Pacific Northwest Rainforest, Zigzag River, Mt. Hood, Oregon

To Oregon We Go! Parts 1 and 2 can be found here and here.

On the second night of our journey we were asleep at our campsite along the Zigzag River near Mt. Hood, next to a warm and glowing fire, when our dogs began to growl around midnight…

We woke with a start to see a man standing near our outdoor bed, maybe a dozen feet from us. He was illuminated by the light from our fire—a white male, average build, thin brown hair, thirtyish, somewhat pale—his features were soft, rubbery. The man was staring at us, not speaking. “Can we help you?” asked my wife, Donna.

After a very long pause he spoke slowly, with a hint of a rural accent: “I’m trying to start a fire…you have a real nice fire.” He paused, then “Do you have any kindling?”

The dogs were still growling. The man’s arms lay still at his sides. He stared at the ground, then us. “No, we don’t have kindling, but we have some newspaper,” we answered. No response. Donna turned to me and whispered with a fair amount of urgency, “Get up—get him some paper.”

I rose and got him more than half of our remaining newspaper (I had already used up all the firewood we had brought). I handed the man the paper, who then asked if we had any matches. I got him a pack—as I handed him the matches he asked, after another of his long, awkward pauses, “Do you have any lighter fluid?”

That question did not sit well with Donna. People who camp, who light campfires in the wilderness, do not, at least from our experience, use lighter fluid. It is too volatile. I have never used it for a campfire—my father used it when I was a kid to light the briquets for barbecues. “No, we don’t have any lighter fluid,” we answered.

Donna suggested to the man that if he made small, tight balls of the newspaper they might hold a flame longer, thus giving him a better shot at having his campfire “take.”

I returned to our bed. The man lingered. The camp hosts were quite elderly and at the other end of the campground and were not a viable option to go to help for, should we require any.

Rudy and His Tennis Ball of Glory

The night was very dark—the tall trees blocked the light of the waxing moon—the man lingered for a few seconds more, then turned and vanished into the night. Donna, with visions of Stephen King and Ted Bundy and BTK and…(fill in here with your personal favorite psychopathic bogeyman/killer icon) Suffice it to say, Donna had not enjoyed this strange interruption—this man who stared at us silently as we slept, not announcing his midnight visit. She was creeped out by his standing so still, staring at us with only the dogs to alert us to his presence. His long pauses and elliptical speech added to the overall effect, his pale and then suddenly ominous face lit orange and red—Halloween colors courtesy of our campfire. I felt much less trepidation than Donna, my thinking being that Chauncy and Rudy had protected us, and the chances of some random whacko doing us any harm seemed very low to me.

Of course, after he left, I lay awake (my ursaphobia having left its cave to descend upon me) and waited for the Giant Bear of Destruction to crush me where I lay. Millions of years after the first ambulatory life rose up on hind legs and trod upon the vast tectonic plates of the wild world, we found ourselves on our backs next to the rush of a small river, feeling threatened. We peeked between the tall pines to see portions of sky lit by pinpoints of starlight, and it was all very beautiful—then there are those moments when frightening things seem very possible, and all beauty vanishes in adrenaline and fear.

I thought our visitor was just an odd, lonely man, maybe high on something, and maybe he was drawn to what must have looked like an idyllic and happy family. He never reached for a weapon, nor did he approach closer after the dogs reacted to his arrival. Donna felt differently than I did. Donna had visions of Deliverance and Death and small blurbs in regional newspapers about campers who went missing. I have to admit, her worries are more interesting than my fear of bears.

The following morning I looked at the next campsite down, which I guessed belonged to the man as there were no other tents down there. There was no wood in the campfire ring, neither were there remains of a fire.

It was nearly 11:30 a.m. by the time we drove off for a closer look at Mt. Hood, then north to the Columbia and back west toward Portland via the 84. We would stay in a motel in Clackamass County that night. Below we could hear the traffic of the 205 as it motored by, and Donna and I fell to dreams quite readily. Chauncy and Rudy slept soundly through the night, until there was a knock at our door late in the morning. It was the man from the campground!

Er, no it wasn’t. It was the cleaning lady.

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Part 4 of To Oregon We Go! will show up tomorrow or the next day…

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