I’m sitting in my car, dripping wet, back where I started. I don’t know what I was thinking, coming here. It seemed like everything in my life had just kept getting worse. I was struggling with grief and depression and I wasn’t really thinking all that well. I wasn’t sure what else to do, so I thought would try to find the whispering teeth. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea, but it was the only one I had. So I packed up my gear and headed out for a hike through the driftless.
I parked at the trailhead and filled out one of the self service cards. Dispersed camping is free in national forests, but it’s a good idea to let someone know you’re out here. I wrote down when I got there, when I expected to be back, and where I was going.
“Looking for the whispering teeth?”
The voice came from right behind me, and I jumped straight out of my skin. I spun around, and there he was, my dad, with the biggest shit-eating grin you’d ever seen plastered across his face.
“Scare ya?” He said, raising an eyebrow.
“Dad! What the hell?” I shouted, wrapping my arms around him until they hit his pack. “Going for a hike?”
“Yeah. Figured I’d take the weekend to do a little fishing.” My dad, the consummate angler. “But if you have an adventure in mind I’d love to tag along. Unless you were looking for some time to yourself.”
“Of course you can come with. I’d love the company.”
I amended my card to include my dad and stuck it in the box. Then we turned and started down the trail.
“What are you going to ask for?” Dad asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. A little perspective, I guess? A little help figuring things out. You?”
“I’m just along for the ride, kiddo. Besides, I got everything I could ever wish for when you came around.”
My dad was a real sweetheart. He married my mom when I was three and raised me as his own. My bio dad was an abusive drunk. He got sober a while ago and tried to make amends, but fuck that guy. As far as I’m concerned, this is my real dad. It was real nice to be out here in the wilderness with him again. I was happy he showed up.
“We’ll need to head off trail about halfway to the river,” he said.
“You’ve been to the whispering teeth?”
“What’d I just tell you? Everything I could wish for.”
I gave him a loving bump and we kept on our way. The main trail here is an easy hike. This area can be quite hilly, having mostly avoided getting sanded down by glaciers, but anyone can get to the river easily enough. It’s a short hike and there’s a campground there. A family can get there towing as much camping gear as they wanted. It’s a regular activity for the residents of Licorice Grove, and we’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember. I was ten the first time Dad took us off trail. He said that’s the best way to see the real majesty of the place. He was right.
For as long as the Mississippi has been around, it’s been cutting through the driftless. Each course change leaves behind massive limestone pillars and cliffs, topped with thick vegetation. Countless maples and oaks ringed by the bright white trunks of fast-growing birches. There are a few places here that have been untouched since before the glaciers even existed. Little micro biomes, covered in lush green ferns, left on the protected side of the hills. A patch of ancientness surrounded by trees and stuck out of time. It’s why they put the state forest here, to protect them. There are no maps to them. The powers that be decided a long time ago that it’s best not to advertise that particular feature. Find the right one, though, and you’ll also find the whispering teeth.
Dad and I stepped off the trail and started forging our way into the wilderness.
“We’ll follow one of the old dry riverbeds first. I can’t handle the climbing like I used to.” Dad said.
“Oh sure. My little ten year old legs gotta go the hard way to see the sights, but your old man hips get the riverbed?”
“I never said life was fair, and if you wanted to do things the hard way you wouldn’t be out here looking for the teeth.”
“Fair enough.”
I slowed my pace and let Dad take the lead. A fishing pole stuck out of his pack, reaching up to the sky. Its swaying accentuated the wobble his walk has taken on. His stance had gotten wider – he stepped more to the side, coming down straight on his leg to avoid putting stress on his hips. He’s gotten shorter, too, though I doubt he’d admit it. It’s wild seeing your parents age. I can’t help thinking of him watching his dad start to wobble and shrink when he was my age. Even with the wobble, he still looks tough as nails. He’ll probably outlive you, me, and the driftless.
We stopped for lunch in the shade of a limestone pillar. A calcified trilobite poked its head out of the stone next to me, watching me unwrap my sandwich. I took a bite and leaned back against the rock, breathing in the fresh air and savoring the sandwich. Peanut butter and honey may not sound fancy, but after a few hours of hiking it’s better than any hundred dollar meal.
