Firstly, I must mention that I am Norwegian and reside in Norway. Not that it makes me special, but I believe it adds a certain context to the end of the experience.
We are six guys who usually gather to play cards every 3-4 weeks. We eat and drink a bit, listen to 80s and 90s rock, and chat while sharing stories. Once someone starts with a personal story, it doesn’t take long before one of us chimes in with details because we were also there, or someone else wants to tell a wilder story.
Among us six, four, including myself, have known each other since primary and secondary school. We’ve always stuck together. The other two are “newcomers.” I say “newcomers” in quotes because we’ve known each other for 7-8-9 years now. At least.
These are evenings I look forward to, filled with laughter and old memories.
On the particular evening, I came in second place in the poker game. I lost with a full house, fives over tens, against a royal straight flush in hearts. We had eaten German sausages with spicy mustard as usual and chatted away.
The other guys had a few beers. It’s not uncommon for me to do the same, or for some of us to bring a bottle of whiskey to share. And on those whiskey nights, poker tends to take a back seat while the volume on the stereo is cranked up to the max. But, I had promised my dad to help him pull up his fishing boat the next day. Maybe we needed to weld something on the stern. And you know how retirees are. They prefer to have everything done before 7:00 AM and have completely forgotten what it’s like to be in a job and sleep in a little on weekends when you finally can.
And since I was going to help him, I drove home between midnight and 12:30 AM. The drive takes about 20 minutes, and I’ve driven this road hundreds if not thousands of times before.
Just as the road veers away from the coast and inland onto the island, you come into a series of S-curves. There have been many accidents here over the years, so the road authorities have installed plenty of streetlights in recent years. As I approached the curves that evening, there was a thin layer of mist. Unusual, I thought. The fog usually lies right down by the water’s edge and dissipates when you gain a few meters in altitude. Instinctively, I slowed down a bit.
I navigated through the first curves more or less on muscle memory. Some rap song I couldn’t name but had heard a hundred times played on the radio. As I approached the next curve, I saw someone standing under the streetlight. I drove closer and could clearly see that it was an elk. An elk standing upright on its hind legs, dressed in a jacket and top hat. It stood there smiling at me while waving with its hand or hoof, or however I should describe it.
I must have looked like a question mark with my mouth open as I waved back. I turned my head and blinked several times. With gaping disbelief, my mind had to acknowledge what I was seeing. The car continued forward, and as I went to straighten the car and drive out of the curve, I noticed a table and two chairs in the middle of the road. There was a Victorian-dressed girl about 8-10 years old and a wild boar wearing a hula skirt and a flower crown, sitting there cliché-like, having a tea party.
On pure reflex to avoid hitting them, I turned the wheel and forced the car into the ditch. I hit a birch tree hard, and the last thing I remember thinking is, “No, now the airbag will deploy,” before I lost consciousness.
When I come to, I stagger a few meters into the woods barefoot. The clock on my wrist shows that it’s nearly 2:00 AM. Have I been walking around here for over an hour?
My nose and jaw ache from the crash, and I can feel dried blood in my mustache, along with blood drops on my jacket. I remember what I’ve seen and that I drove off the road. I decide to go back to the car and see if there’s anything I can do. But the car isn’t where it should be. Has it been towed? Has someone found it or called the police, and it’s been removed? I check my pockets for my phone, but the last thing I did with it was plug it in to charge when I started driving.
I walk along the road, hoping I’ve mistaken the location of the accident. I walk back to where the bridge lands on the island and walk up all the hills and curves. But no car. About a kilometer past where I firmly believe I drove off the road is a small center with a grocery store, a gas station, and a handful of houses. I decide to walk that way. It’s at least in the direction of home.
Sweaty and with sore feet, I arrive at the cluster of houses. And there, right in the middle of the grocery store’s parking lot, is my car. Not between two white lines as if someone found it abandoned and parked it there. But right in the middle of the lot. Confused but relieved, I jog the last few meters. I open the car door, and the keys are still in the ignition, but the entire car is filled with leaves and pine needles.
We get his boat ashore. The damage we might have had to weld looks better than he feared, so I can leave the welding machine behind.
I don’t tell him anything about what I’ve experienced, and thankfully, he doesn’t peer into my car, so I avoid having to explain. I drive back to where I think I drove off the road the day before to search for my shoes. But after 20 minutes and no luck, I drive home to clean and tidy up the car.
Later in the day, I call the friends I was with the day before, cautiously asking if they too experienced anything strange. I’ve speculated a bit that the sausages we ate might have contained a hallucinogen or some fungal spores that could have caused me to hallucinate. But none of them noticed anything. After I drove off, they had stayed to watch an NHL game before going their separate ways.
Had I experienced a psychosis? I booked myself a doctor’s appointment for a thorough check-up. I didn’t mention what I had seen to the doctor, but I underwent numerous tests, and none showed anything concerning. The doctor had no complaints about my health, other than that I weighed 4-5 kilos more than I should for someone of my height.
The thought of psychosis didn’t go away. And I promised myself that if I were to experience anything even remotely like this again, I would book another doctor’s appointment and tell things as they were. But psychosis didn’t provide all the explanations for everything that had happened. How had the car ended up in the parking lot? Had I filled it with pine needles and run back without shoes?
What truly made me put aside the notion of mental illness happened a couple of months later. One day, when I came home from work, there was a package wrapped in gray paper outside my door. I do shop online like everyone else, but I wasn’t expecting anything right then. The package had no sender’s name but was postmarked in Pretoria, South Africa. I tore off the paper and opened the box. There were my shoes. My worn-out sneakers and a top hat filled with dried leaves and pine needles.