So, I had a fun adventure yesterday. I left for a simple trip to the store and ended up a damsel in distress.
Let me set up the scene first. I live on a small mountain. Our apartments are built into the hillside surrounded by woods, and my cluster happens to be on the bottom. Literally, the forest is my backyard. I have two ways to get out of this place: 1) walk up five flights of stairs to the main entrance at the top of the hill and follow the twisty main road down, or 2) cut through the woods to the main road, which eliminates a lot of climbing. Since I don’t drive, I walk this hill a lot, and I’m used to it. However, we live on the west face, I usually go down the north face, and yesterday I needed the store that is down the south side of the mountain.
There are four paths out of our apartments and into the woods, and of course I took the wrong one. The really wrong one. In less than five minutes, I was lost, and when I tried to turn around, the meandering foot trails had forked so many times, I had no clue which way to go.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, it suddenly began to rain. So there I was, lost in the woods, not prepared at all since I was just supposed to go to the store, not even wearing proper hiking boots, it’s raining, and it’s cold with snow still on the ground in some places.
I’ve gotten lost in the woods once before, but that was at my grandfather’s cabin on the East Coast. At that time, I just kept walking downhill, no trails, just empty leaf-strewn ground, until I came to the river and followed that into town. Not possible in Oregon! Blackberries grow everywhere, like a weed with sharp thorns that continuously blocks your path. Plus, like I said, it was snowy, wet, and I had only normal walking shoes on, not boots. So I was forced to stick to the trails, and they were leading me everywhere but where I needed to go.
And that was when I heard footsteps behind me.
I stopped and looked all around, examining every tree. My ears picked up birdsong and raindrops as they strained to hear the talking of carefree hikers, or even the growling of an animal. Nothing. I was all alone. I shook my head, decided it was the imagination of a frightened girl lost in the woods, and kept going, trying to find the right path or at least a familiar tree.
Then I heard a noise again. I stopped, and the crunching noise of wet leaves stopped, too. By instinct, I crouched low, all muscles tensed, fight-or-flight adrenaline burning my veins and making my hands feel cold. However, there was no sign of another soul in those woods with me.
Up until then, I had been taking pictures of the woods and posting them on Facebook, as well as joking about being lost. This time I wrote something ominous: “I hope this is just paranoia from being lost, but I swear I keep hearing footsteps behind me that stop when do.”
I initially thought I’d leave a message like that to tease my readers a bit. As I kept walking, feeling uneasy, a morbid part of me also thought that with a message like that, at least when the police found my body, they would know I had been followed.
It stopped being a joke when, once again, I heard a twig crack behind me. I jumped around, reached swiftly into my purse, and whipped out my pepper spray. I stood perfectly still for two minutes, but I heard nothing else.
I kept telling myself, it’s the rain, it’s paranoia, or maybe it’s animals (I did see lot of squirrels and some raccoons). I wanted to keep calm. If horror flicks have taught me anything, it’s that panicking only leads to mistakes. The chick who freaks out dies first.
That calmness vanished when I saw discarded men’s boxers on the side of the trail. The last thing I need to see as I’m imagining worst-case scenarios of a stalker-murderer-rapist… is men’s underwear caught in a holly bush.
I wrote one last message into Facebook: “I’m outta here!” Then I put the phone away and ran.
About twenty minutes later, I made it out, and never did I see any person following me. Hopefully, it was just the over-active imagination of a scared woman reliving those terrifying stories from her youth, like Little Red Riding Hood, tales whose theme was usually “don’t go into the woods alone.”
I don’t think I’ll go out into the forest by myself for the rest of the winter.
Let me set up the scene first. I live on a small mountain. Our apartments are built into the hillside surrounded by woods, and my cluster happens to be on the bottom. Literally, the forest is my backyard. I have two ways to get out of this place: 1) walk up five flights of stairs to the main entrance at the top of the hill and follow the twisty main road down, or 2) cut through the woods to the main road, which eliminates a lot of climbing. Since I don’t drive, I walk this hill a lot, and I’m used to it. However, we live on the west face, I usually go down the north face, and yesterday I needed the store that is down the south side of the mountain.
There are four paths out of our apartments and into the woods, and of course I took the wrong one. The really wrong one. In less than five minutes, I was lost, and when I tried to turn around, the meandering foot trails had forked so many times, I had no clue which way to go.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, it suddenly began to rain. So there I was, lost in the woods, not prepared at all since I was just supposed to go to the store, not even wearing proper hiking boots, it’s raining, and it’s cold with snow still on the ground in some places.
I’ve gotten lost in the woods once before, but that was at my grandfather’s cabin on the East Coast. At that time, I just kept walking downhill, no trails, just empty leaf-strewn ground, until I came to the river and followed that into town. Not possible in Oregon! Blackberries grow everywhere, like a weed with sharp thorns that continuously blocks your path. Plus, like I said, it was snowy, wet, and I had only normal walking shoes on, not boots. So I was forced to stick to the trails, and they were leading me everywhere but where I needed to go.
And that was when I heard footsteps behind me.
I stopped and looked all around, examining every tree. My ears picked up birdsong and raindrops as they strained to hear the talking of carefree hikers, or even the growling of an animal. Nothing. I was all alone. I shook my head, decided it was the imagination of a frightened girl lost in the woods, and kept going, trying to find the right path or at least a familiar tree.
Then I heard a noise again. I stopped, and the crunching noise of wet leaves stopped, too. By instinct, I crouched low, all muscles tensed, fight-or-flight adrenaline burning my veins and making my hands feel cold. However, there was no sign of another soul in those woods with me.
Up until then, I had been taking pictures of the woods and posting them on Facebook, as well as joking about being lost. This time I wrote something ominous: “I hope this is just paranoia from being lost, but I swear I keep hearing footsteps behind me that stop when do.”
I initially thought I’d leave a message like that to tease my readers a bit. As I kept walking, feeling uneasy, a morbid part of me also thought that with a message like that, at least when the police found my body, they would know I had been followed.
It stopped being a joke when, once again, I heard a twig crack behind me. I jumped around, reached swiftly into my purse, and whipped out my pepper spray. I stood perfectly still for two minutes, but I heard nothing else.
I kept telling myself, it’s the rain, it’s paranoia, or maybe it’s animals (I did see lot of squirrels and some raccoons). I wanted to keep calm. If horror flicks have taught me anything, it’s that panicking only leads to mistakes. The chick who freaks out dies first.
That calmness vanished when I saw discarded men’s boxers on the side of the trail. The last thing I need to see as I’m imagining worst-case scenarios of a stalker-murderer-rapist… is men’s underwear caught in a holly bush.
I wrote one last message into Facebook: “I’m outta here!” Then I put the phone away and ran.
About twenty minutes later, I made it out, and never did I see any person following me. Hopefully, it was just the over-active imagination of a scared woman reliving those terrifying stories from her youth, like Little Red Riding Hood, tales whose theme was usually “don’t go into the woods alone.”
I don’t think I’ll go out into the forest by myself for the rest of the winter.
- one of the pictures I took yesterday -
