As I write this I am sitting on my couch on the second floor of a century-old renovated house across the street from an even older house, an old Colonial. I keep glancing out to look at the way the orange light from its backyard is illuminating the tail-end of an old truck and is casting a light on the old stone-wall in a way that makes me feel, for some reason, even more nervous. That is an old wall. I am just glad that I live on a very busy street.
But there are a lot of old structures here in Rhode Island. It’s common knowledge, for the most part, that there isn’t a lot of old growth left in New England. Farmers cut down almost everything a few… a few centuries ago –
Jesus Christ. But they cut down everything a long time ago and the way I heard it, Rhode Island’s old worn earth heaved up a lot rocks during spring or other seasons and the farmers had no where to put the stones so they made lots of walls with them. Lots of mills and other churches, forts, were built rock and stone, too. There are a lot of old structures left here in the woods and in the forest.
I get horrible flesh-eating burning little goosebumps as this jarringly loud truck just passed by now: I’m thinking about how easily life can change, how, you can look back in your memory, and really feel how you’ve arrived at some point in your life that you cannot walk back from. You can imagine how some indeterminate time ago, you were clean – you were clean, pure, safe.
I’ll be specific. Right now I imagine this – I recall these old memories. Hiking in Hew Hampshire. Climbing mountains with friends during the day-light, stepping over old crumbling stone walls over trails. Or this. One day before an online college class I packed up my bag and found a trail in Southern Rhode Island. It had a beautiful dam, and, I saw a massive frog sitting immobile by a beautiful stream. Then I went to a Panera and attended the class on my laptop.
These memories aren’t irrelevant – they belong to a simpler time. A time inaccessible to me completely. Then, this horrible fear, this gnashing, destructive paranoia I have that gushes from me and makes me feel dead – it couldn’t have existed in me then, I couldn’t have imagined it. If only then I had been able to have the foresight to be satisfied with the beauty of my life! Yet I always find within myself the urge to go looking elsewhere; and odd places, always in nature, call me. It is like my existence is a challenge to the world, and it sends its force to me, harkening me to and fro – and as strong as I thought I was, I kowtow – I’m at Nature’s beck and call.
So I find myself seeking out nature often. I find myself involuntarily wandering off the trails and making my way cautiously through dense shrubbery, pushing back thorns and thick undergrowth. There aren’t many clear spaces in Rhode Island forests, not too many meadows or breaks in the thick growth. It’s dense.
Today I found a trail way far South, perhaps only 5 or 6 miles out from the shore-line, up in some isolated hills off a lonely road where I saw some cows grazing in the pasture. Hardly any cars. There were some signs. I won’t say what the name was for obvious reasons. I parked my car and set off, and soon found myself veering off the trail to save myself from the pangs of loneliness the boredom of an empty well-marked path so often tortures me with.
A few minutes go by. I’ve scaled a few small hills and pushed myself up an odd stony ravine laden with thick trees I don’t see very often; actually, I can’t name them. It was then that I saw the beginning of an old wall. Curious, I rushed forward, but misstepped, and rolled my ankle, hard, on a loose stone. I yelled out in pain loudly and cursed myself and hobbled forward closer to the wall. Following it, I found that the trees it lead into actually revealed three more walls. It was the foundation of an ancient stone house.
I couldn’t believe it. I knew immediately that because of the trouble I took to get to this location, as well as the amount of trees blocking it from showing up by satellite, that I had probably re-discovered something that hadn’t seen the pages of recent books or blogs in a long time. I intuitively knew I had made an actually decent discovery and I was thrilled. Happy, I turned the corner and almost immediately reeled. Crouched in the corner of the stone-house was a police officer, clad in his uniform. He was mumbling something and I could even hear chatter from his radio now that I was within a close distance of him.
For some reason, before I could even conjure a single line of reasoning, my entire body summoned up intelligence for me. It was instantly clear to me that something was deeply amiss. There was a big issue with everything here.
Frozen. I had to turn around. I couldn’t let him see me or notice me. But I had just yelled a moment ago and now sweat was beading on my forehead and my chest hurt badly. My heart was completely flipping out.
Now I was afraid to make a sound but I had to move backwards and out behind the stone-wall again before he saw me; and my eyes were taking in the scene so rapidly and the image I saw I could never forget.
