70. Somewhere I Shouldn’t Have Been
We were camping at Long Beach, Washington for the kite festival, and decided to take a late-night drive. We found ourselves on some back roads in the woods, cruising along slowly with no music on and the windows down. No other cars but us, and suddenly everything just felt wrong. It was dark, but the light seemed different somehow.
I remember the hair on the back of my neck standing up and just having the thought, “This isn’t right, we shouldn’t be here.” I look over and my wife is wide-eyed and clearly feeling the same way. I decided to pull over so I could turn around and head back the way we came. Then we noticed deer were coming out of the woods and standing on the sides of the road, and they were just… staring at us.
We realize the woods are oddly quiet, which just made things seem even more strange. We look up and the branches were full of birds on both sides of the road. There must have been hundreds of them, all perched and alert. My wife said, “We need to go.” So, we left. Eventually, once we had gone far enough, everything seemed normal again.
I’m a pretty big fan of the idea of multiple worlds/dimensions, and honestly wonder if we accidentally drove through a “thin spot” and briefly wound up somewhere we shouldn’t have been.