Back at camp Lucy walked down to where my tent used to be. She sat down on the log I used to sit on to put on my boots in the morning and took a sip of her coffee. Her sleeping bag and several of her clothes were strewn about the ground. Fortunately for her, I hadn't thrown them that far and so, for the most part, they were on ground that had been shielded by my tarp and was fairly dry.
It was a good camping spot. The ground was flat and well drained. The log she was sitting on was a convenient feature, and I'd left a laundry line up between a couple of trees. There was a good view from the log through the trees down to the creek we got our water from. The best part was that it was on its own. Towards the creek, the ground started to slope down steeply enough that you couldn't camp on it. Above the camping spot and on one side the trees were dense enough that there was no room to put up a tent. Above this, the hill started sloping up again.
Lucy absorbed all this as if seeing it for the first time. She balanced her coffee mug on the log. Then she gathered and folded up all of her clothes and placed them carefully on the log beside the coffee cup. She hung her sleeping bag on the laundry line to dry and in general, tidied the area up a bit. Then she went back to her own tent and stuffed all of her belongings in her backpack. She spent the next hour and a half moving her tent from where she had originally set it up to where my tent had been.
While Lucy was stealing my tent spot, Tony and I were checking out the remains of the bridge. What had been a small, quiet river was now a raging torrent. The bridge had been supported on either bank and in the middle. The middle support, along with most of the deck of the bridge itself, was now gone. In its place was a new rapid where the water roiled over the foundation of the missing support.
"Are you sure this is the way we came last night?" asked Tony.
I looked at him in a way carefully calculated to inform him he was an idiot. "Yes," I said. "I'm sure we came this way. This is the only road into camp."
"But not the only road out of camp?" he asked hopefully.
"Yes, oddly enough, the only road into camp is the only road out of camp," I said.
"But there was a road heading up the mountain. That must go somewhere. What if we turned left instead of right when we left camp?"
"That road goes up the mountain. It's a logging road. It doesn't go anywhere useful."
"Surely it must connect with something."
"I suppose it might," I admitted. "Brendan and Joe might know. I haven't looked closely enough at the maps. But I'm not optimistic. It basically just ends in a maze of cutblocks."
"What do we do now? Should one of us swim and go for help?"
Despite the insanity of this suggestion, I was oddly tempted by it. Yes, there was a good chance I might die attempting it, but at least I wouldn't have to go back to camp.
On the other hand, the water looked damn cold.
"Or we could just use the phone back at camp," I said.
"Oh yeah. Good idea."
Ah yes, returning to the scene of the crime after a grand exit ~ always a difficult and humiliating experience. How will he pull it off?
YFA Wendilicious