Another Day on the Geocaching Trail

Since my good friend and longtime geocaching partner, Scott (a.k.a. Diefenbaker) and his wife departed Asheboro, NC, for a new domicile on the NC coast a few months ago, day-long geocaching outings, particularly those involving trail hikes, have been few and far between. Still, from time to time, nice opportunities arise, and today, friend Tom (a.k.a. Skyhawk63), from Browns Summit, NC, had business in Martinsville and asked if I'd care to join him afterward on a caching trip northward — first to the town of Rocky Mount and then to the Lovely Valley Loop Trail near Smith Mountain Lake. Fifteen caches that neither of us had found awaited our efforts, one of which had yet to be found, so shoot yeah, I jumped at the chance.

 

It was hot, muggy, and buggy, but we enjoyed the hell out of spending time together and wandering about the woods to sign pieces of paper inside hidden containers. We found a wide variety of hide types; claimed the almost-coveted first-to-find honors on the unfound cache; spied what appeared to be an old, haunted church in the woods; and put in about five miles' worth of fancy footwork. Alas, I came home with three ticks and a slew of chigger bites, but them's the risks, and hopefully, neither of us will suffer any maladies as a result. I love the outdoors, but sometimes Mother Nature is a bitch. Over the years, I've had enough bug bites from woodland excursions for probably a dozen people, and so far, so good...

Yep, a mighty fine day overall, and I hope Mr. Skyhawk and I can hit the woods again in the very near future. Sometimes, you just gotta.

L: Our first-to-find scribble on the otherwise pristine logsheet; R: Where's that confounded cache?

I say, is that an old, haunted church in the woods?

Autumn Woods, Unexpected Stashes

The backyard is looking pretty nice

For well over two years now, I haven't missed a single day of walking and/or running at least three miles, usually a good bit more than that. Fall is my favorite time to take long walks around the neighborhood (except maybe sometimes when it snows). This year, we don't seem to have as many varying colors of foliage as we sometimes do, but it's still pretty, and the temperature is pleasant. We have woods on three sides of our lot as well as on the far side of the street out front, so we're surrounded by nature.

 

Lake Lanier is a small lake just down the street from us, and I walk there frequently. There's a smaller, adjacent body of water that we locals have always called "The Little Lake," and beyond it, a stretch of woods between two roads about a mile long. When I was a kid, several friends and I frequently played among those woods (mostly as soldiers who fought against the giant monsters that lived out there), and in my teenage years, we rode minibikes and motorcycles on the trail that snaked through the woods.

 

There's still a trail back there, now used mostly by our sizable deer population. Once in a while, I take a walk back there, and today was just the day for it. The terrain has changed somewhat over the years; the trees are denser and taller, but there's far less undergrowth. Back in the old days, the ground was largely covered by tall reeds and flowering plants, which gave it a more jungle-like appearance. During my adolescence, when I was so smitten with the daikaiju movies of the day, like Destroy All Monsters and War of the Gargantuas, we always kept a sharp eye out for monsters, and our BB guns at the ready (yes, they were very powerful, anti-monster BB guns).

When I was 11 or 12 years old, what I didn't count on finding back there was a stash of the most grotesque porn magazines possible—mostly about bestiality. The graphic photos and stories of animals, mostly horses and dogs, having sex with young girls were pretty traumatic. I was with a couple of young friends at the time, and I think we ended up burning them. I never had any idea which neighbor had hidden the magazines in a plastic bag in a hollow tree, but whoever it was must have been pretty sick.

 

The memories of fighting monsters in those woods are far more pleasant. And nowadays, it's a tranquil and lovely place to engage with nature.

Appalachian Horror Story: The Witch of Ferrum Woods

A little while back, I saw the image above posted on Facebook, which immediately piqued my interest. Ferrum College is my old alma mater, about thirty minutes from Martinsville, out in the boonies of Franklin County. During my two years at the college, I frequently explored the extensive woodlands in the area, sometimes hoping to find interesting critters, such as snakes (which I often did), sometimes to indulge in certain substances of not-necessarily-legal status (at least at the time). In more recent years, as an aficionado of hiking in deep woods, I've returned to those old stomping grounds many times, particularly when fellow geocachers have set out new caches.