“I miss doing this stuff with you,” Dad said.
“Yeah, me too,” I said. It had been a while since Dad and I had really spent any time together. Not for lack of desire, but life just sort of gets away with you. “Sometimes when I’m having trouble sleeping I’ll lay back and imagine being out here. Just laying back and watching the wind play in the tops of the trees, making the leaves rattle.”
“There’s nothing better than trolling around out here all day, then laying back and finishing off a meal while the sun sets.”
I took a big bite of my sandwich and nodded in agreement. “Sometimes I wish I could just stay out here.”
“You remember that when we get to the teeth,” Dad said as he slapped his thighs and pushed himself back up. “Speaking of which…”
“Yeah, I suppose.”
I stood up and brushed myself off, rearranging my pack. Dad did a little jump, bumping his pack up. His fishing rod wiggled and twisted over his head. Then he turned and got on his way, wobbling slowly through the underbrush.
“It’s going to start getting hilly now. Don’t get behind,” he said over his shoulder.
We climbed and twisted through the forest, sticking to game trails when we could. Dad stayed ahead of me the whole time. It really drove home how much I’d let myself go lately. This old man with bad hips was always a few steps ahead, and if I slowed down too much he’d just stop and wait patiently, rocking on his heels.
“You sure you know where we’re going? I’m starting to get pretty worn out here, and I’d like to get there before we set up camp for the night.,” I said.
“I know the way. Don’t you worry. We can just stay there if you want. It’s a great place to watch the sunset. Probably wouldn’t hurt to pick up the pace a bit.”
“I don’t know how much faster I can go. How are you doing this on those hips? Seriously, what’s Mom been feeding you?”
“Come to dinner sometime and find out.”
Okay, he made his point. I picked up the pace, huffing behind him as he moved through the forest like he was part of it. He’d get ahead of me, then slow down and wait, then get ahead of me again. Another hour passed and the sun started to get low in the sky. By then I was breathing like a steam engine. I stopped and leaned over, bracing myself on my legs, trying to catch my breath. That’s when I saw it.
Something glinted up at me from the dirt. I leaned over and brushed the dirt away, picking it up for closer inspection. It was a roughly cubic piece of white enamel with four roots dangling down. I turned it over in my hand, settling on the glinting metallic filling.
“What the fuck, Dad?” I said, hollering his direction. “Are the teeth actual fucking teeth?” I brushed some of the leaves and dirt away with my foot. They were everywhere. Canines, bicuspids, molars. Capped teeth, filled teeth, cavity riddled and coffee stained.
“No, but it means we’re close,” he said. “You gotta keep up if you want to get this done before dark.”
Dad stood there watching as I took a step forward. The teeth crunched beneath my weight. Another step and I could hear them grinding against each other. I watched as my shoe sunk down into the topsoil and the edges of teeth rose up around it. Incisors and canines poked out from under the shallow soil, grasping at my soles. I looked up at my dad in horror. He stood there, shifting his weight back and forth.
“They’re human, Dad.”
“Try not to think too much about it. We’ll be there soon.” He wobbled back and forth, his fishing pole swaying above his head, before he turned and started going. “Come on.”
I was tired and overwhelmed, and I didn’t know what else to do, so I just followed my dad. He always knew what to do out here. We probably spent half my childhood out here, wandering through the woods. He taught me how to find the right spot for our tents and how to pitch them so water wouldn’t get in if it started raining. He taught us how and where to hang our food in case bears came around. He knew where the fish were, how to catch them, and how to kill, clean, and cook them fast enough that they wouldn’t develop that unpleasant fishy flavor. They’d taste just like fresh, buttery joy. There was nothing out here my dad didn’t know how to handle, so I did my best to set my nerves aside and keep going. It’s not like I could have done anything about it out there in the wilderness anyway.
Dad moved fast now, up and around the hills. Any faster and I’d have had to run to keep up with him. It wore me down. I was really struggling to keep going, and I had this nagging feeling that we should just turn around, but Dad was on a mission. We crashed through the forest. Every step came with less topsoil and more teeth, grinding beneath us.
