Gary

Gary was finding the hike through Ottawa National Forest both invigorating as well as somewhat unsettling. There was a degree of absolute green and brown that somehow got into his bones, but mostly in a good way. He’d been camping before, as a kid and in college, but this was somehow different. He just couldn’t put his finger on it. It didn’t make him want to high tail it back home, no, it was just a weird feeling of déjà vu. But he couldn’t remember ever camping this far north. Parks in Georgia, Wisconsin and Ohio hadn’t quite hold any sort of unearthly quality to them that he remembered. Up here, in the Upper Michigan peninsula it was like a different world. Different shades of green, brown, grey of the rocks, sounds of animals, a touch of….

Why they had to come this far north? Flores had gone into detail about it being the yearly team building exercise. Frank stated it was a chance to survey the southern reaches of noctilucent cloud formations. Benny had added something about some new petroglyphs that matched ancient Norse runes. He didn’t think much of that. Vikings in the Upper Peninsula didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Now, Minnesota… he could have believed that.

Whatever it was, they were all being sent on a triple pay weeks’ vacation, which he wasn’t going to bitch about, not after only being three weeks on the job. And it wasn’t as though he’d made any special plans that couldn’t be put off. Sure, the Reds were heading into a home stand, but it was almost the end of the season they were eight games under five hundred, so not the biggest draw for him at this point.

They’d taken a Delta flight to Green Bay with one stop in Detroit, and then drove a rented Dodge Journey up through the hills of northern Wisconsin for a few hours and finally across the state border into/under the dark forested canopy of the northern Michigan peninsula, more precisely straight into the heart of the Ottawa National Forest.

It was late summer now, so there was a bit of a chill in the breeze coming through the trees, even if the sun was still hitting the back of his neck fairly hard. So, while he was happy at the choice of a lined jean jacket, Gary’s choice to leave his baseball cap at home seemed a mistake at this point.

“You seem to be taking to this pretty well,” Benny, who’d chosen a check shirt, cargo pants, windbreaker and his own Cleveland Indians cap, suggested as they entered their second day of hiking even deeper into the forest.

They were heading up a trail that wound its way along a river through some rocky shield-type country amongst the old gnarly evergreens.

Gary realized he was, despite the substantial weight of the pack on his back. He was enjoying the quiet of the forest, the smell of the natural parkland and otherwise the whole trip so far itself. And, beyond being assigned the official picture-taker job along the route, it felt like a working vacation at worst.

He’d managed to get a neighbor to agree to feed and water the cats – Timbuktu and Marty – his ex-girlfriend May had saddled him with when she ditched. Yeah, he’d toyed with sending the pair to the SPCA, but it wasn’t their fault they were left with him, was it? Hopefully, they wouldn’t pull anything like they had after she abandoned them with him. That would really annoy Janet.

And so they were on foot, and had been for hours.

They’d left the Dodge at the Dancing Eagles resort, then took a shuttle bus about twenty miles into the woods to their jumping off point. Plan was to make the journey to the so-called Lake of Two Skies, which was where they were supposed to ‘investigate’ mysterious occurrences based on old some Chippewa legends which hopefully included use of the 2-4 pack of beer that Frank was hauling.

“It feels kind of familiar,” Gary did admit. “ But I lived in Green Bay when I was a kid for a few years. This all looks pretty familiar, even if it’s wilder than the forest me and my dad camped in when I was a kid every summer.”

And the light was different, he remembered it having a tint that was a little bluer than what was streaming through the trees. But, hell, that was near thirty years ago. Places changed. People too.