“The Great Divide”
We were camping once many years ago, in the Great Smoky Mountains. My wife and I set up our tent and arranged everything the way we wanted them. Soon it grew dark and I blew out the lantern. In all my life, I had never seen it so dark. Well, we joked about it and told some scary stories. You know stories get spookier the darker it is. I told my wife one about an old Indian that used come through here from Cherokee to Gatlinburg, going after whisky. I shouldn’t have done that. Chill bumps shot over me when she started screaming. I’m not talking about a little scream, I’m talking, blood thirsty. Well, I don’t think I should have said, did you hear that? With her voice reverberating like a speaker in a rock band, she said in a high-pitched voice, “light the lamp”. I tried calming her enough to ask her where the matches were. She reverberated back, “I don’t know, turn on the flashlight”. I was scared to say, it’s in the car, until I got some distance between me and her flailing arms. I had to go get the flashlight or stay there and get killed either by busted ear drums or flailing fist and arms, so I started toward where I thought the door was. Well, I finely got out of the tent. The screams were getting louder so I picked up speed to where I thought I had parked the car. Tree bark can hurt when it hits you in the face and the big rocks that you don’t see can bring out words you thought you didn’t use anymore. A chill swiped over me when I thought I heard something other than my wife’s screams. Drunk Indian popped into my mind. It’s hard to hurry when you can’t see your hand one inch from your face. Scratched up and bloody, I ran into the car, literally. I got the flashlight and headed back to the major mental breakdown in the tent. I shouldn’t have told her I was just kidding about the old drunk Indian. It would have been good if there had been just one star in the sky that night, but there wasn’t. It could have protected me from my foolishness. Continue reading ““The Great Divide””