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rape woods adventure

Husband found a state wildlife preserve about a half mile from home. Maybe a mile. I don't know. I am really bad at judging distances. After walking six miles round trip just to get some groceries, a little thing like a “mile” just doesn't seem to matter.

Well I thought it was disturbing that we have lived here for so long and never knew it was there. He's been having a lot of fugue walks lately. He gets stressed, takes off, ends up in the woods somewhere, and sometimes gets lost. It's probably because he has no memory of how he got there. Oh yay for mental illness.

I finally decided to go check the preserve out with him last week. I thought the ignorance of its existence was the disturbing part, but it was not.

The forest itself is the disturbing part. I've never been in a forest so dark in my entire life, and I have been in a lot of forests in my time.

Of course when I say dark, I am not referring to the amount of light that filters in through the trees.

First off, there is evidence of a tent city back in there. Some people built entire log cabins at one time. There are still tarps and grills and other small evidence like a shoe here, a water bottle there. Down a ways from ghost tent city there is an old TV with wood paneling. It's pretty far back there, so it is not like someone ditched it out of a car. Someone carried it back there. I didn't see any plug ins out there, on the trees, so wtf? We used the TV as a kind of marker because it just got more dense and creepy from there on.

There are no trails at all. In fact, humans are not supposed to be back there. It says no trespassing on the old rusty sign at the entrance that lies on the ground next to the fallen down barbed wire fence. You have to follow deer trails to get anywhere. You have to step pretty tall, otherwise the grasses and brush will trip you up. I knew this. I've been in deep woods before. That wasn't the issue.

The issue was it felt like I was being watched. Not just watched. Judged. I kept stopping and looking around, and aside from birds and squirrels, there as no one. It was like a horror movie out there. My husband was leading the way, but he kept stopping and looking around too. He kept getting turned around. He kept admitting he wasn't sure where he was. It's unusual. I am pretty good at walking through unmarked woods and getting back out, and he is usually even better at it. But I started to feel like the entrance was getting further and further away. That it had disappeared. Swallowed us up. Like we were in Evil Dead II or Blair Witch. Like we would end up walking around that damn TV set for months, even though we kept going East.

The nicest thing was the wild strawberries that carpeted parts of the floor. Ground. Forest floor. But when I would stop and look at them, I'd see the earth underneath. It's very dark, rich top soil. Pretty much the best soil I have ever seen, and I am from Iowa. It's evident that there are dead things in there. Lots of dead things. Bodies. Human bodies. It's like something so horrible happened there that no one ever wanted to develop the land. Or, maybe they tried and the land said “nope”. So, it just became a “preserve”. And the town grew around it. Buried it back in there next to a bike path and semi-detached housing.

I could still hear lawn mowers and construction beeping and people yelling no matter how deep we went in there. It was annoying. Not what I want out of a trip to the woods. And it was creepy, because the sound kept appearing to come from different directions all at once. I couldn't even follow the sound to get back out, because it was all warped and distorted.

By the time I realized that we were standing on some kind of mass grave, we were pretty far in and I started to panic. I haven't had a panic attack in months. And I have never had one in the woods before. Usually, I go to the woods to feel better. Usually, my agoraphobia takes the form of too many people. Being in big crowds. But this was like being in a crowd. There were dead people everywhere.

And trees everywhere. Too many trees. Trees that are too close together. Stretched out, sick, mostly dying. And they yelled at me. I've never had trees yell at me before. Usually trees are mellow at best, despondent at worst. These woods were pissed off.

Again, like a horror movie. “Get out!” I could all but hear that being yelled.

Phrases that came to mind when I was out there were: “rape forest” and “mass grave” and “suicide woods” and “massacre site”.

That woods is sick to death of people. It hates people. It will try to hurt you, if you are dumb enough to spend enough time there. I don't know what happened to the ghosts of tent city, but I can't imagine it was a nice place to spend your Saturday nights. Or any night.

Husband found a bunch of special mushrooms out there. I am not sure I want to ingest anything that came out of that place. He says they are fine, but his definition of fine varies from hour to hour.

The walk home was awful. It ended up being rush hour and the traffic build up was insane. We had to go two blocks out of our way just to cross at the lights because the traffic wouldn't stop coming. We had an argument. We never argue. That place is evil.

We had to go through East park. It's a developed park near that preserve. Jungle gyms and swings and picnic tables and shit. Only there is never anyone there. I have never once seen any kids playing there or adults sitting there. There was a cop in the parking lot on the way home, which was intense, because that is the ONLY person I've ever seen even parked in the lot. And I was already freaking out.

And now I am disturbed that it is so close to our home. Lately I learned a lot about the deaths of the indigenous people around here. Some horrible things happened that they try really hard to hide. They don't teach you about it in school. But if you go walking far enough in any direction, you hit the woods and the woods will tip you off and you can go home and go on the internet and fill in the blanks and never get a good nights sleep again.

11:25 AM - Tuesday, Oct. 10, 2017

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