WELCOME TO Mojo Mountain
Tramp & Camp; The Story of Ripley
I had just spent several months working as a house and office cleaner in a suburb of Vermont near Montgomery. I was also waiting tables at a little restaurant part time and had overheard a conversation about the tramping in the area. When I asked I was told of several trails nearby that even had a view into Canada, hmmm, maybe I'd go to Canada. one thing I knew for certain was that I was ready to move on. It would be easier to let the cleaning jobs go, I had no "regularly scheduled program" to follow, I just either answered the page or didn't. With the waitressing I wanted to quit properly, give my two weeks' notice and then move on. I didn't tell my co-workers much about what my plans were, I had learned the hard way to keep my business to myself when it came to that, but that is another story. At any rate, after that two weeks I brought my pack to work with me and hitched out right after my shift was over.
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​The woods were like a warm embrace to me, the further I hiked in, the more at home I started to feel as I shed the city and the job and the mundane like a snake sheds its skin. Along the way I gathered herbs I might need for this or that so I had my knife in my hand as I tramped along through the woods. Before too long it started to get dark, or not dark really, the color of the sky just changed as the sun played with clouds casting hues of pink and gold and orange. It was a beautiful day to have quit a job and decided all willy-nilly to hike to Canada. Still, I knew I'd need to find a place to dig in soon and I kind of wanted to build a fire. It was my custom to have a burn my first day back into the woods after a period of being settled. I had kept a journal, several actually, but I wanted to burn at least one of them along with all of the documentation binding me to that place, I like a fresh start. Oh who am I kidding, I just didn't want to carry it around.
So I'm warming my hands, the last hints of light in the sky are fading and I am set for the evening. I've tramped far enough into the woods to safely pitch my tent and from what I saw in the dusk while setting up camp the view in the morning would be fantastic. I've burned away the town and the restaurant and the very few people I met that I would tentatively call friend in my fire pit. Now as I sit there contemplating where to go next knowing I never follow a plan, I'm taken aback by the trees across from me. There's a sort of wavering effect in one area of the forest. I'm trying to write it off as people are wont to do, as a fluctuation in the light source, some sort of shadow play, anything easily explainable, but what I see next is not easily explainable. As I focus my attention on the tree line across from where I am sitting I see again the wavering, which is to say that there seems to be movement in the trees and it is wave-like, as though the forest is really only a reflection in a calm, still lake and a stone has been dropped in to create a ripple. As I focus, I see the ripple extend outward and then stop. When it stops, I recognize that the borders, the outer edge where the ripple stops as it goes outward in all directions creates the shape of a human.
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​I can clearly make out a head, arms, legs, but there is no face, no discernable clothes, nothing, just forest, just trees. It's as though it's a movie effect for someone wearing a cloaking device. Since my fire is about out anyway I casually stand up, kick some dirt on the coals and head toward my tent. As my eyes adjust to the semi darkness I take one last look in the direction of the ripple. I saw it again in the same place, like it hadn't moved at all and as I looked to see it, it rose up through the trees until it was gone. I was done maintaining my composure, I jetted into my tent so fast I myself might have been seen as a blur. I had a small battery powered lantern I turned on and it wasn't long before I actually felt safe in my tent, as though it's flimsy walls could protect me from anything. My tent was my fortress and after staying up for awhile reading, I fell asleep.
I had no idea what time it was when I woke up and really didn't care. The sun was well up but I could tell it was still relatively early, maybe 10am or so. I tossed back some granola, packed up camp and started walking, I figured I could find a place deeper in the woods closer to Canada and set up camp and just chill for a few days, I was well supplied and it was a good time of the year to find food in the woods as well. I had been on the trail for about an hour and a half when I saw something out of the corner of my eye just to my left. Oddly, there wasn't much there. I was on a trail that was fairly narrow with the mountain rising up on my right side and down on the right, down as in, there was no forest floor next to me for some animal or something to catch my eye. It was all air and when I turned my head to look that is all I saw. I continued along but had the strangest feeling that I was being watched. As I looked ahead I saw that the trail led back into forest and that was somewhat of a comfort to me as I kept catching something out of the corner of my eye, something that would have had to be levitating or something. It set me uneasy until I finally got back into the woods.
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Again the woods were like a big hug to me, nature has always had that effect on me. The canopy above let in light that was diffused through greenery and that had a really calming effect. It was perfect, the day was getting warmer and the ledge I had been hiking on offered no shade. Now I was in the woods and hiking along feeling quite good about my progress. I stopped to take a swig of water from my water bottle and there it was again. The feeling I was being watched. The hairs on my arms stood at attention and the ones at the nape of my neck felt as though they were trying to pull themselves out and run away. As was my instinct I tried to just remain calm and appear "normal." I screwed the lid back onto my water bottle and something made me look up, there, about 100 feet ahead of me on the trail was the Ripple Man, I'll just call him Ripley. Often in past when I would be alone and feel a presence I would say, out loud, "I can't see you but I know you're there." For some reason I felt better knowing that I made my knowledge of their presence known. Right now I wasn't sure it would work since I could clearly see Ripley.
