A Day of Halcyon

Today was a beautiful day. I spent it with (I've got to think of a nickname for him)

We spent it at Armitage Park camp ground on the McKenzie River.

This is where I like to look for snakes and fossils.

Today, we walked to the North bank of the river by crossing a bridge which looks like it used to be a train tressel.

This is the kind of river that isn't lazy. Not like the southern rivers too red or dark with clay and earth, full of catfish and water moccasins, warm and slow, no, this is fast cold water that runs deep in places and real shallow in others and there are millions of rocks on the riverbed. Millions more on the shore.

The water here is clear, too. I love to swim with a snorkel and mask. Here is where the northeast pike are. And I've probably seen a few hundred dollars worth of fishing lures hanging off of rocks in the swift current. It's just too deep and fast to collect them safely.

But today we went to the other side which is the creepiest woods I've ever explored. There are several meandering foot trails through dense and overgrown wilderness. We came upon what looked to be an abandoned miniature town but by homeless people, with the remains of several individual camps in such disarray they reminded me of the crash sites on the show Air Crash Investigators. The trails meander to dead ends hidden by thick blackberry vines, nests of disintegrating tweeker hoards.

(A tweeker is someone under the influence of methamphetamine).

And I was impressed! There wasn't a single syringe in that forest. Syringes are ubiquitous in the other parks, even Armitage Park across the river.

We heard rustling in the woods and it also sounded as if someone was working on something so I assumed it wasn't completely abandoned.

But creepy!

I kept looking beneath the hedges of overgrowth for a skeleton. The restroom in the County Sherrif's Department is the only one available to the public in that vicinity, and in the middle of one of their long corridors is a display of pictures of all the missing people in the area. It's astounding.

Having someone missing would be torment.
That's why these woods are so creepy. It seems likely some of them are there.