The branches of the trees started to look different. Meaner, somehow. They’d reach out, scraggly and thin, with nearly leafless twigs knuckling at us. We were in the shadow of a large hill. The trees were starting to die back and the underbrush was getting thicker. A thorn reached out and scratched my cheek, drawing a small bead of blood and freezing me in my tracks. I followed the viny branch that scratched me back to a thick bush covered in thorns. In the middle, tied up in the thorns, hung a stark white bone, about the length of my forearm.
“Dad. This isn’t right. We should leave,” I called out.
Dad came over and looked at the bone through the bushes. His eyes squinted as he measured it up. He turned and stood, looking me in the eyes and putting a hand on my cheek.
“You probably thought this was all some old wives tale. That the whispering teeth was some weird rock formation. I know you did. Most people do. But you gotta understand, the driftless is a place out of time.” His fishing pole twitched above him. “There are things out here that aren’t anywhere else. I know you’re scared, but we can’t turn back now.”
“Why not? We can just go back the way we came and camp somewhere safe!”
His pole twitched again. Stronger this time.
“You don’t understand. The only way out is through, okay? We’ll get there, you ask for what you want, and it’ll be done. We can’t stand around here.”
His pole pulled hard this time. I grabbed his shoulders.
“Dad, what’s happening?”
There was a big yank on the pole, Dad’s eyes got big, and he was ripped back, pulled fast through the underbrush. I didn’t even think about it, I just chased after him, barrelling through the thorny bushes. Tendriled vines clawed at me the whole time while I watched dad get pulled on his back farther and faster than I could keep up with. I could see his face twisting up, his brows pointed in terror as he rolled left and right, desperately trying to undo the straps that held his pack on. Then he slipped through the brush and was gone.
I kept going, following the trail through the teeth his pack had dug out. The brush got thick, tying up in my hair and catching on my clothes as I struggled through, shouting for my dad. Then the underbrush broke and I stepped into a huge grove of lush green ferns on the side of the hill. Sunlight streamed through the bone-white birches surrounding it, lighting up my dad as he hung in the air, suspended by his fishing pole. At the end of the pole, a scrawny black arm grew out, dangling him about fifteen feet off the ground. The arm reached up into the sky, then turned at a knuckled elbow and continued on to where it was rooted into the top of the hill.
I ran up beneath him as he struggled above me. His arms and legs flailed as he bounced in the air. Bony crags grew up from the ground around us, with sharp tips pointing inwards. There were too many too close together for me to fit through.
“Dad!” I shouted. “Dad, what’s happening?!? I can’t get out!” Dad wiggled wordlessly in the air. His arms and legs were lifeless, jerking with gravity as the arm bounced him above me. Then I heard it. The whispers came from everywhere.
It sounded like gibberish. Like the sound a child would make trying to imitate water. Each sound babbling on its own tempo, some slightly faster than others. Sometimes they would come together and it would sound like they were trying to make a word, and then it would all fall back into chaos. I looked up at my dad and wailed as tears streamed down my face. He opened his eyes and froze in the air.
“What do you want?” His voice was plain and unwavering. The rest of him hung lifeless. I howled into the air and a rush of tears streamed down my face.
“What do you want?”
I blubbered and stuttered and sniffed back a bubble of snot before finally shouting back.
“I just want my dad back!”
The ground fell out from beneath me and I watched as my dad’s body flew into the air. The teeth came up around me, closing off the sky. I fell, landing on a slick fleshy muscle. It curled up above me to meet the teeth and I took a deep breath as the light disappeared and the muscle crushed me against a slick, bony wall. A thick wave passed through the muscle and pushed me down, faster and faster. The fleshy walls coated me in a thick slime. I held my breath and closed my eyes and just let it happen.
The walls gave way and I was in a brief freefall before I splashed into a cool liquid. I bobbed up and opened my eyes and there I was, floating down the river, less than a hundred feet away from where we used to go fishing. Right at the end of the trail.
I got to shore and stripped down to the bare essentials, hanging my wet clothes on my pack, and made the easy hike back to my car. It’s not what I asked for, but I did get that perspective. A couple nice bits, actually. Sometimes life just shits you out and you gotta find a way to deal with it. That’s some perspective, I guess. The other piece? My dad, the consummate angler, died last week. So here I am, sitting in the driver’s seat mulling that over, staring straight ahead and trying not to look at who is knocking at my window.