The worst part was that the police officer stood up and saw me. He looked at me with a cold face. His eyes were blank, beady, expressionless, careless. He asked me if something was wrong, if I needed to report something.
I could only stammer and point at what I saw. His eyes didn’t so much as glance anywhere. He just looked at me.
“Go on.” He said. “The police are on this. Go home.” He stepped forward suddenly, a huge step, closing a ton of distance. “You shouldn’t be on this scene anyway!”
The noise in my mind was deafening. I turned and didn’t look at him. A million questions flooded me as I blundered idiotically through thorns and down the ravine, branches and vines gouging up my face and body. I could hear him savagely beating through the woods behind me. The officer was chasing me, why? Just because I found an old abandoned stone foundation? Or the stuff inside…! Why was..!
He chased me all the way-down the trail until I lost him about 500 yards before the trail-head. He had completely stopped shouting and wasn’t even saying anything. I heard him stomp past me as I hid behind a rock. I didn’t see where he went, but I waited, and waited. Then I made a run for it and – it was getting dark now – flew down the trail and got to my car. I unlocked it and rushed inside, looking around the entire car and the parking-lot in a wild craze, trying to see if he was somewhere waiting for me.
There was no one as I skidded out of the sandy-parking spot and sped down the road without even checking if there was traffic. I was sick to my stomach and crying at this point. I had passed the police station on the way over and knew where it was. I had to contact them and see if I could make sense of this. But as I drove by, the most overwhelming eerie feeling overtook me, and in slow motion, as if in a movie, I watched myself drive past the station entirely, even though, it was the most logical place to go. It was a moderately large station, too, for the relatively small town. It was nice and clearly renovated, and there were many cruisers in the lot, and I could even see some patrolmen discussing something outside. The relief I thought I was going to feel from contacting enforcement vanished, and the lump in my throat came back worse.
Not here, I thought. The hopelessness that was growing inside me, inexplicably, horrified me.
And so I drove just over an hour, all the way down to Providence, RI’s big-small city where the state capitol was, to go to the police station there to report this. There, there would be a completely different unit. It was a different town, with a completely different system and a different workforce. It was the difference between night and day. And I felt incomprehensibly better as I saw all of the working street-lights shining brightly on the high-way down; and I saw college kids bumping it to music in their cars as I passed a college. I was back in civilization, reality.
I parked at the station and began walking up the door; and that was when I saw something I didn’t like at all. There was a cop there, standing up, facing the desk. Without a seconds more thought, I knew it was the same officer I had saw way up where I had been earlier. How was this possible? A clawing, claustrophobic blackness crept up inside of me: an abject, mindless feeling of vacant dread: like I was in a cycle in a dream. The walls were closing in on me.
I quickly got in my car, numb, and drove all the way out of the city and to a different police station across the border in Massachussetts. I picked the biggest, brightest one I could find. Nervous, sweating, I picked my way across the parking-lot and came into the lobby.
Please, could I just report something, I asked. Yes, the officer said at the desk, hardly looking at me, eyes focused on a split-screen of something. As I tried to end the story, the officer looked directly at me, and told me to drop it. He looked cynical and not amused or interested. He looked like I thought I was completely pranking him. What I thought was unrealistic and made no sense in the slightest was that he didn’t even attempt to file a report. He just warned me. Told me I should drop it.
Now I felt like I was in a hell. But it got worse. I called my friends and family as I drove in a daze back to my apartment back toward the South of RI, and they tried to console me, but to no avail. I was beside myself. And then fifteen minutes out as I got closer – as if things couldn’t be more evil – I saw cop-lights flaring up behind me. It was 12:00 AM and the roads were deserted where I was. Ha ha! There was no hell in way I was stopping. I drove over the line onto the other side of the high-way and took the next exit quickly and stepped on it. I rushed down side-roads and ducked into a big neighborhood. Although I had always imagined outrunning a cop and always thought of it as impossible, I had somehow, in the first stroke of luck I had that day, pulled it off!
I set Waze to backroad only to stay off the high-way and just now pulled home and now I’m writing this.
I don’t know what to do. Everyone seems to be in on something hellish. It’s a weird thing to perceive the people who are supposed to be in charge, competent, and just, as… I feel like I’m falling, like into a black void or abyss. No ground.
Why am I so alone? I can’t stop staring out the window at the old, wrinkled column of stones, that fence in my neighbors yard. The darkness around it is so old, so oppressive.
I don’t know what to do.