Chris reminded me of one I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. Early 2000s my girlfriend and I were doing a cross-country road trip. The end destination was Wyoming for hunting and camping, but we stopped a couple places along the way. On the second afternoon we were somewhere in Missouri when we decided we wanted to break from the road and thought it might be nice to find a camping spot for the evening and have an early supper.
At that time, we did not have GPS in our cars and probably still had a MapQuest print out somewhere. The only map I had was the big Rand McNally truckers atlas that had a single page or two for each state.
I I located what appeared to be a parcel of national Forest land south of the highway. It did not seem to be contiguous with the entire forest, but big enough piece just the same. And it looked like we could get to it in about three turns from the interstate so we went for it.
15 minutes later, we turned onto a dirt and gravel road . There wasn’t much of anything around and no national forest signs, but we were undeterred. After driving a little ways, we came upon a section of shacks, what looked to be seasonal camps or hunting shacks . Even though it was fall and hunting season there weren’t many people around.
As we drove through the camps, we did notice that there was one couple just kind of hanging out. The guy was raking and burning a few leaves and his lady was sitting on a truck tailgate nearby. There were also a couple of cold beer sitting on the tailgate so I instantly thought hey, my kind of people and throw a hand up as we drove by. I didn’t really get much in return but a blank stare, but I was OK with that, we kept driving.
After another mile or so we realize we didn’t seem to be finding any indication of public land or any camping spots that we could use so we turn around. As we drove back by the couple at their camp, I came to a stop, roll down the wind and tried to start a little conversation. That went nowhere so I went right to the point and asked the guy where the national forest was. With that same blank stare, he kind of raised his hand up on his left side, swinging it slowly towards the distant woods from left to right and put his hand back down. He never said a word. At that point, I looked him square in the eye and said it’s probably best for us to get on out of here, isn’t it? He nodded slowly up and down. I had seen and heard all I needed and we did in fact get out of there.
We headed back towards the interstate, making a stop at the next crossroads where there was a little country store. We made a pretense of walking around picking up a couple of items and as the lady at the cash register was ringing us up I casually mentioned the experience we just had. She seemed rather surprised and insisted that everyone around there was super friendly. Then she asked what kind of campsite I was looking for as there weren’t many campgrounds around. I told her we just needed a place to stay for tonight just something to put a tent up on.
She said well if that is all you need there’s a place right down the road here about a mile and a half on the left. It would be perfect and nobody cares if you’re there. It only took us a few minutes to find it and it did seem like a good set up. There was a fairly well worn path that led about 70 yards to a circular turnaround. There was a small pond and all the grass was pretty short with plenty of good tent space. We got camp set up quickly and I mixed a beverage and then grabbed an ultralight spinning rod made a few casts in the pond. I didn’t catch any fish, but it was a beautiful afternoon andwe quickly forgot the encounter we had on the other road. After that we made supper and went to bed shortly after dark.
Sometime around 1am, we were both awakened by the sound of a car pulling into the driveway. When we sat up and looked out of the tent, the headlights were naturally focused right on our tent and our truck. I fully expected the car to back out of there and go on its way. That didn’t happen. Instead, after sitting there for a moment, the car started to inch forward. I immediately put my hands on the only weapon I had accessible, a Ruger wildcat 22 magnum revolver. It took another moment for the car to cross that 60 or 70 yard stretch, but it seems like we were frozen. I didn’t want to get out but I didn’t want to be stuck in the tent either. So I huddled half in and half out of my sleeping bag with a flashlight and pistol.
As the car got closer, we were completely blinded by the headlights. We could tell very little about the car and certainly couldn’t tell anything about who was inside of it. It just kept creeping forward slowly. My heart was easily going Much faster than the car was.
They stayed on the path and slow rolled right beside our tent so close that if they had opened the door, they would’ve hit our tent. I could have touched the car from my sleeping bag.The only good thing about that I felt was that they would have to open the window or door to see in the tent at that point. I reasoned that at least at that point they would be exposed. But the car never stopped, just slow rolled around the turn around and crept back out to the road where it stopped for another moment before turning back onto the blacktop and driving away.
We sat in silence for another minute or two trying to wrap our heads around what just happened. Eventually, my nerves calmed, and I rolled over and crawled back down into my sleeping bag to go to sleep. I could very much feel that my girlfriend was not taking similar measures and that she was still sitting upright. A minute later in the darkness, she says to me, you know they never caught the zodiac killer, right?
Knowing that sleep was out of the question, I did not say a word. I just got up, packed the truck and we were back on the highway by 2 am.
