Blowdowner
Lil-Rokslider
- Joined
- Jun 21, 2022
- Messages
- 175
Send me map coordinates or post an image of the map.I got one for you guys. Been lurking these forums for a few months now I figure I should contribute.
This story takes place during a rafting trip on the deschutes river in central Oregon. My girlfriend and I had decided to drive down from the Seattle area for the famous salmonfly hatch.
With that being said, due to the timing of the year there’s a ton of people on the water. Guides doing day trips, as well as other folks like my girlfriend and I spending a couple days fishing, floating, and camping.
Our first day of the trip goes by pretty poorly. I had a crappy boat and no idea what I was doing. Dry bags leaked, I hit a rock and got us a sizeable leak and then had forgotten the bucket so I spent the rest of the trip bailing out the boat with a water bottle non stop. So needless to say, we’re both pretty frustrated and tired and as the day turns to dusk we’re scouting out any possible spot to throw our tent up for the evening and get out of that crappy boat.
Finally things are looking up for us - we come up on this beautiful stretch of water with a small island diverting the river into two flows, with the main flow going along the deep left channel at a pretty good clip. On the right side bank a big clearing surrounded by tall grasses. This is where we chose to make camp for the night.
We do some fishing, cook, and decide to lay down for bed and read until it’s time to really go to sleep at full dark. Going out to take a leak nobody as far as I could see or hear had decided to camp anywhere near us, and prior to a few boats floating on by while we set up camp as far as we knew, we were alone.
That’s when the music started. At first it sounded almost faintly like someone was throwing a rave, with dance music and the like. My girlfriend and I looked at each other like “what the hell?” but we chocked it up to the wind carrying sound from far away because at this point the music was still intermittent.
It gets louder. and louder. And now we can make out the music except it’s not. You know that feeling when someone is blasting the bass out of their car subwoofers and you can feel it in your chest, and in your head? We’re feeling their, whoever they are, music through the ground as we’re trying to sleep. and all we can hear is this unworldly, jarring, collection of disjointed bass / drum notes coming through the ground. It doesn’t resemble any music I’ve ever heard, or even any sort of “beat” you could dance to.
By midnight or 1am we’re starting to getting really damn pissed off. It has been since around 10pm since they started and so that’s when I finally decide to go find whoever the hell they are and shut down that damn noise. I have one of those really powerful headlights that lets you output like 1500 lumens for a short burst and it really just lights up the whole damned countryside for hundreds of feet.
So all pissed off I jump out of the tent and turn up my headlight of doom and I’m just furiously scanning everywhere I can see. Up and down the river, behind us as far as I can on our own bank, across clear to the other bank, and the little island in the middle. And there’s not a single thing in sight. Complete pitch darkness. I turn off my headlight to see if I was washing out any light and I stand there for about 10 minutes to see if my eyes adjust and see anything. Absolutely nothing at all and this maddening noise is going on endlessly.
At this point I realize it’s the same three disjointed “songs” playing over and over endlessly. My girlfriend starts crying because she’s exhausted from the bass rattling our skulls while our heads on laying down on our pillows. We’re unable to sleep for hours as this thing continues on through the night.
Finally, sometime around 4:30- 5am it must have stopped and we both drifted off to sleep. I have a hard time sleeping in so I woke up by myself at around 6:30-7 and I roll out of bed furious, once more just going out to go see if I can find whatever bastards were making that noise all night long.
We never saw or found any sign of those people. we waited until about 9am slowly breaking camp after eating breakfast before we rowed out in the main current and back rowed to try to get a good look at the other side of the small island, and we saw no signs of people.
The only reasonable theory we have is that sometime after we went to bed, some folks floated down to the far side of the little island and threw some sort of… party? Ritual? All through the night and somehow slipped out between 4:30 and 6:30 AM. If I wasn’t with my girlfriend and she hadn’t corroborated as well I would’ve thought i was going insane. Just one long maddening sleepless night full of the same noise over and over, with no evidence before, during, or after that it ever happened.
I was eyeing every boat we passed or passed us for the remainder of the trip looking for anyone who was packing serious audio equipment and we saw nothing.