I first saw it rising above the trees at 5:35 PM from U.S. 68, right around Stokesdale, NC. Big old moon. Huge. Half of it blood red, the other half silver. By the time I'd gone ten miles farther north, the whole thing was silver. By 6:00 PM, it dominated the eastern sky. I don't think I've ever seen a moon so big and bright.
It was a memorable ride to Martinsville tonight. I stopped off to hunt several caches along the way, one of them being a ways out in the woods, in one of those lonely areas where you almost expect to hear a chainsaw starting up, and if you hear it, you know it's on account of you, and you don't have long to stay in one piece. Fortunately, there were no chainsaws, but I had no sooner found the cache when a low-flying black helicopter came buzzing by, only to stop and hover directly above me. I'm thinking great, the geocaching police are coming to get me, but after a time, it glided away, and I headed back toward my car. Just before I got there, two beautiful silver-gray foxes came out of the woods, gave me a brief look that said, "Oh, it's just some dude," and then wandered off. I've never seen foxes that close before, and I swear, they were the prettiest animals I've ever encountered in the wild. Caching has a way of taking me to places I've never been before and showing me things I didn't expect. I'm always glad for it.
I ended up spending a quality evening with my friends, the Albaneses, drinking martinis and watching The Horrors of Spider Island. The martinis, at least, were excellent. Afterward, I stopped at a couple of my caches to drop off travel bugs and geocoins, and the silvery moon was up there lighting up the very cold night. To get to the caches, I had to hike fairly short distances in the woods, but the moonlight was so bright it was like walking around in daylight. No need for a flashlight.
At the one called "Give Me Liberty," something was in the woods nearby. Don't know whether it was a fox or something else, but it sounded damned large. Bigfoot, I reckon. And silly me, I left my Jack Links beef jerky in the car. I wasn't the least bit nervous, though, as I did have a nice whacky stick, and the other — whatever it was — didn't seem to have a chainsaw.