"I can't see you, but I know you're there." I said, loud enough for Ripley to hear me. To my surprise, Ripley's reaction was demonstrably one of surprise. If Ripley had a head and face and such, he would have looked up, made eye contact and then yes, straight up into the air, just like the night before. I started wondering what the heck was going on. What was Ripley? It seemed clear to me that Ripley wasn't used to being seen, so was Ripley a ghost or spirit? I'd never seen one like that before though, just empty space, a ripple in the air, a human shaped anomaly. I've seen some strange things in my day but Ripley was new to me, almost otherworldly. Some of my friends over the years have thought I was a little off, how could I believe in ghosts and not aliens? I always thought it a little silly to think aliens are among us. It never helped that it's easy to stereotype folks who believe in them and to put it mildly, I didn't want to be one of them. I found there was plenty I could do with my other avenues of interest. Still, in an infinite universe, there are infinite possibilities.
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I was pondering this as I stepped back out into the bright sun onto another stretch of the trail that was like it was before, more of a ledge. On my right, the mountain rose up. The trail was about six feet across and then, to my left, air and a drop off down the mountainside. Imagine my surprise when as I looked over to my left I saw a person, a person standing there in midair. Then imagine my surprise when I realized it wasn't another person, it was my own reflection. Even as I reacted the thing rose up, this wasn't Ripley, it was bigger and different. I could make out a shape before it got far enough away that the mirror effect started to work as it was clearly meant to. As difficult as it is for me to say it without sounding like a weirdo, the "ship" was shaped like a teardrop that moved forward point first. It was reflective, like a mirror so when it rose high enough into the sky and only reflected sky and clouds back it became all but invisible, but if it flew too low it reflected things back that couldn't be explained, like my reflection. The thing went straight up, just like Ripley had and I stood there like a dope while my rational mind started its onslaught on my irrational mind, starting with what exactly "rational" and "irrational" mean.
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All I wanted was to get back into the woods again and off the ledge, I was used to Ripley and Ripley wasn't as big as the "ship" or "pod" or whatever the hell it was had been. Once I made it back in I had only one goal in mind, set up camp and chill. I wanted camp set up well before the sun went down so I could take in my surroundings, get my bearings and just sort of get grounded. I set up in a nice enough place, plenty of trees, nearby water supply, I was set, this would do for the next three days. By the time the sun was going down my camp was ship shape. I had stayed so intently focused on making the very best camp I could make that I wasn't thinking about the pod or about Ripley, nor did I have the feeling I had before, the feeling that I was being watched. Once I had started a fire and was sitting near it writing however, my mind started going back to all the questions that had been raised thus far during my tramp and camp. I figured a good night of sleep was just what I needed.
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The next morning I awoke to the sound of birds and the sun beating down on my tent. It was a lot warmer than yesterday or maybe I just slept in late. Then it occurred to me that I had chosen a place that would have been shaded throughout the majority of the day so it made no sense that I'd be in full sun like that. I crawled out of my tent and into blinding sun. I heard water and looked over to see the river. What the hell was I doing so close to the river, I never camp close to rivers because they tend to be too heavily trafficked by nocturnal critters. As if that wasn't weird enough I was realizing more and more that something was way off, in point of fact, a lot of things were way off. First of all, I had set up my camp on the other side of the river and second, it seemed as though spring was over and we were well into summer. There was evidence of the passage of time in the position of the sun and in the vegetation. I had picked some herbs the day before and they were totally withered and dry.
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I felt sort of groggy and tired but I had enough of my wits about me to get the hell out of the woods. I'm generally comfortable with strange and unusual things and I can handle strange turns of events but this whole thing was too much even for me, for the first and thus far the last time I actually fled from the forest to civilization rather than the other way around. I didn't even hitch out of the mountains, I just walked and walked unsure of what day it was, how much time had passed and how the hell my entire campsite and myself were transported from one side of the river to the other. When I finally reached civilization I went to the first gas station I saw and stepped inside to look at a newspaper. I was rather surprised to see that almost two months had passed since I had quit my job at the restaurant. What for me was two days in the woods was closer to two months. Where did that time go? Was this connected to the weird pod I saw? With Ripley? What the hell had happened?
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​Even now when I try and remember that particular tramp-n-camp all I get are random memories of the mundane. Preparing meals, cleaning up, reading, writing, doing a bit of yoga, talking to myself or to trees. It's not that strange, if you spend enough time in the woods you might talk to trees, they're very good listeners. The memories I get could be from any of the hundreds of times I've camped out in the woods, as though some of my past camping memories were chosen to be played back on a loop over and over whenever I try to remember it. As time has passed my brain makes more and more attempts to explain it or pretend that the whole thing was just normal, just those looped memories. My brain wants it all to be perfectly explainable but it wasn't. There is just no way that the situation was entirely made up in my mind, while I do indeed have a great imagination, I couldn't have made that shit up. I also couldn't have survived alone in the woods for as long as I was gone with only the supplies I had brought with me when I set out. When I took an inventory of my things after checking in to a hotel room I realized I barely used any of my original supplies. I suppose I might never know what happened, what I do know is that next time I go to Canada, I'll take the train.