I had bought tickets for a 9:00 p.m. starting time, so about an hour in advance, Brugger and I hit the dark, isolated backroads that lead to Ferrum. Little about that drive has changed since I was a student there, forty-plus years ago. Once we arrived at the parking area, a short distance from the campus, we found ourselves a little bamboozled — as did several other folks who had arrived at about the same time. The instructions were to park and follow the lights to the registration tent... except that we could find no lights! Eventually, we decided to follow the nearby paved road into the woods, and there, finally, we spied a line of glow sticks along the roadside, which led us where we needed to be, about a quarter-mile down.

The event info indicated that hot dogs, popcorn, and drinks would be available, and since we suffered from the Great Starvation, we destroyed a couple of hot dogs while we waited. I got to talking to a couple of the folks at registration, one of whom was a local author, so needless to say, the conversation turned to writing. Several years ago, I gave a talk to one of the English classes, for which I received a respectable stipend, and I indicated that if such an opportunity should arise, I'd love to do it again. Although I didn't run into him at the site, one of the professors involved in the Friends of Ferrum Park group, who sponsored the haunted trail, was a gentleman whom I'd interviewed for the college newspaper back in the days when I fancied myself a budding journalist. It's nice to know that at least one faculty member from back when is still there and going strong. And the Friends of Ferrum Park's mission is one that is near and dear to my heart, for it is devoted to preserving the natural areas there rather than allowing needless commercial development to destroy them.

The backstory for the haunted event was that a couple of students had gone missing, and that weird, uncanny forces might have been responsible for their disappearances. Our hosts gave us the unfortunate victims' descriptions as well as "special" flashlights to help us find our way in the darkness. Our lights indeed occasionally revealed certain sinister entities lurking in the darkness. Some of them were indeed frightening — at least to our companions! At one point, I ended up behind them and inadvertently startled them. After some screaming, one of them whispered in relief, "Ah, it's just the horror writer." That kind of made my night.

While the trail setup wasn't all that sophisticated, it was sure as hell fun, and the decidedly creepy atmosphere helped scare up some much-needed Halloween spirit. I do hope this event will become a regular Halloween tradition.

Once safely back at our starting point, our party still intact — sadly, having found no trace of our missing hikers — Brugger and I returned to Martinsville (passing my favorite Spooky Place along the way) and stopped at Renewal Brewing, where we topped off the evening with a couple of brews.

This is Halloween, this IS Halloween...

Defileth Not II

The remains of the old firepit I built when I was about 13.

This is a reprise of a very old blog entry (from 2012), updated a bit to reflect a little outing into the neighboring woods earlier today...

When I was a young'un, the woods around my house in Martinsville were a source of pure joy as well as abject fear. In the daytime, they seemed an endless place to explore, play army, hunt dinosaurs, practice kung fu, blow up model tanks, and all kinds of exciting things. But at night, whippoorwills, owls, insects, and other night creatures made eerie, sometimes ghastly noises that convinced me all was not what it seemed in the dark. It was the latter that so shaped my sensibilities early on and most directly influenced my explorations of fear in my fiction. It was from those woods that the "Fugue Devil" sprang and that "The Gray House" was born.

In my teenage years, with the onslaught of land development in the area, I became aware of how fragile and how precious such places are — and how utterly devastated I would be should they be destroyed by the damnable souls who see such green areas as nothing more than sources of revenue. Happily, for the most part, those woods still exist, though there are certainly more houses in that part of the neighborhood than when I was growing up. In my current wanderings, I can still find souvenirs of my past there: bits and pieces of countless toys and models that I used in early pyrotechnics experiments (in my teens, I fancied myself a budding special effects director); the beech tree carved with the name of the kung fu club (haha) that Chuck Neely, Bob Cox, my brother, and I came up with; and the two trees that boast the visages of protective demons, which, in my young teen years, I carved around prominent knotholes to emphasize the natural patterns in the bark, along with the words "Defileth Not" — warnings to anyone who might go into those woods for any reason other than to preserve them.

Well, with so many of those remnants still out there, perhaps those demons are hard at work. I sincerely hope so.

First "Defileth Not" trees\. L) Circa 2012; R) Today


Second "Defileth Not" tree. L) Circa 2012; R) Today

One of the old beech trees that marked the boundaries of our old Kung Fu Club sparring area, circa 1974.
It reads "Marakami no Tsurugi," which means "Sword of Marakami." I don't recall who or what Marakami was,
but we used the name because it sounded cool.