepy, & the GPS wasn’t finding us on my phone the way it should have, but we kept going since the map showed that the road looped back to the highway. It was wrong.
I could tell Sara was getting a bit scared, so I kept the GPS situation to myself. I figured that if she thought we had a working map, there wouldn’t be a reason to freak out. So while she was outwardly freaking out, I had to keep my freak out in the inside. I don’t think letting on that we were off the map would have done any good.
After we were chased by a pretty big dog, possibly a Doberman, we came upon another turn, which presented us w/ a couple abandoned cars & a pile of old garbage. On the other side of the road, there was a sign that seemed to have been made by a freaky local, rather than the county road people who are in charge of such things. It seemed to say that the road was a dead end, but that didn’t make sense since the map suggested it wasn’t. The other problem was that over the sign, someone had secured a piece of poster board w/ a strange, rambling paragraph about fur trapping & how God doesn’t want us to use animals that way. I prepared to get a closer look @ the sign, but Sara wouldn’t let me get out of the car. I believe her exact words were, “YOUARENOTGETTINGOUTOFTHISCAR!!!”
By this point, the sun had set, so we were most definitely in the dark.
The darkness shouldn’t have been a problem, but w/o the map, w/o clear visibility, & w/o the certainty of not being approached by some weirdo, we had problems. As we maneuvered around the clutter of rusted out vehicles, we were approached by a pack of mangy spaniels. These spaniels seemed to have perhaps been abandoned out there. They were so creepy. And hungry. And maybe possessed by Satan.
Oh, did I mention, of course, that we needed gas the whole time? I didn’t, but if you’ve ever seen an old horror film, it should be obvious by now that our lack of fuel was also an issue.
She’d never given me such a direct order before, so I figured I better heed the words, as it were. We kept on going through more mud & twisting hills until we came to a fork in the road, or more specifically, a sort of multi-pronged rake. There were no signs, & we were more than uncertain as to which way to go. We chose the center path, but as we skirted around a few more abandoned cars & a couple old RVs which were missing their front-ends, we turned around. Taking a different route seemed rather perilous because we didn’t want to forget from which way we’d come.
From there, we headed back to from whence we came, & presently had to deal w/ all of the previous perils a second time. Of all of our labors, the second coming of those Satanic Spaniels seemed the worst. They were dark in the road so we couldn’t see them but for the head lights reflecting in their eyes. The dogs didn’t seem to want to get out of our way. Maybe they wanted us to play w/ them, but I wasn’t going to find out. In fact, I considered suggesting that she just stepping on it & plow over the dogs. (I should say right now that she didn’t. In fact, as far as I know, all the dogs survived the ordeal.) We finally got around them, & I let on that the GPS hadn’t been working (we had a good laugh). After our little laugh, we headed home.
Home to blow shit up. That’s right folks, after this ridiculous adventure, we were able to light off a shit-ton of fireworks that we’d acquired @ Boomland just east of Sykesville, MO. At Boomland, I also scored a shot glass for my collection & a coon skin cap for Isaiah. A coon skin cap seemed apropos since we’ll be visiting The Alamo this week. Of course, had we met our doom this evening, there would have been no one to remember us the way we remember the Alamo. In fact, there was a moment when I feared a fate worse than the folks @ the Alamo. What I would have given for 188 compatriots volunteering to go down w/ us. They who faced down the guns of Santa Anna have nothing on we who faced down the spaniels of Hell!
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