Becoming Odyssa - Jennifer Pharr Davis [79]
If only he knew.
I steadily hiked my way through shock and denial, but when I arrived at anger, I wasn’t just mad at the two men, I was mad at myself. why on earth had I felt compelled to say that I was sorry? I didn’t need to apologize!
You say, “I’m sorry,” when you’re at a public restroom and you open a stall door that wasn’t locked properly and there is someone already inside. You say, “I’m sorry,” inside a changing room when you pull back a curtain without realizing that the space was already occupied. But you don’t say, “I’m sorry,” when you pass an old man stark naked and grinning on the side of a national long-distance trail.
I was the one who now felt unsafe and unsure about what was around the next turn. Those guys should have apologized to me!
Later that afternoon, I was walking through the woods when I saw a type of snake I didn’t recognize. It was black, but not consistently black—more of a dark gray, with bands the color of dusk circling its outstretched body. At first I just saw its head lying on top of a fallen tree, but then I traced its body through the leaves and found its tail almost six feet away.
The snake wasn’t just long, but fat too. I don’t know if it had just eaten, but the middle of its body was as big and round as a grapefruit.
I slowly began to pull out my camera, but as soon as I brought my hand in front of my body, the animal sprang into a tight coil. Then, with its tongue flickering and its tail poised, it rattled!
A rattlesnake? The tail was dark and hard to define, but now I could see a narrow honeycomb rattle. I had never seen a rattlesnake in the wild before!
I was already ten feet away from the creature, but I respectfully backed up several more yards before taking a distant photo.
I was becoming a lot more comfortable with snakes, or perhaps just inured to them. And I decided that I liked rattlesnakes the best, because they could communicate their location, their emotion, and whether or not they wanted their picture taken, with a shake of the tail.
Sounds are so important on the trail. When it came to animals, roads, people, and water, I would usually hear them before I saw them. Toward the end of the day, I heard a noise that I couldn’t quite pinpoint. It didn’t sound like a human, more like an animal, but whatever was making the noise was clearly in distress. As the sound grew louder, I became more apprehensive with every step. I don’t know why I kept walking forward, except that I had decided to follow these white blazes wherever they led.
When I finally came out of the forest and into a grove, I saw where the sound was coming from. Twenty yards away, in the middle of the field, a man wearing a black hooded cloak was reaching his stiff arms heavenward. His body looked tense and rigid, and his groans were deep and indecipherable.
My brain said to keep moving, but my eyes and feet remained glued where they were. I was lost somewhere between fear and fascination. Could this man be a monk performing a Gregorian chant or a Wiccan conducting an outdoor ceremony? Did I even want to know what he was doing?
Suddenly the chanting stopped and my spine stiffened. The man’s body remained motionless except for his neck, which he slowly turned in my direction. The way his head turned independently from his torso, it seemed like his neck could screw off his body. Looking in my direction, I knew that he could see me, but I couldn’t see his face under the shadow of his hood. Was there even a face in there?
Like a wizard raising his staff to ward off evil, I raised my mop stick in the air to acknowledge the encounter. Then I put it in my hand closest to the shrouded figure and kept hiking.
The man didn’t acknowledge my presence, but once he identified me, he rotated his head back to the front of his body and began to cry out to the sky in the same possessed groans as before.
Once I was out of sight, I hiked as quickly as possible away from the field. It was already dark, and I had planned on camping soon, but I continued hiking until it was