After 1000 miles and four days in a car with someone you begin to discover little things about the nature of the person who is sitting next to you in the front seat. These little epiphanies come even though the expanse of the front seat is quite wide in a 1972 Chevrolet Impala. As the miles click off bits and pieces of who they are come through. Sometimes what you find are little insights into thier personality that because of how you were genetically wired or brought up, (although me I think who we are is more genetics), that you didn't just don’t understand.
The first of several insights that were to reveal themselves on that two and a half week road trip showed up while camping in God’s country. It appeared at an abandoned naval base in the middle of Idaho. Idaho seems an odd place for a naval base doesn't it? But in World War II apparently having an inland naval training center was apparently very important. Bearing the name of Farragut Lake the base had in 1978 recently been converted into a state park. The work appeared to have been done on the cheap, or relatively inexpensively as they would say. Some open tent sites and a concrete boat landing for sport fishing boats were about the total of amenities. I don’t remember showers and thus it must have been a pit toilet kind of place.
This was an honor campsite at the time and you had to put $2.50 into a paper packet and drop it into a slot in a pipe to pitch a tent for the night. Cheap was good. The place was isolated. As I noted a lake abutted the campsites and a short walk away sat the old Navy barracks. The barracks were not behind any kind of fencing. If you were so inclined you could have looked in the windows and climbed the exterior staircases. They were just off to the side of the campground and they slowly starting to fall apart. It was not the decay of vandalism but just the creeping return of North Country nature.
Farragut Lake was beautiful, a naturally dammed box canyon that about a mile deep. In the need to quickly, efficiently and safely train submariners the lake was pressed into use as a training ground. My guess is that you needed the depth to teach people how to dive and surface those submarines. You also needed a place to train that was not in the active war zone like off the Pacific Coast. Going out from Seattle or the other ports of the northwest for a practice run would have put the trainees in immediate danger.
Farragut Lake was north of Coeur d'Alene and south of Bonner's Ferry. Nestled in the woods the park was just a stone throw from the Canadian border, a border mind you, where I had to show a gas credit card and $200 in traveler's cheques before they would let me in the country. My hair was a little longish and my female companion was a little waif like. For all the world we looked like hippies coming to homestead in the true north proud and free. Farragut Lake was out of the way and not a whole heck of people were using it at the time. After the day fisherman left we had the run of the place. We did not I emphasize go poking around the old barracks
Picking a site down near the water we figured we could see the sun going down. We cooked dinner as it were on a green Coleman stove (which we still have to this day). No gourmet meal it probably was fried hot dogs split in half or scrambled eggs as a main dish and baked beans for a side. After cleaning up using the campground's pump and a dinky little sample size of dish detergent we drank a beer or two and crawled into our sleeping bags. The cotton batting sleeping bags we had got stuffed into a little nylon tent that stood maybe three foot high, was three foot wide and seven foot long. We had no Coleman lantern and when night came we were done.
As we talked before sleep were covered all the topics two twenty somethings on the road would talk about. Books including Dune, Watership Down anything by Kurt Vonnegut were riffed on. We probably were still babbling about the beautiful campsite the day before in Wyoming. Lying there just talking my travelling companion then told me about her fears of abandoned buildings. Deep rooted as it was she could not explain exactly wheree it came from. Knowing it was irrational she was quite uneasy because of the old abandoned barracks.
She also had the fear of old bridges where one center piece was still standing but the access points to the bridge were gone. This fear came from a dream which had been recurring in her youth about being stuck on that center span. I joked about these being just unreasonable fears, but these were nightmare fears and I personally know they don't go away easily. These were fears that came out in dreams again and again. Me I had my own nightmare fear. For me there existed in my subconscious a pair of hands coming out from under a door and grabbing my ankles pulling me under a garage door or down into a drain. About once every three months still I have this dream and I wake up screaming and sweating. Don't know why. We drifted off.
We slept at eight hours for we were dead from a long day’s drive. As a result the time asleep passed very quickly. At dawn however the pterodactyls arrived.
At 5:45 in the morning a murder of crows was set out and about in the CCC forest that the base/campground. was nestled in. These large dark birds had taken control. As daylight was breaking they began to scream and caw like crows I have never heard before. It was unremitting. It was bone chilling. It drew a power from prehistory.
The shrill screaming scared the living hell out of me. To my travelling companion who had already given voice to her unease with the surroundings, this otherworldly message provided by those dark birds, creatures that populate Poe and so many other stories of horror, stood as the warning to get out. The screeching was a message to flee. Trust me I was right there with her, I don’t think I have ever heard an animal sound so ill timed and nerve jangling. These crows could have been a message that doom was impending. Given the ferocity of their cacophony I was buying into the "this is a creepy place" vibe.
We were up and packed in minutes flat. No coffee was brewed. No toast or pancakes were made over the Bunsen burner like elements of the Coleman stove. We just got the hell out of there and started heading north to that interesting exchange up at the border I mentioned. We didn't look back. Odd moment, odd night we spent there on the north edge of the country. Mental note was made by this writer, no abandoned building infested future camp sites. Also beware of crows for they are nasty loud creatures.
http://parksandrecreation.idaho.gov/parks/farragut
No comments:
Post a Comment